You're Fired!!!

Well, not really, obviously but it can’t have escaped the notice of any of us that these are dark days for jobseekers and more and more people are asking for our help in finding employment. So we at Treasure Hunt Towers have put together a collection of links and useful information that we hope will be useful for our readers. Go to the Westminster Library Gateway and you will notice a box labelled Back to work – we can help. At the top is a guide to where to find jobs ads – both in print and online. One top tip is to recommend people to check each local council website every week as very few public sector jobs make it into the Guardian or Voice any more. (go to the Westminster Council homepage and you’ll find a link at the bottom to Jobs and Vacancies). We’ve given a link to the libraries careers advice sessions (very handy for printing out for a reader) and to the local advice services.

As well as the Back to Work, it’s also worth pointing readers (and yourselves) towards the Education section. Scroll down to the Adult & further education for links to the local adult education colleges (including Westminster Adult Education Service) plus the online version of Floodlight, which lists part-time course all over London. And for anyone who wants a complete change of career there are links to colleges running access courses and to universities in the higher education. Have a look – who knows, you may discover a hitherto suppressed desire to make a career in Golf Management or Fish Farming!

Summer School

If there’s one thing we at Treasure Hunt Towers hate, it’s spending money. And if there’s one thing we like doing, it’s getting educated. So how to combine our two hobbies without actually getting out of our chairs? (another thing we hate doing!) . As usual it’s the Gateway to the rescue! First up is Computers & the Internet where I can scroll down to Learning Resources and then learn just about anything I want toinvolving ICT. The biggie here is obviously IVY (or the Ivy Learning Management System as it’s officially known). You need to register for this – you should have instructions at your enquiry desk, or if you're not a library staff member, just ask next time you visit – but once you have a login, there is a whole wealth of ICT and business courses available to you. If you want to browse before registering, just click on the About Ivy link on the Gateway page and see what’s there – a full range of Microsoft offices, all in easy bitesized chunks so you don’t actually have to learn Access in one go plus an excellent range of business courses from health and safety, employment law, interview techniques and even body language.

Once you’ve exhausted everything Ivy has to offer, there’s plenty more available back on the Gateway. Fancy learning a new language? Go to the Languages page of the Gateway and you’ll find I Love Languages as a key link. Going to Zanzibar this Summer? Well, you’ll want to have a bit of basic Swahili so clink on Languages and then By Language and the helpful Swahili links will give you some basic lessons. Taking a trip to Qo’nos and worried about not being able to ask way to the bathroom? Check out the Klingon language resources and memorise the useful phrase ‘nuqDaq 'oH puchpa''e' ?

Perhaps you fancy something a little more creative than learning how to talk to fictional characters? How about something a little crafty? Try HintsandThings which you’ll find in the Homes & Gardens section of the Gateway. Check out the Workshop and you’ll find guides to cross-stitch, making paper clay (papier mache we called it when I were a lass), economical gifts and much more. It’s an excellent site and you can get lost browsing in it – the Kitchen is excellent for brushing up on your culinary skills.

What’s the use of a book without pictures or conversation?

Wise words there from Alice and we at Treasure Hunt Towers are big fans of pictures. And books. (And conversations but that’s for another day). So today we’re considering the latest addition to the 24/7 library – The Illustrated London News (the clue’s in the title). This was the first ever illustrated weekly newspaper and ran from 1842-2003. Contributors included Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, W Heath Robinson, Kate Greenaway and Agatha Christie. And it’s now all available online via the News and Magazines page of the Westminster Library Gateway or the - Exclusive Resources page

They struck lucky in their very first week – the hot news of the week was a devastating fire in Hamburg so an artist was sent to the British Museum to find an engraving which he copied with additional flames for the front page. A two page spread inside was devoted to a Magnificent Fancy Dress Ball given by Queen Victoria but in case that was too cheerful, there was also an Awful Steamboat Explosion in America and a Dreadful Railway accident near Paris.

Every issue has something of interest. You can pick one at random and browse it – the cover picture on the week I was born is of Professor Dorothy Hodgkin receiving the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, while other articles (all copiously illustrated) cover Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s visit to Washington, Inside Red China Today and the new traffic signals just in force (NO U TURN, SCARBOROUGH A64 etc). All fascinating stuff.


Royalists will have a field day browsing through the many special editions devoted to royal weddings and funerals (the 2nd May 1882 number celebrating the marriage of Prince Leopold and Princess Helena has some splendid engravings of the groom’s student life at Oxford though sadly this was followed only two years later by a commemorative funeral edition after the Prince’s death, giving them a chance to re-use some of the same pictures), while war-buffs will want to spent time browsing the issues relating to the Blitz. Or you could check out your own workplace – I’ve been reading about the ratepayers’ meeting May in 1856 which agreed that a public library in Paddington was ‘needless and inexpedient’, while during the summer of 1854 Marylebone Free Library had 5489 male visitors and 179 ladies who between them read 5655 books, all no doubt Highly Improving.

