Author: Jane Stevenson

A selection of features

/ Jane Stevenson

This December’s feature, Somerville and Ross, is the fourth time now that we’ve highlighted the description for their Manuscript Collection held at Queen’s University Belfast. It’s an interesting collection!

The yellow jersey though goes to John Ruskin, whose manuscript collection at The University of Manchester, The John Rylands University Library has made a total of six appearances in our features. Several collection descriptions appear three times, including those for papers of Robert Donat and Nikolaas Tinbergen, and for the records of Penguin Books.

Henry Blogg

/ Jane Stevenson

Coxswain Henry Blogg (1876-1954) was the RNLI‘s most decorated lifeboatman. As well as RNLI medals for gallantry, he was awarded the George Cross and British Empire Medal. In 53 years of service, Henry Blogg and his crew helped to save 873 lives. There is now an RNLI Henry Blogg Museum in Cromer, Norfolk.

Yule be amazed

/ Jane Stevenson

The Insect Circus: Hoxton Hall, December 19th-30th Those of you who enjoyed the Insects and Entomologists feature in March will be thrilled to see that the Insect Circus is appearing at Hoxton Hall, London N1, for the Christmas season this year, December 19th-30th.

Once one has encountered the magical world of the Insect Circus, how could one come away and forget about the Knife Thrower and the Brave Butterfly, or the Heroic Capt. Courage and his Vicious Vespa Wasps? Mr. Maroc the Beast Tamer, The Balancing Scarab Dungo, The Antics, Tallulah the Worm Charmer, Ephemera, Hat-trick Hattie or Fleur de Paree?

"A Unique Theatrical Extravaganza."

From our special correspondent

/ Jane Stevenson

Alexander Nevsky Cathedral
Sofia 2006: 8-10 November – Globalization, Digitization, Access, and Preservation of Cultural Heritage – has been a successful conference where the participants had the opportunity to share knowledge, learn and meet new friends. Sofia is a cultural city with extraordinary buildings like the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. The Bulgarians are very friendly people and proud of sharing the beauty of their country with visitors. The high quality of their cuisine and their smooth wines with a strong tradition in the whole country was the perfect attraction to add to the Conference. Just a little note for future tourists: nodding your head in Bulgaria means No and shaking it means Yes, you can get into funny situations if you don’t remember this!

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.

Constructive comments

/ Jane Stevenson

Foamhenge Could there be such a thing as experimental archives science, in the same way as experimental archaeology? What sort of experiments might it involve? And could there be, say, an office building constructed for archives training purposes, along the same lines as the crime scene houses for forensic science training at the University of Central Lancashire?

Illustration: ‘Foamhenge’, Wiltshire, 2005. Photograph by Alun Salt. Image courtesy of Archaeology Image Bank. This reminds me of the short story "FOAM", 1991, by Brian Aldiss. The acronym stands for "Free Of All Memory".

Hoo, hwæt, why, when, where, how

/ Jane Stevenson

Wind-up/Solar radio, tuned to Radio 4 Hwaet is the opening of the epic poem Beowulf, which I found online (although the exclamation mark used in the November feature’s title is just artistic licence on my part). The idea for a feature on the Anglo-Saxons came from an interview I heard on BBC Radio 4, where the Anglo-Saxons were described as being pushed from the curriculum.

Previous features have also been inspired by Radio 4 – hearing an interview with the parents of Mark ‘Insect Circus‘ Copeland on Home Truths led to Insects and Entomologists. And hearing Paul Scholfield reading part of The Waste Land on Radio 4 led to Hurry Up Please It’s Time.

If I was any good at geography, perhaps I’d do a feature inspired by the oddly evocative shipping forecast …

Time and Relative Dimension

/ Jane Stevenson

Police boxThe eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed the Hub website reverting to last August – and in fact today, the Blog is stuck in August as well. We are in the process of restoring everything, but in the meantime please accept our apologies for any inconvenience. October 2006 will be resumed as soon as possible!

The Tardis here is in fact a restored police box near St Mungo Museum in Glasgow. Photo copyright © 2005 Archives Hub.

The new digital archivist meets South Park

/ Jane Stevenson


I’ve created a PDF of the talk I gave to the Society of Archivists’ Conference, succinctly titled ‘The New Digital Archivist: from relative isolation to global interoperability’, the talk is based on the premise of an archivist who does not actually have any archives to look after! In other words, the kind of archivist who works on a service such as the Archives Hub :-)
What sorts of skills do we need and will more archivists require these sorts of skills in the future?

The talk is available from our website on the Introduction page at http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/introduction.shtml under ‘Presentations’.

South Park character creations are by permission of Zwerg-im-Bikini (Janina Koppel)
http://www.sp-studio.de/

P.S. Our software developer is supposed to look thoughtful and not grumpy!

EAD has a new schema (nearly)

/ Jane Stevenson

I have been looking at the beta version of the new EAD schema today. This will eventually replace the DTD that we currently use to validate our EAD files. Usually when I investigate new standards and technologies, the way is fraught with problems, but this was almost indecently easy…..Actually, I should make clear that I mean easy to link to and validate some test documents. When it comes to actually thinking about making all of our Hub data validate to the schema, that may throw up far more issues. It seems that the main changes for us will be to do with the values for date ranges, the use of xlink to create links, and the need to change the repository code values (i’m still a little unclear about how this will actually work).

Isn’t it nice when something turns out to be far more straightforward than you thought it would be!