Amanda sent me a YouTube link on the theme of Web 2.0 a few weeks ago. I was reading about James Watt (1736-1819) at the time, for a feature.
Watt devised a radical improvement for the widely-used but inefficient Newcomen steam engine, by simply separating out a key process into an external mechanism.
It struck me that this was a lot like XHTML, and a fundamental principle of XML …
Abbreviation for the word ‘flourit’, ‘fluorit’, or ‘floruit’. The Oxford English Dictionary says ‘floruit‘, but you will probably see these variations, even on the Archives Hub, very sorry about that. Pronounced ‘floor-yuh-it’. When an index term for a proper name requires a date, but if neither the birth nor end date is known to the cataloguer, then the archival material being described can provide a date when its creator ‘flourished’, in the sense that they were obviously active, rather than at the peak of their career or somesuch. Illustration with apologies to Sonny Carter.
A holograph is a document written wholly in the author’s own handwriting.
See also: Love letters.
A noun, singular, most often pronounced ‘fonz’. This generally just means an archival collection, so when an archival description is at ‘fonds-level’, it’s an overview without details of each individual item. Some archivists simply use the term ‘collection’, or treat the terms as interchangeable. But others reserve ‘fonds’ to distinguish a collection generated by a person, family, or organisation, as opposed to an ‘artificial’ collection, which has been gathered and arranged by a collector or a repository.
Sadly, the term ‘fonds’ does not seem to appear in this sense in the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED does include ‘fond’, meaning "source of supply, stock, store", which is apt in the sense of the archival collection providing a fund of data, which we can elaborate with metadata. But does anyone want to suggest some published examples to the OED for the archival use of the word? And can anybody guide us with the pronunciation?
February is LGBT History Month. This was the theme for February’s feature last year. While sketching out an early draft, I thought of Foucault‘s observation that homosexuals didn’t exist until the 19th century, and it occurred to me that this was true in the same way that Italians didn’t exist until the 19th century either. So maybe a portolano chart on the homepage… That one didn’t get past the draft stage.
image copyright Edinburgh University Library Special Collections Division.
I recently watched an episode of the Imagine… TV programme presented by Alan Yentob on the rise of the World Wide Web. One snippet that particularly delighted me was the reference to a Victorian book called ‘Inquire Within Upon Everything’. This is a compendium of advice on every conceivable subject, from alleviating aches and pains to social etiquette. It was the initial inspiration for Tim-Berners Lee when he was developing the software program that was the precursor to the Web – he named it ‘Inquire’ in homage to the book.
I like the idea that the World Wide Web was inspired by an obscure Victorian book. It gives a kind of sense of the continuation and spread of the world’s knowledge from a little-known book to the world wide scale of the Internet.
On a completely different note, I was chatting to Brian Kelly of UKOLN about the wonders of RSS and blogging. However, we agreed that setting up RSS feeds may not be for everyone. You now have an alternative – you can sign up to an RSS email service so that you receive regular emails instead of RSS feeds – read more about this on Brian’s blog – I believe that he’s testing a few out…
Glasgow Caledonian University‘s Carole McCallum supplied us with a couple of splendid photos for Collections of the Month once again. This photo here unfortunately didn’t make it into the final version, due simply to pressure of time…
Illustration: Cookery class at The Glasgow and West of Scotland College of Domestic Science (Incorporated), 1931. From The Records of The Queen’s College, Glasgow,part of Glasgow Caledonian University Institutional Archive. Photograph copyright © Glasgow Caledonian University Archives.
The 2006 Conference: New Delhi, 10-15 December of the International Planning History Society has been a very successful event. The conferences were varied and rich, and the presentation of Town and Townscape: the work and life of Thomas Sharp was well received! The participants coming from all over the world were willing to share ideas and conversations and why not, a glass of wine or an Indian beer after the intense presentations! New Delhi is a vibrant cosmopolitan city and have so many things to see and experience… and we have so little time. It is a very remarkable place that has to be visited sometime, the food was delicious and the people so nice. Jantar Mantar (photograph above) is located on Sansad Marg between Connaught Place and Rashtrapati Bhavan. It is one of the five astronomical observatories across India built in the 18th century. The name of Jantar Mantar derives from corruptions of the words ‘yantra’ (instrument) and ‘mantra’ (formula). It is a fabulous site!
Report and photo by Laura Fernandez, Project Archivist of the Thomas Sharp Project, School of Architecture, Planning & Landscape, and Special Collections, Robinson Library, Newcastle University.
Amanda and I attended an excellent colloquium this week, ‘Memories for Life’. This was the culmination of a project that sought to bring together a diverse range of academics with the aim of understanding more about how memory works and developing the technologies to enhance it:
http://www.memoriesforlife.org/
The expert and very excellent panelists covered aspects of device engineering, computer science, psychology and neuroscience as well as ethical and legal issues. The stuff of our digital life may be created and controlled by us or it may be held externally, evidence of our interactions with the world around us. The colloquium looked at ways this stuff is growing, questioned how it is being used and how it might be used and looked at the implications for us as individuals and as a community.
As a magician in a former life, Professor Richard Wiseman showed us how magic tricks illustrate the sleight of hand that can fool us into certain beliefs that are not in fact true. To some extent magic actually manipulates memory and shows us that we can’t necessary trust what we see (or think we see). Similarly, Richard explained how psychological experiments that he has been involved with show just how open we are to suggestion. One example he gave was a s