Ian Cooke, Lead Curator in International Studies and Politics at the British Library and co-curator of the Propaganda: Power and Persuasion exhibition, examines different views and expresions of British Identity.

In our exhibition Propaganda: Power and Persuasion, we look at different ways in which British identity has been presented, both to domestic and to international audiences. From images of Empire used in stunning Empire Marketing Board posters, through the Festival of Britain to last year’s diamond jubilee and the Olympic Games, the nature of Britain and British people has been described in different ways. In some cases, you can see similarities such as a focus on technical and cultural innovation, but what can differ is the people used to represent Britain. We’ve just posted to YouTube our interviews with Tessa Jowell, Alastair Campbell and Iain Dale, on bidding for the 2012 Olympic Games, and their impact on perceptions of Britain. 

Earlier this week, the 60^th anniversary of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II was commemorated at a service at Westminster Abbey. The readings and addresses were given by those representing the highest levels of state – the Prime Minister, Archbishop of Canterbury and Secretary General of the Commonwealth. The service also included however 11 “representatives of the United Kingdom”. These archetypes of Britishness included a nurse, a teacher, a judge, a ‘lollipop lady’, children, Chelsea Pensioners, and a Guide leader.

Although some of the choices seem a little old fashioned, the range of young and old, the use of health and education alongside representatives of law and military, were not that far removed from the vision of Britain presented at the London Olympic Games. The bid film, shown in our exhibition, presents images of school children, construction workers, air stewards, police officers and city workers (in bowler hats). The inclusion, among several celebrities, of the then London Mayor and the actress Helen Mirren provides a sense of symmetry with the coronation celebrations.

British identity as viewed from the US: street art outside the Mr Brainwash Show, The Old Sorting Office, London. August 2012. Image courtesy of Ian Cooke.

Last week, at our Picturing Propaganda study day, Linda Kaye of the British Universities Film and Video Council showed a clip from Jeremy Deller’s stunning English Magic. Deller, and English Magic, is representing Britain at the 2013 Venice Biennale. The British pavilion is sponsored by the British Council, and the film references work such as an inflatable Stonehenge, birds of prey, and Range Rovers being crushed. The last segment has footage from the London Lord Mayor’s Show, featuring a military parade, ambulance workers, tax advisers, London Freemasons, the Institute of Directors, and a carnival float sponsored by Thomson Reuters. All of this is accompanied by an arrangement of David Bowie’s The Man who Sold the World, played by the Melodian Steel Orchestra. Music plays a powerful role in the whole film, which also includes arrangements of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Symphony no. 5, and A Guy Called Gerald’s Voodoo Ray.  Interviewed in the Summer 2013 issue of Art Quarterly, Deller explains the choice of title, ‘because it’s about deceit and concealment and disappearance’, seeing related themes in tax avoidance, and justifying war in Iraq. 

Finally, a rather different, but oddly traditional view of London is presented on the Southbank with the Festival of Neighbourhood. The events are wonderfully diverse, and aimed at a variety of ages and tastes. The setting draws on various nostalgic themes, such as allotments, sandcastles, greenhouses, street parties and ‘Beanotown’. Nobody going past Waterloo Bridge at the moment can miss the monumental “sweepers”, seemingly made out of privet hedge.

So, what do these different views say about our view of Britain? To an extent, these examples all show a confidence and pride in British culture, although there may not be complete agreement on what that is. There’s a sense of recognising and valuing diversity, whether that’s in age or cultural backgrounds. There’s also a sense of pleasure or nostalgia in tradition, but also a willingness to play with and adapt those traditions. Attitudes to other aspects, such as the traditional sources of wealth or power in Britain seem more ambivalent and unsettled. The title of this year’s show at the British Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, ‘English Magic’, provokes the question of whose identity is represented as “British”?  

