Intute blog

25 years ago today the National Union of Mineworkers announced that it was calling off the 1984-1985 coal miner’s strike.

The nearly year long strike became the totemic struggle of the Thatcher years, polarising a country with lasting and often devastating effects still arguably felt today. Intute has a number of records relating to the struggle – from a document describing research using the BBC archives – and ways in which news footage can be reused by those involved to create richer histories beyond the official narratives – to collections of archive material and artefacts such as the South Wales Coalfields Collection giving “insight into the experience of the South Wales Valleys during a period of industrial turmoil both from an institutional and personal perspective”.

I am pleased to pass on details of the call for papers of the excellent DRHA conference. Some of our colleagues at Intute are on the committee of DRHA. In the past we have also presented and run panels, (see other Intute blog posts tagged drha), at this international conference for Digital Resources for the Humanities and Arts.

CALL FOR PAPERS AND PERFORMANCES

DRHA 2010 Conference: Sunday 5th September – Wednesday 8th September 2010 at Brunel University, West London. www.drha2010.org.uk

CONFERENCE THEME: Sensual Technologies: Collaborative Practices of Interdisciplinarity

The conference’s overall theme will be the exploration of the collaborative relationship between the body and sensual/sensing technologies across various disciplines. In this respect it will offer an interrogation of practices that are indebted to the innovative exchange between the sensual, visceral and new technologies.

At the same time, the aim is to look to new approaches offered by various emerging fields and practices that incorporate new and existing technologies. Specific examples of areas for discussion could include:

• Delineation of new collaborative practices and the interchange of knowledge
• Collaborative interdisciplinary practices of embodiment and technology
• Integration/deployment of digital resources in new contexts
• Connections and tensions that exist between the Arts, Humanities and Science
• Notions of the ’solitary’ and the ‘collaborative’ across the Arts, Humanities, and Sciences
• eScience in the Arts and Humanities
• Use of digital resources in collaborative creative work, teaching, learning and scholarship
• Open source and second generation Web infrastructure
• Digital media in time and space
• Music and technology: composition and performance
• Dance and interactive technologies
• Taking inspiration from SET: imaging, GPS and mobile technologies
• Evaluating the experience among providers and users / performers and audiences
• Interface Design and HCI
• Performative Practices in SecondLife or other virtual platforms
• New critical paradigms for the conference’s theme

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

• Richard Coyne – Professor of Architectural Computing at the University of Edinburgh.
• Christopher Pressler: Director of Research and Learning Resources and Director of the Centre for Research Communications, University of Nottingham.
• Thecla Schiphorst: Media Artist/Designer and Faculty Member in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology. Simon Fraser University , Vancouver, Canada.
• STELARC, Chair in Performance Art at Brunel University and Senior Research, Fellow in the MARCS Labs at the University of Western Sydney.

Professor Stelarc

(Image from a photo on Flickr by tomcorsan, licensed under Creative Commons).

The DRHA (Digital Resources for the Humanities and Arts) conference is held annually at various academic venues throughout the UK. This year’s conference is hosted by Brunel University, West London. It will take place from Sunday 5th September to Wednesday 8th September 2010. It will be held across various innovative spaces, including the newly expanded Boiler House laboratory facilities, housed in the Antonin Artaud Building, and state of the art conference facilities plus high standard accommodation.

SUBMISSIONS:
We invite original papers, panels, installations, performances, workshop sessions and other events that address the conference theme, with particular attention to the ‘Sensual Technologies’ focus. We encourage proposals for innovative and non-traditional session formats.

DRHA 2010 will include a SecondLife roundtable/discussion event, led by performance artist Stelarc, which will enable international participants to present performative work via Second Life. For this event, we particular encourage submission of Machinima works that can be screened as part of this panel.

Short presentations, for example work-in-progress, are invited for poster presentations.

Anyone wishing to submit a performance or installation should visit http://www.drha2010.org.uk for information about the spaces and technical equipment and support available.

All proposals – whether papers, performance or other – should reflect the critical engagement at the heart of DRHA 2010.

The deadline for submissions will be 31 March 2010.

Abstracts should be between 600 – 1000 words.

Letters of acceptance will be sent by 15th of May 2010, when the conference registration will be opened.

Please see http://www.drha2010.org.uk for all relevant information and online submission.

