Mass Observation Archive in the news

Following on from Victoria Wood's success at the Bafta awards for writing and starring in the drama Housewife, 49, the BBC have published an article on Mass Observation, including mention of the archive at the University of Sussex.

Review of 2006

It's been an eventful year for the Archives Hub, so I thought I'd take this chance to select a few highlights. Development work has been proceeding fast on the Spokes software. John Harrison (over in Liverpool), Jane and Steve have put a lot of energy into this and we're also grateful to all the 'early adopters' who've given us so much useful feedback. I'm sure that 2007 will see widespread uptake of this software, which gives institutions a low-cost way of presenting their EAD files online. ELGAR is the Spoke installation at the John Rylands University Library here in Manchester, which has not been live for long, but which is already appearing in search engine results for searches on the names of John Rylands collections. The Hub's collections of the month have been brilliant this year: I think my favourite one was June's look at Romanies and Gypsiologists, which is a great example of the way that services like the Archives Hub can bring together related collections from a range of archive-holding institutions. Thanks to Paddy for all the work that he does on this aspect of the service. We've had a couple of interruptions to the Archives Hub's service this year: a major power cut to Manchester Computing's building in May and a hard disk failure in October. Steve ensured that the interruptions were as brief as possible! We are a small team here, with five of us sharing an office, but all three of the men became fathers during 2006, so best wishes to all the new families for their first Christmas. In the last week a complimentary review of the Archives Hub and other MIMAS services was published in the Guardian newspaper (scroll down the article to 'The MIMAS Touch'), which was an excellent way to end the year. We wish all our users, contributors and colleagues a happy Christmas and a fulfilling 2007. The image is of the 2006 Archives Hub Christmas card, in case you didn't get a hard copy version. Snowflakes were made using the Make a Flake site.

Irish blues

The library of Trinity College Dublin was featured in Material World this week on BBC Radio 4. The programme discussed the use of Laser Raman spectroscopy, which is a non-destructive way of analysing the contents of the pigments in the illustrations of the 9th-century Book of Kells. It had originally been thought that the blues in the paintings were made from lapis lazuli, causing elaborate theories of very early trade links between Ireland and Afghanistan to be developed. The new technique showed that the blue was in fact created from woad, which is slightly less exotic and exciting, but much more easily explained. Keeper of manuscripts Bernard Meehan and keeper of conservation Susie Bioletti both featured in the programme, which is available online until next Thursday.

Death again

I was going to post about the mention of the Cumbria Archive Service on Radio 4's The Today Programme yesterday morning, but then two pieces of news about the National Archives and Library in Iraq caught my attention. One was a posting by Jeffrey B. Spur on the History News Network stating that the institution has been closed, the other was Patricia Sleeman's message to the JISCmail archives-nra list, inviting archivists to read the diary entries of the institution's Director, Saad Eskander, which have been mounted on the Society of Archivists' website. These items put PR triumphs by UK archivists into perspective, but you can hear Anne Rowe (Cumbria's County Archivist) talking about the more mysterious seventeenth century deaths in Cumbria in The Today Programme until next Thursday.

Random death

Geoff Pick of the London Metropolitan Archives made an appearance on BBC Radio 4's statistical programme 'More or Less' this evening, talking about the way the V1 rockets hit London in 1944. The way the bombs landed, often in clusters, meant that many people thought that they were being deliberately aimed at certain targets. The London County Council Architect's Department's maps of the locations of the strikes were used by R. D. Clark, a statistician, to prove that they were in fact perfectly random. During the next seven days you can listen to the programme through the BBC's website. P.S. For what it's worth, I tried very hard to find a reference number for these maps, but with no joy. Please chip in if you know better...

Gunpowder treason

The Parliamentary Archives have put together a great online exhibition for all ages in The Gunpowder Plot: Parliament & Treason 1605. It featured today on BBC Radio 2 as Website of the Day, which rarely mentions our sector. The programme in question attracts an audience of 6.5 million people, so that's quite a PR achievement.

Philip Pullman on libraries

There was a good promotional article on libraries and librarians in The Times on Saturday. Though I don't think Philip realises quite how much librarians are involved in bringing information online and improving the quality of online information (not to mention providing online access within libraries).

Paying for publicly funded data

An interesting story in last week's Guardian about the cost to the economy of buying back data which has been created using public money (OS maps, Highways Agency video feeds and so on). It contrasts the situation in the UK with that of the US, where this kind of data is available free of charge and has resulted in the creation of innovative services like Google Maps.