"Will no one rid us of this turbulent membership?" Mustering techniques to avoid.

I am a member of CILIP. I am a member of CILIP because my peers at Library School were also members of CILIP. I am a member of CILIP because maybe at some point I’ll get around to doing the Chartership thing, even though I’m not still 100% convinced that the whole enterprise is not just a white elephant money-making racket for CILIP. I am a member of CILIP because I believe it is important for an area such as librarianship to have a strong body that represents the interests of libraries, librarians and library users.

Things I am not a member of CILIP for:

CILIP Update; training events (though some would be nice); opportunities to engage in democratic processes; small print scrutiny; trying to get my head around an at first glance bizarre organizational structure; reading a CILIP councillor describe dissatisfaction over a rebranding exercise as betrayal; reading an ambassadorial figure within CILIP shrugging off dwindling membership as aninevitable function of library closures and deprofessionalization; reading the same figure address the same issue of dwindling membership in terms of “quality over quantity” (I don’t want this to drift anywhere remotely close to an ‘answer-post’, let alone character assassination -- there’s something wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time about the CILIP President role and a slip of the keyboard is all too easy -- but just take a few seconds to mull the ramifications of that statement)...

There were more different types when I were a kid.

In case you’ve missed it, the fiddles are out at CILIP again, this time regarding the recent Governance Review. You may have missed that too. I’ve a distant hazy memory that I once followed a link from an email (though a search of my inbox suggests that I deleted whatever email provoked it), saw lots of boring governance stuff and then got distracted by BuzzFeed or something. It’s not really been a debate I’ve followed, partly because it’s not really been a debate. I could express in broad strokes (and reasonable reasoning) my sense of rights and wrongs, but the simple truth of the matter is that this one seems to have slipped under the radar in a way that the whole ILPUK debacle didn’t. It’s all building up to become another deck-chair shuffle of an AGM.

The first deckchair to be vacated was that of enfant terrible Tom Roper, who explained his reasoning in this blogpost. His resignation brought the detail of the Governance Review to the attention of twitter. In a way it’s a shame he didn’t go before the review’s close-date (think of the traffic!), but such is the nature of cause and effect. Council chair Martyn Wade responded to Roper’s post, and Roper’s replied here. And this weekend President Band added her thoughts. 

From my perspective, CILIP’s governance is overly elaborate: an elected President and Vice-President with so little power and influence that nobody stands anymore; an appointed Chair (to assume the Presidential office in the proposed regime) overseeing a mixed bag ofelected and appointed Councillors; a paid CEO “delivering the change programme and effective charity management”. Some simplification might not go amiss. The problem seems to be that the proposed simplification is a simplification that reduces rather than inspires member involvement: the role of President becomes more relevant but we’re not allowed to vote for who might get it anymore. The number of elected Councillors drops from nine (or potentially all) to eight, which seems another backwards step.

Voting in these things is always going to be pretty low. We don’t generally know enough about the candidates to feel too strongly. Therefore, CILIP elections should be at worst a formality and at best a way to engage any membership so inclined. So why reduce the membership’s say? That just seems stupid. Almost as stupid as ILPUK. Seriously... why would you do this?

Why?

And it’s the fact that CILIP’s powers-that-be seem to make such a mess of the easy things like sensible, positive member engagement that is so frustrating. These things should be non-issues.

So will this September's AGM be dominated by yet more belly-button stare-offs? Or will there be some motions tabled that actually engage with the very real threats that library services (in all sectors) are facing? Perhaps you have a motion you’d like to put forward. You’ll have to be quick, though. You’ve got until 5pm tomorrow (Monday 21^st July). More details on how to submit a motion can be found here. I hope some of you are more inspired than I am.

Barbara Band says some good stuff in one of her replies to a comment on her post:

“[We] are best served by having a national professional body that can have a positive strategic impact on Government policy... [via] the work it has done with the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Libraries, or the work on Information Literacy, or the policy responses it has submitted, or the frankly bloody good work that Annie Maguer does 7 days a week [weekends are important, Annie, but thanks all the same] on securing influence and credibility with policymakers... [This is] the only effective way to defend the long-term and precious principle of the right of access to library services... CILIP needs to influence Downing Street and Treasury... CILIP needs you... like we need everyone in the library and information professions.”

