Trading Knowledge

Address, affiliate, attribute

Posted on February 17, 2014 by Frank Norman

A few weeks back I saw an OA paper published in PNAS that has over 37,000 authors. (Well, that’s one way to defray the costs of OA charges!). There are ten regular authors, plus “EteRNA Participants” and a link in the footnotes to the EteRNA author list delivered as a 2Mb supplementary CSV file (ht Greg Jordan).

Science magazine commented:

researchers have now crowdsourced their experiments by connecting players of a video game to an actual biochemistry lab.

This got me to pondering about authors and OA. I imagine that no-one else in the world is interested in this, but here goes anyway.

Deciding who should and who should not qualify as an author has received a good deal of attention over the years, including a post by me. The question of what address each author should use is much less scrutinised. In particular, I have not seen generalised guidance on whether the address given should reflect the address at which the research was carried out or the current address of the researcher.

It seems fairly obvious to me that the ideal is to always list the address at which the research was carried out, with a footnote listing the current address if that is different. But perhaps that reflects my primary interest in things like attribution of credit. For me the address (or affiliation) is there partly to show which institution “owns” the credit for the research, and partly in order to make it possible to communicate with the author. But I have come to realise that many authors are not concerned with that first function. One said to me recently “I put on my new address as my old email doesn’t work any longer and I wanted people to be able to contact me here”. The idea of putting a research address AND a correspondence address had not occurred to him.

I am forever looking at lists of publications and trying to decide whether they should or should not be included in the list of outputs from this Institute. We search for anything that mentions the Institute in the address field, and add those to our outputs database. This requires some vigilance though as the search throws up many papers that have our address in but turn out to be authored by current staff before they came here. Only rarely is this clear from the addresses given on the paper.

Does this matter? I think it does for two reasons. One is that mis-attribution to Institution X rather than Institution Y can potentially affect bibliometric analyses. OK, maybe that is a marginal effect (a guesstimate would say 10% of papers include a wrong address like this) but who knows? The other reason is that it can confound the picture around Open Access compliance. We have been set a target for compliance as an Institute and there may be a financial penalty if we do not make it. I am not sure how the compliance calculation will be done, but if it involves a simple search for our address then the denominator in the calculation will be higher than it should be, probably making our compliance appear lower than it really is (depending on the open access status of the extra papers).

Guidance to authors is patchy. I have not made a detailed study of journal policies, but I found a few encouraging signs. One Elsevier journal stipulates:

If an author has moved since the work described in the article was done, or was visiting at the time, a ‘Present address’ (or ‘Permanent address’) may be indicated as a footnote to that author’s name. The address at which the author actually did the work must be retained as the main, affiliation address. Superscript Arabic numerals are used for such footnotes.

A society journal requires:

the names of all authors (first name, middle initial, last name) and their departmental and institutional affiliations at the time the research was done. Indicate which authors are associated with which institutions by listing the appropriate author initials in parentheses after each affiliation listed.

If an author has changed affiliations and wants this information in the article, then this information should be included in a separate line on the title page.

But Nature says only:

ensure addresses and affiliations are current

I was pleased to see that the issue had been discussed briefly in a thread at ResearchGate, though opinions varied. The actual question posed was what affiliation should be reported if the experimental work was carried out at Institution X but the data analysis and writing up was done at Institution Y, which is more tricky. I think it is justified to use both addresses in that case, provided the work at Institution Y was ‘substantial’. Another tricky example is where a review article was started in one place but finished in another. Again, probably both addresses are justified.

I am not about to start a big campaign about this, but maybe someone will notice and slowly more people will adopt the idea of using a separate Research address and Correspondence address. I did see that ORCID are going to launch an affiliation module, so perhaps they might help to spread the word.

Thanks for reading this far. I feel better now I have got that off my chest!

Posted in Authorship | Tagged Affiliation | 7 Comments

Music for love

Posted on February 14, 2014 by Frank Norman

Today, 14 February, was a day of celebration devoted to lovers and their love. Love remained a mystery to me for many years. Now that its full majesty has been revealed to me I embrace it with all my limbs and I pulsate with love.

Music and love are natural companions. The ecstasy aroused by music can (almost) match that derived from love. Both music and love can make you feel deeply, both joy and pain, and both have an irresistible force that can leave you gasping.

Here then is my musical compilation for lovers, or perhaps it is just a compilation of love in music, or a meditation on love and music. At any rate, it is music that I love.

1. Sibelius’ Violin Concerto

This is romantic music, music from the heart, played here with a gloriously sweet tone by Jascha Heifetz. I love the phrase that comes a little after 3 minutes into this clip: a blast of extra sweetness like a sudden gesture of affection between lovers. It always makes me catch my breath, like a rush of hormonal emotion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixEberxZfUY

2. Rachmaninov’s vespers

Rachmaninov wrote so much wonderful romantic music! He is forever associated with thwarted love because the film Brief Encounter used music from his 2nd piano concerto. The 3rd piano concerto and the deliciously tender 18th variation from his Paganini Variations are equally lovely, but I am choosing something from his Vespers – section 12, the Greater Doxology (Znamenny Chant). To me this conveys not love exactly but rather awe, a muscular serenity, and ecstasy. Imagine you are walking into a great church building; you feel the silence and immensity. Then you hear this music coming from somewhere, you can’t see where. It is beautiful and heartfelt and sweeps you up in its flow. Soon you are flying, high up, like an angel, looking down from the ceiling.

3. Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet

I think Prokofiev was at his most intensely lyrical in his ballet music, Romeo and Juliet, based on Shakespeare’s play. Many years ago I saw Rudolf Nureyev dancing Romeo to his own choreography at Covent Garden and I have loved the piece ever since. I am ashamed to say that I was not familiar with the play before, so when the ending came I was shocked (i.e. wept buckets). It is a classic romantic tale, so gorgeous but so tragic. I know it’s only a story, but it is too sad. In the balcony scene Prokofiev gives us throbbing bass, surging music, soaring strings that match the intensity of emotions of these young lovers. This is music that expresses my heart.

4. Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time

A little contemplation to follow that: the last movement of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. Religion and love were two of Messiaen’s preoccupations and here he expresses his love for Jesus. Yes, it may seem weird, but love of God is a thing too. This is not romantic love then, but something noumenal. The beauty of the violin tone evokes for me the contemplation of your beloved, like watching your lover sleeping.

5. Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde

Tristan is another classic tale of love, again with an outcome that I’m not eager to match. Liebestod seemed an alien concept to me for many years – what connection is there between love and death? Now I can understand it. Having found love, experienced that joy, one may feel a satisfaction with one’s life, a sense of completion. Death can come and there is no regret. At the climax of this music the feeling of release is incredible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SA2KsY0ZRI

6. Philip Glass’s Songs of Liquid Days

These songs are not about love. However, the text of one of them – Forgetting – conjures up for me a vision of the ideal lover:

Bravery. Kindness. Clarity.
Honesty. Compassion. Generosity.
Bravery. Honesty. Dignity.
Clarity. Kindness. Compassion.

Linda Ronstadt sounds oh so sultry, and the Roches on backing vocals give an edge of sweet frenzy to the music. It is full of energy and light.

7. Bartok’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle

Duke Bluebeard is the kind of man that I’m sure your mother warned you about. In the opera Judit has gone and married him anyway. Love is blind and all that. Bartok’s opera tells the story as Bluebeard shows his new wife round his castle There are seven doors that he unlocks one by one to reveal a succession of horrors, a bit like a scary estate agent. The fifth door is the least scary – a vision of his vast lands. The music is grand and terrifyingly impressive. This doesn’t really fit well with the Valentine’s Day theme, except as a warning that all may not be as it seems. Bartok coaxes some ear-ticklingly beguiling sonorities from the orchestra which make this piece come alive for me. Plus, the soprano in this clip is one of my favourites – Jessye (no relation) Norman.

8. Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe

Another ballet, another love story. Ravel’s sumptuous orchestration is masterful and overwhelming. He includes a large choir at certain points which adds another dimension. The music is hard to sing but thrilling. This extract includes my favourite section, reaching a truly pornographic climax. From about 13mins 30secs it is pure sexual energy. I used to be innocent and to think it wasn’t really meant that way, but now I’m sure it is.

9. Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier

Richard Strauss produced an evocation of beauty, pain, love and regret in the closing scene of his opera Der Rosenkavalier. The music always has a profound effect on me, I can’t explain why. Well, I can – I suspect it has something to do with my father. He loved this music. I bought tickets to see the opera with him in 1981. Sadly he had a stroke and died a month before we were due to see it. I still have not seen it performed live. Put this one down to filial love.

10. Poulenc’s Figure Humaine

Poulenc’s cantata Figure Humaine is an a capella setting of Paul Eluard’s poetry. The last movement is extraordinary. It begins:

On my school notebooks
On my desk and on the trees
On the sands of snow
I write your name

The tension builds as each stanza ends with the same line: I write your name. You think you know where it is going – it seems like a love poem. As the movement proceeds your expectation and curiosity increase – whose name? Who is it? The final word of the final verse reveals the true meaning of the poem. It comes as a blinding flash, with a suitably ear-splitting final top note for the top sopranos.

The poem was first published in 1942 and reprinted a number of times. The RAF dropped copies of the poem over occupied France as a morale-booster. This piece is not about the love of a person, but about the love for an idea. It is just as powerful as the other kinds of love described above. You can love and idea, and love a person because of their ideas.

Posted in Music | Comments Off

The Linnaean Society Library

Posted on February 13, 2014 by Frank Norman

Visiting other libraries can be a great source of inspiration to a librarian, giving you ideas to copy and making you jealous of the lovely things that other libraries have. Over the past twelve months I have hosted visits to my Library by three separate groups of librarians, during which I told them about our library service and showed them our collection. The most recent of these was on Tuesday this week. Yesterday I sat on the other side of the fence, joining a group visiting the Library of the Linnaean Society of London.

Portrait of Carl Linnaeus. Original in Linnaean Society of London

Carl Linnaeus on his wedding day
Click to enlarge

I read Wilfrid Blunt’s 1971 biography of Linnaeus not too long ago, so I knew a little about the man, but I had not visited the Linnaean Society before. It is one of those Learned Societies housed in the rather lovely Burlington House in London’s Piccadilly. It is an interesting example of an institution founded around a collection – Carl Linnaeus’ own collection of his published books, his library of books, and his notebooks and specimens. When Linnaeus died in 1778 Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society and longtime correspondent of Linnaeus, made an offer for his collection but at that time Linnaeus’ widow decided to give the collection to her son. Sadly he too died just five years later, so the collection was offered to Banks again. This time he was not in a position to purchase it but recommended it to his young protege James Edward Smith. Smith persuaded his father to put up the money for purchase, not without some difficulty. The collection arrived in London in 1784 and in 1786 Smith was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. The Linnean Society was founded in 1788. You can read more about this story in a lecture by Mark Seaward on the Joseph Banks Society website.

My visit to the Society comprised a very good introduction to the man and the society, a tour of the Library collection and a bit of archival scholarship thrown in for good measure. We started off in the Society’s meeting room, where we were told about Linnaeus and the Society that bears his name. I spotted a plaque on the wall from 1 July 1958, commemorating 100 years since the day when Darwin and Wallace’s paper was read out to the Society members. At the time I didn’t realise that the visit was taking place on Darwin Day, so this was very appropriate.

Plaque from the Linnean Society meeting room

Memorial plaque

In the meeting room there a number of portraits, pride of place going to those of Darwin and of Wallace. I particularly liked the portrait of Wallace, painted by Roger Remington in 1990 or thereabouts.

Next we went down into the basement, into something like a strong room, with a heavy door and carefully controlled temperature. There were about a dozen shelves of books by Linnaeus and a whole lot more with the rest of his library, the earliest volume dating back to 1488. We were shown a copy of the 12th edition of one of his works, with interleaved blank pages containing his notes of corrections and additions to be made for the following edition. He was clearly a methodical and meticulous man. We also saw a first edition of his Systema Naturae – it is a very large format book, with pages like charts. Someone commented that the pages would make great posters.

Systema Naturae

Close up of Systema Naturae

Next to come out were the beetles. Not live ones, obviously. These were Linnaeus’ specimens so they were well and truly dead, and dried. Apparently once dried then the specimens can last for a very long time. We also saw some beautiful butterflies, but I decided to scare you with a photo of the beetles instead.

Beetles from the Linnaean Society
Click to enlarge

We then left the basement and went up to the main Library upstairs. Now, that’s what I *call* a Library – a beautiful double height room with a sculpted ceiling.

