A golden rule of professional blogging: if you go to an event, blog about it that day, or maybe the next, or at least that week – otherwise you will either forget or never get round to it.
When I say “you” of course, I mean “I”.
Sometimes, though, the organisers will post the presentations or someone else will blog, which is nice cos you can just link. Like this! Archival Encounters III: summary and presentations.
Heavy rain in Sydney, 1935, from the flickr commons stream of State Library of New South Wales. Chose this because a) lovely example of the way digitisation brings difficult bulky formats like glass plate negatives to new audiences b) event was on a wet day and c) the umbrella lady looks sooo fed up.
The event, on 4 February, handily brought together archive professionals, community projects and interested academics to discuss the implications of digitisation. It is one of a series of such things organised by the Centre for Collaborative Heritage Research, initially as I understand it to bring academics and others together at the University of Leeds but now open to all. I think the series is a very good idea, cutting across silos of “library”, “gallery”, “department” etc to find and share common interests, particularly helpful in a University the size of Leeds.
I’m afraid it was such a wet and windy day that I spent most of the early presentations trying to warm up and dry out and I had to leave before the end, so I can’t give a detailed account of each paper. However, the speakers confirmed my overall impression of digitisation now. It’s core business, what we do all the time, not an add-on. Organisations are looking at it in a strategic way, finding good partnerships (often commercial), and not expecting to get it all done by some wonderful big grant (though must mention the way AHRC are supporting fantastic boutique projects involving academic research).