Whatever your interests – films, theatre, history, science, fashion - the Illustrated London news is bound to have something to interest you. And the Treasure Hunt Towers top search tip? The default search is Keyword. Ignore that and click on the button for Entire Document and you’ll get far more results.

Holding out for a hero

We at Treasure Hunt Towers like to start our morning with Radio 4’s Today programme and this morning we were intrigued to hear an interview with the editor of one of our very favourite online resources, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. If you missed it, you can listen here - here (it’s the last item). He was discussing the way the concept of heroism has changed over the last 150 years.

Anyway, this prompted me to revisit the ODNB (linked from the Biography page of the Westminster Libraries Gateway and check out the fascinating article on heroic figures in the ODNB here with links to biographies of such varied characters as Grace Darling, The Unknown Warrior and Princess Diana. This led me to some of the other themed articles on such subjects as Childhood in the ODNB, the Great Fire of London, Servants in the ODNB and Trafalgar Square.
My thirst for knowledge not satiated, I checked out the Life of the Day (you can subscribe at Lives of the Week) and found the rather sad little story of Penelope Boothby (1785–1791), artist's model and subject of poetry.
Then I took a quick look at the list of 90 new names added this month including Kathleen Drew, (1901–1957), phycologist (who knew there were celebrity experts in algae?) and George Tuthill, (1817–1887), banner and regalia maker.

Fascinating stuff and you can easily get lost browsing around there but you’ll certainly learn a lot more than you set out to.

After all those biographies, I felt like a change of scene and had a look at a rather fun site sent in by Stuart Walsh, a correspondent from Victoria. This is the Literature Map. Simply put in the name of your favourite authors, (here at Treasure Hunt Towers it’s George Orwell) and watch as a hypnotic pattern of names appears, all of other writers who you might enjoy. Click on one of those for another hypnotic cluster of suggestions. It’s rather like the If You Like… site linked from the Books & Literature page of the Gateway or the book Who Writes Like? which some of you may have at your enquiry desk but a lot more psychedelic.

Too Many Books Spoil the Broth

Are you running up huge bills on Amazon every month? Worried your bookshelves will collapse under the weight of your acquisitions? Struggling to get your suitcase through customs since you can’t possibly go away for a week with less than seven books? Then maybe an eBook reader is for you. We at Treasure Hunt Towers, being at the cutting edge of technology, have already invested in one of these lovely shiny gadgets, much to the envy of our colleagues and now all we want is some books to put on it!

Obviously we could head off to Amazon and hand over some of our hard-earned cash but that would be ridiculous when there is so much free stuff around. And fortunately the Westminster Libraries Gateway (http://www.westminster.gov.uk/services/libraries/gateway/) is here to help. Just click on the section for Books and Literature and scroll down to Online Books and you’ll find literally tens of thousands of free books to download onto your new toy.

The mother of all online book sites is Project Gutenberg, named after the chap who invented the printing press. The creator of the site claims to have invented the eBook back in the Neolithic era or 1971 to be precise (trivia note – the first ever eBook was The Declaration of Independence) and since those unimaginably far distant days, long before the web was even a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye, he has added over 30,000 copyright free (in the USA) titles to the site. These range from the classics – you’ll find all of Dickens and Thomas Hardy there as well as the Sherlock Holmes stories – through children’s titles such as Peter Pan and Anne of Green Gables to heavier reference works such as Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language and various translations of the Bible. If it was published in the USA before c1923 and you’ve heard of it, it’s quite likely to be there. And they can all be downloaded to your ebook reader for the grand sum of nothing! And the site has some useful advice on how to do it.

Once you’ve read everything on Project Gutenberg, where to go next? Also linked from the Books and Literature section of the Gateway is the Online Books Page, created by the University of Pennsylvania. This covers a lot of the same ground as Project Gutenberg but it also has handy collections of Women Writers and, excitingly, Banned Books so you can gather together Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Frankenstein, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Rousseau’s Confessions and Black Beauty into one playlist on your eBook reader and also find out what was so controversial about them.

Staying on the Books and Literature page for a moment, don’t forget Contemporary Authors, one of the key links at the top and one of the unsung heroines of the 24/7 library. Not flashy or glam but very useful indeed with biographies, bibliographies and critiques of 1000s of authors which you can search by name, book title, country, genre or even by year of birth.
Hopefully, all this should keep your eBook readers well-stocked and more importantly your readers happy until The Management unveil their scheme for Westminster Libraries’ eBook Collection

Vote early and vote often

We at Treasure Hunt Towers are in fever pitch of excitement about the election and just can’t get enough of speeches, hustings, manifestos, soundbites, battle buses and electoral reform. But even if you’re not as enthusiastic/sad (delete as appropriate) as us, it’s useful to know what’s out there on the web to help you decide where to put your cross.