The Library of the Linnaean Society of London
Click to enlarge

Here we were treated to a display of some of the Library’s treasures, including Edward Lear’s book of parrots. Lear was an accomplished painter as a well as a writer, it seems. Sometimes I wish I worked in a botanical or zoological library – they have such beautiful books. Those floras and, er, whatever the zoological equivalent is (do they call them faunas?). I remember when I was a library student we were treated to a visit to the Royal Botanic Gardens Library in Edinburgh and I was astounded at the beauty of the drawings they held. I recall that the Zoological Society of London Library also has some fantastic visual material. The closest I ever got was when I worked in a hospital library and we had some colour medical atlases. The most gruesome were A colour atlas of Accident and Emergency medicine and A colour atlas of genitourinary medicine.

One of Edward Lear’s parrots
Click to enlarge

An Indian reed
Click to enlarge

Flora Graeca
Click to enlarge

One of the most interesting items on display was a book of ‘cyanotypes’ by Anna Atkins. Cyanotype is a photographic printing process, the origin of blueprints. Anna Atkins, an English botanist and photographer, used this process for capturing botanic specimens.

Book by Anna Atkins
Click to enlarge

Not content with delighting our eyes and our sense of history, the Librarian then introduced Isabelle Charmentier, a historian working on Linnaeus, who explained her research into “the writing technologies of Carl Linnaeus“. Briefly, and as far as I understood it, she has explored the way that Linnaeus collected information in his various notebooks. At one time he used a blank notebook, reserving chunks of pages for groups of species. Of course, if he underestimated how many pages he would need for a particular group then he would have a problem. Later he moved onto using looseleaf pages. He might still have problems if he needed to insert a new species into an already-crowded page, but at least he could always add an additional page. Later still he used index slips – one for each species. This was apparently the first use of what we now call index cards. Just think what he could have done if he had had Filemaker Pro?

One of Linnaeus’ notebooks
Click to enlarge

A looseleaf notebook
Click to enlarge

Index cards
Click to enlarge

This was truly a fascinating visit, and I am indebted to the Librarian and Deputy Librarian, as well as Dr Charmentier, for their time and erudition. Thanks also to the CILIP ARL group for organising the visit.

Note added 14 Feb. I forgot to say that more information is available on the Library’s website, including digitised versions of 16 of Linnaeus’ manuscripts and images of his specimen collections.

I was very pleased to be able to take photos during the visit, though at one point the phone on my camera got confused and this photo appeared by mistake.

What is this photo of me doing here?

Posted in History, Libraries and librarians | 8 Comments

Marking the occasion

Posted on February 3, 2014 by Frank Norman

Yesterday was my first anniversary. See this and this for more details of what the anniversary was.

A first anniversary is a special day – and hopefully the first of many more to come. But, though it marks a whole year, it is quite a lowly event in the cannon of anniversaries. I checked and found that the first anniversary is deemed to be the paper anniversary, so gifts of paper are to be exchanged. That struck me as very retro and quite inappropriate for a digital hipster like me, fluent in the multifarious ways of online scholarly communication. So I set about drawing up an alternative list. Here is my version of ~~the Twelve days of Christmas~~ the first ten years of anniversaries. Sadly I ran out of inspiration after 8th.

I made a start yesterday.

Anniversary	Old style	My style
1st	Paper	Tweet
2nd	Cotton	Tweet with Instagram
3rd	Leather	Tweet with Vine
4th	Linen	Short blogpost (up to 200 words)
5th	Wooden	Full blogpost (500 words)
6th	Iron	Long blogpost (1000+ words)
7th	Copper	Blogpost with video
8th	Bronze	Guest blogpost somewhere more high-profile
9th	Pottery
10th	Tin

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments

Paperless at last

Posted on January 8, 2014 by Frank Norman

1 January 2014 marks a watershed moment for my library: I have cancelled the last of our print journal subscriptions.

Back in 1995 we subscribed to our first online journal, Journal of Biological Chemistry, from Highwire Press. I still have the email which announced:

We are pleased to announce that a World Wide Web version of the Journal of Biological Chemistry is now available for testing. Beginning with the April 14, 1995 issue, the full-text of all articles, including images are available. The URL is: http://www-jbc.stanford.edu/jbc/

After opening the JBC Home Page, we recommend that users read the “JBC Online Handbook” so that they can configure their machines properly. Netscape version 1.1 is the recommended (and the only supported) browser for accessing the Internet version of the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

This was, to the best of my recollection, the first online production version of a mainstream bioscience journal, though there had been a great deal of other development activity (including publishers sending out their journals on CDROM! We had a drawerfull but never used them).

During the years 1995-2000 we gradually built up our portfolio of online journals corresponding to our print journal subscriptions, so we had both print and online in parallel. In 2000 a JBC editorial celebrated the journal’s 5th year of being online, saying:

Now virtually every life science journal, as well as journals of many other disciplines, publish online.

Declan Butler reported in Nature in 1999, in a fascinating round up of publishing at the time, that one Danish library had:

decided to phase out print altogether, and deliver journals direct to staff desktops via the World-Wide Web.

Many librarians (including me) were more hesitant to abandon print, wanting reassurance on issues of continuity and archiving.

A joint ICSU/UNESCO symposium was held in 1996 to consider the issues raised by electronic publishing in science. The eminent biologist Joshua Lederberg addressed the conference and his talk makes interesting reading today – much of what he says still holds true. He stated: “Electronic materials need to be archived”. Print journals were archived by libraries, but the model that was adopted for publishing electronic journals meant that the publishers held the content of the journals in digital form. Would the publishers commit to longterm archiving, and if not who would? This was an issue that gnawed at librarians’ souls – we wanted to embrace the e-future but didn’t want to abandon our archival duties. This was much-discussed in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Initiatives such as LOCKSS (1999) and Portico (2002), together with the activities of various national libraries, began to provide that reassurance (though there are still fears that not everything is adequately preserved). Thus libraries began to cancel print subscriptions, relying only on the online versions of journals.

