Blogs from national libraries focusing on the work of specific departments or specific projects.
Created by UkolnCulturalHeritage on Jan 15, 2009
Last updated: 06/26/10 at 11:04 PM
Tags: News Libraries
National-libraries has no followers yet. Be the first one to follow.
I don't think so many constitutional experts have been gathered in TV studios than they have over the last week, nor have various voting systems (PR, STV, AV, etc.) been brought up at so many water...
(From the Taking Liberties blog: Matthew Shaw documents the struggle for Britain's freedoms and rights)
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/takingliberties/2010/05/men-in-smokefilled-rooms-and-tights.html
Preservation Week: from the American Library Association and the Library of Congress. In case any readers are not already aware of it, this week of 9-15 May 2010 is Preservation Week in USA, and its...
(From the Digital Lives blog: Jeremy John on personal digital archives)
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/digitallivesblog/~3/lcguzHaeG18/pass-it-on-saving-heritage-and-memories.html
The exhibition lives on (and not just on the web). On Monday I was invited to give a talk to some UCL MA students on the process of putting on the exhibition and to provide a summary of the British...
(From the Taking Liberties blog: Matthew Shaw documents the struggle for Britain's freedoms and rights)
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/takingliberties/2010/04/taking-liberties-talks.html
Sorry, blog, for the neglect. The reason is that I have accepted the offer of the post of A.W. Mellon Chief Librarian of the Frick: Frick Collection and I should start there, visa permitting, on the...
(From the Breaking the Rules blog: Stephen Bury on curating, books and the avant-garde)
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/breakingtherules/~3/V-KeBGFrRNU/moving-on.html
This is an update of the Digital Lives Synthesis, version 0.2: Download Digital Lives Synthesis02 With many typos corrected and bibliographic references at the end of this Digital Lives Research...
(From the Digital Lives blog: Jeremy John on personal digital archives)
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/digitallivesblog/~3/BmEjdtmnZAw/synthesis-02-a-fair-copy.html
I am pleased to be able to release for the first time the Synthesis for the Digital Lives research project Download Digital Lives Synthesis01A. Earlier this month I attended the enjoyable and...
(From the Digital Lives blog: Jeremy John on personal digital archives)
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/digitallivesblog/~3/VwBNefI86rE/digital-lives-synthesis.html
Hate the period between Xmas and New Year and would rather work, so did. Re-wrote the Benjamin Britten exhibition proposal for 2011, playing up his work with the GPO Film Unit - 'Night Mail' etc. and his role in pacifist organisations such as the Peace Pledge Union. Also wrote some captions for the Europeana/The European Library 100 great books project - we are taking the slightly unusual angle of selecting bestsellers (some forgotten, some still selling) of the 19th Century. Discover one of these authors, Sabine Baring-Gould, who wrote the hymn 'Onward Chrstian Soldiers', was a pioneer collector of folk songs and bowdlerized 'Scarborough Fair' etc. Baring-Gould: and he collaborated with Cecil Sharp.
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/breakingtherules/2009/12/year-end.html
Hate the period between Xmas and New Year and would rather work, so did. Re-wrote the Benjamin Britten exhibition proposal for 2011, playing up his work with the GPO Film Unit - 'Night Mail' etc. and...
(From the Breaking the Rules blog: Stephen Bury on curating, books and the avant-garde)
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/breakingtherules/~3/yYgN3LmMkt0/year-end.html
Eurostar to Paris after attending the Board Investments Committee. Get there quite late and walk fromChatelet Metro to the hotel in the Marais. Next morning it's an early start at the French...
(From the Breaking the Rules blog: Stephen Bury on curating, books and the avant-garde)
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/breakingtherules/~3/AIWBzcqj7yI/a-paris.html
Eurostar to Paris after attending the Board Investments Committee. Get there quite late and walk from Chatelet Metro to the hotel in the Marais. Next morning it's an early start at the French Publishers Association SNE. It's a meeting between the Federation of European Publishers and CENL (Conference of European National Libraries) and we start at 9.00 (I must start a campaign against the one hour difference with European time). We discuss web harvesting, the Google settlement No 2, the Europeana Next Steps consultation and have two presentations on Libreka and ARROW. After lunch in a Vietnamese restaurant, some of us attend the Assises Professionnelles du Livre "a l'heure numerique". Ronald Schild gives a presentation on Libreka - a sort of Gallica 2 for German publishers and booksellers: it's interesting to discover the business model - 70% to the publishers, 25 to the bookseller and 5 to Libreka. The next talk is by Jeremy Ettinghausen, the digital editor for Penguin The Penguin Blog, who describes such projects as "1 million Penguins". He refers to the British Library archiving some of his web projects UK Web Archive - it's good to get such a public mention, and as we meet as I leave I thank him for it. We have a quick chat about computer games - I am more and more convinced that we should be doing more at the British Library - narrrative has moved on from the three-decker novels of the 19th Century to film in the 20th Century to games in the 21st.