In this post Andrew Dixon, Lead Curator for Management and Business Studies, writes about his engagement activities with Management and Business Studies researchers and asks how we can support the Business History research community   

It has now been almost six months since I took up my present role at the British Library.  This personal landmark seems like a good reason to share some thoughts about how the British Library has been engaging with the MBS research community (here at the Library we refer to the subject as Management and Business Studies or MBS for short).  The phrase “MBS research community” is perhaps a misnomer as it implies that there is one heterogeneous group of like-minded, like-funded and like-reported researchers and projects.  In fact members of the business and management community are a diverse bunch whose interests range from post modernist critiques of capitalism to full on number crunching of raw economic datasets.  Still, this diversity makes for an interesting life and one thing that they do all seem to have in common is that they like to share their thoughts and opinions. 

To give some examples of how we try to engage with the MBS research community for this subject, I have attended a number of meetings and events in order to build contacts and tap into the collective wisdom of academics, policy makers, students, practitioners and stakeholders. The overriding purpose of these activities has been to engage with our readers to help make informed decisions about how best to develop coherent collections to meet their research needs.   Some of these activities have been hosted at the British Library such as the Open Access event that marked the end of my first week in post.   This resulted in a number of contacts that were to prove useful as time progressed.   Attending the Annual Research Conference of the Association of Business Schools held at Lancaster University was another useful exercise.  My colleague Sally Halper and I had the opportunity to give a presentation on the MBS resources at the British Library, to explain our content strategy and to elicit opinions about how best to meet the research needs of the business schools.  This event formed part of a pattern with others undertaken along with colleagues.  These included a presentation about the Business & IP Centre, a Library facility that supports entrepreneurs and innovators in launching and developing businesses, at Brunel University and participation in a Study Conference at Kingston University.  These reinforced our view that there is a large demand from business and management academics for resources that support specialist research rather than the teaching and learning support often offered by their own institutional libraries.  The British Library as a national library has a vital role to play in this.  Of particular interest to participants across events were the implications of the coming into force of the Non Print Legal Deposit regime, British Library plans to engage with Open Access and the use of the British Library MBS Portal as a means of doing this.

Another more specific project that I have been involved in is a review of how we can support the Business History research community.  Anecdotal evidence suggests this group have been seen as “falling in the gap” between MBS and History research support.  As a practical first step we have targeted the development our annual report collection as a type of resource that is particularly valued by many business and management historians.  To this end I have conducted focus groups and targeted interviews with business historians and other stakeholders with a particular interest in using such material.  The Library has traditionally received a large amount of such items but in a rather uncoordinated way as annual reports have not been covered by legal deposit and active collecting had tended to be focused on the leading FTSE companies.  Other material has, however, found its way into the collection often as part of donations of wider collections relating to companies or industries.  So far we have received a variety of opinions as to how best configure and develop our holdings so as to make them of most use to researchers.  Widely proffered opinions have included that we should build collections around industries and sectors across time and that we attempt to develop holdings for the “lost years” from the mid sixties to the end of the century where this kind of material can be particularly difficult to find.  We are also investigating how researchers react to digital storage and provision for such collections.

This is very much an ongoing consultation so if you would like to offer your opinion individually or take part in one of the forthcoming focus groups then please do contact me, preferably by the end of June, at [email protected] and we can find the best way to feed your ideas into the process.  Indeed, do feel free to contact me on more general MBS related topics as well.  A part of the purpose of all of the activities outlined above and of others that are taking place in the Library is to engage with our users to sense-check that our actions will lead to outcomes that help them to access and exploit our unique resources and collections to best effect.  We are always keen to hear from those in the MBS community, be they students, academics or practitioners, who want to contribute to this ongoing process. 

Ian Cooke, Lead Curator in International Studies and Politics at the British Library and co-curator of the Propaganda: Power and Persuasion exhibition, examines how propaganda can often be fed by public opinion.

I had a great time last week at a private view of Propaganda: Power and Persuasion for secondary school teachers, put on by our Learning programme. Professor Jo Fox, University of Durham, gave an excellent talk on the evolution of propaganda between world wars and into the cold war. One concept that stuck in my mind was the idea of propaganda being a reciprocal arrangement, which responds to public opinion and may require the complicity of its audience to work.

