Tom Roper's Weblog

Unveiling rafts

The newsreader on the BBC said that David Cameron is to "unveil a raft of new policies" at the Tory conference. How does one unveil a raft, I wonder? One would need to veil it first, which seems, to me, a little odd.

Queen Elizabeth II Stakes day: selections at Ascot and Market Rasen

235 Ascot: Sharp Nephew
310 Ascot: Saoirse Abu
340 Ascot: Shevchenko
345 Market Rasen: Oslot
420 Ascot: Excellent Art

WESLINE colloquium: Exploding the Canon

I attended the WESLINE Colloquium, Exploding the Canon. From Medieval Romance to TV Soap:
meeting the challenges in resource provision on 12 September at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies.

David Pearson, Director, University of London Research Library Services (ULRLS)  drew attention in his welcoming remarks to the problems libraries face. All University of London research libraries run at a deficit. The average library spend by  CURL  member libraries rose from £8.5 million in 2004-205 to £9.6 million in 2005-06 and libraries shave to handle an increasingly wide range of resources. David drew attention to the SAS-Space project, their institutional repository, of which more below. He wondered if the arts and humanities were not more backward when it came to self-archiving than other subjects. He also warned of the decline in languages in schools and universities. Languages, he felt, are a prime candidate for collaboration, but collaborative collection management is always popular until an institution is asked to give something up.

He then introduced a panel discussion and open forum on trends in French/Hispanic/Italian studies research and implications for resource provision. The first speaker was Trevor Dadson,  Professor of Spanish at Queen Mary, who reported from the Arts and Humanities Research Council Postgraduate Panel panel. Today’s postgraduates are tomorrow’s researchers and academics, so the results have important implications for staffing and for the future of the disciplines.
Across all languages, between 80 and 90% of applications were in post-1950 subjects, and many ignored book-based subjects in favour of film, cultural studies and the visual arts. Applications also showed little originality, and showed evidence of excessive supervisory influence. He wondered if institutions would have the right resources to support these applications, and whether staffing was adequate. Increasingly Spanish nationals are recruited by British universities to teach the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. He also felt that many of the applications were unsuitable for the AHRC and were more with in the scope of the Economic and Social Research Council.
Then Jane Everson, Professor of Italian at Royal Holloway, reported from the AHRC research panel. One of the difficulties the panel has is in judging applications where one has no experience. There are many also PhDs in modern languages which are not supported by AHRC, and she endorsed Trevor Dadson’s point about applications that fall into the ESRC’s remit. In Italian, a smaller discipline, the medieval period, above all the writers know as the Tre Corone, Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, is still central, and she praised the Bodleian’s recent exhibition, Italy’s Three Crowns. Increasingly Italian nationals, including medievalists,  are being appointed to British university posts. Electronic resources are well developed, particular in Dante and Boccaccio studies: see for example Brown University’s Decameron Web or Princeton’s Dante Project. 

The visual arts remain strong, as does 16th century lyric poetry. Popular themes include women, censorship, driven perhaps by the opening up of the Inquisition’s archives,  the holocaust, translation studies and detective fiction. There is a big  historical gap, with very little interest in the 17th, 18th, or 19th centuries, in contrast to Italy itself where the 19th century remain strong. In the Italian tradition, the preparation of a critical edition remains an important part of a scholar’s career.
Book-focussed research remains important and there is interest in work on secondary figures in Italian literature, cinema (though not yet photography), linguistics, immigrant writing, identity, both regional versus national, national versus European and European versus the wider world, comparative culture, exile and, last but not least, food; see for example UCL’s Cappuccino Conquests  project . In questions Jane was asked whether modularisation could be blamed for the lack of contextual knowledge displayed by applicants, She felt that, yes, it might, or the excessive emphasis on illusory choice in the undergraduate curriculum.