First port of call on the Westminster Libraries Gateway (http://www.westminster.gov.uk/services/libraries/gateway/) is the section on Government and Politics : National & International. A useful site is They Work for You – you can check out an MP’s voting record, expenses claims (my MP, now retired, claimed for a Zone 1-3 travel card and £6.541 for stationery )

Also useful is the UK Parliament site which includes far more than any sane person could possibly want to know about the workings of Parliament including the full text of Hansard, the record of Commons and Lords debates for the last 30 years. If you want to go further back (to 1803 to be precise), you can pay a visit to Westminster Reference Library to check up on some name-calling between Gladstone and Disraeli

One further site of interest can be found on the BBC website http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/default.stm.
Just put in a postcode or constituency name to get a profile of the area (my leafy little suburb ‘has been a desirable place for young professionals to live for a number of years’) and a list of candidates

Of course, May 6th isn’t just a general election for Londoners – for the first time since 1979, we’re voting in a local election on the same day. Back to the Gateway and then to the link for Government : Local and you can find links to other councils and to the Greater London Authority and the results of the last local government elections. And check out http://www.westminster.gov.uk/services/councilgovernmentanddemocracy/ for details of the current Westminster representatives


And for a bit of fun, try this quiz on elections in literature (I got 8/10, sadly failing on George Eliot rather than Jeffrey Archer. Oops!)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/quiz/2010/apr/06/elections-in-literature

I’d just like to thank…

Excitement at Treasure Hunt Towers is at fever pitch because it’s Oscar weekend. Frocks have been dry-cleaned, speeches prepared and tissues bought in bulk. And let us not forget that not only are these the most famous awards in the world (because who really cares about the Nobel Prize?) but they were named by a librarian. Take a bow, Margaret Herrick Anyway it seems appropriate to have a look at a couple of the cinematic offerings to be found on the Gateway – Check out the link for Stage and Screen
The king of all sites cinematic is The Internet Movie Database – your first point of call for any film or tv programmes credits. It’s an enormously powerful database and if you use the Advanced Search features (click on the drop down search box at the top) you can do complex searches for Titles (ever wondered if any Carry On films were shot in Marylebone – wonder no longer, part of Carry On Girls was) or names (did any stars of The Italian Job come from Maida Vale? Why yes, the great Irene Handl did)
We at Treasure Hunt Towers are great fans of British films, the more black and white the better so a favourite site here is Screenonline, produced by the British Film Institute. It’s packed full of articles about genres (B movies, public individual films, animation and so on) as well as information about television programmes and individual actors and directors. And if you use it in a Westminster library, you can access thousands of clips and even whole films and programmes (spend your lunch-hour comparing the first episode of Coronation Street with the first episode of Brookside)

Exercise, eating and economics

Being a strong-willed sort of person, as all information providers are, you will, of course, be in the 12% New Year Resolution Makers who actually stick to it [1]. And like 99% of people they probably involve Taking More Exercise, Dieting and Sorting Out Your Finances. So how to work on these without actually leaving the comfort of your armchair?

First exercise – well, obviously you’ve got to put the research in. Fancy taking up a new challenge? The favoured form of exercise at Treasure Hunt Towers is outdoor swimming and by searching at Active Places (go to the Sports section of the gateway), a dull looking but jolly useful site, I was able to find two lidos near my home and of course the Serpentine near my work. And there’s proper link

Having taken some healthy exercise, obviously I’m up for some healthy food. Quite a choice here at the Home and Garden section of the Gateway. There’s not much in my fridge but opening the BBC Food pages and using the Recipe Search, I discover that I can turn my sad-looking courgette, onion and lump of stale cheese into a rather delicious-sounding Mediterranean pasta. There’s some useful videos demonstrating recipes, guides to cooking on a budget and for special dietary requirements and you can specify recipes by your favourite TV chef.

Lastly, having taken out an expensive gym membership, you are probably now vowing to finally get round to sorting out your personally finances. Probably your eyes glaze over at the words ‘insurance’ and ‘endowment’ but ‘received wisdom’ suggests we should all audit our finances occasionally and there’s plenty of help out there. You’ve probably come across Martin Lewis on tv or the radio, bouncing around giving advice and his website MoneySavingExpert (go to the Family and Personal section of the Gateway and scroll down to Personal Finance) is really jolly good. Lots of helpful stuff about finding cheap flights or changing your insurance or getting a new mortgage – frankly it’s worth checking it out every time you want to spend money. And there’s very useful advice there about what to do if financial problems are starting to get on top of you. Plus, the weekly email has all sorts of vouchers and tips about current bargains.