I was a bit slow to join the print cancellation trend. I didn’t want to race ahead of our library users, many of whom still seemed uneasy about the idea of relying on online journals. I remember getting comments such as “I no longer use the print journals, but I like to know that they are there” and “it would be unthinkable for an institute like this not to have PNAS on the shelves”. But by the mid 2000s I could hold off no longer and I did begin to cancel – at first cancelling print subscriptions that would save us money, picking off a few more each year. Then I cut print titles even when we would make no direct saving by so doing (thanks to the vagaries of publisher pricing and UK VAT anomalies). It made no sense to spend staff time on processing printed issues that hardly anybody ever read, so I kept on pruning.

Thus for the last few years we have had only a handful of print titles: those that seemed too important to lose (e.g. Science, Nature), those that were not important enough for us to purchase higher-priced online versions (e.g. New Scientist, Scientific American) and one or two that our agent insisted were not available online only.

This year I have finally cancelled this last clutch of print titles. The usage of even these titles proved very low so I don’t think that anyone will notice. Fingers crossed that there is no internet apocalypse. Now, where did I put those old CDROMs?

(Footnote: If you are interested in how ejournals developed, Martin White traces some more of the history of ejournal development in a 2012 article.)

Posted in Journal publishing | 6 Comments

Mind, the map

Posted on December 18, 2013 by Frank Norman

Last week I attended the launch of a new exhibition at the Science Museum, called Mind Maps: stories from psychology. This is an exhibition, sponsored by the British Psychological Society, which:

.. explores how mental health conditions have been diagnosed and treated over the past 250 years. …this exhibition looks at key breakthroughs in scientists’ understanding of the mind and the tools and methods of treatment that have been developed, from Mesmerism to Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) …. Bringing together psychology, other related sciences, medicine and human stories, the exhibition is illustrated through a rich array of historical and contemporary objects, artworks and archive images.

I was there thanks to a shiny black and gold sign that has appeared on my blog before, courtesy of the MRC Centenary exhibition Strictly Science.

I had always thought the sign looked rather attractive, in an olde-worlde kind of way, so I brought it to the attention of the Strictly Science curators when they came for a look around last year. They recognised it as the sign for Henry Dale’s old lab at NIMR when it was in Hampstead, so they borrowed it for their exhibition at Imperial College in April this year. Dale’s lab was the fourth lab on the first floor of the building, hence F4. Presumably someone from the Science Museum then spotted the sign at the Strictly Science exhibition because I subsequently received an email asking if I would lend it to them for their Mind Maps exhibition.

The Mind Maps exhibition includes much that I would class as neuroscience and neurophysiology rather than psychology. It goes back to Galvani – his 300 year old apparatus is displayed in the exhibition – and continues right up to current research on connectomics.

The exhibits that have been gathered together in this exhibition are pretty impressive – you get a real sense of history – and they tell a great story of neurophysiological research, albeit just touching the peaks rather diving into its depths. As well as the Galvani table I rather liked Charles Sherrington’s cat (move over Schrodinger’s cat!)

I also loved the rather scary section on medical electricity. The look of terror on the face of the man in this painting is all too realistic.

The exhibition also featured displays about Hipp, George Adams, William Grey Walter, Hans Eysenck, Sigmund Freud and more recent material on Valium, Prozac, fMRI and EEG.

My F4 sign is displayed in a small section about Henry Dale which includes excerpts from the film Let’s get an effect. This was a film made by members of Dale’s F4 lab in 1949, some years after he had retired, and just before they all moved to the new building in Mill Hill. It is apparently full of in-jokes about Henry Dale and his lab, though they are a bit obscure to the casual observer. Tilli Tansey has described the film, the jokes and the people portrayed in the various scenes of the film, in her W.D.M. Paton Memorial Lecture about Henry Dale’s lab:

The film is called LET’S GET AN EFFECT, which was a favourite saying of Henry Dale’s whilst doing an experiment, and subtitled AN EF-FOUR-VESCENT EPISODE, an obvious pun.

The Science Museum website has some more information about some of the objects in the exhibition and there is a blog post plus video by Samira Ahmed too, about the making of the exhibition.

Mind Maps runs until August 2014 and is free to view, so do get yourself to have a look if you have any interest in matters neuro or psycho, and find yourself within reach of London’s Exhibition Road.

Postscript: Just after posting this I spotted a longer and more scholarly review of the exhibition by Keith Laws on his blog.

Posted in Communicating science, History | Comments Off

Being special

Posted on December 4, 2013 by Frank Norman

Classification is something that librarians are supposed to be good at, but when it comes to classifying types of libraries there is a bit of a #FAIL. At library school I was taught that there are three main kinds of libraries: public libraries, academic libraries and ‘special’ libraries. Public libraries are well-understood, usually considered as the prime exemplar of what libraries are. Academic libraries too are broadly familiar. I think of them mainly as libraries in universities and higher education institutions, but the term can also encompass further education libraries and perhaps school libraries too at a stretch. But who knows what ‘special libraries’ are? It is a cop-out – a class of libraries that aren’t in one of the other classes. Miscellaneous, ‘other’, odds-and-sods. There is a sop to their vanity by calling them ‘special’, though that is a mixed compliment. These libraries are in fact an enormous and enormously varied bag of different kinds of library.

Non-aligned

My career has been spent in this kind of library – I think of them as the non-aligned movement of libraries, defined by what they are not as much as by what they are. Almost any statement you make about special libraries as a whole will be inaccurate. They are workplace libraries, but not all of them. They are small libraries, except for those that are rather large. They focus on a narrow subject range, though some are broader-based. Sometimes ‘special’ is taken to be synonymous with ‘corporate’ libraries, but there are many examples in the public and charity sectors too. Special libraries include several large sub-types: medical libraries, law libraries, finance libraries, government libraries, learned society and professional libraries, charity libraries. Some of them may be more information services than libraries per se, their main focus being on delivering information to members of the public rather than building a collection. The definition of special librarians may also be stretched to include other information professionals working as information managers, though they probably would not consider themselves to be working as librarians at all.

Library Camp

Last weekend I attended the third UK Library Camp, held in the marvellous new Library of Birmingham. I had not visited the library before, though I had heard many good things about it. It is still new and it seems to be a tourist attraction as much as a library – it was very crowded.

The Library of Birmingham – exterior

The Library of Birmingham – interior views

Library camp, or Libcamp, is now an annual tradition: an unconference for all kinds of librarian. It is a great chance to mix with library people from different backgrounds and to take part in informal discussions as part of the unconference format. I like Libcamp. I have attended each of the three UK national Libcamps and a couple of local libcamps.

