Monday

A fine day, spent not at the HLG conference but travelling to Edinburgh and participating in the METRO Workshop, a fringe event at the AMEE conference. I rose early (no run) and arrived at Belfast City Airport where I used their wireless network; but whereas Belfast City has one, there’s no networking at all at Edinburgh, although it seems to me to be a larger airport. How can this be? The Waterfront Hall has no wireless either (in general, fine building though it may be, its IT provision is decidedly limited…when it came to my presentation on the Wednesday, I had to rely for internet access on the technician’s own Vodafone card which he kindly put at my disposal.
METRO workshop was good, and was struck by how the medical educationalists there were able to think in classificatory terms as well as any librarian. The workshop consisted of presentations by members of the METRO project team: Alex Haigh on the history of the project and the need for a set of reliable and authoritative descriptors for medical education, Don Liu on the principles and practice of the taxonomy, and Marshall Dozier on the blog they use to discuss and develop the taxonomy collaboratively. Then, led by Caroline Selai, we had a practical exercise, using the taxonomy to index two articles from the medical education literature.
After lunch I had time to kill before my flight back, so visited the Royal Scottish Academy for their fantastic Titian exhibition (though a lot was by Titian’s contemporaries and students) and then for a drink in the magnificent North Bridge bar. which was formerly the office of the Scotsman.
In the evening I took a flight back, in time to see the British Library team triumph over Oxford University press in the finals of University Challenge: the Professionals, before going to the famously much-bombed Europa hotel to see Scott Plutchak and Bruce Madge entertain with their guitars and Scott’s vocals. They played without a break for around two and three quarter hors, to general delight and acclaim.