Back from my trip to Prague for the European Library Contacts Working Group The European Library and from my Xmas leave, and it's time to review the year and what's done and left undone. Although 'Breaking the Rules' was strictly a 2007 achievemnet, the work - press, introductions and events lasted until after Easter and I did a paper in Bucharest much later in the year. I'm now working on a censorship proposal and need to complete the feasibility outline by early January.
Other achievements have been the completion of the USA Patents project and the work that went into the material for the European digital Librray, europeana, which will relaunch in January after collapsing under the strain of huge demand.europeana. I was rather impressed with it whilst it lasted. The press coverage and public reactions were interesting: the US papers wanted to know why there was so much French material - was it a conspiracy against the Anglo-saxon world? Another highlight was successfully raising, with Michele's help in the Development Office, the money for the Library to acquire Marinetti and Tullio d'Albisola's 'Tin Book' - now we have the three most innovative Italian futurist books.
A lot of my work is 'business as usual' and advances are often incremental. But the web Archiving programme I took over in June is going well under its new manager, Helen: there is a new website UK Web Archive for our collaborative selective archiving of UK websites. We need to get permission to do this from each site until the Legal Deposit regualtions are in place, which is very time consuming and frustrating when you get no response. The team is working on credit crunch sites at the moment.
