The Rise and Rise of the IWF

Internet Watch Foundation

The Internet Watch Foundation has been working to remove child abuse images from the internet since 1996. People worried about certain images can report them via the IWF hotline, so they can be investigated, removed and if appropriate, reported to the authorities for further criminal investigation. Over the past 6 months there have been a number of changes which have raised the profile of the IWF and I’ve been watching with interest.

Death, Romance and the Landscape

Time Passing

This piece is a rather odd collection of thoughts. As a jigsaw of unintended connections, it works as a semi coherent whole; from chance encounters with Tower Hamlets cemetery, various books on forests and a romantic landscape exhibition at the weekend. Wild wooded nature is the theme of all these and I've been thinking about how woodlands have been perceived by people at different times. There is a large physical difference between a dilapidated Victorian cemetery, South German primeval native forest, and sketches of pastoral fantasies. However they in turn have provided us, and continue to provide us, with pleasure, escape and a way of passing the time.

Adding a LinkedIn Button to Outlook Signature

If you are a regular user of LinkedIn, you may want to encourage your clients and contacts to visit your profile. An easy way of doing this is to add a button to your email* so recipients can click straight through to it. In a meeting I was asked to outline how to do this, so thought I'd post it here too.

Only set up this feature if your profile is complete, up to date and regularly updated.

First find the web address for your LinkedIn public profile. This should be a link underneath your photo on your profile page. If in doubt click on it and it should take you to your page as seen by your contacts. It should look something like uk.linkedin.com/in/yournameinfullhere/.

Go to Outlook and open a new email. Click on the Signature button and then Signatures…

Your existing signature will come up. Take this opportunity to update, amend or make any necessary changes to the original text.

Copy and paste the image below into the signature box under your contact details.





Click once on the image to activate it and then click on the hypertext icon – the globe with chain link to the far right. Return to your public profile on LinkedIn and copy your [uk.linkedin.com/in/yournameinfullhere/] link, then paste it into the address box. Click ok. 

Click ok again and the signature box should disappear.

To test whether the link is active, create a new email and send to yourself. When you click on the image box, you should go straight to your LinkedIn public profile. 

Easy.

*I use Microsoft Outlook 2010.

Effective Networking: From the recycling pile

Useful Connections

It's that time of year. The sunshine is finally strong enough to reach into the farthest recesses of the dusty bankers boxes on my office bookshelves. Looking at them blinking in the sun I realised I hadn't touched them in years. Despite a few office moves they have followed me around, so this morning I called their bluff and sorted them out ferociously. For the most part they contained old budget figures, meeting minutes, course notes, and various suppliers catalogues which I can now view online so my recycle bin is now bulging.

I thought I'd recycle some of the course notes in a different way, with one set from 2004 striking me as still very relevant and interesting. This piece uses 'Top 10 tips for effective networking' which was presented by Lesley Robinson (Oct 2004). Amazingly I still vaguely remember the seminar, partly because of the anticipative terror I experienced by the thought of having to actually talk with a large number strangers. As I recall we listened to her talk, then put her ideas into practice and it worked really well.

Twenty Years as a Law Librarian - Professional Bodies

This is the third in this series of twenty years in law librarianship. I already have covered technology and communications, both of which are fairly uncontroversial. This one is about librarianship's changing professional bodies, which made up part of my report's section on ‘professional awareness’, and could be problematic.



Our Professional Future 1998

Twenty years ago the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals was the Library Association. My Professional Development Report provides an excellent snapshot of where I was in 1999 and was submitted to prove my professional worthiness to become an Associate Member of the LA. At the time of writing it, the profession was undergoing momentous change, and they were consulting on the proposed merger with the Institute of Information Scientists (IIS). I wrote,

Strange Beauty and Augustus, Elector of Saxony

Altdorfer 'Landscape' 1518-20

It seems you can travel miles in search of a certain historical figure, and not realise that useful insights could be hiding in plain view. After a trip to Dresden to see Elector Augustus of Saxony's family home, I decided to visit to London's National Gallery 'Strange Beauty' exhibition. This is not a review because I am too late and its failings have been done to death. However for my purposes the exhibition was a success because it helped me frame some interesting art historical questions, as well as send me off in an unexpected direction.

Naturally I got distracted; in the introductory room I was able to spend quality time with the Arnolfini Portrait, where you could get up close and personal without the usual crowds (yes, I'm happy to pay to be alone with it); as well as some stunning engravings and woodcuts by Cranach and Holbein. The latter's Dance of Death (1526) showed how a tiny skeleton can imbue a scene with an emotional sense of loss - the unwilling toddler being led away was heart stopping. Another dual highlight was Dürer's Melancholia I and an engraving of a self portrait. That arresting gaze missed nothing; whilst the reflection of the windows captured the illumination of his own soul. 

The various Cranachs were, as usual, inscrutable and teasing. Finally I was getting there. Cranach the Elder spent a lot of time at the Elector of Saxony's court and was highly esteemed as an artist and diplomat. Cranach chose to depict the naked people of the mythical silver age fighting one another, against a backdrop of wild mountains and greenery. Instead of focusing on the positives of this age, where Jupiter introduces the seasons and agriculture, he shows the senselessness of men beating each other. The graceful, perfectly coiffed women with their toddlers look on. The fleshy tones and juxtaposition of violence and babies is disturbingly captivating. 