Eleanor Quince of Southampton presented the results of the AHRC Review of research in modern languages undertaken for the AHRC by the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies, an attempt to analyse the intellectual health of the subject area. There are around 2,000 active researchers and 2,500 postgraduates in the field, something which will change as the decline in undergraduate numbers works its way through. There has also been a migration of some linguists out of modern languages, growth in collaborative research, a rise in applied language research, and in interest in intercultural communication and in interpreting and translation studies at postgraduate level. Literature is still a focus, but interest is declining in schools and among undergraduates; gender, post-colonial and cultural studies remain strong. From a chronological point of view, the Cinderella centuries, that is to say the 17th and 18th, are in danger of disappearing altogether. Objects of study are changing, with ICT allowing the development of online editions, and research growing in new genres such as sports literature or graphic novels, while textual criticism is in peril.
Eleanor didn’t mention it, but for me, by far the most interesting element of the report is the analysis of modern languages publishing in part 4 Trends in dissemination.

Michael Moriarty, Professor of French at Queen Mary, gave a British Academy perspective, and drew attention to the BA's response to Dearing .
He was concerned that many resources in the field were not sufficiently known or used, for example CESAR, the Calendrier électronique des spectacles  sous l’ancien régime et sous la révolution . He warned of insularity, and that poor language skills, even at postgraduate level, meant a great deal of teaching is now done through translation. To check the availability of sources in their original language, he had run a check on the British Library catalogue  and those of  the University of London  (I was unclear whether he had used the University of London Research Library Services catalogue for this  or the M25 consortium’s cross-searching tool ) for French editions of the works of three authors, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser and Alain Badiou, with disappointing results. I should be interested to see this exercise repeated on COPAC for a national picture of availability of these texts, indeed would also be interested to see what institutions’ collection development policies say on the matter.

The last member of the panel to speak, who discussed the Research Assessment Exercise, was Margaret Atack, Professor of French at Leeds.  The RAE has rescued modern languages from vocationalism, she claimed, and referred to HEFCE’s review of the impact of quality-related (QR) funding for research in English higher education institutions . In modern languages there was consistency across subjects, but most research is concentrated in the modern period. There is some interest in new areas such as film studies. The age profile of researchers suggests that appointments are not keeping pace with retirements. There is some concern that opportunities for publishing are diminishing, but there are increasing opportunities for e-publication, including in repositories and an increase in inter-disciplinary and collaborative work.

After lunch David Lowe  of Cambridge University Library chaired a session on projects, with presentations by Stephen Bury on the British Library's Content Strategy,  Zoë Holman and Richard Davis  of  the School of Advanced Study, University of London) on the SAS-SPACE institutional repository  and  Ed King  also of the British Library on the BL/JISC Newspaper Digitisation Project This last project will take an impressive range of 19th century British newspapers and make them available online, but we were dismayed to hear that access would be restricted to users in further and higher education. See more here on the matter: http://tomroper.typepad.com/tr/2007/09/british-library.html
In a final session on resources, chaired by Geoff West  of the British Library, we heard a fine report by Vanya Murray, of Oxford University Library Services  on researching film: changes and challenges, a fascinating look at establishing a new service, including some of the issues of classification and certification, format issues, cataloguing and classification standards. There’s some resources based on her guide at: http://languagelearningcentre.wordpress.com/2007/09/13/film-studies-resources/

Stephen Hart, Professor of Hispanic Studies at UCL,  spoke on sourcing material for the study of a living author: compiling a new biography of G. García Márquez an insight into the problem faced by the biographer who chooses to tackle a living subject. The sources available to him included García Márquez’s own radio interviews, documentaries, journalism and his attempt at autobiography, Vivir para contarla as well as interviews with friends, family and servants. But García Márquez is elusive, enigmatic and some times self-contradictory. There is also another biography by Gerald Martin due to appear soon.
Finally Sally Curry, the  CURL/RIN Collaborative Collection Management Programme Advisor  spoke on supporting engagement with the research community through Collaborative Collection Management and the developments towards a British distributed research network. Libraries face problems if space, of budgets, of a loss of specialists and a lack of institutional support. CCM covers selection and purchase, stock transfers, resource discovery and storage (the UK Research reserve) and shared retro-conversion and digitisation. She mentioned the CoCoRUPS  project  a qualitative survey of researchers behaviour in medieval and early modern studies, and the Research Information Network's study  Researchers Use of Academic Libraries and their Services . Visits to collections are declining, and when researchers use electronic resources they may not automatically identify them as having been provided by the library   I was interested to see that collaborative collection management seems not to have advanced very much since the days we were doing it in the ASVIN project