I agree with most of what’s being said here. This is the important stuff. Getting a clear message deep into the halls of Whitehall and Westminster. Saving libraries. 

Barbara continues: “We need a credible brand and a professional presentation.” This is at the heart of CILIP’s recent efforts regarding rebranding and governance. Maybe CILIP are right: politics has always had an obsession with image after all, especially in the last couple of decades. “Most of all,” Barbara adds, “we need people to understand that whether the battle is personal or professional, we get absolutely nowhere by fighting amongst ourselves.”

Which is the underlying sentiment of this post. It’s also why members get affronted when CILIP’s governance seems to start picking fights with them, be it by conducting lip-service surveys ahead of an unpopular namechange, or by reducing the few democratic pathways though which the membership can influence said governance. This is a particular affront at a time when some of the membership may feel that the governors in question are not doing enough on things other than name-changes and internal restructures.

It seems that I agree with Barbara (and probably the rest of the CILIP great-and-good) that we should stop fighting among ourselves and start concentrating on fighting for the future of libraries. What we probably disagree upon is the reason the in-fighting is there in the first place (and indeed the potential solutions to it). The disgruntled membership are not out to cause trouble for trouble’s sake and I doubt CILIP's leaders are too. We’re not the agents in this so it’s a bit galling when we’re told to be quiet.

The argument can perhaps be summed up as: 

CILIP MEMBERSHIP: Stop messing about!

CILIP GOVERNANCE: Stop arguing with us!

CILIP MEMBERSHIP: Stop making changes we don’t like!

CILIP GOVERNANCE: Shut up!

The elephant in the 'blog post.

I’ll be paying my subs for another year because I really really really want CILIP to be out there fighting for libraries. And I really want to be able to support them in that fight. But I’ll not be shutting up. And I will be exercising my ballot at the AGM. I voted for Tom Roper in the Council elections last year and I thank him for his efforts in representing the membership during his brief tenure. I also thank him for being a one-man publicity machine for CILIP’s internal democratic processes, as without his annual agitations the AGM and its agenda would doubtless pass me by un-noticed. Finally, I thank Barbara Band for everything she does in being an ambassador for The Cause. It’s far far more than I do and it’s very much appreciated. 

Full and frank debate is healthy and proper, and a necessary part of good governance (wherever possible taking place ex camera so we all know what’s going on). In the course of such debate we should, of course, never fail to lose sight of the fact that the real enemy is without.

Just a bit of fun...

Of all the PowerPoint slides I've ever made, I think this one may be my favourite:

It's really quite a simple one too: repeated freeform motion path animations with the smoothing turned off. Right click and save-as to download a version of it (1.7M).

2048.xlsm

Today I had a day off work, and what better way to spend it than by programming an Excel spreadsheet 'port' of the web game 2048? So that is exactly what I did!

This is a beta version of the game: I'm not entirely convinced that I've got every aspect of the gameplay quite right (my random weightings for the spawning of 2s and 4s may be a little out), and there's always the small possibility of the odd formula error somewhere along the line causing tiles to misbehave. Anything like that can be easily ironed out. The point is that it works!

[Edit - I spotted one problem that needed fixing: new tiles shouldn't spawn when all adjacents in a direction are doubled and shunted. Tut. I've added a new line of sums to monitor and block spawning in this situation, and things are working a lot better as a consequence.]

The game was designed in Excel 2007, and requires macros to be enabled. Right click here to download yourself a copy at a tidy 32K. If your browser tries to save the file as a .zip, be sure to correct it and to save it as a.xlsm file.

The gubbins that works the game can be found to the right of the sheet, explored and amended to suit your tastes. Basically, the five buttons (four cursors and a "New Game" reset) copy the current grid to a space below it (or in the case of the reset, copy a blank grid), and then the gubbins does the rest. 

Each move follows a three-stage process: shunt the tiles together to skip the blanks; double up adjacent duplicates; shunt again. Calculations are made for all four directions. This was the trickiest bit to work out, and I'm thankful that there are only four rows to work with at a time. There was a fair bit of trial and error beyond the initial idea of what should happen.