When the kunstkammer of the Electors of Saxony in Dresden was founded by Augustus, Elector of Saxony in 1560, paintings were subordinate to technology and other crafts. However, despite his practical focus, August cherished Cranach the Younger's Adam and Eve which he kept with his treasures. These slim paintings may lack either the sculptural monumentality of Michelangelo or the anguish of Massacio's Adam and Eve, but they have a power and allure of their own. The elegance and simplicity of the gestures catch them on the cusp of the fall; the calm before the storm, the moment of silence before the death and horror. You catch your breath at the inevitability of their temptation and they act as a reminder that we now need to rely on our industry to survive.

From Cranach to the second to last room where I finally captured my Elector; 'Nature and beauty' was the theme. I copied the text which explains the rationale of the pictures in this room. 

Critics have sometimes described German Renaissance art as ugly because of excessive emotion or natural detail but the images themselves present more subtle relationships between beauty, nature and artistry. Durer wrote of his constant search for accurate proportion but he also observed that the human body exists in varied shapes and sizes. Rather than searching for universal ideas of perfection German artists created beautiful images by exploring the diversity of the human form whether variations in body type the effect of ageing or the expressive power of gesture. 

They often lavished equal attention on topography and foliage since mountainous forest landscapes signalled Germanic identity and history. Albrecht invented the new genre of independent landscape omitting all human subjects. But in many figurative images too, landscape setting plays a vital part. Nature in these works is never an objective truth to be recorded. Instead the natural world becomes a subject for creative investigation.

It was Dürer's 'Illustrations of perspective from 'Four Books on Measurement' (1538) I saw Augustus. Augustus was constantly measuring everything, from surveying the land to mapping the heavens. He was looking to the art of science to work out the relationship between things. One article states, 'a 1580 handwritten catalogue lists 2,345 works in his collection from all fields - the classics, theology, history, medicine, surgery, law, mathematics, architecture, astronomy, tournaments and festivals, warfare, mining, numismatics, mineralogy, biology and agriculture'. So not so much creative investigation but early modern natural philosophical experimentation on what the earth can produce for the benefit of the Elector and his state.

Landscape was all. I don't know whether Augustus saw the romantic beauty of his wild forests and mountains, or if he saw the mineral ore, timber, and wealth that they provided. However it is the mountainous forest landscapes signall[ing] Germanic identity and history which has provided me with raw material for consideration. The wiredrawing bench is covered with images of a mysterious forested landscape and set against some of the images in this exhibition, it can only be described as 'germanic'. Altdorfer and his dramatic landscapes are going to provide some very interesting ideas.

The exhibition ends with questions and says, 'today art galleries avoid identifying aesthetic qualities with national character'. I agree, 'national character' is a very woolly and unhelpful phrase. However when a patron like Augustus commissions a work of art or technology, it is necessarily going to be identified with him and his personal interests. Where his interests are so forcefully tied to the identification and exploitation of his state's natural resources, do they produce a 'national character'? If a place is famed for its silver mines and industrial processes, and one of the tools of that process - the wiredrawing bench - is highly decorative, it is logical to assume that the images are inspired by the local landscape. Thus the work of art takes on a national character and demands an explanation in that context.

And this is what I'm setting out to investigate. 

ICLR Online Review

The ICLR was established in 1865 to “prepare and publish, in a convenient form, at a moderate price, and under gratuitous professional control, of Reports of Judicial Decisions of the Superior and Appellate Courts”. With a long standing information pedigree, excellent archive, and a selective editorial approach, I felt optimistic about their online database. I've put down a few thoughts.


The Main Site

Before logging in to ICLR Online, I looked at their main site which has a wealth of free information. As well as the latest case summaries/published cases search, it has an up-to-date blog, details of ICLR events, and other entertaining snippets. I must admit to not using the case digests in my current awareness, but I have now rectified this by adding their RSS feed onto my reader. This is going to be an extra part of my daily bulletin and I can link to the summaries.

Islam in an Age of Confessionalisation

Suleiman the Magnificent

I hadn't been to one of the Birkbeck EMPHASIS seminars in ages. Every time I go to one, I leave with my head bursting with knowledge, usually in several types of dead language. So one a year is probably my max. This one on Islam and Christianity in the Early Modern World, presented by Jan Loop caught my eye, as this topic has been on my study to-do list for a while. Hoping for a break from my wiredrawing bench, I inevitably came away with a few ideas of new areas to pursue regarding the Lutheran polemic which forms part of its decoration. It was bound to be relevant because that is how connections work...

CLIG Seminar: Employment law and socia media

These notes come out of a CLIG seminar I attended on 18 March 2014 - the excellent and extremely thorough speaker was Alexandra Mizzi. Apologies for any omissions or mistakes, which are entirely mine and certainly not her fault.

Social media is being tackled piecemeal in the courts and some of these interesting cases are discussed below. It is a tricky area due to increasingly blurred lines between personal and private lives. Creating a successful social media brand is personality driven, so a personal/professional clash is inevitable.

The seminar covered the following areas: the perils of online selection, screening and recruitment; employee misconduct online looking at both company reputation and employer liability; and finally the tricky issue of social media contacts ownership.