This blog now intersects with that of my colleague, Matthew Shaw, a lead curator for our exhibition Taking Liberties and which I warmly recommend - as I do a gig at CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) for their ISG/UCR joint event on "Policing Library Users". It's a mixture of public and university librarians - most of the questions come from the public side. I choose an anecdotal approach - the anarchist incident in the 1890s, the storyline for Conrad's 'The Secret Agent' (we have the manuscript): the bomber had on his body a British Museum Reading Room ticket belonging to his brother, and it appeared he had consulted a dictionary of explosives. I raise the problems of archiving the UK web domain (however defined) and what one might accidentally hoover up in the process.
Next day David Rumsey gives a talk here at the British Library. He spoke at the 21st C Curator Conference in New York: this time he's applied some Web 2.0 approaches e.g. his avatar can swoop through a Second Life mapscape. The digital can make research quicker, easier, and Web 2.0 more collaborative and accessible to a wider public, but does it change the nature of research? - I'm not yet convinced.
Friday afternoon is a meeting of our Digital Library Programme Board and we walk through our business case for our Gateway 0 Review OGC Gateways It sparks a very interesting discussion on the amount of resources the Library devotes to the analogue and digital, and when there might be a tipping point.
The next day I meet my sister for lunch at the Rivington. Before that I catch two exhibitions - Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook c-type photographs and video of Thai farmers before icons of French modernist painting e.g. Manet's 'Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe'. Gimpel Fils Gallery At Timothy Taylor Gallery Ewan Gibbs is showing pencil drawings after photographs of New York. The city becomes a hazy gridded monochrome of marks. I'd like to own one but I'm not sure i would want it on my walls (not that I have any room).