Playbills, pantomimes and patent medicines

As the festive season still has another week to run, my mind naturally turns to panto (‘Oh no, it does’nt’). And indeed the history of pantomime. One treasure trove of all matter Victorian, Christmassy and theatrical is the John Johnson Collection. You can browse by subjects – human freaks, minstrels, dioramas, flea-circuses or whatever else takes your fancy – or search by keyword. If you look for pantomimes, you’ll find literally hundreds of adverts, playbills, songsheets, newspaper cuttings and more. And it’s not just about entertainment – there are sections devoted to crime (‘Trial and execution of William Crouch, for the murder of his wife at Marylebone’) and advertising. Which of course is where the patent medicines come in. If only the NHS weren’t so hide-bound we could all be using Dr De Jongh's (Knight of the Order of Leopold of Belgium) light-brown cod liver oil, prescribed by the most eminent medical men throughout the world as the safest, speediest, and most effectual remedy for consumption, bronchitis, asthma, coughs, general debility, rheumatism, gout, neuralgia, diseases of the skin, rickets, infantile wasting, and all scrofulous affections and I’m sure we’d all be better for it.

The John Johnson Collection can be found at the Exclusive Resources page at http://www.westminster.gov.uk/services/libraries/247/exclusives/. Scroll down to Art. And if your interest has been aroused by any of the Wonderful Phantasmagoria or Terrible Crimes you’ve read about, you can always check The Times or Guardian (see the same page under Newspapers) for the real story (William Crouch was not just a murderer but a bigamist too and there was a lively argument in The Times letters page about whether he was insane or not).

Gender, genetic modification and guinea-pigs!

‘Have you got anything on gender issues?’ Or climate change or pornography or alcoholism or abortion or homelessness or gambling or any of the other hobbies Young People have nowadays? We’ve all had these questions from teenagers doing projects and we’ve all wandered over to the shelves hoping that all the books on animal rights aren’t out. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a single site you could use for all your homework needs on these issues? Well now there is and, imaginatively it’s called Issues Online. Some of you may know the Issues series of books – useful A4 sized volumes full of excellent articles on subjects like euthanasia and global warming. Well, this is the online version and jolly useful it is too with topics ranging from one-parent families to cloning.

You can find it on the Gateway in the Society & Citizenship section and also on the Exclusive Resources page (http://www.westminster.gov.uk/services/libraries/247/exclusives) under Social Issues.

‘This is all very find and dandy but where are the guinea-pigs?’ I hear you cry! On the Westminster Advent Calendar (linked from the library homepage), that’s where. Click on the link for the 2nd of December and sit back and enjoy the legendary Guinea Pig Theatre’s moving adaptation of A Christmas Carol.

Bonfire of the library books

As you may know, Treasure Hunt Towers shares premises with Marylebone Library, and we’ve been helping the staff in the Information Service to build up a pile of books for a good bonfire. After all, what’s the point of them? They age faster than a superannuated Spice Girl, and the stuff in them is out of date before the ink is dry. As I splash the paraffin about, I’ll go through a few of them, explaining why they won’t be missed.

Toss them on the pile

This is a good one – The Oxford English Dictionary, published before many of our readers were born, and updated with a few measly supplements. What sort of a way is that to keep up to date with the language? You’re far better off with the online version, which was last revised three weeks ago!

Here’s another multi-volume white elephant from Oxford, the Dictionary of National Biography. Nice to hold, well produced, I’ll give you that. But rather a lot of notable people have died since 2000, and some of us might have passed gently on waiting for the updates if it weren’t for the online version. This has admittedly not been updated since May – shock! horror! – but that was a pretty impressive update, with 87 new biographies (mostly of people who died in 2005), together with loads of corrections and additions.

We’ve been filling the smaller spaces on the bonfire with these one-volume dictionaries and handbooks – look, hundreds of them. No tears to be shed over any of them. Not only are they frequently updated online, they’re also collected together in mega-databases, like Credo Reference, Gale Virtual Reference and Oxford Reference Online. Which of course means that one search covers the lot. So you get quick service while we build up our flammable pile.

While we’re talking about reference books, these Encyclopedia Britannica volumes are bulking up the bonfire very nicely. Who will miss them? Where’s the multimedia? Where are the links and the slide-shows? Online of course. Now, what else shall we add to the blaze?


First-rate fuel

Things are really starting to hot up now. These old Grove Music and Grove Art tomes should really make our conflagration visible from space. Both of them have been made obsolete by – again – Oxford, who’ve renamed them Oxford Music and Oxford Art, and of course added lots more content and brought them bang up to date.

Don’t just stand there – pass me those Who’s Whos and that pile of newspapers. Then we’ll start on the directories. What? Oh yes, they’re all in KnowUK, so we can get rid of the lot. What else? Any more useless paper for our lovely, lovely bonfire?