The random tile was another tough thing to implement. It is calculated by totting up the number of empty spaces, then allocating each one a number (using =COUNTIF), and picking one of the spaces at random using the =RANDBETWEEN function. I'm quite proud of this, though like I say, I'm not sure I've got the weighting right as I'm clocking in some high scores.

Scoring is achieved by totting up the difference between the shunted grid and the doubled grid, and applying a square/root to knock off any negatives.

Anyway, feel free to have a trawl of the cells and let me know if you find any glaring errors. If you'd like me to make a step-by-step work-through I'll give it a go.

Marathon (or "Hello again, World...")

Since the late 1990s I've been making things under the moniker A/V Woman, most obviously my website, which itself is old enough to make babies. So here's one.

When I first dabbled with twitter I used the name @KingConstance by way of an OED-inspired, Sarah Grand-related pun. When I started tweeting about libraries I created a new twitter account: @SaintEvelin : it's a title/name form that riffs on the @KingConstance account (the avatar nods that way too) while also being a tenuous pun on my first names. I suspect, too, that @AVWoman was being used by someone at the time, though maybe I'm making that up. Maybe I just wanted a further separation there. 

At the same time as setting up @SaintEvelin, I set up the Succentorship without Sneers 'blog: http://saintevelin.blogspot.co.uk/ (this 'blog, essentially). Both have served me very nicely, I'd like to think. 

But I've tired of late of the SaintEvelin pun, not least because I'm not called Evelin. I'm also wanting to do something more with my website (I'm not entirely sure quite what of yet, but that's something to look forward to). And I'm feeling that A/V Woman is a perfectly good alias for a technologically minded librarian to hide behind. I've been a bit quiet recently, both on here and to a certain extent on twitter too, so now seems as good a moment as any to put the swap into action. 

I made the twitter-switch at tea-time yesterday. Most twitter platforms these days make more play of the screen name than the handle, so switching handles isn't as obvious as it used to be. This has its pros and cons, but I think for the most part the avi and the screen name carry the brunt. In the interests of consistency I won't be swapping these. Not at the moment, anyway. I can cause more confusion in the long term this way!

Twitter is very good at handling a handle switch. Continuity is pretty seamless. The biggest drawback is if you cold-call me on my old moniker, but see the previous paragraph. I think I'm the last person left who tweets by text message. But I'm determined not to miss any messages. To account for this I've set up a holding account on my old handle. In a month I'll switch it to some other use, but in the meantime it's a neat way of occupying the void (it also staves off any would-be scavenger, keen to don my shedded skin to the further confusion of all involved). Later I'll still mop up the off-chance with a tweetdeck search column.

Then there's the 'blog. I could've just swapped the domain over from saintevelin.blogspot to avwoman.blogspot, but again I'm concerned about continuity. And in this case continuity is all the more important: I must've made it to someone's news feed, and I know there are one or two links to my 'blog from hither and thither. I don't want to lay waste to such connections. So I've trod a little more carefully in that regard.

So it is that this tabula rasa at avwoman.blogspot.co.uk is not as violent as it might have been. The old posts are still there at the old address, and the search box in the side panel will lead you back into its depths. More importantly, I'm posting this entry (and any that might follow) to the Succentorship without Sneers RSS and Atom feeds. So while this post is the first at the avwoman domain, and sits on a different page to my previous posts, the newsfeed remains a continuity of service. I think that's important.

All this adventurous plumbing being done, it will be time for me to weld it all to the website, which is kind of the whole point. But I'm still a lot hazy on what might go there. Until then, my apologies to you all for the mucking about. I'm as bad as those Olay/Ulay people, I know.

You may now updated your bookmarks... 

TLFKASE 

Some more Excellent tricks

I've been playing around with Excel an awful lot lately, which is always guaranteed to cheer me up. Time, then to add some more little discoveries to the pile of Excel-based bits and bobs I've put your way in the past (specifically here, here and here).

Blank skip

How many times have you been infuriated by empty rows getting in the way of good analysis? Perhaps the answer to that question is "none", in which case "clever you". Me, though; I'm always getting myself into situations where for whatever reason I find empty cells getting in my way. One example is to be found in my personal accounts, where I have daily entries, and then weekly and monthly summaries appearing down the side. These summaries are cast adrift amidst rows of emptiness, and that can have implications when it comes to wanting to do anything very involved (graphs, for instance, can be a pain). There are ways around this: I could producing running figures down the page, but that would be ugly and would defeat the idea of the summary; I could copy and paste somewhere else, skipping blanks or sorting them away. That would look better but it would have dynamic repercussions, and I want to perform calculations using live data rather than a copy and paste of a particular point in time. What I need is an array formula.