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/breakingtherules/2009/11/a-paris.html
Travel to Ankara for a meeting of The European Library. The planes and an early pre-meeting mean I have to get there on Saturday night, so I have some time to see Ankara. But it's wet and cold and...
(From the Breaking the Rules blog: Stephen Bury on curating, books and the avant-garde)
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/breakingtherules/~3/8YhcT8URxcU/ankara.html
Travel to Ankara for a meeting of The European Library. The planes and an early pre-meeting mean I have to get there on Saturday night, so I have some time to see Ankara. But it's wet and cold and Ankara is a difficult city for a pedestrian - steep kerbs and footbridges over road junctions. It's a bit like Washington - long boulevards and state buildings - but with lots of barracks and minarets Ankara. I spend three hours in the The Museum of Anatolian Civilization and learn about the Hittites, neo-Hittites, Phrygians and Galatians - I'm impressed by a metal deer ornament to be mounted on a ceremonial pole, small gold mother-daughter tokens and the Gilgamesh reliefs from Eastern Turkey. The meeting next day is largely about the relationship between TEL and Europeana. The National Library of Turkey are our amiable hosts and look after us.The journey back is difficult - a boy racer taxi driver (and the seat belts don't work), and a long queue for the connecting flight in Munich. I get home after 10.00 and discover winter has arrived - time to put on the central heating.
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/breakingtherules/2009/11/ankara.html
Robin asks me to do an obituary for David Troostwyk who died on the 29th September. It's for Art Monthly which won't come out until November: how can you sum up a man's life in 300 words? I see the...
(From the Breaking the Rules blog: Stephen Bury on curating, books and the avant-garde)
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/breakingtherules/~3/zsGQ1UYoTHg/skulls-madrigals-swedish-films-david.html
Robin asks me to do an obituary for David Troostwyk who died on the 29th September. It's for Art Monthly which won't come out until November: how can you sum up a man's life in 300 words? I see the obituary in the Guardian David's obituary : and we cover much the same ground - his dealing in photographs and letters as David Koos (his middle name) and his trajectory at an odd angle to the art establishment. Where we differ is the Guardian obituarist's focus on David's Euan Uglow Review, and my emphasis on his desire to remain a painter: "For me, the act of painting was never considered, never possible unless only painting could provide the means of sustaining legitimate calls of the mind." Space doesn't allow us to capture the man: I wrote the catalogue introduction to his 'Private Act' (1999) and interviewed him to do this - there were stories of his radio am days, sharing a bed with a Welsh (?) farmer as a wartime evacuee, an obsession with canasta...I hope I can find the black T-shirt he gave me at my Chelsea leaving party with the transfer text SB ELIXIR = EX LIBRIS (a typical David word game) which I'd like to wear for his funeral.Paul invites me to the private view of Damien Hirst's sub-Mexican 'The Dead' exhibition at the Other Criteria. There's an interesting PhD thesis (compare and contrast) to be written on the contrasting fortunes of David and Damien (and conceptual art). It's heaving with the Frieze Fair hordes.I get home and watch the DVD that Anna-Karin has sent from Filmform in Stockholm, where we met at the ARLIS Norden Conference - very wet I seem to remember. The Lars Arrhenius animation is both funny and sad, and I like the film about the artist Zdenko Buzek, a Zagreb artist. The voiceover by a child gives me an idea for my metonymy show next year.Sunday is madrigals in Canonbury, so I use it as an excuse to visit the Estorick Collection, which has an exhibition of the Hockemeyer Italian ceramic collection: ceramics had a surprising (to me) at least centrality to the work of Marino Marini and Lucio Fontana. It's amazing how our preconceptions write out chapters of history.David's importance will eventually surface to its rightful level.
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/breakingtherules/2009/10/skulls-madrigals-swedish-films-david.html
Some of the more confusing (and arguably confused) aspects of the British Constitution are those relating to executive (or royal) prerogative. Those with an interest in such matters may be pleased to...
(From the Taking Liberties blog: Matthew Shaw documents the struggle for Britain's freedoms and rights)
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/takingliberties/2009/10/prerogative-powers.html
I am very pleased to be able to make available a Digital Lives discussion paper by Andrew Charlesworth on Legal & Ethical Issues. It represents our principal output for the legal and ethical...