In our exhibition, we look at the London 2012 Olympic Games as a point at which there was a considered attempt to present a view of Britain that was in some ways new - about a population that was diverse, and drew confidence and innovation from that diversity. In some ways, there are echoes of the 1951 Festival of Britain, but, as the Sport at Heart bid film shows, the emphasis on people was much more central. The 2012 Olympic Games are also interesting in terms of public opinion, and we look at this as expressed through Twitter comments in the last section of the exhibition. It's been suggested that print media followed public opinion, expressed in part through social media, in its positive coverage of the games.

Carole Holden gives an example of public opinion shaping the form of propaganda on the Americas Studies blog. Norman Rockwell's 'Four Freedoms', initially turned down by the US Office of War Information for not being sufficiently representative of "fine arts", were later enthusiastically adopted by the same office once they had proved their popularity in the Saturday Evening Post.

Seeing Rockwell's 'Four Freedoms' up close in our exhibition brings home the emotional power in the images and it's not hard to see why they were so successful. However, the exhibit that's had the most impact on me personally is one that takes quite a different approach and at first didn't strike me as very impressive at all.

This poster, 'Road Accident Deaths to Children and Teenagers, Great Britain 1960' (click to view large image), presents a series of simple line graphs and I very nearly ignored it when I was looking through our set of posters from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents. But I was drawn to the small graph in the left-hand corner headed 'Pedestrians'. The big peaks at ages 3- 4 and 6-7 was shocking and made me think about the risk to my own young children. Having been brought up with TV images of the Green Cross Code man, I was already running through the version of the code that I could remember (which I discovered is actually closer to the kerb drill) whenever I crossed the road with my children. However, seeing this poster made me much more diligent about doing this. And also now means that I take even longer to get anywhere.

Like a lot of propaganda, it didn't make me do something that was completely different than before. It worked through reinforcing attitudes and behaviour that I was already expressing. It's also quite odd in working even though I was looking at the poster in context of the exhibition - I was thinking about it as propaganda, but still influenced by it. The reason why it had such an effect was that I was exactly the right audience for it, which comes back to the idea of reciprocity and complicity in propaganda.

That's the piece of propaganda in our exhibition that's had the biggest impact on me. But how about you? What's the most effective or powerful message in your opinion or experience? Let me know #BLPropaganda.        

Would you like to get guaranteed reviews for your articles from an audience of managers, wider publicity for your work and the chance to win £1,000?

 

    

If so, submit a short article to the Chartered Management Institute Management Articles of the Year Award.  This is a quick, no-fuss online submission of a 2,500 word article – and can include existing work, as long as you have cleared the copyright.  Each article get reviewed and rated by members of the Chartered Management Institute, and the top five articles are published in a special report.

This scheme is designed to help:

1. Demonstrate the impact of your work – previous academics have used this scheme as part of their REF impact submissions
2. Reach a wider audience - your article  will be accessible by over 90,000 professional CMI members who will have the opportunity to read, evaluate and comment on it
3. Celebrate success – the author of the winning article will receive £1,000 cash prize and runners-up will be invited to a high-profile Awards Evening at the British Library.

The winning articles will gain considerable exposure as they will be:

• published by the CMI in a special collation of winning articles
• featured in Professional Manager magazine (readership 138,000)
• and made available for free download on the British Library Management and Business Studies Portal and the CMI website.

But don’t just take our word for it…

“Entering these awards is really worthwhile as it allows you to test just how valuable and useable your research is from the perspective of hard-nosed senior managers who have to confront difficult management problems on a day to day basis.”  Les Worrall FCMI, Professor of Strategic Analysis, Coventry University and overall joint winner 2012/3.

Enter today

To find out more about how you can enter go to www.managers.org.uk/toparticles or email [email protected].  Extended deadline for First Call entries is 14 June 2013. 

 

         

This post is by Abiola Olanipekun, a British Library Intern. Abiola writes about her intellectual and emotional responses to the oral history extracts which are part of the Sisterhood and After website.

After my first posting for this blog went well (at least without horrific controversy), I’ve decided to write another, this time on a different topic. My first blog post here was ‘Generation Y Not’ which examined an article about how generation ‘Y’ are managed at work. This latest blog focuses on the ‘Sisterhood and After’ project.

‘Sisterhood and After’ was a research project which aimed to document, through oral history, the experiences and memories of the women who powered the women’s liberation movement in the UK during the period from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. The project resulted in 60 oral history interviews which are held at the British Library, as well as a huge, lively learning resource about the movement. It is this resource that I have spent some time looking at.