[At this point, gentle reader, the author of the above words was led away, while the books were retrieved from the pile, rinsed of paraffin, and returned to the shelves, where they will be available for reference as soon as they have dried out. Rest assured that we recognise the continuing need for hard-copy as well as online sources of information, and we have no intention of allowing any bonfire of our books. Still, makes you think, doesn’t it?]

(Many of the links in the Gateway to websites are to Exclusive Resources for Westminster Libraries members. Outside a Westminster library, you will need to enter your library card number to get free access to the resource.)

No books were harmed in the composition of this message.

So a man comes to me...

…and he says he’s got a simple question about getting married to his girlfriend just round the corner at the register office. He popped in there but they’d looked at him funny and sent him to see me. What’s going on? Turns out his girlfriend is from South America, living in an EU country and doesn’t have a visa to visit the UK. After that, it gets complicated. Could I just sort it out for him?

Questions beget questions

The obvious place to start is the Passports & Immigration part of the Home Office website, which directs you to a separate visas site, which starts to ask you questions. Don’t get mad – answer the questions, because then you start to get the facts relating to your particular case.

Firstly, you get a “yes” or “no” on whether you (or your girlfriend or whoever) needs a visa. If the answer’s “yes”, you are offered more information in the form of Frequently Asked Questions. If those three words make the blood run cold, give the website a chance. I thought that most of the questions were probably asked frequently, and they certainly included questions on the lips of my anxious enquirer.

I’m not saying it’s easy. This is a complicated area, and government departments have a fine tradition of making this sort of thing more complicated (see Dickens’ “Circumlocution Office”). The early government websites upheld this tradition, with the Home Office leading the way. They have got much better.

Persist, take a deep breath now and again, and deal with them on their own terms. If you are asked questions, try to answer them. If you take the view that all the information should be available without you showing your hand at all, you will defeat all their efforts to focus on your query and minimise the distractions.

Remember (he says, pedantically): there is no such thing as a general enquiry. At least, not if you want a useful answer. If the website tries to be specific, be grateful and give a little. And if you don’t quite like the answers you get, try a bit of reading around…

(From the Gateway to websites, select “Advice & help”. The Home Office’s Passports & Immigration pages are under “Immigration & nationality”.)


Take a CAB

My chum with the girlfriend problem had also visited the Citizens Advice Bureau, but they couldn’t see him because he had the wrong colour tee-shirt on and there was an “r” in the month. OK, it was some other set of reasons, but he got no joy. But the CAB Adviceguide is open to all, at any time. This website is updated regularly and is divided into four main sections, “your money”, “your family”, “your daily life” and “your rights”.

The advice you get will be impartial, with printable factsheets and pointers to sources of further advice.

Naturally neither the Home Office nor the CAB will tell you whether it’s a good idea to get married. For that you may turn to Mr Punch (“don’t”).

(From the Gateway to websites, select “Advice & help”. CAB Adviceguide is a Key Link.)

Clubs, cabals and captains of England

You know what it’s like: new people move in, and the first thing they do is change the colour of the front door. It happens to information databases too…

Magic ingredients

When the Oxford University Press took over the Dictionary of National Biography, renaming it the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), they promised benefits galore: rewritten entries, many new entries and “added value” features. It was quickly apparent that they had delivered on the first two. Thousands of entries have been revised or completely rewritten, and the ones I’ve dipped into are mostly a pleasure to read, the dry-as-dust elements replaced by attractive prose. Hagiography is off the agenda: subjects come over as real people with good and bad aspects. Complete b*st*rds are dealt with as they deserve. But what of the bells and whistles?

The stand-out feature is the collection of “themes”. Each consists of an essay on a given theme, with links to the individual entries in the main Dictionary. There is a vast range of themes, starting (alphabetically) with the Aberdeen Philosophical Society (joke removed on grounds of racial harmony), and ending with Yorkists (not chocolate bar lovers – Yorkists supported the House of York against the House of Lancaster).

Apart from being often interesting in their own right, these themes are really useful if one or more of them chimes in with some research you are doing. Antarctic explorers, bluestockings, captains of England (cricket, naturally) – the range is wide and wonderful.

When I saw “Patrons of the Mermaid Tavern”, I had a look to see if they’d covered the distinguished denizens of my own local, but sadly not. Still writing the essay, I expect.


Roll up and try your luck

Another great piece of “added value” which Oxford have brought to the DNB is a terrifically versatile search function. The “people” search allows you to specify a name, obviously, but you can also find people alive or active between certain dates, or people born, educated, or buried at particular times or places. There are several more search criteria. Try it –it’s strangely addictive, like a sort of biographical fruit-machine.

