Breaking the Rules

From Frankfurt to The Hague

Feeling a little tired, having had two quick Thursday night / Friday trips in a row to Frankfurt and then The Hague: the hour's difference means an overnight stay. Frankfurt was a meeting about key performance indicators for The European Library. This would be relatively easy to do this for a national library, but for a portal this is quite difficult. The morning goes well but in the afternoon there is too much detail about file logs. The following Friday is a meeting, convened by The European Library and europeana, to explore an eScholar project for European funding: what tools does the digital scholar need? Are some researchers not using digital research methods because they are too difficult to learn, combine, or just because the right tool for them has not been devised? I must be cursed as each time I fly to or back from The Hague there is a storm, and the plane is usually delayed. Time to catch up on my new reading, Mary Shelley's 'The Last Man' - the plague could almost be the swine flu pandemic.

Radio 5 Live

Another busy day. Have to chair the Content Steering Group at 9.30. We discuss the draft Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) strategy, e-books and overseas newspapers. An hour later the collection heads meet up to draw up our action plan to cope with the slump of the pound against the euro and dollar.

Then it's off to the BBC at White City to do a panel on whether libraries are needed in the digital age - not quite the subject I was expecting, but the three of us, under Simon Mayo's questioning, are mostly in agreement. I think librarians are more in doubt about their role in the 21st century than anybody else. The BBC provide a taxi back but as it's 4.30 I decide to go home - I was working until 8:30 last night at a Patrons' Evening so don't feel guilty. And anyway I have an article to peer review for 'The Electronic Library'.

Curator continued

The weekend has been wet and apart from my swims I've hardly been out, deciding to tidy up the garden in between the showers and continue reading Patrick Hamilton - often described as the early 20th Century Dickens. He's more like a sordid Jane Austen. Patrick Hamilton There's often an overwhelming narrative momentum that the reader wants to resist: George Harvey Bone, the "hero" of 'Hangover Square' (1941), depletes his capital in the disastrous pursuit of Netta in the pubs of Earls Court, and as the money diminishes, the final scene rushes on to its conclusion, a headline "SLAYS TWO / FOUND GASSED / THINKS OF CAT", when all the other newspapers are pre-occupied with the outbreak of war.

I'm half way through the semi-autobiographical trilogy, 'Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky'. Bob, the young seaman turned barman of 'The Midnight Bell' on the Euston Road, squanders his small savings on the prostitute, Jenny, who is the subject of the second volume. I've long had the habit of wading through all the novels of a particular writer - last year I completed Thomas Bernhard. It's partly addictive behaviour, but it also has a rationale - if you are familiar with an author's voice and style, you can read much more quickly.

I wonder if such addiction is another quality of the curator - the desire to collect and compare all the works of one writer, one press etc.; the desire to "complete" the national published archive.

Curator

We have always had a problem with the term "curator" at the British Library - it's always sounded rather elitist. On the other hand it sums up what a lot of us do - care for the objects in our collections, understand them to answer specialist questions about them - where they came from, how they relate to similar objects in other collections and how they can be used for exhibiitions and digital equivalents. We need to understand how to acquire new objects - from dealers, auctions, donations - and from contemporary writers and artists.

Today, Sunday, I've been to the Publish and Be Damned independent publishers fair in Shoreditch. This was started by Emily Pethick and Kit Hammonds in 2004 and is now run by Sarah McCrory and Joe Scotland. The catalogue was published by Four Corners. Four Corners run by Richard and Elinor. It's more febrile than the London Artists Books Fair - there is very little room between the stalls and as it's raining outside it soon gets very crowded. I meet Clive Phillpot who has just published 'Ray Johnson on Flop Art' (Fermley Press). Vanessa gives me a copy of the annual 'Flatwork', the work of ten sculptors using the 2-D page. Flatwork

I go upstairs to the Resonance FM studio and record an interview on the role of independent publishing in the digital age for a podcast they are doing Resonance FM
The physical book is or can be a virtual space but we talk about children in future not being able to understand the book format.

Librarian?