Best wishes,

Franziska Schroeder

DRHA 2010 Programme Chair
School of Music and Sonic Arts
Queen’s University Belfast
www.sarc.qub.ac.uk
www.music.qub.ac.uk

Something that is sometimes missed about Second Life is that all the content is generated by its residents: Linden Labs provided both a platform and the tools for people to build. Apart from a small library of basic items, every building, every tree, every table, every chair, every nut, bolt, rat, or aircraft has been made by a resident who has likely paid a subscription in order to work on the platform, and paid again in order to upload any media used in their build. For some, a good rate of sales makes their endeavours profitable. For many others, who just build for themselves or for friends or who give their creations away for nothing, there must be other motives.

In September this year I was given the chance to create a small project in Second Life with funding from the First World War Poetry Digital Archive. I would have a whole region to use to highlight and re-present materials from the archive. I decided that one way to do this would be to follow the typical career of a soldier from training camp to front line and to narrate this career via some of the audio interviews with veterans which the archive holds; to counterpoint it with poetry from the poets in the collection; and to illustrate both with images from the archive.

The plan was to devote the whole ground level of the region to creating a reproduction of a typical western front trench section. Within this would be space for a medical station, a dugout, and a section of no-mans-land. Above the region, out of sight of the ground, I would build a model of the training camp. This would serve as context for the relevant archive and poetry material, but would also serve as a place where the Second Life user could orient themselves, find out a little about the region and the archive itself, and also pick up a free uniform which they could wear while touring the region.

In the construction of these scenarios, much was built and scripted from scratch. Some items were adapted from existing objects with suitable modify permissions; others were begged from their creators or bought on the open market where budget allowed. A few residents donated objects to help decorate the region, including the excellent tanks and the period aircraft. Many others gave us advice, support, and encouragement in our endeavour.

When we opened, the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. Some superlatives levelled at us were very flattering indeed. Within two days we were being featured in the in-world Showcase pages for educational sites. It became clear that we had created something which touched people on quite a deep level. Word spread via the very active SL blogging community, and we were featured both on TV in-world and on radio off-world. In the first month we had over 1500 visitors, with the average visit time being around 90 minutes. People were not only visiting: they were staying and exploring, often returning on several occasions. People were also creating other works using the region for their raw material.

Something interesting happens when you place the eyewitness accounts alongside the poetry. These two types of narrative are both trying to convey the experiences of life on the western front, and both seem to complement and reinforce one another. The raw emotional power of the poetry bypasses your intellectual response and touches you on a deeper level. And sometimes, the detail of trench life told by a veteran has, in the very fact of its mundane ordinariness, a poignant sort of poetry of its own. Together, and in the immersive setting we have attempted to create, the effect proves very powerful. Speaking to people about their reaction to the installation I often hear words like ‘traumatic’, ‘emotional’, and ‘moving’. I can say from my own experience that, after working very closely with the material for the duration of the build, I more than once found myself weeping at the end of the day. It seems as if the juxtaposition of these two types of narrative adds up to rather more than the sum of their parts.

There was another element that we tried, in a small way, to weave into the experience.  By handing out a free soldier or nurse uniform at the landing point, and by encouraging people to wear them while visiting the region, we introduced a very low-level form of role-playing. The idea of the uniforms was to add to the visitor’s own sense of immersion, but also to reinforce that sense in any other visitors who happened to be present. On the whole, visitors do take the time to change into the uniform, and the effect works as intended. This is as far as we were able to take the idea at this stage, but it started me thinking about the concept of actors, and of using actor/roleplayer figures in the region: a person in suitable attire who is briefed with the details of their part and is able to converse with visitors ‘in character’. This is certainly something I would like to explore more in the future if I get the chance.

Role-players in the environment of Second Life are interesting to me. In the context of the First World War material, we had visitors who, from whatever their initial interest, had cast themselves in that period.  In the process of creating or adapting their own vision of a particular role, they represent another possible view of the history: one created by a knowledge of historical material coupled with an emotional response to that material and distilled through the personal sensibilities of the roleplayers themselves. I do not, however, think of the term “role-player” only in its more formal gaming sense, but more broadly, to encompass anyone who uses a virtual world to re-invent themselves in some way. In this I also find, perhaps, one reason beyond profit why people build in Second Life: the ability to create, or be part of, a personal narrative. There are many communities in Second Life where I see this taking place: the Steampunk communities of Caledon and New Babbage; the various period recreationist or re-enactment groups; the Tinies of Raglan Shire or the Furries of Luskwood; as well as many many other groups, sub-cultures and communities. These groups are authoring their own narratives on a daily basis and perform feats of great creativity in support of that narrative.