(From the Gateway to websites, select “Biography”. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is a Key Link. This is an Exclusive Resource for Westminster Libraries members. Outside a Westminster library, you will need your card number to log in.)

Don't dump that dog-basket!

Recycling is like dieting – noble ambitions tend to be gnawed and nibbled by human nature. The ideal diet and the ideal recycling plan should be fun to follow and easy to understand. Any chance…?

Free to a good home

Freecycle scores heavily on ease of understanding. The only purpose of the website is to put you in touch with a local group who subscribe to the Freecycle ethos. So what’s the big idea?

The idea is that I advertise stuff which I can’t use any more (or never could use), and my advert is answered by someone who can use it. And to keep it simple – no long-distance correspondence, no postage and packing – the movement is organised into local groups.

Since I live in Westminster, naturally I followed the link to Westminster Freecycle. I had to have a Yahoo login, as the group is formed as a Yahoo Group. If you haven’t got a login, signing up to Yahoo is reasonably straightforward. So I was in – what did I find?

Messages are displayed last-first. There have been 190 in the last week. They consist of offers (a car seat, a single bed, some coloured pipe cleaners for children’s crafts), items wanted (a radio, a USB cable, “as many jam jars as possible”) and subsequent messages confirming that offers have been accepted and goods collected.

It’s a global idea, but it’s also a parish-pump affair – that’s its biggest strength. Of course there are risks involved – in any transaction with another person, even a free transaction, you have to take precautions. The local group’s website gives prominent warning on its home page, and this is backed up by the main Freecycle website.

Other local groups can participate, as long as they are not-for-profit. This is great because it makes it easier to find a good home for, say, curtain material which is no longer fashionable or to your taste, but can be eagerly transmogrified into exotic costumes by the kids in the local playgroup.

I rather fancied the hammock and the wind-up gramophone. I could just see myself relaxing to the scratchy strains of some old records, but they’ve both been snapped up. Pity… perhaps I’ll just go for the sandwich toaster, and while I’m at it I’ll get rid of that giant panda that’s blocking the wardrobe…

(From the Gateway to websites, select “Environment & geography”. Freecycle is under “Going green”. There is a separate link to the Westminster Freecycle group.)


Boris’s bin-liner reduction strategy

There’s just room for a quick mention of Recycle for London, the Mayor’s colourful shop window for the many official and voluntary schemes to starve our black bin-liners and redirect the waste which isn’t really waste at all.

(From the Gateway to websites, select “Environment & geography”. Recycle for London is under “Going green”.)

The next blockbuster?

Got a novel inside you? Just putting the finishing touches to that pithy poem? Maybe illustration is your thing, or journalism, or travel writing? Let’s see if we can share it with a grateful public…

An expert eye

I wonder how many budding writers have not looked at the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook at least once. I also wonder how many of them realised that this biblical work is available online, through KnowUK, to Westminster Libraries members.

Without minimising the difficulties you will face if you want your literary or artistic baby to be made available to the world, the Yearbook gives lots of practical hints on how to get your stuff accepted and, even more valuable, how you can plan for a successful outcome even before you start scribbling.

Want to write fantasy novels? – read Terry Pratchett first. Fancy being a cartoonist? – Martin Rowson will set you straight. Whatever your chosen (or not-yet-chosen) métier, the Yearbook has words of wisdom from a successful practitioner.

As well as being a repository for these wise words, the Yearbook acts as a directory of agents, publishers, producers, and almost anyone else who might turn your hobby into a livelihood. Legal and financial considerations are well covered, as are resources such as writers’ retreats.

A couple of words of caution. The online version is dated 2008, whereas the 2009 printed edition (branded 2010 but recently published) has already hit the shelves. Most of the content does not date “dangerously”, but it’s something to bear in mind. Also, the online version does not seem to include the introductory note from Richard & Judy. Just an oversight, I expect.

(From the Gateway to websites, select “Books & literature”. The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook is a Key Link. Remember that you will need your membership card number to log in, if you are not using a Westminster Libraries computer.)


The source

As I said, the Yearbook is just one brick in the KnowUK wall, and what a huge wall it is. This resource suffers from being just too big and diverse. Because it covers a vast range of subjects from Arts and Media to Tourism and Leisure - by way of careers, government, law, personal finance and many more subjects – it’s difficult to pin down. That’s why we have extracted resources like the Yearbook and given them their own links on the Gateway.

We can’t do that for every resource – if we did, the Gateway would be rather obese! So if you have a query which might be answered by using a directory or guidebook, whether professional or local, official or tourist, try KnowUK first. You will be surprised how often it comes up trumps.

(From the Gateway to websites, select “Quick reference: directories”, where you will find KnowUK. Remember that you will need your membership card number to log in, if you are not using a Westminster Libraries computer.)