As a young woman, I am not old enough to recall some of the key aspects of the women’s liberation movement and pivotal turning points for equality in this country. Nonetheless, I can safely say that I feel a wholehearted appreciation for the liberation movement. I also feel a genuine appreciation for the project of ‘Sisterhood and After’ which has documented the movement through dedicated and uncompromising research.

Above: Why Miss World? Pamphlet © Jo Robinson, Sally Alexander, Jennie Fortune, Mary Kelly and a collective of other protesters. The Miss World Protest was held in November 1970.

When I listened to excerpts such as “The Feelings Behind the Slogans”, “Contraception and controlling poor women's bodies” or “The experience of having an abortion”, I was filled with a sense of another era. Despite being from a different generation to the participants of the movement, I still feel that their era is close to my own: this society is still not completely fair in its treatment of men and women and I personally feel that it still does not respond with equity to women. Indeed, recent news stories suggest that the position of women in society may be worsening.

Feminism is something that I have related to more and more over the years. Perhaps it is because I have always been an avid reader with a curiosity for history and real life experiences, but also (and perhaps more significantly?) because I believe in sustained, long-term equality for all. I (not so privately now) consider myself to be a liberal feminist (I’m usually not one for labels, but I’ll wear this one with pride). The ‘Sisterhood and After’ website has helped me to think further about my own feminism and to relate to the women who helped power improvements to women’s lives in this country.

I could try to do more to really describe the special quality of the extracts on the website and the emotive and evocative nature of each recording, but perhaps it is better to listen yourself?  Click here to listen to the experieces of others; like me you may find their words to be both painful and insightful. To me they are for both your emotions and intellect to experience.

Ian Cooke, Lead Curator in International Studies and Politics at the British Library and co-curator of the Propaganda exhibition, reflects on the first few days of the exhibition and public responses to it, especially those relating to propaganda in the modern age.

These past four days since Propaganda: Power and Persuasion has opened have been very interesting, finally finding out reactions to our exhibition. I've been talking to lots of people, and it's been good seeing the reviews and discussions online and in the press. Particularly great has been following comments on our #BLPropaganda Twitter feed. Thanks to everyone who has contributed so far, even if it does feel odd to send tweets from an exhibition that asks whether we're all propagandists now.

Above: Chorus © Field

One thing that people have been particularly interested in so far is how propaganda operates today, and whether we recognise it as such. The fantastic Twitter wall 'Chorus' has been getting lots of attention. Through the exhibition, you see how propaganda moves with the available and popular cultures: from monumental architecture, through print and posters, to cinema, radio and television.

There's also the suggestion, from Lord Northcliffe during the First World War, that propaganda that looks like propaganda is 'third rate'. So, we were interested in asking whether propaganda techniques have changed to take advantage of new media and social media. And, if it has, can you recognise it? Eliane Glaser examines the opportunities that new media offers for those wishing to influence us in 'The west's hidden propaganda machine'.

That's one question about propaganda in the 21st century. There's also the question of how reporting in mass-media is changing, with the emphasis on 24 hour news. Also, there's interest in how states themselves are changing in the way that they communicate, and in some cases mediate communications, with their own citizens but also internationally. Recent stories relating to North Korea have focussed on some of the more obvious propaganda images and broadcasts.

So, have things changed less than we think? Here at the British Library this Friday 24 May, we'll be looking at Propaganda and Politics in the Modern Age. In partnership with the New Statesman, we're holding a debate featuring Charles Crawford, Isabel Hilton, and Nick Cohen. It will be chaired by Sophie Elmhirst, features editor at the New Statesman. Expect discussion on state-media relations, communications and dissent in China, and the challenges of diplomacy in the 21st century.

Ian Cooke, Lead Curator in International Studies and Politics at the British Library and co-curator of the recently launched Propaganda exhibition writes about an upcoming study day that will examine the power of visual materials. Ian also provides answers to last Friday's quiz.

