Get in early to work, overcoming a profound reluctance to get out of bed: my mental clock is a day out and I pretend that it is Saturday. My desk is a pile of papers, contrary to my usual clear desk policy. The exhibition and multiple projects have sabotaged that. Check that the Writers and Scholars Centre is set up for the Toril Moi seminar. It's good to meet her and she talks about the change (deliberate) in Ibsen's handwriting (and beard) when he achieved fame. She asks if we are still collecting Scandinavian materials and I re-assure her that we are. I forget to ask her to give a plug for the exhibition.
I have a quick look at the exhibition. On the comments wall there is a remark that it could have been more distilled. Not sure I fully understand this. The show is a huge simplification and its thesis is telegraphically abridged. The avant garde on the ground bursts through the constraints we have tried to place on it.
Looking at the Nazi book burnings again, I suddenly make the connection that must be obvious to everyone but me. Whilst Marinetti and the futurists attacked the institution of libraries, that was always a metaphor and their dependence on the print format made such burnings inconceivable: as in case of the manifesto, the Nazis perverted this position and really burnt the books.
Then it's a one-to-one with Peter, my Head of Maps - he's just given three papers in Chicago. He also advised on our maps of Europe in the exhibition 'chronology'. We discuss the handling of some vacancies and some items up for auction. Then it's a Project Board for the Mellon Preservation Project: one of the streams is looking at the historical internal (as opposed to just climactic) environmental conditions in which books were kept over time and it is proving difficult to track these conditions over time. It would be good if we could at least establish a baseline for the future, but is this perhaps another project.
Next is a Property Strategy meeting - a videoconference: I inject security into the principles, and add time/availability as a variable to the fixed space cake. Straight on to a discussion of the Arts & Humanities survey. It's very supportive of what we do, and the variation from what we have proposed as a forward strategy is not great - the greatest deviation perhaps is the lack of interest in multi-disciplinarity and instruction in research methodology.
Lots of emails to answer: tours for the exhibition, meetings to arrange on newspapers and US patents. Organise some files to be sent from the corporate archive at Boston Spa. Check that our contribution to the wiki Romani bibliography, hosted by the National Library of Serbia, can be automatically updated through The European Library. It's time to go home. As I get to the Tube I look down at the congested entrance to the Piccadilly Line. It's seething with a mass of bodies, so I turn back and get on the Hammersmith and City Line. Slow and rattlely as it is, at least it's above ground. I decide to make a mushroom risotto and polish off the remnants of a bottle of rioja.
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