Does it squeak?

I’ve been conducting some public training courses in various aspects of computers and their uses. As a personal mental work-out it’s great: however hard you prepare, unexpected questions come from all angles. For instance, you keep talking about the mouse, but what is it? Why is it called a mouse? What crazy person thought of it? Let’s see if we can get some help…

Not exactly catsmeat

TechEncyclopedia has had an honoured place on the Gateway for as long as I can remember. The claim is that it holds definitions for “more than 20,000 IT terms”. I haven’t tested the number, but I bet it’s true because this is a website to rely on. So are mice on the menu here?

The TechEncyclopedia entry on “mouse” is a model of its kind. A five-word basic definition is followed by some history, an explanation of why it’s called a mouse (because it looks a bit like a mouse – duh!), and lots more techy stuff for those that want it. There’s a picture of the first mouse, looking more like a miniature angle grinder, and a line-up of bizarre mice which somehow didn’t catch on.

Some of the definitions raise more questions than answers – no criticism, these things are sometimes, necessarily, complicated – and there are linked microsites which get into very deep waters indeed. But if all you need is a basic definition of a straightforward piece of hardware or software, this should be your first port of call.

By the way, if the first thing you get is a full-page advert, you can easily skip it.

(From the Gateway to websites, select “Computers & the Internet”. TechEncyclopedia is a Key Link.)


Hair today, united tomorrow

Talking of why things are called what they are called, Digital Unite used to be called Hairnet, and I’ve no idea why. Probably a snappy acronym. No matter – now it’s Digital Unite and it’s good at its job, which is to help “people over 50 use IT - from internet & email to social networking & blogs.”

They do this in a number of ways, but probably the most useful to the people we’ve been training in the library is that they can supplement group sessions with one-to-one help and advice on the things they most want to do with computers.

If you click the “Tutors and Training” button on the website, you will see the “Find a Tutor” feature. This has changed: previously you could pop in your postcode and get a list of tutors. Now, presumably to fend off the attentions of machines which access and misuse such lists, you have to send them your details; either a nearby tutor or Digital Unite themselves will contact you (alternatively you can phone a freephone number).

This is not a free service: they quote a price of “around £25 per hour, plus travel”. Discounts, although mentioned, are unspecified. But for a beginner or for someone wanting specialised advice, if they can afford it, this is probably 25 quid well spent.

(From the Gateway to websites, select “Computers and the Internet” Digital Unite is under “Accessibility”.)

The next train's gone

Thanks to John Orton (Will Hay’s scriptwriter) for this week’s apt title. Just one website again, but there’s quite a lot to say about it.


I wouldn’t start from here

Does your blood run cold when you read the words National Rail Enquiries? Do you remember queuing at the station for the chance to question a pimply youth with a dog-eared timetable clutched to his bosom? Or waiting for hours for a reply from an understaffed call centre? No? Maybe you are too young for these golden experiences. But surely you remember the appalling excuse for an enquiries website foisted upon us by the ill-fated Railtrack. Has it, I wondered, improved under Network Rail?

Yes, it has, beyond all recognition. It’s not perfect – you start with a graphics nightmare, and as you penetrate the site the flashing ads can get very irksome. But in terms of its functionality, I think it’s worth the hassle. Finding train times is relatively straightforward, with a standard journey-planner format which differs little from the Transport for London version. But that’s just the beginning.


First class towards the rear

Having got some train times, how about working out whether you can actually afford the trip? It’s important, if you have any sort of discount railcard, to register the fact before you hit the “check fares” button. Nothing, not even this website, can save you from the nightmare of rail ticket pricing, recently “simplified” (ha ha). But with a bit of clicking and weaving you can maybe find a not-too-ruinous fare. You can’t actually book the tickets on this site, but you can be linked through to the online seller of your choice.

Other dinky features include a season ticket calculator (particularly useful if you have to make a claim on your employer before buying the ticket), travel alerts and live travel information (by text or phone), a widget which compiles a personalised timetable for your chosen journey, and a search option to find the cheapest fare for a journey. Oh, and there’s Lisa.

Lisa is a “virtual assistant”, in reality a picture of a very pleasant-looking woman fronting up a database of frequently asked questions. Throw Lisa a question and she will politely try to interpret your query in terms she’s got answers for. I asked “can I still get a cheap day return?” (The answer’s no.) Lisa recognised that it was a fares enquiry – no flies on Lisa – and offered me info on fares categories and how they have recently changed, which is fair enough.

Lisa’s pals at Network Rail have made some progress in improving train services, but the National Rail Enquiries website has made even more progress. So focus your eyes on the meaty stuff, avert your gaze from the flashing stuff, and your journey will not be in vain.

(From the Gateway to websites, select “Transport & tourism”. National Rail Enquiries is under “Rail”.)