Images from CC licenced images on flickr by Chris Stephens, Alun Edwards, PJ Trenton, and Wildstar Beaumont.

Image sharing website Flickr is the subject of today’s Advent Calendar post, with perspectives from Tim Machin and Larissa Douglass.

Museums, galleries, heritage collections and Flickr by Tim Machin

Staffordshire Hoard: Cheek piece, fittings and zoomorphic mount

Flickr has been enthusiastically embraced by a whole host of individuals and organisations. In particular, museums and art galleries have made exciting use of it. In the press recently were images of the Staffordshire Hoard, a collection of exquisite dark-age metal work, unearthed in a field by a metal-detector enthusiast, and valued at over £3 million. These images, in a savvy move by the local museums concerned, were placed on Flickr, together with images of the crowds queuing outside to catch a first glimpse. Elsewhere this year, crowds again featured – this time, the round the block queues for Banksy vs Bristol museum, together with an evolving record of documenting Banksy’s continuing interventions in the Museum.

It’s easy to see why museums are keen to show how popular they are, and embed in public consciousness why something like the Staffordshire Hoard should remain on Mercian soil. And its not just these ticker-tape responses to breaking events that Flickr is well suited – it is after all crammed full of the output of various digitised collections, and august institutions such as the V&A have embraced it as a way of engaging with visitors, whilst the Dutch Nationaal Archief, has used its geotagging functions discover the location of hundreds of photographs taken in WW1. Indeed, Flickr has embraced this use – launching a project called ‘The Commons‘ to encourage and describe all (well, some) of this stuff.

A group of Dalmatians and their owners before the judges, 1920s or 30s / by Sam Hood

But there’s something equally exciting going on outside the institutions. I’m going to ignore the countless ‘Museums of…’ which have cropped up on Flickr (for everything from unselected pools of images of graffiti to projects to ‘exhibit outside the academy’), and focus on the way that museum’s collections and gallery exhibits have been photographed by visitors (against the traditional gallery rules) and uploaded, and museums’ own feeds borrowed and remixed.

Singapore- no camera

Here we have groups exploring museums as social spaces, for example, Museums at Night and Museum Watchers. Other groups reunite collections or support new (or counter-hegemonic) narratives, for example transferring the Benin Bronzes of the British Museum into a symbol of modern Nigerian culture. More simply, Flickr lets lovers of Women of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, dogs in art and the curious bring together collections of art and objects. In a world of tagging and Creative Commons, ownership of the images as well as control of the way exhibits, collections and artefacts are represented, is questioned and the role of the institution (and the professional status of curators) is challenged.

V&A museum, Cast courts

Context, supported by scholarship, is everything in museums and galleries – setting objects into the place in a particular world view, or relating them to a cultural tradition – and as such, hotly contested. Once you kick away these kinds of supports, whether by allowing all users to tag and curate photos in groups, or giving visitors’ own photographs the same status as official documentation, you de-centre privileged (and expert) views of the objects. A space is opened up not just for alternative narratives, but their effective dissemination and (perhaps) eventual mainstream acceptance, but this is at the risk of substituting context for opinion. Pictures of dogs in art for well, just pictures of dogs.

Mark Dion, collection of specimens

In museums, this kind of thing already has a rich history – (non-expert) artists like Banksy, the Guerilla Girls, Fred Wilson and Mark Dion have been intervening and re-curating collections, both officially and unofficially for years, re-examining the academy from within, using its own mechanisms. Perhaps this is not yet happening in online communities in the same way – can the Guerilla Girls please sign up for Flickr?

guerrilla girls in Chelsea

See Intute for other academic resources in Museum, Library and Archive Studies.

Urbex “communities” on Flickr by Larissa Douglass
User-generated content becomes especially relevant to historical research through the Urban Exploration (Urbex) communities on Flickr and other photo-sharing sites. Urbex, a growing movement over the past two decades, began as amateur photographers spent weekends gaining entry to and photographing sealed and abandoned buildings, institutions and municipal structures, including hospitals, asylums, schools, churches, barracks, sewers, subways, mines, factories, military bunkers and air bases. Images in these collections, taken before demolition – or, more rarely, restoration – efforts, document the monumental changes of our era. Buildings which once constituted the monolithic infrastructure of the establishment have been unfunded and declared redundant or fallen into neglect. There are now Urbex communities in every major city in the developed world; and their photos testify to the trajectory of that development. On Flickr, pools of photos tagged as, ‘Decayed yet Hauntingly Beautiful‘, ‘The Light Painters Society’, ‘broken but loved’, ‘Urban Secret & Forgotten Places’, ‘Abandoned Places and Things’ and ‘Exploring the Megastructure’, enable Urbex groups to preserve the ongoing, hidden history of these sites.