(From the Digital Lives blog: Jeremy John on personal digital archives)
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/digitallivesblog/~3/wUAp6PmMze8/-legal-ethical-issues.html
I am very pleased to be able to make available a Digital Lives discussion paper by Andrew Charlesworth on Legal & Ethical Issues. It represents our principal output for the legal and ethical component of the project. Download Digital Lives >> Legal & EthicalFrom my perspective it has a number of useful qualities. (1) It is directed at - or at least is accessible to - a wide audience, and should be useful not only to large and small repositories but also people at home organising and preparing their own personal archives whether these are destined to go to a repository in time or are to be passed to a family member or friend. It provides in one place a straightforward and concise outline of the legal requirements - to the extent that these can be determined in the absence of court cases that serve as precedents. (2) It is imbued with a natural pragmatism. It urges repositories to take a pragmatic stance in dealing with the legal uncertainties of holding and making available personal digital archives. Specifically, it confirms what many in the profession have suspected for some time, that there is some significant uncertainty about what precisely the law expects, and suggests therefore that there is a need to consider not only the potential costs of the 'risk' (which may not in the end manifest themselves) but also the benefits of a less conservative approach in terms of capturing, preserving and making available archival resources to current and, equally importantly, future generations. (3) The paper elaborates in more detail, but briefly the approach entails: (i) a transparency in the policies, guidelines and actions of repositories, (ii) a passing of the onus to the users of the library (who are after all subject to the law too), and critically (iii) a responsive, prompt and sympathetic system for addressing and acting on concerns and grievances of third parties. Speaking for my own institution I am pleased to see that steps in this direction are already emerging. (4) I also like the idea of using icons to represent specific metadata and the existence of layered explanations of legal statements. Regarding the use of icons I had been thinking along similar lines having come across a paper describing this approach in bioinformatic cataloguing and archiving. Again, the onus is being passed in part to others - in this case the creators of personal archives. Suggestions and feedback would be very welcome. You can email us at digital.lives@bl.uk. Please identify yourself, and if available use an institutional email address. Please do not include attachments. We may not be able to reply to all emails but we shall read them all. Thank you, in anticipation. A number of people from a variety of institutions kindly participated in two focus group meetings, and we would like to thank them very much for their support:Guy Baxter, Victoria & Albert MuseumGareth Burfoot, British LibraryElse Churchill, Society of GenealogistsMaxine Clarke, Nature Publishing GroupFrances Harris, British LibraryArwel Jones, National Library of WalesJack Latimer, Community SitesHannah Little, HATII, University of GlasgowLuke McKernan, British LibraryKathleen O'Riordan, Media & Film, University of SussexHelene Snee, University of ManchesterTilli Tansey, Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of MedicineSusan E. Thomas, Bodleian Library, University of OxfordDave Thompson, Wellcome Library Lynn Young, British Library.I'd like personally also to thank the Digital Lives team members: most especially Jamie Andrews, Alison Hill, Ian Rowlands and Pete Williams as well as Lynn Young for their comments on an earlier draft. Finally, congratulations to Andrew himself for an excellent paper.
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital_lives/2009/10/-legal-ethical-issues.html
Imagine if I couldn't say what this blog post is about, to what I am referring, who said it, or even if they said it. As many of you will know, the Guardian newspaper was in exactly this position...
(From the Taking Liberties blog: Matthew Shaw documents the struggle for Britain's freedoms and rights)
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/takingliberties/2009/10/hashtags-libel.html
Yesterday I promised more America and less politics. I misspoke. Today we have both. After an interesting talk about how Euston Road might develop over the night few decades, the Americas Collections...
(From the Taking Liberties blog: Matthew Shaw documents the struggle for Britain's freedoms and rights)
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/takingliberties/2009/10/nobelled.html
Don't know where the summer went - had a week up in Lancashire to see my mum (and it rained all the time). Last couple of weeks I have got back into the exhibition circuit - Paul Carter's 'Hotel' at Matts, Susie Hamilton at Paul Stolper, Bloomberg Space, Gina Medcalf at Chelsea Futurespace. Also caught the end of 'Futurism' at the Tate - having reviewed the catalogue I was disappointed by the realisation of the exhibition - not the work. The futurists always get a bad press and this doesn't help.On Friday afternoon I was on the Birgit Skiold prize jury with Elizabeth and Gill at the London Art Book Fair. This is a very different show and includes trade and gallery publishers. This is my first visit to the Whitechapel Art Gallery since their revamp and I get disorientated until I map the old space onto the new.I treat myself to acquiring a Mark Pawson treated map of the Allegheny Highlands Mark Pawson. So much for saving up.
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/breakingtherules/2009/09/the-end-of-summer.html
Don't know where the summer went - had a week up in Lancashire to see my mum (and it rained all the time). Last couple of weeks I have got back into the exhibition circuit - Paul Carter's 'Hotel'...
(From the Breaking the Rules blog: Stephen Bury on curating, books and the avant-garde)
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/breakingtherules/~3/WZQNTHKQTeE/the-end-of-summer.html
I went to a lecture last night at Birkbeck with my colleague Jerry (who has an interesting BL Twittter feed on the Library's vast international organisations collections). Richard J. Evans, the Regius Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge, was giving a public lecture to mark the European History Quarterly's 40th anniversary, and his subject was 'What is European History?'.