Bonfire of the lists!

“I’ll just look in the box for a list. Here we are – oh, no, this one’s from 1998… there must be a more recent one than that. Here’s another one. Damn – that’s even older, and the box has fallen apart! Hang on, I’ll look in the workroom.”

Do I exaggerate about ageing lists of local services on curly paper in scruffy boxes. Perhaps I do – sometimes the boxes are quite neat. But why pre-print a list, which is out of date as soon as it’s printed, when you can get up-to-date information on demand?


Doctor Where

NHS Choices, as a title, invites cynicism. Is it just Big Brother-speak for a lack of choice? Actually, it isn’t. This website really can help you find a local doctor, dentist, chemist, optician or hospital (including emergency hospital), providing you with much of the information you need to make a choice.

Take doctors, for instance. I put my postcode in the box, and what I got for all this effort was a list of doctors starting with the closest to my front door. But more than that, I was told whether each surgery had provision for early (before 8.30am) or late (after 6pm) appointments, and whether the surgery was accepting new patients. This is crucial – there was nothing more depressing for a new arrival than the ring-round of doctors’ surgeries – “are you taking patients or, if not, have you heard any rumours about who might be?”

Of course, circumstances change from second to second, and I don’t suppose that NHS Choices is updated quite that often. But it’s a good starting-point.


What seems to be the trouble?

There’s much more to NHS Choices than a database of local services. If you think you might have caught something nasty, you can click through to NHS Direct, with its symptom-checker, its common health questions (and answers!), and its telephone number. There is, of course, a lot here about Swine Flu, including the dedicated phone line.

Back at NHS Choices, there is a huge amount to read, watch and listen to, on keeping healthy and taking action when you or a loved one is under the weather.

I’ve seen the NHS’s internal ICT systems in action, and I was less than impressed, which makes it pretty ironic that this public face of the NHS should be both so useful and so attractive.

(From the Gateway to websites, select “Health and medicine”. NHS Choices is a Key Link.)

Clipart from Clipartheaven.com

Beware: poet at work!

Poetry is all the rage:
They’ve recently had it on telly.
So where should you go to find out more?
Look below: feed your mind (and your belly)!

Not the wasteland

The Poetry Society
Has all the latest news
Of poets meek and poets fierce
And poets with radical views.

Discover the Poetry Café
And buy a new volume or two.
Attend their frequent readings
And feast on their veggie ragout.

This website’s tone is friendly:
Nothing snooty or precious here.
So if you need any encouragement,
Seek their help with a smile, not a sneer.

(From the Gateway to websites, select “Books”. The Poetry Society is under “Poetry”.)

South Bank scribblers

The shelves of the Poetry Library
Groan with books and CDs, also mags
Full of poems from 1912 onwards
By beginners and old also “old lags”.

The library’s a physical entity
In the bowels of the Festival Hall,
But the Poetry Magazines Archive
Is a database open to all.

They invite you to write your own poem,
Using words they had left on the shelf.
But unless you’re as good as what I am,
You should not write a poem yourself!

(From the Gateway to websites, select “Books”. The Poetry Library is under “Poetry”.)

Anyone for Bunnock?

Yes, you guessed! It’s the “take advantage of a Brit still being in Wimbledon to plug a few sporting websites” issue!

We will start, however, not with tennis whites but with sharp suits and trilbies.

And they’re off!

Actually the suit-and-trilby sneer is a completely unjustified caricature of the users of the Sporting Life website. I’m not saying that your average race-goer won’t check the odds on this site – he/she probably will, and maybe place a bet in passing. But there’s so much more to this website than horse racing.

Football, cricket, tennis, golf… they’re all there. When I looked, they had the latest news on Formula 1, the current score in the touring match at Hove, and Leicester Tigers’ fixtures for the coming season. It’s extraordinary how many live feeds they’ve got coming in simultaneously - probably not that surprising if you’re a techie, but I was impressed.

If you want to head off and put your hard-earned on a horse with a name that’s a bit like your sister’s, Sporting Life can accommodate you. But if all you want is lots of free stuff on your particular sport, it’s seven to four they can do it. And you don’t need any stake money to enter the competitions!


(From the Gateway to websites, select “Sport & recreation”. Sporting Life is a Key Link.)


The truth about Bunnock?

What to say that’s original about Traditional Games? It’s not an enormous website covering thousands of games, but it is good on games from around the world, including some weird and wonderful games which are in danger of disappearing altogether. In fact they encourage organisers of leagues devoted to endangered games to send in the details for inclusion on the site.

So come forward, all you players of Aunt Sally or Ringing the Bull, you are not (quite) alone!


(From the Gateway to websites, select “Sport & recreation”. Traditional Games is – slightly inaccurately – under “Indoor games”.)