SPLASH: Student Personal Learning And Social Homepage

I've stumbled, thanks to a Technorati update I run for anything that links the sussex.ac.uk domain, this project: SPLASH: Student Personal Learning And Social Homepages. The project pages are here and the project blog here. It's a little unclear, but it looks as if they're trying to integrate blogger and other social networking with the university's rather clunkyVLE.

Patrick Hamilton and a stuffed penguin

I'm indebted to Robert Greenwood at the Royal Society of Medicine who spotted an article on Patrick Hamilton in the spiked review of books by Emily Hill, not only an appreciation of Hamilton, but a clever analysis of different ways of reading.
Robert also alerts me to an exhibition opening at the RSM: Treasures from the Libraries and Collections of Gentlemen’s Clubs and Learned Societies in London. The chief exhibit is a stuffed Emperor Penguin brought back by Scott from the Antarctic, the property of the Amry and Navy Club.

Technorati Tags: patrickhamil, clubs

Hollywood Librarian UK

I'm very pleased to see that Ben Skinner's suggestion that there should be a British screening of Hollywood Librarian has been taken up by Bruce Madge, CILIP's President-Elect. Indeed Bruce suggests, commenting on the earlier post, that we should consider making a UK version. Perhaps the title should change though: Pinewood Librarian? Ealing Librarian?
Casting could be fun too: bags I be played by Alain Delon, if he's available.

European Day of Languages

Today is the European Day of Languages, which aims:
• to alert the public to the importance of language learning
• to increase awareness and appreciation of all languages
• to encourage lifelong language learning
More at http://www.cilt.org.uk/edl/

I shall mark it by learning some irregular Attic Greek verbs.

Technorati Tags: edl, europeandayoflanguages

University of Sussex Library Special Collections re-opening

I went to the reopening of the University Library's Special Collections at lunchtime today. I seem to have blogged about the special collections often here, though I have yet to go there to consult J.G.Crowther's correspondence with Reg Birch. Perhaps the reason is that, as University Librarian Debby Shorley pointed out in a characteristically elegant and well-judged brief speech, Sussex's  special collections are the envy of larger and better-resourced universities.
A display showed some of the books written using material from the collections, among them Simon Garfield's We Are At War, Jenna Bailey's Can Any Mother Help Me, Victoria Glendinning's Leonard Woolf and Alison Light's Mrs Woolf and the Servants
See Flickr for more pictures.

Technorati Tags: leonardwoolf, regbirch, jgcrowther, sussexuniversity, universityofsussex, virginiawoolf

Banned books week 29 September to 6 October

I've just joined a Facebook group for the American Library Association's Banned Books Week, which takes place from 29 September to 6 October. There's no British equivalent to this event. I think British librarians think themselves relatively free from the pressure to censor US librarians face. However, recent history, from the attempts to ban Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses in 1988-89 onwards,  may suggest we should not be so complacent.

The week will also see the launch of the film Hollywood Librarian, which claims to be "the first full-length documentary film to focus on the work and lives of librarians."

The search facility is currently not available due to maintenance requirements

MI5 transparency? You can search their web pages but if you try anything remotely controversial you get the message above.
Oh, if you're worried about Islamic terrorism the current threat level is assessed as "Severe". That, at last, we are allowed to know.

Technorati Tags: MI5