January 2009
20 posts
“The voices from up there or behind the curtain are hot-tempered, powerful,...”
– Fred Wah, “On the edge of Centre. Just off Main.” Describing voices of old men playing mahjong in Vancouver Chinatown.
searching other library catalogues
HKUL is undergoing renovations to make more shelf space for its books. I’ve had no complaints so far with its collections in Canadiana. Rooting around the stacks last week I came up with some unexpected gems, including a real live Royal Commission report, the Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration 1885. (That’s the first of three. It will keep me busy enough for...
borrow books from other libraries
Found a book you need? The loan period for HKU postgrads is 120 days, or until another patron requests it.
Need a book but HKUL doesn’t have it? Search all Hong Kong university libraries under the Hong Kong Academic Library Link, or HKALL. Once you find the book you need, you can request it and have it delivered to the academic library nearest you. Access HKALL from the Services link...
John Updike, 1932-2009 →
portraitoftheartistasayoungman:
A very sad day
“Before you read one page of a source, record all its bibliographic data.”
– Booth et al. The Craft of Research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
cite while you write
Nothing is more tedious than tracking down bibliographic data on a source you’ve used—long after the source is gone. Of course with the internet it’s much easier to recreate information on a specific book, but I know from experience it is no fun to try to remember the exact edition of a popular title, or to find the exact page of a really great quote.
Wayne Booth et al, in...
“It is well-documented that domain experts tend to avoid topical searches in...”
– Olsen, Tod A. “Utility of a faceted catalog for scholarly research.” Library Hi Tech. Vol. 25 No. 4 2007.
finding sources
How do you draw the line between creativity and neurosis? I always saw myself as being organised, creatively so, and it wasn’t until recently that I began to suspect that what I have is in fact an obsessive compulsive disorder. The bulk of my possessions consist of one form or another of paper, which are housed in every imaginable form of container and classified using a finicky array of...
starting research
So I had some fireworks upstairs and thought I could log my research workstream here, in my new sweet little tumblog. When I logged in today I saw that I had decided that in the first post here. Such is my short and erratic memory.
As you may already know, I’m in the last semester of a two year part-time masters programme in English Studies in the territory’s oldest university. ...
“The effort…to make the workings of imperialism, in its colonial,...”
– Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes (Routledge 2008)
feel
So far feels just like a blog which I’ve never had any success maintaining.
workstream
Exploring tumblr as a possible tool for a workstream.