As the title suggested, much of the lecture was historiographical (e.g, Lord Acton's doomed plans for a cosmopolitan, non-national Cambridge History of Europe, A. J. P. Taylor's 1986 remarks in History Today - "European history is whatever the historian wants it to be"). The thrust of the lecture was that, in the UK, European history has in fact traditionally been 'Continental History', but that this has changed, not least because of the influence of the demands of publishing for a US audience and the welcome influx of scholars from the Continent to British universities. Books purporting to be about Europe and sold in New York or Portland cannot not have a chapter about Britain. Intellectual currents have also changed, and the Whiggish view that Britain stands alone from Europe, offering the benefits of liberal democracy, freedom and civil rights to those that would listen, has been replaced by ideological uncertainty, a greater sense of the complexity of whatever the historian wants Europe to be and, most recently, an alertness to the global. These older, eddies, of course, may still be visible in recent work.
Some of the questions also revealed how Evan's contribution to Penguin's History of Europe series may be shaping up (and how it's word-count may compare with other, usually rather epic, European histories). There was a hint of a return to social history; the role of poverty and wealth, even the importance of food and death should not be forgotten. Many of these things were connected to the wider world (the atmospheric dust from a volcanic eruption in Indonesia might, for example, lead to failed crops in France).
These interconnections - the global, the social, Britain, Europe and the world - reminded me of the fact that this blog is now over a year old and its first post (16 September) wondered about what the collapse of the banks might mean for the political and social consensus in Britain. We're just getting a sense of that now.
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/takingliberties/2009/09/fog-in-channel.html
My boss inherited many of the papers of the former superintendents of the Round Reading Room; these include a list of items displayed at an exhibition celebrating the bicentenary of the British Museum, which we happened to look at today.
Following an item on the first 'keeper' of the Reading Room, Dr. Templeman (which revealed how he found that the 'six hours' daily attendance enjoined upon him by the Trustees affected his health adversely and he resigned in December 1760, to become the secretary of the newly founded Society of Arts), I was intrigued by a note (Add. MS. 45868) on William Blackstone, who was'engaged on his edition of the Great Charter and the Charter of the Forest'. This monumental work was one of the first items on display in Taking Liberties (in the Rule of Law section).
The manuscript reveals that part of the materials which Blackstone 'wished to consult was adorned with Pictures or Illuminations'. The regulations of the day meant that the great legal scholar would have to wait until the following day. However, he was 'obliged to set out for Oxford the next day'. Dr. Templeman, clearly not too adversely affected at that time, 'permitted him the use of the Manuscript without waiting for the authority of the Committee'. Templeman, it seems, in his 'zeal in the cause of Readers', often transgressed this statute, leading to 'complaints from the several officers and servants'.
Rules, it seems, are sometimes made to be broken.
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/takingliberties/2009/09/breaking-the-rules.html
I've been lucky enough to have spent the last week in the Pyrenees, riding some of the great mountain cols, such as the Tourmalet, the Aubisque and the Portet d'Aspet. I'm not sure which required greater effort, 400 miles of hills or the exhibition, but the hours on the hills certainly gave time for some reflection.
On a lot of the mountain roads, there remains the lettering left from supporters during recent Tour ascents ("Cav Cav Cav", or "Contador"). At first, they are cheering, encouraging, letting you believe that you may have some ability, but very soon they become, at least for me, a reminder of the vast gap between such riders and this wheezing curator. It's a good job I wasn't doing an AudioBoo, like my colleague Jamie Andrews during the 'Berger Run', as I suspect there would be nothing but heavy breathing.
The graffiti was often much more serious, and perhaps was a form of protest we should have included in the exhibition in a way other than the oblique stencil visual language of the signing and posters. The most pressing issue in the Pyrenees, at least going by the marks daubed on roads and walls, is currently the introduction of a dozen or so Slovenian brown bears: "Non Aux Ours" (perhaps it should have been written in Slovene). During one lonely ascent, far behind the group, I pondered the best way to fend off a peckish beast. Could I release a wheel in time? Bribe him or her with a PowerBar? But then, the bears had been here long before I, or indeed, pretty much anyone, had arrived.
More serious questions of political legitimacy were also raised. There had recently been a round-up of ETA suspects in the Alps, and several lonely bridges and passes were marked with slogans supporting, or opposing Basque separatism. Returning home, I find that the political, constitutional, and emotional aspects of terrorism are still playing out in a not very elegant dance between London, Edinburgh and Libya.
There is also a more local endangered species: it is the last week of the Henry VIII: Man and Monarch exhibition at the Library. The show closes 6 September, so there are only a few more days to see his flirtatious marginalia to Anne Boleyn or to get a sense of what it felt like to joust. There may also be echoes of attempts to balance politics, the law and constitutionality in a very tricky situation.