In this example I have three columns: A contains the days of the week (my x-axis, if you like), while B and C contain data entered on certain days. To abbreviate that table to just those rows that have data in column B, I've popped the following into D1: 

=INDEX($A:$C,SMALL(IF($B:$B<>"",ROW($B:$B)), 

ROWS(D$1:D1)),COLUMNS($D1:D1))

Most importantly (and this is the weird and counter-intuitive bit) you need to press control, shift and enter at the same time (rather than just enter) to make this formula stick properly. Doing this will add those curly brackets round things ({}) and make everything work as if by magic. Infuriatingly, just typing the curly brackets doesn't work. It's all about the ctrl-shift-return. 

Once you've ^⇧↵ed into D1, you can expand the formula across the rest of the cells in the usual way (and colour everything all rainbow-like, if that's how you roll). There are errors in D5-F7, because there's no data to feed them, but that can be sorted out with an =IFERROR in the right places if it bugs you. 

So what is the formula doing? Let's pull it apart:

The bones of the formula is a simple cell reference from a defined array (the first three columns):

=INDEX(array, row number, column number)

The column number bit is a simple column-counting formula that will increase as we drag across E and F. In D1, the value is 1, in E1 it is 2, and in F1 it is 3.

The row number is more involved because this is the bit that's doing the hard work. There's a conditional formula in a SMALL formula that relies on the row number. The condition is that we should return the row number only if the value of a cell in B is greater than or less than blank. The rest of the SMALL formula states that we're only interested in the kth returned value, where k corresponds to the row we're on (so if we're on row 1, which D1 is, then we're after the first value where the value of B is greater than or less than nothingness). 

Doing all that with a normal formula won't get you very far, because you'd be unable to keep count of those successfully met conditions (you could keep a running tally, but we're trying to keep our sheet clean of that sort of thing), but turning it into a magic ^⇧↵ array formula lets Excel tot up various details across a whole range of cells.

Array calculations do make Excel have to think that little bit harder, so you might want to avoid whole-column arrays like the ones I've used.

Offset Mapping

You know what's really irritating? When you've got a lot of data in Sheet2 that's reliant on the data in Sheet1, you delete a row from Sheet1 and everything on Sheet2 goes all error-y. Likewise if you sort Sheet1 in a new way and Sheet2 becomes a befuddled mess. What you need is to break the link between a cell in Sheet1 and a cell in Sheet2 while still carrying over the data. What you need is to be able to map to a particular cell, regardless of its contents. One way of doing it is to use INDEX (like in the example above), for which you must establish an array range. But perhaps easier is to use OFFSET. While INDEX pinpoints a location within an established array, OFFSET pinpoints a location relative to an origin (e.g. cell A1). The difference is subtle but slightly more flexible.

If we want to reproduce the contents of any cell in Sheet1 in a corresponding cell location on Sheet2 (without tying the two together in a relative formula), we can use:

=OFFSET(Sheet1!$A$1,ROW()-1,COLUMN()-1)

The ROW() and COLUMN() bits get the current coordinates, and these are applied with reference to cell A1 on Sheet1 (the "-1"s account for the fact that A1 takes up a cell of physical space). The offset location can be anything we want it to be, as, for that matter, can the offsets (the example above is just a convenient starting-place). 

I'm currently using this to make reading lists. I can use one sheet as a sandpit (inserting and deleting rows, and shuffling content about the place), then have a second sheet which takes a snapshot of that content and arranges it in a pretty way without me having to do anything. It's my favourite thing in Excel at the moment.

The Name Game

Ok, this one's a brag more than a formula...

