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.


