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.