I just mentioned that I'm using Excel to generate reading lists, and I thought it would be wise to come up with a set of formulae to standardise whatever I put in and turn it into a Harvard citation. On the face of it, this shouldn't be too tricky. We can all look at a citation and work out what's what and how we might move the commas and brackets about to switch from one referencing style to another. Why a program like EndNote makes the process of importing citations such hard work I'm not entirely sure, given that even allowing for the vast wealth of different formats and models, the basic codes are all variations on a theme and surely a reference manager could work out which it was looking at if it could but really be bothered to try. But that's a different quibble. What I'm wanting to do is take a pre-existing citation of indeterminate style, dismantle it into its constituent (citation-manager friendly) parts and reassemble them. Unsurprisingly, the hardest bit of that is the identification of the dismantled parts. The presence of numbers, capitals, and various forms of punctuation are a clear help in this regard, whatever style is in play. Isolating the publication date is very easily done, and things start to unravel nicely from there because there are only so many ways you can describe the elements of a citation (at least in the common forms and for the common formats, which is what I'm playing with). A title is a title and varies very little as a consequence. Even volume and issue numbers follow some sort of discernibly extractable logic. In fact, there is only one part of your general, generic, stylistically vague common-all-garden reference that poses an especially pressing problem to a poorly programmed computer and that is the author name. Having extracted every other necessary building block, I was not to let myself be beaten by a few names.

There are a number of reasons why names cause trouble. They can be awash with commas and full stops, performing a range of different and often contradictory roles: commas between surnames and forenames, commas between collaborating authors; full-stops after each initial, or all initials, or none. Which brings us then to the swirling mess of first names, surnames, middle names, initials etc. But as humans we can look at these things and work our way through them with not too much trouble, so surely a computer can too. Admittedly, part of the human advantage is a reference database of typical forenames and surnames: something which could be emulated in Excel if needs be, but it seems an extreme length to have to go to. There must be a simpler way.

Well, reader, I managed it. Having already isolated the name portion of the original citation, I then dismantled it word by word, classing a comma as a word but eliminating full stops from the equation, to give something like:

Smith , A , Jones , B and McDonald , C

 Now to work out what each cell actually is. Commas and "and"s are easy to determine. Initials were identified using something like: 

=IF(OR(LEN(A1)=1,IFERROR(CODE(MID(A1,2,1))=CODE(UPPER(MID(A1,2,1))),FALSE)),"I1,"")

...in other words, if the length of a cell is one character, or if the second character is upper-case, consider the cell to contain one or more initials.

This is a good starting point and will serve us in good stead. The use of "I1" is to indicate the first instance of initials. Later initials can be given "I2", "I3", etc. This will help when it comes to piecing things back together properly.

Initials are easy. Forenames are pretty easy too, if they immediately follow a comma. An entry that goes SURNAME COMMA FORENAME is easy to tag. SURNAME COMMA FORENAME COMMA SURNAME COMMA FORENAME... is slightly more troublesome, but here maths is our friend: if we assume some sort of internal consistency, then the first comma indicates a forename, the second a new surname, etc.

Sometimes, commas are used more sparingly, eg. SURNAME INITIAL, SURNAME INITIAL, etc., but here we have the benefit of an initial to help us through the soup. Thankfully, SURNAME FORENAME is not something that tends to appear in the occidental world, so we can probably apply the assumption that nothing like that will bother us.

From these foundations, it's quite easy to put together some formulae to draw out the names we need in the majority of cases. But some people have really awkward names. And some people aren't people at all. People with two forenames or two surnames are especially troublesome. Again, commas (and "and") are our friends here. And we can begin to string together some really messy formulae based on relative positions of our respective bits of names. There's a lot of trial and error to this, but after some messing about it's possible to get something together that works almost universally (I've run my current version across about 400 citations and it seems to be working ok). Then it's just a case of glueing everything back together again.

Here's a link to a very-much beta version. The gubbins is very messy trial-and-error stuff, and I'm sure you'll be able to break it quite easily if you try, but it might give you a place to start should you ever require something similar.

The 40 most-visited-by-me sites of 2013

How much time do I spend on the internet when I'm at home, and what am I looking at? A few years ago I decided to set myself that very question, and to answer it I stuck a clock on my browser. Unfortunately, I forgot to collate the first couple of years' stats. But I've since tweaked the counter a few times, and this year I've actually remembered to crunch the stats therein. The list consists of my 50 most-visited domains, some of which I've combined because they amount to the same site, and one of which I've removed because it is buggy (I did not spend five days watching Channel 4, and the suggestion that I did seems to have stemmed from some corrupt data left in the file from the previous year, but their website should probably be in this list somewhere). Another note before I show you the list: for the first half of the year it was clocking stats from all open tabs, and in the second half it was limited to the active tab. Also omitted is browsing from any other platform except Opera (so my brief flirtation with Netflix is not listed as it took place in Firefox owing to compatibility issues).