The recent event started with a round of very brief introductions (very brief as there about 150 people there) and then there was a chance for each of those wanting to propose a session to make their pitch. Then at the end of that the organisers sorted out the timetable, trying to avoid clashes, and squeezing some sessions on similar topics together. As we waited for this to be completed one of the facilitators asked for shows of hands for those from public libraries, academic libraries etc. He did not actually ask about special libraries though – as usual we got overlooked.

Special libraries

One session I went to at Libcamp was devoted to special libraries. It was a joint proposal: in the preliminary list of session proposals one proposer asked “Am I still a librarian?” and the other described herself as a “Third sector librarian without a library” – they teamed up on the day to hold a joint session. It attracted a good crowd, including quite a few graduate trainee librarians who were interested to learn more about the sector.

I remember that my first introduction to the richness of special libraries was a visit arranged by my Library School to the library at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh. This was a great collection with many rare books, including beautiful flora and collections of illustrations. At Library School I was also introduced to an organisation called ASLIB: the Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux. ASLIB used to publish a wonderful directory of specialist libraries, and was a membership organisation supporting special libraries. Aslib still exists but has changed its name so it is no longer an acronym and it has a different remit these days. In the US there is a Special Libraries Association, and they have an active European Chapter. There are also many smaller groupings representing particular segments of the special library menagerie:

CHILL (Independent health libraries)
LIKE (Information and knowledge managers)
CLSI (commercial, legal and scientific)
NGLIS (government libraries)
PIPA (pharmaceutical information)
HLG (health libraries)
BIALL (law libraries)

This is just a small collection of the groups I am familiar with but I am sure there are many more. Some of them are subject based and so may include members from academic libraries too. An interesting group I have heard about recently is the Association of Pall Mall Libraries. It started out as a group of libraries serving gentlemen’s clubs but broadened to include other subscription-based libraries, so is quite diverse.

Library Camp logo

Solo / small team work

The Libcamp discussion on special libraries mentioned some of the characteristics of work in the sector. Many special librarians are solo operators or small teams. This can lead to feelings of professional isolation. They are also very likely to be managed by someone who is not a librarian, and who probably has little knowledge of library work and trends. This presents particular challenges (no names, no packdrill). Special librarians need good influencing and self-promotion skills. Library services are often seen as easy prey when budgets are tight, so the threat of closure is ever-present.

More positively, working in a small library brings opportunities to try your hand at all kinds of tasks, and to take responsibility at an early stage in your career. This is something you do not experience so easily when you are just a small cog in a large library service. Sometimes though the small size can be frustratingly limiting, e.g. sophisticated IT support may not be so readily available.

Workplaces

Often special libraries are workplace libraries, meaning that you are serving the professional information needs of adults, rather than dealing with students or general reading material. Special libraries therefore tend not to be concerned with learning materials (though of course workplace learning is all the rage nowadays) nor with fiction or books aimed at the mass market.

One person in the session mentioned something that, for me, is a defining characteristic of special libraries: you are serving a well-defined group of people (members of the organisation). I can remember thinking this back when I was at library school – serving a defined set of people seemed like an easier task than trying to serve the whole population of a city, say, as a public library service must do. A key aspect of work in the special library sector is the need to gain a really good understanding of the needs of that set of users, putting yourself as close as possible to them.

Embedding

Interestingly, the following session at Libcamp that I attended was devoted to embedded librarianship. This refers to the notion that, particularly in academic libraries, librarians should rethink their location and get closer to users, or as the Embedded Librarian blog has it:

the trend of moving librarians out of libraries, both physically and organizationally, is growing, can be of great value to the organization, and can be very rewarding to the librarian — if done well.

It seems to be a new trend, though it has antecedents in e.g. clinical librarianship and of course in special libraries, where librarians are partially embedded to begin with. There is a growing literature about embedded librarianship, including a big report on Models of Embedded Librarianship sponsored by the Special Libraries Association a few years back. About the same time the Association of Research Libraries put out a special issue of their journal, on report on Transforming Liaison Roles in Research Libraries.

At the LibCamp session we heard from a librarian working in a specialist school of a university who has ‘gone native’. She identifies strongly with the school and is involved in teaching and research duties there to the extent that she has withdrawn from most duties in the central University library. Others had not moved so far in that direction, but came up with various ideas for getting closer to their users, like “pop-up libraries”, tailored current awareness searches and just simply being nosey.

More generally I think embedding is a response by those academic libraries which serve large populations of researchers to the perception that researchers are ignoring library services. Only by getting closer to researchers, and effectively becoming part of their teams, can librarians have a hope of catching any business from them. This seems more feasible in the USA, where academic librarians have a tradition of “scholar librarians” who know their subject (be it music, anthropology or neuroscience) and can gain the respect of researchers.

I don’t think this tradition is so strong in the UK. My impression is that senior researchers this side of the Atlantic do not see the need for more intensive information support personnel, also sometimes called ‘informationists‘. Other embedded roles related to information processing – grant wrangling, writing papers, data curation – may be identified as useful but these are likely to be filled by those with direct research experience. I think librarians’ best chance is to identify and work with people carrying out these roles in research groups, and not to attempt to become fully embedded themselves.

Posted in Libraries and librarians | 2 Comments

Winton Royal

Posted on November 28, 2013 by Frank Norman

The Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books award ceremony took place on Monday night. The event is open to anyone so I went along – I like to feel part of the great science communications endeavour. But I had had a busy day stuffed with meetings so was unable to get there as early as I would have liked. The doors opened at 6pm but by ten past six there was still quite a queue and it sounded as though they were struggling to fit everyone in. Just as I got to the head of the queue they announced that the main hall was full so we would have to go into the overspill room. At least I got a seat in the front row of that room but I felt disconnected from the excitement of the event.

I felt an urge to Tweet so I got my phone out and started poking about to see what people were tweeting. The Royal Society twitter account posted a tweet using the hashtag #scibooks so I started tweeting using that hashtag. It did seem a bit unspecific, I admit, and I was surprised that the twitterstream seemed a bit quiet. It was only when the whole event was over that I discovered everyone else was using the hashtag #WintonPrize2013. Bah! Wrong room, wrong hashtag – I was definitely not on the right wavelength tonight. [Memo to self: get there early next time and do your homework on the hashtag].

