Breaking the Rules

Meanwhile back in London

The calendar for my week was looking good - I had blanked most of it out for a European Library Management Board Meeting in Zagreb, but in the end we decided that the CEO would attend alone. But appointments started to accumulate anyway - a review of the Web Archiving Project; a meeting with the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Convergence Think Tank Team - they are looking at the consequences of the communications and broadcasting industries converging; a meeting with the AHRC Modernism Project Team based at the University of Sussex, who are working on a volume on European avant-garde periodicals: they had seen 'Breaking the Rules' and are interested in some of us contributing articles for it. Meanwhile I try and put together proposals for the Crimean War as a subject for digital research - can we overlay maps of the troop positions over physical geographical maps? can we trace the effects of newspaper reporting on parliamentary debates? can we use digitised street directories and digital mapping to understand the persistence of Crimean War battles in public memory - Inkerman, Balaclava, Sebastopol, Alma? We have wonderful collections - letters from Florence Nightingale, fragments of flowers from the Battle of Balaclava gathered by a survivor of the Charge of the Light Brigade, Fanny Duberly's letters and printed journal and her photograph taken by Roger Fenton. Fanny Duberly, Camp before Sebastopol, 15 April 1855. Albumen print by Roger Fenton Not to mention Mary Seacole's travels, maps, mail, patents etc.  And even  Alex Soyer's 'Culinary campaign' (1857) - a celebrity chef at war.

On Friday I meet Jayne to sign off her PhD submission and then Barbara Campbell web writer/artist, who is working on "a durational performance" of 1001 nights 1001 nights cast. We talk about the difficulties of archiving this site with its dynamic content.

Saturday: have to come in to officially welcome Vaclav Havel Havel, former President of Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic, who is being interviewed about his autobiography, 'To the Castle and back',  by Sir John Tusa, in the Conference Centre of the British Library. He speaks mostly in Czech but there is a wonderful translator. Can you imagine a writer being elected to the position of prime minisiter of the UK (or president if we had one)? And did you know he redesigned the staff uniforms of the staff at the Castle?

Bucharest

Flew out to Romania on Friday to give a paper on exhibiting the avant garde at a conference on modernism and anti-modernism, organised by Roger Griffin Griffin. I get there late as the traffic from the airport is horrendous: the taxi takes two hours. One develops patience into a religious cult. Dump my bags at Novotel and decide I can make the last session in the hall "ten minutes away". I take a short cut and find the street is an impassable trench. I double back but still have to cross the trench - I don't understand the excavation as most services are wires in the air - a bit like Tokyo. Finally, I make it to the hall but the session has started earlier than scheduled because of the visit to the Palace at 7:30. One of the speakers attempts the record for the fastest paper ever delivered - one of the audience asks for it to be slower but they adjust the microphone for it to be louder. After the session I meet Pat and Mark from Duke University who are giving the other papers in my session and they introduce me to Maria from the Sorbonne who is a friend of theirs and we travel to the Palace together.

I'm still trying to make sense of what happened next. At the Palace they ask for ID - but I'm the only one who doesn't have any but they still let me in. We wait in an aula - an Egyptian vault-like space. The royal anthem is played from a recording and the prince and princess enter. There are formal speeches and an award ceremony, and then its Roumanian champagne and drinks and food. On the way out we write in the visitors' book. The coach takes us the restaurant which brews its own very good wheat beer. Maria, Pat, Mark and I leave early. We are all staying in the same hotel.

Our session is late on Saturday though Maria's paper is in earlier one. I lend her my memory stick to tranfer her slides to the laptop connected to the projector. She's talking about the First World War and the notion of apocalypse. Afterwards we head off to the People's Palace People's Palace and the Costume Museum. Then it's back to our session. I go first and it's OK - I'm conscious that I avoid the word modernism. Mark and Pat follow with fascinating discussion of the relationships between anarchism and vorticism (Gaudier Brzeska Gaudier Brzeska) and Kupka Kupka There are questions at the end and I have to field the question of how avant garde and modernism relate. I fall back on St Simon who described the avant garde as a military cadre of artists and writers preparing the way for his socialist utopia. Where modernism fits is uncertain: what is the art form for this utopia - modernsim (the Bauhaus answer), socialist realism (Stalin), abstract art (Kandinsky, Mondrian), constructivism (Rodchenko), the realism of Mass Observation or surrealism (Breton's answer)? I point out the slippage between modern, modernisation, modernity and modernism.

e-books

Tuesday morning. Rain again. I start to think of Ruskin's storm cloud of the nineteenth century - a warning of how industrialisation could change the climate. Arrive at work at 7.45 and plough through overnight emails, then do my online 360 degree survey for a colleague who has entered the developmental centre programme. That takes about 20 minutes and I organise and read my papers for today's meetings. Time for an early coffee with Carole and she tells me (without ruining the plot) about the new Paul Auster novel, 'Man in the Dark'. Lawrence from the Press Office interrupts to ask if I'd do a quick interview for ITN on the Sony e-book reader Sony e-book reader at 11.30. But first, straight into a meeting with Jude and The National Archives' corporate research manager, Valerie, on our research strategy and our use of Independent Research Organisation status with the Arts & Humanities Research Council AHRC. Our research break scheme seems to be the envy of many institutions. We've just reviewed the last five years of its operation and are pleased with its results. Then its the ITN interview - I'm curiously unnervous - maybe I have done too many: it's good to have a slight fear as it stops you being over-confident and too relaxed. The trouble is that I have to familiarise myself with how the Sony reader works and think how to contextualise it at the same time. The shoot is outside the King's Library Tower and it's re-assuring to think of Henry VIII annotating some of its volumes. The Sony reader is in a light brown leather case - surely not in imitation of a leather binding ?? It's small, smaller than the Kindle. Navigation is intuitive to anybody who can use an MP3 player. The old backlight problem has been solved - though I have to tilt it for the cameraman. It's probably not a rival to the book as a threat to a medium-sized collection of books - the student and the business man might find it useful in their pursuit of content, but the book-lover and leisure reader will probably still use the book. And there is no guarantee that your electronic titles will last as long as your hardcopies. Another thing that strikes me is the e-book's adherence to the sequence of the book - can't all the preliminaries - imprint details etc. now be relegated to the end of the book. Yet it defeats the book structure: every page is a recto - you have no sense of where the text lies in the book - there is no left or right, only right. Then it's back to my office and I have to plough through a business continuity exercise for the collection areas. It's time for a meeting with Jo on Project Gateway and approaches to news content. A Research Board for our Mellon Project on identical books ans VOCs - volatile organic compounds - follows. I then have to ring a dealer in Edinburgh who is an intermediary for the purchase of a futurist book, made from tin. We are struggling to prove who owned it 1933-1945. It's time to home.