Truly, you could not make this stuff up.

Roly Keating, originally uploaded by jjn1.

To the British Library (which has one of the world’s best URLs, by the way) for an event marking the extension of the ancient rights of legal deposit to the great libraries of the UK and Ireland.

Regulations coming into force tomorrow (6 April) will enable six major libraries to collect, preserve and provide long term access to the increasing proportion of the UK’s cultural and intellectual output that appears in digital form – including blogs, e-books and the entire UK web domain.

From this point forward, the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales, the Bodleian Libraries, Cambridge University Library and Trinity College Library Dublin will have the right to receive a copy of every UK electronic publication, on the same basis as they have received print publications such as books, magazines and newspapers for several centuries.

The regulations, known as legal deposit, will ensure that ephemeral materials like websites can be collected, preserved forever and made available to future generations of researchers, providing the fullest possible record of life and society in the UK in the 21st century for people 50, 100, even 200 or more years in the future.

It’s a big moment and the British Library was the right place to mark it. But the event itself was, well, puzzlingly naff. The vast (and glorious) entrance hall of the Library was thronged with library and publishing types, all drinking from some mysterious source of liquor which I never managed to locate. Nibbles consisted of two kinds of roasted peanut and some cheese straws. Deafening ambient noise was provided by escapees from an Ibiza nightclub, who specialised in a techno genre of the kind that is normally appreciated only by the recently deceased. The audio crew also came equipped with dry-ice machines and disco lights and made sure that no civilised conversation was possible within 100 metres of the venue.

It was very New Labour, somehow. Lots of thirtysomething apparatchiks in Paul Smith suits, close-cropped hair and purposeful looks. Eventually, the din was stilled and the strangely-designated “Chief Executive” of the Library, a former BBC executive named Roly Keating, also in a Paul Smith suit with tapered trouser-legs, stepped forward to make a little speech, which was the only graceful thing in the entire evening. He was followed by the Head of the National Library of Scotland and a lady novelist of whom I am ashamed to admit I had never heard. Then there was a naff ‘countdown’ — despite the fact that the legislation giving force to the new legal deposit arrangements didn’t come into force until midnight. And then it was over.

All in all, very unsatisfactory. One wondered what the staff of Trinity College, Dublin or of the National Library of Wales made of it. They after all, had made the trek to London and presumably an overnight stay. And then there were the people from the Bodleian and some of my colleagues from Cambridge University Library. All of these folks had put a lot of work into the detailed preparations needed to make digital legal deposit a reality. But they didn’t get a look-in at the actual launch event. Was this standard-issue metropolitan bias, one wondered, or just plain ineptitude? Being of a charitable disposition, I’m plumping for the latter. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

Ignore the ad at the beginning. I discovered this while listening to Desert Island Discs this morning, where it was one of Sir Sydney Kentridge’s choices. It’s an hoot (as Alan Bennett would say). Kentridge is the South African lawyer who represented Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko’s family, and he has good judgement in both music and books.

The book he chose was The Jeeves Omnibus. Sound man, as we say in Ireland.

… There’s a sobering essay in Foreign Affairs which argues that the most rational strategy that the infant Kim could follow is the one that NATO used in Europe against the threat of overwhelming Soviet forces on the ground.

It’s impossible to know how exactly Kim might employ his nuclear arsenal to stop the CFC from marching to Pyongyang. But the effectiveness of his strategy would not depend on what North Korea initially destroyed, such as a South Korean port or a U.S. airbase in Japan. The key to coercion is the hostage that is still alive: half a dozen South Korean or Japanese cities, which Kim could threaten to attack unless the CFC accepted a cease-fire.

This strategy, planning to use nuclear escalation to stalemate a militarily superior foe, is not far-fetched. In fact, it was NATO’s strategy for most of the Cold War. Back then, when the alliance felt outgunned by the massive conventional forces of the Warsaw Pact, NATO planned to use nuclear weapons coercively to thwart a major conventional attack. Today, both Pakistan and Russia rely on that same strategy to deal with the overwhelming conventional threats that they face. Experts too easily dismiss the notion that North Korea’s rulers might deliberately escalate a conventional conflict, but if their choice is between escalation and a noose, it is unclear why they would be less ruthless than those who once devised plans to defend NATO.

Brought to you by the New Yorker.

I particularly like this one:

OptiCal

This robust app seamlessly re-integrates your aggregation optimizers, and then pushes all the data to the cloud to provide a more accurate feed-based social metric, and a more robust, texturized social graph. “We have no idea what it does,” said an anonymous venture capitalist who’s contributed millions to the app’s development, “but we have to stay ahead of the curve.”

I want it

We went to see Nick Hytner’s National Theatre production of Alan Bennett’s latest play, People. Verdict: enjoyable and amusing, but not as memorable as his best work (for example A Question of Attribution). In it, Bennett works out one of his ongoing obsessions: what’s happened to British society, and Margaret Thatcher’s role in same. His vehicle is a comedy set in a decaying stately home whose decrepit aristocratic owner (played with great panache by Frances de la Tour) is trying to decide whether or not to hand it over to the National Trust. The comic relief is provided by (a) a nauseating fine art auctioneer of the Sothebys/Christies/Bonham/Phillips variety and (b) a group of film-makers who are using the premises as the set for a porn movie, complete with jokes about erections and a Latvian actress who whiles away the time between fornications knitting something warm for her aged grandmother back home. Her pleasant vacuity immediately brought to mind the sexy Swedish secretary hired by Zero Mostel in the original production of Mel Brooks’s The Producers.

The Trust, needless to say, doesn’t come out of it well: it’s mercilessly lampooned as an outfit that saves British ‘heritage’ by sanitising and trivialising it for the delectation of middle-class folks whose capacity for aesthetic (or indeed any other kind of) judgement has been anesthetized by modern consumerism. But it has at least the consolation of being represented by a terrific over-the-top performance by Nicholas le Prevost as its representative on earth. And maybe the moral of the story is that, just as we get the politicians or newspapers that we deserve, we also get the ‘heritage’ we deserve.

I’m an early adopter of gadgets, which means two things: on the one hand I’m poorer than I should be because I fritter cash on experimental gadgets; on the other hand, I have a hard-earned scepticism of the utility of gadgets. And what I’ve found is that few devices have the long-term utility of, say, the Swiss Army knife.

But here’s a gadget that has really justified its existence: a Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner. It just swallows paper and converts it into instantly into pdf files. This one (the S510M) is currently swallowing the vast archive of transcripts, notes and other documents which went into the writing of my history of the Internet. In the process the contents of about ten archive boxes of paper are being compressed into a folder on a hard disk (and, needless to say, into several copies of same folder on remote drives).

I got it originally because a colleague lost one of his Moleskine notebooks and realised that it was the one thing he possessed of which he didn’t have a back-up copy. One way of backing up a paper notebook is to feed it to a scanner. But which scanner? It was at that point that we discovered the ScanSnap. It wasn’t cheap, but it has more than justified its price. The one in the photograph has been running since 2009 and it’s one of the best devices I ever bought. The current model is the S1500M.