Things got better once the event kicked off. Dara O’Briain was the Master of Ceremonies and had his verbal overdrive chip installed, talking umpteen to the dozen. He introduced the event then introduced the first author (a short video clip was played to announce the book) as they took the podium to give a short address and read an excerpt from the book. After this Dara and the author had a five-minute discussion about the book. This process was repeated for each of the six authors on the shortlist, and followed by a general discussion between all of them and a few questions from the audience.

Dara conducted the proceedings with great skill and good humour, ribbing one of the authors about a joke that they had pinched from him, and commenting that another (author of a book on memory) had clearly forgotten they had agreed that he, Dara, would be wearing that shirt – as we realised that they were indeed wearing shirts with identical floral designs.

I have not read any of the books so my comments below are based purely on what I learned about them at the awards event, plus my personal prejudices. In best reality TV show style, I judged the authors by their performance on the night, rather than their entire writing performance.

Tim Birkhead gave a good start to the evening as he talked dirty about birds and senses. I remember reading his pieces in the Times Higher where he always seemed a thoughtful and likeable character. Tonight he read a purple passage from his book, Bird Sense. The extract dealt with the question of whether birds feel emotion and sexual pleasure. Noting that in one species of bird copulation takes less than a second, while males of another species have a false penis, he then described a bird that seemed to undergo a very sensual and erotic experience in his lab. In the subsequent discussion his depth of knowledge about birds and his love of the subject shone through. I decided I must read this book, and thought it was a potential winner.

Sean Carroll had the harder task of selling us quantum physics. His book The Particle at the End of the Universe about the Higgs boson had no cute birds nor sexy talk. Tonight he focused on the entity’s name, or rather its nickname – the ‘God particle’. The nickname has always seemed a bit daft to me and is apparently hated by physicists, but loved by journalists. Now, I must admit that my interest in physics is only slight (blame my old O-level physics teacher for putting me off it) and I didn’t particularly feel that I wanted to read this book. My bad.

Enrico Coen intrigued me. I have purchased a couple of his books for the Library, including this latest one, and they seemed to attract some interest. I recall that a favourable review of his shortlisted book, Cells to Civilizations, in the Times Higher first drew my attention to it. The reviewer comments that Coen is attempting “a lofty and ambitious project, so I [was] somewhat sceptical at first”. When he spoke about his book Coen came across as a Renaissance man with a great breadth of interest and reference, and a philosophical undertow (or should that be overtone?). I expect that I would enjoy the book, but I fear it may be excessively intellectual and tire out my poor little brain. Intensely thought-provoking but not the kind of book you want to read in the toilet. In the discussion session I warmed to him; he had some nice turns of phrase, noting that “plant neuroscience is a very small field”. Later he commented that science was full of analogies so science writers should not be afraid to use analogies to explain things. But I suspect the book may not have a very broad appeal, and I have a hunch that his climb up the ladder of abstraction may not lead anywhere fruitful.

Charles Fernyhough‘s book was about memory: Pieces of Light: The new science of memory. He referenced the work of Elizabeth Loftus (as described in this recent article in The Atlantic) on how memories can become contaminated. He explained that memory is something constructed, and is not just like a video camera that we can replay exactly. Last year I attended Tim Bliss’ Croonian lecture about the mechanics of memory, and was left feeling that the process of forming memories seemed very fragile. Fernyhough confirmed this to be the case and explained the phenomenon of imagination inflation, by which if you imagine something you are then more likely to remember it as an experience you have had. He noted that advertisers make use of this, putting colourful imagery into their adverts to try and seed our memories. This all sounded very intriguing and he left me wanting to know (and read) more about it.

At first I couldn’t quite make out Caspar Henderson, nor quite see what his book, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings, was about. It sounded like a nightmare to classify (in the library catalogue sense). Was it science? or art? or history? or mythology? As he talked about his list of beings, all of them real, I was drawn in. He read out a list of extraordinary names given to diatoms – I thought Drosophilists were bad but these were really bizarre. I decided that I liked his quirky way of thinking, and his broad frame of reference. When asked about Homo sapiens he said that he thought music was one of our defining traits. The book sounds like an entertaining read.

Callum Roberts was the final author in this parade of scientific writing talent (all of it male, I noted). His book, Ocean of Life, explains how the oceans are changing. The excerpt he read reflected on the changes that a bowhead whale has seen in its lifetime – which might be up to 200 years. During that time it would have seen (and heard) a huge growth in shipping traffic, and witnessed a dramatic fall in the bowhead population followed by a partial recovery. The ocean is a very different place now than it was 200 years ago. Roberts said that he tried to avoid making the book too preachy, but I got the feeling that there might be an element of sermonising in it, and that puts me off wanting to read it.

So, I mulled over the shortlist and decided that on balance I would award the prize to Caspar Henderson. He made me want to read his book, even though I still had only a very sketchy idea what it was about. Sadly, I was not in charge of that decision.

Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society, came onto the platform and made a great show of opening the envelope very slowly, in his best Miss World / X-factor judge manner. The tension was, er, unbearable.

Finally, he announced that Sean Carroll was the winner, for his book on the Higgs boson, by a unanimous decision of the judges.

So, that put me in my place. Maybe next year, as well as getting there early and checking what the hashtag is, I should also try reading some of the shortlisted books in advance so that I can make an informed decision about the books.

Posted in Books | 3 Comments

Mill Hill Essays 2013

Posted on November 12, 2013 by Frank Norman

One of my more pleasurable annual tasks is producing the volume of Mill Hill Essays. I commmission between 5 and 10 essays, mostly from authors at the Institute, then edit them and oversee the production. Print copies of the essays are sent to various universities and libraries and miscellaneous others, and they are also published on our website. I have got into the habit of plugging them on here so here we go again – the Mill Hill Essays 2013 est arrivé. This year they are a bit later than intended so apologies if you have been eagerly awaiting their arrival. This year there are six essays, one art project and four mini book reviews.

Cellular Alchemy: the science of reprogramming cells by Ben Martynoga

Ben is a postdoc in our Systems Biology Division. He chose his topic just before last year’s Nobel Prizes were announced, but I don’t think he had inside knowledge. He describes the ability to reprogramme cells as a kind of alchemy and explains the mechanisms of reprogramming and its potential, highlighting the work of John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka.