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/takingliberties/2009/09/last-chance-to-see.html
Summer hols: a kind friend put me up in Normandy for a week. On the train on the way back I gathered from Le Monde that the NHS has been dragged into the US newscycle as President Obama attempts to introduce his health reforms. This gives me the chance to add to an ongoing series of this blog: "things we didn't include for a number of reasons". In this case, Alexander Fleming's petri dish containing the first batch of penicillin, which would have been the star of a section on the birth of the NHS - or at least the relationship between the state, public health and medicine (as well as an in-gallery link to UK PubMed). We were able to include some of these issues were raised in a section on the Welfare State, and in a series of audio excerpts and films from the 1940s. The current debate does, I think, underscore the ways that healthcare and social welfare inform a nation's idea of what is meant by a right.
Le Monde, by the way, was happy to quote what I assume was the London Times:
"Qui des Etats-Unis ou du Royaume-Uni a le meilleur système de santé ? La réponse est probablement : la France."
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/takingliberties/2009/08/les-vacances.html
Spend a quiet weekend dodging the showers. I'm half way through reading Norbert Lynton's 'Tatlin' for a review: he died before it was finished, and John Milner, completed it - so it sounds a little...
(From the Breaking the Rules blog: Stephen Bury on curating, books and the avant-garde)
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/breakingtherules/~3/yt5Ax1M_dTw/vertical-integration.html
Spend a quiet weekend dodging the showers. I'm half way through reading Norbert Lynton's 'Tatlin' for a review: he died before it was finished, and John Milner, completed it - so it sounds a little strange at times, quoting himself. It's kicking off lots of Science Fiction thoughts.Explore making three dishes from one - I boil a piece of beef (brisket) with celery, onion and carrot, and have some warm with a green sauce. I recycle the stock in a stracciatella soup (with egg, parmesan, breadcrumbs) - simplicity itself. Later I finish off the cold beef in a poached beef salad with spring onion, capers, gherkins, parsley and eggs in a dijon mustard, olive oil and red wine vinegar dressing.
Look through my papers for the Warwick-Duke Humanities Project.
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/breakingtherules/2009/08/vertical-integration.html
Recent additions to the UN's Memory of the World Register have been announced today, including Magna Carta (1215), which was the centrepiece of the 'Rule of Law' section of the exhibition. Other items on the list include Anne Frank's Diaries, the League of Nations' Archives, the Archives of Terror, and Woodblocks of Nguyen Dynasty - a list of hope and horror, and all records that must be preserved for posterity. The full list is online.
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/takingliberties/2009/07/memory-of-the-world.html
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...
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/breakingtherules/~3/14WpeRMJ6dY/from-frankfurt-to-the-hague.html
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.
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/breakingtherules/2009/07/from-frankfurt-to-the-hague.html
Sir Anthony Jay was on the Today programme this morning (listen again at 8:47). The co-writer of Yes, Minister, was arguing that smaller communities should be given greater decision-making power. At root, he suggests that the ideal of a decision-making...
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/takingliberties/2009/07/yes-benobo.html
Readers of this blog may be interested to know that colleagues in the German section have begun a blog: "Dach-Blog". So far, they've outlined the work of the section and posted some reflections on the staging of Mel Brooks's The...
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/takingliberties/2009/07/springtime-in-germany.html
Today is 14 July, or as it's known with more violent echoes in Britain, Bastille Day. The French national day always brings to mind happy memories: France is one of the few places where I can be convinced to try and dance, and this includes the convivial atmosphere of the fire station in the 18e as part of their traditional firemans ball.
The French spent a fair amount of time discussing when to hold their national holiday (or festivals), both during the Revolution and afterwards. 14 July was only settled on in the late nineteenth century, suggesting how difficult it can be to agree on a what might be called the national story. In Britain, the idea of a national day comes up from time to time, but although 15 June (a possible date for 'Magna Carta Day') would at least be in summer, the lack of a clear moment of rupture or creation in our national history perhaps suggests that any such event might be at best rather artificial and souless; at worst, it would deny the complexity of history and promote an outdated view of nationalism.
That said, inventive and joyful national events, perhaps involving picnics and dancing, are a good thing. And why does it have to be on a set date? A roaming national festival, perhaps one year co-inciding with Wimbledon and celebrating Darwin (survival of the fittest?), the next the Ashes and Newton (gravity and physics must have something to do with cricket, surely?)...
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/takingliberties/2009/07/dates.html
I promised/threatened in my last post to mention the Tour de France, and it hasn't taken me long: the quotation of the TdF so far has to be from the current leader, Fabian Cancellara, who commented laconically on his 0.138 second retention of the yellow jersey after the third stage Team Time Trial, "Swiss timing – very precise."