Here, then, are my 40 most-visited sites (caveats already noted). For more information about a site, hover over the name.

		Total (h:m)	Total (d:h)	Daily av. (m:s)	%
	OVERALL	1254:00	52d 6h	3h 26:00
1	Tweetdeck	382:57	15d 23h	62:57	31
2	Wikipedia	72:02	3d	11:50	5.7
3	Old Reader	71:54	3d	11:49	5.7
4	Blogger (my 'blogs)	59:37	2d 12h	9:48	4.8
5	YouTube	57:19	2d 9h	9:25	4.6
6	Facebook	52:41	2d 12h	8:40	4.2
7	BBC	41:36	1d 18h	6:50	3.3
8	Google	37:18	1d 33h	6:08	3
9	Google Maps	28:51	1d 12h	4:45	2.3
10	Twitter	18:15		3:00	1.5
11	(Local Host)	17:02		2:48	1.4
12	Historic Digimap	9:26		1:33	0.8
13	Splendid Chaps	8:03		1:19	0.6
14	A/V Woman	7:49		1:17	0.6
15	Alveley Historical Society	7:11		1:11	0.6
16	The Guardian	6:24		1:03	0.5
17	jobs.york.ac.uk	5:25		53s	0.4
18	TVCatchup	5:08		51s	0.4
19	Bing Maps	4:34		45s	0.4
20	Sporcle	4:25		44s	0.4
21	RightMove	4:10		41s	0.3
22	(Router)	3:38		36s	0.3
23	subjectguides.york.ac.uk	3:20		33s	0.3
24	Lawrence Miles ('blogs)	3:17		32s	0.3
25	Sheffield Planning Applications	3:08		31s	0.2
26	NRK	2:50		28s	0.2
27	Lady V London	2:48		28s	0.2
28	BBC Good Food	2:47		27s	0.2
29	Know Your Meme	2:30		25s	0.2
30	Pinterest	2:27		24s	0.2
31	Amazon	2:21		23s	0.2
32	Flickr	1:52		18s	0.1
33	Out Of This World ('blog)	1:47		18s	0.1
34	The Golden Era of GP Racing	1:43		17s	0.1
35	Tattuinardoelasaga	1:41		17s	0.1
36	thetrainline.com	1:40		16s	0.1
37	IMDb	1:39		16s	0.1
38	Gizoogle	1:36		16s	0.1
39	University of York	1:28		14s	0.1
40	Doctor Macro	1:27		14s	0.1

So there you go. The above list accounts for about 85% of my browsing (a stat that includes the otherwise omitted Channel 4 entry for necessary mathematical reasons). The colour-banding groups things together semi-thematically. What do we learn from all of this? That I like maps? We already knew that (or I did anyway). 

To get an idea of what this is telling us, we need another data-set. My other data-set is anecdotal. It is me remembering what sites I used most about a decade ago. About a decade ago I mainly used Google, Wikipedia, BBC and The Guardian. Those sites constituted a Big Four, with my own content probably filling in a fifth slot. The rest of my internet activity can be discovered from the array of bookmarks I still have in my browser from Them Days: home-made websites (largely replaced by 'blogs now, and consumed via my feed reader). Gone now are the days when I sat grazing the news at The Grauniad and the Beeb (International Version). Twitter feeds now deliver that news to me. But the difference is not as radical as if we roll back the clock another five years, when my most-used sites would've been Alta-Vista and Yahoo! We've come a long way since the Web Ring. We've gone full-circle and found ourselves back in Usenet, but with a 140 character limit.

I'm now going to clear the stat counter and hopefully come back in another 12 months to do some proper, more meaningful analysis of my browsing trends. Between those things, I need to do the pots and make some tea. 