Bacteria maketh the man by Marc Veldhoen

Marc used to be a postdoc in our Division of Molecular Immunology, but moved to start his own lab at the Babraham Institute a couple of years back. He looks into our guts, and at the bacteria there – they are all around us and inside us. While some bacteria are harmful to humans, causing disease, other bacteria are essential for our health and play an important role.

Plasmodium knowlesi malaria infections in Malaysia: The last parasite standing? by Rob Moon

Rob is also a postdoc, in our Division of Parasitology. He was awarded a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship a little while back and used it to travel to Malaysia to do some fieldwork on Plasmodium knowlesi, which is a parasite that causes malaria in macaques can sometimes also cause human disease. He writes about the history of this parasite and how it has become more significant for human health.

(E)MERGE by Carolien Stikker and Thomas Elshuis

Carolien and Thomas are independent artists. Their joint art project is based on visual research material from some of NIMR’s scientists.

Beyond the DNA code by James Turner

James is a programme leader in the Division of Stem Cell Biology and Developmental Genetics. This essay is a complement to Ben’s essay above, but focuses more particularly on the epigenetic mechanisms that control how genes are expressed in cells and the role of chromatin in regulating genes. I kept hearing about chromatin and its importance but I was never quite sure what it was all about, so I was glad to receive this essay – and of course to read it.

The jellyfish revolution by Donald Bell

Donald works in the Computer Image Analysis Lab, and has written about biological imaging. He describes the history and applications of GFP (green fluorescent protein) in biological imaging. This protein found in jellyfish has had a big impact on biological research.

Are we too clean for our own good? by Davina Sui Ann Chao

The NIMR Human Biology Essay Competition attracts around 100 entries each year from local schools. Year 12 students are invited to choose from a list of half a dozen preset topics and write a 1,000-word essay. The winning essay has the chance of being published in the Mill Hill Essays. This essay was the winning entry in the 2012 competition and explains the hygiene hypothesis.

The past two volumes of the Essays have included a series of short book reviews by Institute staff. My powers of persuasion seem to be waning and very few reviews came in this year (well, only one actually). Hence you will find my name on most of the reviews below. I review two short novels written by fellow OT blogger Steve Caplan and the biography of Griff Pugh.

And now for the bad news. This is going to be the last of the Mill Hill Essays. There have been 16 volumes since 1995, and about 150 essays, but they stop here. We are looking at producing an anthology next year of some of the best essays, but not sure yet.

Posted in Communicating science, Writing | 1 Comment

Deeply felt experiences – musical memories

Posted on November 9, 2013 by Frank Norman

Some pieces of music bring back strong memories. You recall key moments when you have heard the music before, or great performances that you have witnessed or taken part in. Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem is a piece that brings back memories of one of the most intense experiences of my life.

I will be singing in a performance of the War Requiem on Sunday 10 Nov, at the Royal Albert Hall. I will be with my regular choir, Crouch End Festival Chorus, joining with the BBC Symphony Chorus and Orchestra conducted by Semyon Bychkov. The concert marks both Remembrance Sunday and Britten’s centenary this year.

In the 1980s I moved to London, working in the suburbs but enjoying the cultural life on offer in the city centre. One of the highlights of my life then was my membership of the BBC Symphony Chorus – my first experience of professional music-making. We rehearsed in BBC Broadcasting House and performed regularly on the South Bank and in the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall. Though the Chorus was composed of amateur singers, we worked with professional musicians and conductors and all arrangements were professionally managed. We performed a wide range of music, including some less well-visited (i.e. obscure) corners of the choral repertoire. At my very first rehearsal we sang Bartok’s Cantata Profana – its often demanding 16-part choral writing and Hungarian language was quite a challenge but exhilarating. I was in at the deep end but swimming strongly. Not long after I joined the Chorus came the exciting news that we were to make an overseas trip. The Frankfurt Alte Oper (Old Opera House) had been bombed in the war and lain derelict for many years. It had now been rebuilt and was being reopened as a concert hall with a festival to mark the occasion. One of the highlights was to be a performance of Britten’s War Requiem, and the BBC Symphony Chorus were to join forces with the local orchestra (Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra) and their regular conductor Eliahu Inbal. The symbolism of having a German orchestra, a British choir and an Israeli-born conductor to perform this very special piece of music about reconciliation was lost on no-one.

The War Requiem was commissioned to mark the consecration in 1962 of the new Coventry Cathedral, which was built after the old cathedral was destroyed in a bombing raid during the second world war. The destruction of the old cathedral took place on the night that the city of Coventry suffered extensive bombing. The new cathedral was built just opposite the ruins of the old cathedral, and quickly adopted a theme of reconciliation. The cathedral’s cross of nails became a worldwide symbol of reconciliation. I went to visit the cathedral earlier this year, hoping to connect with the feelings that had inspired the music. The cathedral is a striking building, filled with visually arresting images and sculpture. The spirit of reconciliation is still very much in evidence. In the grounds of the old cathedral there is a small museum that commemorates the bombing of the city, so remembrance is there too.

The first performance of War Requiem (which should more accurately be called Anti-war Requiem) was a triumph and it has remained a firm favourite with performers and audiences alike, making a strong emotional impact. Britten uses the text of the Latin requiem mass, but he adds a new dimension by incorporating several poems about war by Wilfred Owen, the poet who served (and died) in the first world war. Britten used great skill in selecting and positioning the poems. It’s a bit like the way that Abba songs are retrofitted to the story in the musical Mamma Mia! Although they were not written for the story, they seem to fit perfectly. It is the same with the War Requiem; the poems shine a different light on the prayers of the requiem and feel like they belong in the whole narrative, while some of the Latin text provides a cooler and less passionate retreat from the pain of Owen’s poetry. The music bowled me over the first time I heard it, but my understanding of its subject matter has deepened over the years. Owen said “My subject is war, and the pity of war”. Britten expresses this in musical terms as well as the terror of war, matching and deepening all the emotions of the words.

Back in 1981, the Frankfurters were paying to fly the whole BBC choir to Frankfurt and to put us up in a hotel for three nights. I was not a seasoned traveller at that time, so this was an adventure. I was worried about how I would get to Heathrow for an early morning flight. The problem was solved when another chorus member offered to let a small group of us sleep over at his flat in Ealing, just a short hop to the airport. He even cooked us a tasty chicken casserole for dinner the night we stayed. Everything went smoothly and before long we were in our hotel in central Frankfurt. We found the Alte Oper, now gloriously restored, and we had an afternoon rehearsal with Eliahu Inbal, at first just him and the choir and then together with the other performers.