Time and timing has come up again, after I attended a wonderful commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the birth of the Peruvian historian Garcilaso de la Vega, which included commentaries by the historian John Hemming, the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and the psychoanalyst Max Hernández. Curious about one of Peru's leading intellectuals, I was delighted to find this piece on Hernández's role in the co-ordination of a campaign to encourage punctuality - "La Hora sin Demora" (time without delay), as I'm always intrigued by geographical (and historical) differences in time-keeping and awareness. And more pressingly, my eyes are still propped open after spending 8:45 pm Sat - 4:20 am Sun riding to Dunwich. Matters of time and timing are everywhere, it seems.
The exhibition, of course, also implicitly acknowledged the role of time. Chronology provided an underlying, inescapable structure, from Magna Carta to the Human Rights Act, even as it was given apparent second-billing to themes (such as the Rule of Law or Freedom of Speech and Belief), and led to the risk of accusations of 'whiggery'. But time, and its control, are also tied up with the tensions implied by liberty, rights and freedoms, just as much as they are about property or space. The control of time, historians such as E. P. Thompson argued, have been centrally important to the creation of a productive, - and docile - citizen and subject.
Many important rights, such as freedom from detention without charge, are time-bound; measures of time, such as 42 weeks, were very much at the fore during the exhibition's gestation. Many of the great nineteenth-century social movements charted in the section on social rights, concentrated on limited the hours worked by children, and eventually by all workers. More recently, attention has been drawn to the 'double-day' demanded of many women, especially in the developing world. Time still means much more than who wears a yellow jersey.
P.S., congratulations to the TL team for winning the Nominet Best Practice Challenge 2009 in the 'Open Internet' category.
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/takingliberties/2009/07/taking-the-time.html
Just spent most of Sunday writing up the slides for my talk last month for ARLIS Norden in Stockholm. I always mean to write out a talk in full before I give it, but I rarely do. Now I have to rekindle the performance and it's difficult. I had a great time in Stockholm and the Scandinavian ARLIS members were very hospitable. The downside was the endless rain. On the day of my flight back had two hours in Moderna Museet and saw some familiar icons of modern art. My gift after the talk was a copy of 'The History Book: on Moderna Museet 1958-2008': it has an intervention in the form of a chronology to 2058 by Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska, two artists I know well and whom I mentioned in the talk ! chance publications
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/breakingtherules/2009/07/artists-book-as-photobook.html
Just spent most of Sunday writing up the slides for my talk last month for ARLIS Norden in Stockholm. I always mean to write out a talk in full before I give it, but I rarely do. Now I have...
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/breakingtherules/~3/C8ZTs4Uj9EI/artists-book-as-photobook.html
It's the tenth anniversary of the Scottish Parliament this week (1 July) and most opinion polls seem to suggest that while devolution has been popular, the desire for independence from the Union seems to have waned. If anything, the anniversary has been rather understated, with any hand wringing about national identity, Britishness, etc. relegated to water-cooler and discussions of events in SW19.
There may be more sports-related remarks on this blog following 4 July. That date - and discussion of independence - also brings to mind a recent discovery in The National Archives, according to PhiloBiblos. An unknown copy of the first printing of the U.S. Declaration of Independence (called the 'Dunlap Declaration' after its printer) has been uncovered by a New Jersey rare book dealer. The dealer also paid a visit to the BL (which at the time was displaying one of TNA's copies of the Declaration in the exhibition), but as far as I know didn't make any similar discoveries here...
Still, issues of national identity still abound: according to the blog account of the discovery, "The whole thing was really very English. No cause for excitement. You find a new D of I, you have a cup of tea, and you move on."
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/takingliberties/2009/07/declaration-of-independence.html
Want to have your say about the relationship between people and parliament (and a chance to see Lord Renton on YouTube?). Visit http://lordsoftheblog.net/2009/06/12/people-and-parliament-an-update/ before the 16 June (there's a debate in the House of Lords that evening).
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/takingliberties/2009/06/people-and-parliament.html
Twitter revealed today that there's a citizenship conference taking place at the BL today, organised by the association of citizenship teachers. There's an 'event wiki' as well; it also links in with the Learning team's Campaign! Make an Impact project, which brings together lots of materials on historical campaigns with ideas for how young people can campaign - and learn - today.
Running out of the flat this morning, I caught the start of Harvard Professor of Government, Michael Sandel's Reith Lectures, which as it happens are "about the prospects of a new politics of the common good". The 'commonweal' looks like one of those concepts that is making a come-back (interestingly, it was also used to define ancien regime France as well as Cromwellian England or U.S. States).
I was delighted to discover that there's an urban myth that Professor Sandel provided the model for the Simpson's villainous Montgomery Burns. (Several of the writers are Harvard alums). It seems to me that 'make an impact' has the potential to combine the studious and mischievous characteristics of Lisa and Bart quite nicely.