6,697 Tweets In : The 2013 Twitter Breakdown

4I last did an analysis of my tweeting back in May 2012, and before that in July 2011. Those posts took a thorough look at the content of my first 100 and first 1,000 tweets from the @SaintEvelin account. My tweet tally now exceeds the 6,700 mark, which is too many to go through by hand. Fortunately, there are ways to crunch the content, and so I will, looking specifically at my twitter activity through the course of 2013.

First of all, let's take a look at the volume of my tweeting this last year: 3787 tweets in all. On average I make ten tweets a day (up four from last year). Rounding as necessary, four of those tweets are @-led conversations, two are retweets, and one contains the word-stem libr*. The numbers round more reliably if we expand to a full week's twitter activity, so here we go:

	2012	2013
Tweets/week	43	73
@s	21 (49%)	29 (39%)
RTs	8 (18%)	17 (24%)
libr*	3 (8%)	4 (6%)

So I'm tweeting more, conversing more, retweeting twice as much as last year, and tweeting without the words libr* about twice as much as last year. My use of the L-word is up by one tweet a week, but as a proportion of my output it is lower than in 2012.

Of course, it's not all about the L-word. If we include info* in the search, things go up by another tweet a week. Adding CILIP has the same effect, putting us at six library-y tweetings in seven days. This by no means tells the whole story, so let's add another one for luck. This puts us a little more honestly at the rounded-up figure of a library tweet a day. Let's call it a tenth of my twitter output. That sounds a fair proportion really. At the 1,000 tweets mark it was about a third, so there may be more to this story. Applying the same criteria to 2012 as to 2013 I'm up by a percent or so.

To get a more accurate view of what I tweet about, we can employ a word cloud. Here's one I made earlier:

The RT is for scale. We already know that that's about a quarter of my twittering. I also say "just" quite a lot, don't I just? Looking around the edges I note that I tweeted about Strictly Come Dancing more than I did about the Great British Bake-Off, which is entirely right and proper. But I think the real story can be found at the top of the nebula, with the inspirational legend: NOW EUROVISION LIBRARY! Nice to note that library is the biggest noun in there. I may mention libraries less than once a day, but I seem to mention them more than I mention other things. I think that's an appropriate balance, really. 

I notice that York is bigger than (pretty) Hull. But cake is bigger than both. The words that appear all seem rather positive, so that's nice (top left, between great and lovely).

To wrap up, here's a chart depicting pretty much all my tweeting ever, including on my other twitter account. It doesn't include my tweets from @HullUni_Library. What it does do is show how @SaintEvelin, an account initially intended as a "professional" networky sort of thing, has become my main account for most of what I have to say, be it about libraries or about Strictly. My original @KingConstance account still trickles along, mainly as a vessel for my angrier tweets, and, when I remember, to continue the pretence of a medieval kingdom in South Yorkshire. But the original reasoning behind the schism: a sort of separation of church and state (social versus professional, if you will) has been disavowed. Tweetdeck, and the raising of the limit on the number of members in a twitter list, allow me to monitor various spheres of interest at once. What is more, the social aspect of tweeting is, I believe, a vital component of the networking aspect: all work and no play makes @Jack a dull tweeter. There's no need to carry on a split personality. Not with librarians at any rate. Cake is an essential part of the job.

My total number of tweets this year from both accounts was 4,369 (582 from @KingConstance). In 2012 it was 2,808 (573 from @KingConstance), so that's roughly a 150% increase in activity. In 2011 (the year I started tweeting as @SaintEvelin) it was 2,853 (2,178 of those from @KingConstance). 

The peak in summer 2012 corresponds with library conferences and unconferences, and with me looking for a full-time job. The near-death of @KingConstance in the last quarter of that year corresponds with me finding a full-time job. There's activity on both accounts in January of this year when I was out of work, then things go quieter when I'm in work again. Funny that. May sees Eurovision, and my biggest spike of activity (127 tweets in one day). This is my third busiest day of tweeting to date (Eurovision 2011 clocked 139, and I made 189 tweets in October 2010 when I "live-tweeted" the historical activities of the Sheffield police force). Since July, my tweet-rate has been fairly constant at around the 12-tweets-a-day mark. BBC television may have some part to play in this.

So that's the twitter analysis for another year. I may have slightly exceeded the 140 character limit. My average tweet length is 92.