The War Requiem is a complex musical structure. Britten divides his forces: two male soloists sing the Owen poems and are supported by a chamber orchestra; a chorus of children’s voices is supported by a harmonium; the soprano soloist and full chorus are supported by a large orchestra. As these groups alternate throughout the piece the music ranges from massive awe-inspiring sounds to intimate scenes and heavenly imaginations. The groups are often described as three different planes of sound, but I prefer to think of it as looking upwards (heavenwards) with the angelic children’s voices, looking inwards (to the soldiers’ personal stories) with the male soloists, and looking outwards (to humanity’s shared emotional experience of mourning) with the soprano soloist and full chorus.

I love the way that Britten manages the transitions between the ‘planes’. The dramatic setting of the Dies irae (Day of wrath) features brass fanfares in the tradition of the Berlioz and Verdi settings. It leads directly into the words of Owen: “Bugles sang, saddening the evening air”. In another section the choir sings of Abraham and his descendants: “Quam olim Abrahae promisisti et semini ejus, followed by the soloist singing “So Abraham rose… and slew his son and half the seed of Europe one by one”. The Sanctus is one of my favourite movements. Britten’s music for the Hosannas sounds like fireworks ricocheting around the choir, and it ends with an astonishingly abrupt and powerful ExcelSIS! that leaves you temporarily blinded in shock. Then the soloist whispers ‘After the blast of lightning from the East…”. For me the emotional heart of the work is the Libera me. It contains two pages of the loudest music. In the vocal score these pages look quite innocuous. Different sections of the choir sing Libera me to a wailing musical phrase, with a chord playing in the orchestra. Except that chord is played by full orchestra and organ, with an array of deafening percussion. It is a representation of hell on a battlefield. The music dies away and a long exchange of great intensity begins between the two male soloists, leading up to the chilling words “I am the enemy you killed, my friend”. After this comes the closing section of the work, when all performers join together for the first time. The male soloists sing ‘Let us sleep now” as the choir sing “In paradisum. Requiescant in pace“.

A large choir and orchestra can produce a great deal of sound, but some of the most magical moments of the piece are achieved when the choir is directed to sing very softly. Paradoxically, you need a very large choir to achieve the quietest singing. The vocal score has several moments when we are directed to sing ‘ppp‘, or three degrees of quietness (hardly audible), and then to get quieter still, down to ‘pppp’. So you are singing as quietly as you can and then you have to get quieter. This is a hard trick to pull off. I recall that Inbal spent a good 30 mins with us rehearsing these very quiet passages until he had us singing as quietly as he wanted, each singer just at the border between making a sound and not making a sound. This contrasts with the diaphragm-busting moments in the Dies Irae and Libera me when you have to deliver maximum horsepower singing fit to blow the roof off.

It was a thrilling performance to be part of. The sense of an important occasion added to the excitement. The male soloists were Robert Tear and Thomas Hemsley, two British singers at the top of their game. The soprano was Julia Varady, a German soprano of Hungarian origin, who had exactly the thrilling timbre required for the role. I recall she made a great deal of fuss about the air-conditioning in the new concert hall and had to be placated by regular supplies of drinking water to keep her throat from drying out.

We were to perform the piece on two successive nights but this first evening we were free to explore the city. My group of friends planned to visit a bar or two and get some food. A couple of them were not feeling well so stayed in the hotel. We visited some risque establishments in the area near the Hauptbahnhof, then we went to a pleasant bar and sampled a glass or two of Apfelkorn. But I started to feel a bit strange and a little later had to go out to be sick. My friends walked me back to the hotel, as I was feeling really poorly. I felt a little explosion in my rear and wasn’t quite sure what had happened, but I suspected it wasn’t good. Once in the hotel I made a dash for my ensuite bathroom and all hell was let loose. I spent most of the next 12 hours in the bathroom, exploding from both ends. Happily the basin was just opposite the toilet, so I could stand up and be sick or sit down and diarrhoeaise. Later I found out that five of us who had eaten the chicken casserole in Ealing were all suffering in the same way, though mysteriously the sixth person survived unscathed. I had never before nor have since experienced such a virulent form of food poisoning. I had to throw away the trousers that I had been wearing that evening. For reasons of delicacy I will not spell out why, but I think you can guess.

By the morning I was drained, weak and dehydrated. It was clear that I and my similarly afflicted friends could not perform that evening. The worst thing was that the other choir-members assumed we had been out on the razzle and had too much to drink, which was not the case at all. By early afternoon I was able to keep down a glass of water, and I ate an apple. It tasted good. We managed to go out of the hotel and take a short walk. I saw a stall selling cooked sausages – pink and glistening – and was nearly sick again at the thought of eating one. (It was three or four years before I was able to face eating a sausage again.) We soon felt well enough to joke about the whole experience. I coined the expression “Happiness is a dry fart” – the confidence to pass wind in the knowledge that there would not be any follow through was a wonderful feeling.

We missed the first performance but were well enough the following day to take part in the second performance. I was a little anxious as we approached the moment of full volume in the Dies Irae, fearing that the physical compression of the diaphragm needed to push the sound out might have an unwanted side effect, but all was well. It was a magical and magnificent concert, and the audience received us enthusiastically.

The concert and the illness became memories. About six months later a large box arrived at the BBC chorus office. The Frankfurters had sent each of us an LP of the performance. I note that this recording is available now on YouTube. I cannot say for sure whether I am on the recording as it depends which night the recording was made.

Back to today. We have had one rehearsal with the conductor Semyon Bychkov and he showed himself to be a wonderful communicator and a very able moulder of performers who quickly endeared himself to the choir. In short: he knows what he wants, he is in control and he persuades you to give of your best. We now have an intense weekend of rehearsal leading up to the performance on Sunday night. I will be avoiding chicken and sausages until after the concert. I think it will be an intense experience for me again but this time on a purely musical and emotional level. I don’t know if there are any tickets left for the Royal Albert Hall, but you can catch it live on BBC Radio 3 at 7pm on Sunday 10 November.

Posted in Music | 7 Comments