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/takingliberties/2009/06/bart-and-citizenship.html
Today marks the anniversary of one of the guiding lights of the exhibition, Thomas Paine, who died 200 years ago. You can hear me being startled by my first confrontation with a digital recorder, if you wish, when I tried to talk about the Rights of Man as part of the exhibition's podcast programme. Even better, the audio for the Taking Liberties Study Day is now live, and includes contributions from Miles Taylor, Peter Tatchell, Lord Lester, Barbara Taylor, Catherine Hall and Salil Tripathi on everything from Wollstonecraft, freedom of speech, Britishness, and whether there's a need for a new Bill of Rights. I'm sure that if Paine, the great pamphleteer, was around today, he would seize the opportunities presented by podcasting, audioboos, and the rest. (For that matter, I can see Edmund Burke on This Week.)
There's also another link between the show and this great radical figure. Unlike Paine's bones, which William Cobbett managed to misplace during their transit from the U.S. to Liverpool, the physical remains of the Taking Liberties exhibition are in safe hands: the panel texts have been sent to Lewes Town Hall Corn Exchange, as part of this summer's Paine festival: Revolution and Reason.
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/takingliberties/2009/06/paine-bones-and-podcasts.html
The other Sunday I went to the opening of Richard Grayson's 'The Golden Space City of God' at Matt's Gallery.Future art historians will debate about the 'dark cube' instead of the 'white cube' of the gallery. White space was where you were allowed to be avant-garde, break the rules. But there are so many video installations that the dark cube is perhaps now the experimental space par excellence.Grayson's last piece at Matt's was a Country & Western version of Handel's 'Messiah', based on the anti-unitarian Charles Jennens' text. This time Grayson's libretto is based on the the teachings of David Brandt Berg's The Children of God/The Family David Berg. After the defeat of Antichrist at Armageddon, the world will return to an agrarian utopia, and eventually God's Heavenly Space City 1,500 x 1,500 x 1,500 miles will land, save the chosen ones, and leave for other worlds. Leo Chadburn has composed the music to the libretto. An American choir was filmed in San Antonio in 2009. It's a compelling experience and transcends the occasional moments when it reminds me of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. The choir entering and leaving parallel the Matt's audience arriving and departing. It's on until the 28th June.
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/breakingtherules/2009/06/the-golden-space-city-of-god.html
The other Sunday I went to the opening of Richard Grayson's 'The Golden Space City of God' at Matt's Gallery. Future art historians will debate about the 'dark cube' instead of the 'white cube' of the gallery. White space was...
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/breakingtherules/~3/UmD0kKKAasY/the-golden-space-city-of-god.html
There have been a lot of discoveries in the archives recently. Poirot is set to emerge in two short-stories uncovered among Agatha Christie's papers, and my colleague, Jamie Andrews, has been busy with the recovered John Osborne plays from the Lord Chamberlain's Collection. We are all now very familiar with some records previously held in Westminster, and it looks like there is more than literary implications to follow.
The political implications of archival discoveries has a long history, of course. The ferment of the Civil Wars was impart stoked by the claims of antiquaries to have found constitutional precedents, and the history of Magna Carta is one of continual recovery and interpretation, not least during the agitation for political reform in the 1790s and 1810s. We displayed The Black Dwarf, an early nineteenth-century radical publication that was very much part of the reform movement, but didn't show The Black Book (1819), but it's been 'digitalized' on Google Books. Perhaps 50,000 copies of this title were sold at the time, against the backdrop of the Peterloo Massacre, the US-originating financial crisis and the repressive Six Acts. Would Poirot make any connections, I wonder?
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/takingliberties/2009/06/uncoverings.html
I think I may have been a little too dismissive or understated in my last post, as the expenses row has now mutated into a full-blown political conversation about constitutional reform, elections and even 'revolution'. Precedents from the past have been sought - the Norway Debate, the Civil Wars ('In the name of God, go!'), and obscure cases of City sleaze from 1695 - and on this morning's Today programme one sensed the political parties also had their eye on a soon to be redrawn future. No-one has mentioned the Self-Denying Ordinance yet, as far as I know, either from the Civil Wars or the transition between the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies in the French Revolution (1791). You read it here first.
This said, I still think this is a matter that is consuming the political classes rather than the rest of us. Everyone else is quietly satisfied that their views of politicians matched their assumption that The New Statesman got it about right. But match all this with the backdrop of the financial crisis, and suddenly the notion that history was 'then' (and safely explored, say, in exhibitions at national institutions), and that things will tick along as they are, seems less a safe bet than it did a few months ago.