After nearly two years of planning, Propaganda: Power and Persuasion has opened today. Last night’s launch was great fun, with David Welch and Armando Ianucci speaking, followed by our very own leaflet drop. Over the past couple of days, I’ve very much enjoyed showing people around and talking about the exhibition.

It’s fantastic to finally see everything in place. There’s a huge difference between seeing the exhibits in small groups, as we were doing during planning, and seeing everything displayed together. In the gallery, the emotional power of the more-visual elements is astounding.

We’re going to be examining the power of visual materials in a study day on Saturday 1 June. We’ll be looking at both printed materials, such as posters, and moving images. The programme for the day reflects the themes in our exhibition, covering nation-building, health campaigns, and propaganda in war time. We’re working with the British Film Institute to look at research covering film and other visual materials, and how these kinds of resources can be studied in combination.

Above: Policemen look out of the eyes of the Statue of Liberty, with a policeman's baton forming a tear shape. The image is from a Russian poster, originally titled ‘Freedom American-Style’ by B Prorokov, as featured in the British Library exhibition Propaganda: Power and Persuasion.

Scott Anthony and Linda Kaye will talk about public relations in Britain and the use of film to reinforce images of Britain. Bryony Dixon will talk about public health in early silent film, and Sarah Graham, who features in our exhibition, will compare methods in visual communication in AIDS awareness campaigns. Luke McKernan will talk about newsreels in World War One, and Peter Johnston will discuss government-media relations during the Falklands War. The day starts with David Welch, talking about the use of visual materials in creating a sense of the enemy, and Sue Woods, providing an introductory guide to government film-making.

The day will be a great chance to find out more about current research and resources using these powerful and striking materials. You can find out details and book tickets on our web page.

Last week, I posted three national anthems questions. Here are the answers:

1. South Africa uses five languages in it’s national anthem: isiXhosa, isiZulu, Sesotho, Afrikaans, and English.

2. The national anthem of Poland has the chorus: ‘March, march, Dąbrowski, March from Italy to Poland, Under your command, We shall reach our land’.

3. The European Union uses music from Beethoven’s ninth symphony, the setting of Friedrich von Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’, as both its anthem and to symbolise Europe in a wider sense. 

The ORCiD and DataCite Interoperability Network (ODIN) project, which BL Social Sciences are a project partner in, have announced the beta launch of a new service for searching and claiming works in DataCite, including UK social science datasets. 

The new tool can be found at http://datacite.labs.orcid-eu.org and it enables users to search the DataCite Metadata Store for their works, and subsequently to add (or claim) those research outputs – including datasets, software, and other types – to their ORCID profile. Datasets contained in the DataCite metadata store include UK social science datasets provided by the UK Data Service (formerly ESDS). Claiming these works on an ORCID profile should increase the visibility of these research outputs, and will make it easier to use these data citations in applications that connect to the ORCID Registry – ImpactStory is one of several services already doing this.

The new service also provides formatted citations in several popular citation styles, supports COinS, links to related resources, and displays the attached Creative Commons license where this information is available. In addition to datasets, the DataCite Metadata Store of course also contains many text documents from academic publishers and services such as figshare or PeerJ Preprints, and these works can also be claimed.

This tool is created by ORCID-EU as part of ODIN Work Package 4 – Interoperability, with major input by Karl Ward (CrossRef) and Sebastian Peters (DataCite). The source code is a fork of the code for CrossRef’s Metadata Search written by Karl Ward and is available at https://github.com/mfenner/cr-search.

We encourage everyone to sign in with their ORCiD and try out the new tool. Any feedback on problems or usability issues would be greatly appreciated. Please contact Martin and Mummi at ORCID with feedback.

The service is at early beta stage still, so please expect minor bugs and user interface glitches. The official launch will be at the joint Dryad/ORCID Meeting May 23 in Oxford, where ORCID will present the work and brainstorm ideas for future work with fellow developers at the Codefest.

This blog was re-posted from the ODIN project blog.

Previous social science blog posts have explained the Library's contribution to the ODIN Project, which includes creating a proof of concept for the humanities and social sciences around linking up author and data creator identifiers, such as ORCID, and digital object identifiers, such as DataCite DOIs. We will be reporting on the initial findings of this work in Summer 2013.