The UK has a vibrant Urbex movement, with some cities even boasting their own organized groups, such as the Leeds Historical Expedition Society, founded by Phill Davison:

Leeds Historical Expedition Society banner, reproduced by kind permission of P. Davison

On Flickr, Davison’s work complements material available in formal research institutions. Where archival records stop, he and other contributors to Flickr’s Urbex communities complete the historical narrative. In the example of Chapel Allerton Hospital, Davison provides a ‘missing piece’ to the account of Gledhow Grove in Chapel Allerton, Leeds, designed as a stately home in Greek Revival style in the 1830s by John Hives Architect John Clark. Leodis, an online photographic archive managed by Leeds Library and Information Service and hosted by Leeds City Council, presents images of Gledhow Grove when it was still in good repair in 1950:

Gledhow Grove (Chapel Allerton), reproduced by kind permission of Leeds Library and Information Services, www.leodis.net

Davison noted that the house has been left derelict since 1994, and recorded on Flickr its subsequent ruin in 2007:

"Grandeur" - Chapel Allerton Hospital (formerly Gledhow Grove)

It remains for a portal such as Intute to bring these diverse internet sources together and present them as a coherent body of research resources on particular topics. In its Humanities, Architecture and Planning, and Geography and the Environment divisions, Intute has several sites reviewed which support this topic, including:

• Britain in pictures
• Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester
• CUBE : Centre for the Understanding of the Built Environment
• Flickr : photo sharing
• Flickr Friends of The Twentieth Century Society
• Ideal homes : suburbia in focus
• Leodis database
• The architectural league : NY
• Urban conservation glossary
• Urban Morphology
• Urban Morphology Research at the University of Birmingham
• Urbanicity

Image credits:

• Staffordshire Hoard: Cheek piece, fittings and zoomorphic mount by portableantiquities, licensed under Creative Commons
• A group of Dalmatians and their owners before the judges, 1920s or 30s by Sam Hood, no known copyright restrictions, from Flickr: The Commons
• Singapore- no camera by daniellih licensed under Creative Commons
• V&A Museum, Cast courts by VeronikaB, licensed under Creative Commons
• Mark Dion, collection of specimens by libbyrosof, licensed under Creative Commons
• guerrilla girls in chelsea by jeannejo licensed under Creative Commons
• Leeds Historical Expedition Society banner © phill.d urbEX photography, reproduced by kind permission of phill.d.
• Gledhow Grove (Chapel Allerton), by kind permission of Leeds Library and Information Services, www.leodis.net.
• Grandeur, from a photo on Flickr by phill.d, licensed under Creative Commons.

If you had the funding for a community digitisation project what would you do? The Intute Advent Calendar points towards a recent funding call for creating or enhancing digital collections via engagement with the wider community, and RunCoCo – a project which will help to share and establish best practice in the development of community contributed collections.

Web 2.0 Archives?

Many museums and archives are engaging with the public online. For example, a digitisation project which I have been involved with – the First World War Poetry Digital Archive (based at the University of Oxford) has gained momentum from: Facebook; Blogger and Twitter; YouTube; podcasting on iTunes-U; Amazon Associates; photo-sharing on Flickr; online Pathway Creation tool (developed by Oxford University); plotting manuscript and biographical datasets on an interactive First World War timeline; using MyIntute to manage and display links to Internet resources; VUE mind-maps (developed at Tufts University); supporting a Google Group to maintain and foster discussions which have carried on since the project started in the 1990s; and most recently an acclaimed reconstruction of the Western Front in Second Life.