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/takingliberties/2009/05/live-from-westminster-.html
Following the widely acclaimed three-day Digital Lives Research Conference in February, we have had - over the subsequent weeks - a period of consolidation for the research and writing. A key milestone which is looming fast is a report outlining the achievements of the project. It is due in the first week of June; and we have been gathering the necessary project statistics to send to the Arts and Humanities Research Council. During the remainder of June we shall: (i) bring together the various strands of the project in the form of a final synthesis; (ii) enhance the website, making available some of the project files; and (iii) with publications and various pieces of research writing coming to fruition highlight findings and discuss more widely the possible implications of the research. A quick overview of the outputs of the project: • over the course of the project to date more than 20 presentations have been given by team members at conferences and seminars on three continents; • seven quality papers or articles (including essays) have been published or are in press or are in the final stages of preparation: this includes two peer reviewed papers that have been accepted and one that has been submitted (the original research proposal commits us to only one peer reviewed paper); we expect to produce at least five more quality papers; • the First Digital Lives Research Conference entailed lectures from more than 45 eminent speakers, with talks additionally being broadcast to (and from) the virtual world Second Life; • we intend to enrich the website, with the uploading of files being conducted in phases over the weeks - ultimately there will be more than 60 files made available for download including videocasts, audio interviews, transcripts, presentation slides and papers;• project synthesis report.
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital_lives/2009/05/output.html
Following the widely acclaimed three-day Digital Lives Research Conference in February, we have had - over the subsequent weeks - a period of consolidation for the research and writing. A key milestone which is looming fast is a report outlining...
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/digitallivesblog/~3/jnSqI6F-ysU/output.html
One of the Chartists' "six points" called for the:
4. Payment of members, thus enabling an honest tradesman, working man, or other person, to serve a constituency, when taken from his business to attend to the interests of the country
No mention of trouser presses, moats, moles, or artex removal, I note. On the other hand, there's still a barrier to entry, as the modern-day 'honest tradesperson' seeking a parliamentary seat will probably have to make several attempts at selection and take a couple of runs at an election before they finally get the keys to their office in Porcullis House and their hands on the expenses forms. Doing this requires a lot of unpaid time off work, trips across the country, nights in hotels and, as a friend-of-a-friend quoted one current M.P., a fortune spent at every tombola, raffle and dinner that you're expected to attend during the campaign (and, of course, the year or two before that when you've been selected for your constituency). These are not sums that most us of could meet lightly.
There may also be something to be said about the performative aspect of Parliament: part of us wants them to look succesful, important, and somehow different from us. That's why they're making up the rules, not us. When their cover is blown and expenses reveal an all-too-human side, we get annoyed, perhaps more by that than because of the amounts involved.
We had some election expenses on display, dating from the 1780s, which included the joyous fact that a mob cost one guinea to rent during the election season. Of course, these were expenses met out the M.P.'s own pocket, not the public purse.
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/takingliberties/2009/05/expenses.html
We may be living in the last days of the South Bank Show, but Melvyn Bragg is still going strong on Radio 4. Today's 'In Our Time' was all about Magna Carta - that medieval ragbag of baronial strong-arming. The show tries to answer what the following words meant and mean:
“No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land”.
As regular readers will know, this is clause 39 of the Great Charter. Nicholas Vincent, one of the participants, also kindly gave a great talk at the BL on this very subject.
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/takingliberties/2009/05/1215-and-all-that.html
Up to Scotland on Bank Holiday Monday to look at an archive and possible donation. Have a very enjoyable lunch with the owner and her other half. Train to Edinburgh and catch the Francesca Woodman show at the Ingleby Gallery...
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/breakingtherules/~3/9gygN_-Ugqw/bank-holiday.html
Up to Scotland on Bank Holiday Monday to look at an archive and possible donation. Have a very enjoyable lunch with the owner and her other half. Train to Edinburgh and catch the Francesca Woodman show at the Ingleby Gallery next to the Waverley Station - the relationship of the body to nature and man-made space and objects or animate/inanimate is disturbing - perhaps made more so by her suicide. The Fruitmarket Gallery is en route to the hotel so I call in at Willie Doherty's show Ghost Story & Buried. Willie shows with Matt's Gallery, so I had seen 'Ghost Story' before. 'Buried' is a sort of pendant piece. The next day is a meeting on Collaborative PhDs at RCAHMS Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland. I'm on the panel of non-Higher Education Institutions hosts/collaborative institutions - will all PhDs in 10 years be collaborative?Thursday night after a long hard day interviewing I call in at the Frith Street Gallery opening of Ingrid Calame's show, 'Step on the crack, break your mother's back'. She collects marks collected during a residency at the Albrecht-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo (which I visited in October 2001 and almost drowned on my way back to my hotel). The colour pencil on mylar drawings sometimes result in bold and bright abstract oil on aluminium paintings, enlarged details from the effaced industrial legacy of Buffalo. (Did you know buffalos never got to Buffalo - its etymology is "beau" "fleuve"?)
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/breakingtherules/2009/05/bank-holiday.html
Update Sources