University College, London, Library School had a tradition for academic librarianship and took a subject approach - the subjects I decided to do were social anthropology (an interest from my involvement with the radical historians group at Oxford) and contemporary popular music. You studied the library and publishing infrastructure of your subjects. There was a lot of emphasis on what we then called cataloguing and classification but at least you learned the principles of facet analysis, which has stood me in good stead. There were options too - palaeography: we had weekly transcription homework . It was great being a full-time student again and you could avail yourself of wonderful library resources - the film, 'Trobriand Island Cricket', in a lunchtime at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), a study on construe marks in Hiberno-Latin manuscripts hidden in the library store at UCL or a calming Korean vase in the British Museum.

Important lessons were the use of rules and standards derived from conceptual analysis rather than enumeration. And the fact that we were becoming professional librarians who each owned their own staff development and operated to a charter of professional behaviour. I think these characteristics can distinguish a professional from a librarian who is not chartered. When I joined the British Library in 2000, it was about to have a professional librarian as a chief executive for the first time - and another UCL student, (now Dame) Lynne Brindley.

(Apart from the usual 100 lengths swims on Saturday and Sunday it has been a quiet weekend but managed to see Karin's show at greengrassi in Kennington.  I've followed Karin's work since she was a sculpture student at Chelsea, but this exhibition confirms a new phase in her work. The plaster reliefs remind me of the Seleucid Empire: but there is something vulnerable as well as monumental about them - some of the works are assembled from fragments resting on bent nails - they must have a nightmare to get level and to keep the even spacings (Installation view).

Working late

Tonight I'm the Duty Officer here at the British Library, standing in for a sick colleague. Normally there's always an incident when it's somebody else's duty, but tonight it's busy but quiet. 'Quiet' is probably the wrong word as there is a business reception and private view of our Ramayana exhibition.  So have some time to think about this blog and the 21st century curator project.

We are having a debate about terminology: what's the difference (if any) between a curator, librarian, archivist and content expert? Can you be all at the same time or flicker between them? Where do I situate myself?

I can remember doing my Cub Scout 'Bookman' badge, aged 9 or 10. I had some grasp that there was such a thing as the Dewey Decimal System, but had not grasped decimals - so my first history book was 901, my second 902 etc. When I went to grammar school - Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Blackburn - I worked in the school library and in the sixth form ran it, reporting to the French master, Mr Watson, who had formed a fantastic science fiction collection (QEGS Library now). But I saw an academic career before me and read Modern History at Oxford on a Brackenbury Scholarship. As I did my A levels a year early and after the Oxbridge Exam (with power cuts because of the miners' strike), I worked in the local public library in Blackburn before going up - first indexing local newspapers from the 1790s onwards, then on the the issue and returns desks, processing. As one of the few males on the staff, I was sometimes called upon to help out in the adjacent museum but I've told my Fluxshoe Tour story elsewhere in this blog.

My reversion from academia to librarianship happened in 1975 when I decided I should be working rather than doing a PhD on the persistence of the feud in early modern England. I remember my personal tutor, the late Donald Pennington, saying that doing a PhD later in my career was an unrealistic option. I suppose he was right in a way - the Phd I did part-time much later was on a completely different subject, John Ruskin and history. Anyway, I joined the Inner London Education Authority as a trainee librarian in the Education Library Service and worked for a year at South Thames College (a merger of Wandsworth Technical College with Putney College of Further Education). ILEA paid for my postgraduate diploma at University College London Library School.

21st Century Curator

This blog will now take a change of tack. After Breaking the Rules we have decided to develop the theme of curatorship in the 21st century. In a curious way there are connections: the avant garde faced the challenge of new technologies - car, plane, telegram, telephone, radio, cinema etc. We face the Web, Web 2.0, ubiquitous mobile telephony etc.

In 2003 I began a project at the British Library to re-invigorate curatorship at the British Library British Library website 2008 or rather I should link to an earlier version of the site British Library website 2004 The challenge was to see if the 130 or so staff who described themselves as curators - often a mix of librarians, archivists, academics and museum-style curators (and sometimes in the same person) - were punching their weight in research, acquiring new skills (digitisation, writing for the web et.) and passing on to possible successors increasingly rare skills which were disappearing from the library school curriculum (paleography, historical bibliography etc.), not to mention knowledge of specialised areas of the collections. They had to understand our audiences and relate to other professionals within the Library - in marketing, the Development Office, and our operational departments. A closed conference at New York Public Library, sponsored and supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation brought together a largely Transatlantic group of managers and curators from archives and museums as well as libraries: there were issues common to us all and we could learn from one another. New York Conference 2004

The research piece was perhaps the easiest to do: we have established a research register, research breaks and attained Independent Research Organisation status with the Arts & Humanities Research Council AHRC The staff development programme has included workshops on AHRC processes, copyright, exhibition planning, Web 2.0, managing a university, identifying printmaking processes etc. But cultural change has been slower.

Meanwhile, I have been quite busy. I was the respondent to a paper by Joanna Drucker at the Tate, organised by the University of the Creative Arts, called the Liquid Page,ostensibly about the artist's book in the digital age. The next day I went up to Jack's Art Monthly lunch-time party in South Hampstead - he's selling up so I wonder what will happen to the Sol LeWitt mural - will he have to paint out and recreate elsewhere - I wonder what a future archaeologist will make of it. Then it's off to the Royal College of Art - it's part two: the product design includes roll-up pckaging, a water-powered radio for the shadow and a toilet that recycles waste into cooking oil. But I'm here to see Annabel's work - an intriguing story of the search for lost history and its displacement through archives, libraries and museums. annabel's website. Next day, Sunday, it's madrigals in Nunhead. I get there a little early and visit the cemetery - it's a wildlife sanctuary too. Friends of Nunhead Cemetery It's near the station for easy access. Today it's very green and very windy - almost like Brockley Park in the Antonioni film 'Blow Up'.

Frankfurt

Travel to Frankfurt last Wednesday - amazingly no queue in the bag searching/security: I joke to the equally surprised man next to me as we put our shoes on that maybe all the flights have been cancelled. Frankfurt airport is not my favourite airport and it has got worse - there used to be a shop where you could buy treble and alto recorders, mouth-organs. No more. Get to my hotel, the Steinberger Frankfurt City, where I always stay - it's a hearty walk from the Deutsche National Bibliothek. As you could guess, Britta has organised the conference to perfection despite the sudden increase in numbers to over 200. The purpose of the conference is the launch of europeana, the maquette of the European Digital Library, which launches tomorrow (Monday). It normally snows when I go to Frankfurt - this time it just rains and rains.

Get back to London late on Friday night. Saturday get to the pool for my 100 lengths, do some food shopping and finish off reading the PhD I am examining for Goldsmiths. Sunday, another swim. Then it's a reading at the British Library with John Hurt from Tom Stoppard's 'Travesties', set in Zurich when Lenin, Tzara and Joyce might have intersected. At the party afterwards I invite Tom for a private tour of Breaking the Rules. I think I will learn more from this than he from me.

Distillation

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.

8 - 2

I leave a pile of checked labels in the Exhibitions pigeon-hole. There are more labels on my desk: one strikes me as now not being meaningful. It requires a re-write - you can edit and edit, but finally you may need to restart on  a blank piece of paper. I print out my papers for this afternoon's meeting of the National Co-ordination Committee for Art & Design Resourcs this afternoon.

I have a coffee with Carole who tells me about yesterday's Mexican conference she and Aquiles attended. Time to do ten more labels before I have to go to CILIP Headquarters for a LACA (Copyright) meeting. Stop off at Waterstone's to pick up 'Time Out' which has Rachel's pre-view of 'Breaking the Rules' - it's the Eurostar Special, so it's perfect. The CILIP Meeting is primarily about Orphan Works - where the location of the rights holder is unknown. I have my doubts that in the age of mass digitisation that this is the most important issue. I skip lunch and return to the British Library. I have 30 minutes before my next meeting - the NCC. Just before 2.00 I go down to the Front Desk and pick up the visitors. The meeting goes well with everybody contributing and my role as Chair is confined to just nudging the business on. Afterwards I check the last panels and finish off more labels. Then there's a meeting on our Content Strategy.

I check my emails and have to highlight the main points for the Chair's speech at the opening. Then I go to the Whitechapel Art Gallery. It's shrouded with scaffolding and hoardings - and difficult to find the entrance. I meet up with Jane and sign the Book Works accounts. We have a drink upstairs before viewing the Langlands and Bell.