Hype surrounds Second Life, and commentators still demand to know what is the point to these virtual worlds! However in response to a recent BBC News Magazine article along those lines a reader submitted this comment:

Don’t confuse hype with success. I am sure you are as aware of Gartner’s Hype Cycle as I am: Second Life has been through the over-hype, where it suffered particularly from corporates completely missing the point – they could hardly do anything but fail. Today, Second Life seems healthily on what Gartner called the Slope of Enlightenment, on the way to the Plateau of Productivity. Where Second Life really scores today in my view is as a teaching environment, and as a venue for virtual conferences and events which are far more cost-effective and environmentally sound than flying people across the world. As far as teaching environments are concerned, look at the Frideswide region where the University of Oxford’s WWI Poetry Digital Archive has established a stunning presentation of aspects of their collection in a simulated Western Front.
Richard E, Cambridge UK

There are rumours of a Christmas truce on the Western Front in Second Life, although the High Command deny all reports… Watch this space!

A soldier with a Christmas Pudding, France, 17th December 1917. One of hundreds of images, films and audio clips from the Imperial War Museum which are made available on the First World War Poetry Digital Archive, to put the poetry into context.

Mass digitisation?

The image below is an example of the rare manuscripts of English poets that the First World War Poetry Digital Archive’s standard digitisation enterprise focussed on capturing. Professional photography was undertaken to very high standards by the respositories themselves, and cataloguing was done by the project’s experts.

Isaac Rosenberg's design for a Christmas card including poem, drawn whilst serving in the trenches in 1917.

Previous significant digitisation initiatives by leading cultural heritage institutions involving the public have included Our Wales (by the National Library of Wales) and WW2 People’s War by the BBC. However, the First World War Poetry Digital Archive’s community contributed collection The Great War Archive broke new ground in terms of digitisation. During the four month initiative not only did the public contribute over 6,500 photographs of items they held originating from the First World War, they even completed the metadata (brief catalogue record) for each item when it was submitted online.

Comforts Tin and Contents (photograph and metadata submitted to The Great War Archive by the contributor). These tins were a present sent to all the troops from the then Princess Mary, who like others, thought the war would be over by Christmas 1914.

The costing and other strategies and processes behind The Great War Archive are explained in detail in an article in EDUCAUSE Quarterly If You Build It, They Will Scan: Oxford University’s Exploration of Community Collections.

Flickr photo sharing

The Great War Archive continues to collect digital artefacts from the public on the Flickr photo-sharing website. Flickr is being used by many archives, museums and art galleries to expose items from their collections and for users to share photos of their visit. These include, for example, the V&A, Kew Gardens, Wessex Archaeology, and the National Museums of Scotland.

German Soldiers Celebrating Christmas 1916, submitted to The Great War Archive Flickr Group. This is representative of the international nature of the Flickr pool, whereas the 6,500 items in the Great War Archive are predominantly British.

Amateur metadata?

The Great War Archive showed that the public will add simple metadata if they are interested enough in the objects, and the Flickr pool shows the high quality of commentary and notes provided by enthusiasts – and their willingness to share this knowledge with others.

Some innovative projects have even started introducing games to their digital resources in order to encourage the public to enhance their metadata, as explained by Alastair Dunning in ‘Making metadata fun’ in the JISC Digitisation blog.

The Galaxy Zoo astronomy site has a game which allows the public to help suggest how galaxy collision and mergers took place.

An “unusual occurrence of metadata and fun in the same sentence!” Ben Showers, a JISC programme manager

RunCoCo – Running a Community Collection Project

The activities and results of The Great War Archive has led its funder, the JISC digitisation programme, to further explore the concept of community collections. These are defined as ‘digital resources that are created or enhanced by both user groups inside and outwith traditional academic audiences’. The report by Chris Batt Consulting, Digitisation, Curation and Two-Way Engagement looked at some of the key strategic issues in creating and curating under such a model. The JISC have released funding (in the Developing Community Content call) to projects undertaking the development of community content (up to £75k per project) for:

• Strand A. Rapid Innovation – Rapid enhancement of existing digital resources to provide for greater engagement with previously untapped audiences
• Strand B. Content development – Building new digital collections, or significant extending existing collections, via community engagement

The closing date for proposals will probably be January-February 2010.

“This is a fantastic recognition of the impact of the Great War Archive, and we look forward to seeing the outcomes – there are so many possibilities!” Kate Lindsay, University of Oxford, Project Manager of the First World War Poetry Archive and Principal Investigator for RunCoCo

The team at the University of Oxford will now use the success of The Great War Archive in the follow-on project, RunCoCo: Running a Community Collection. The RunCoCo project will share and establish best practice in the development of community collections, (and will diseminate the open source software they developed), to show that such initiatives can be undertaken by smaller individual units, libraries, museums, and archives; and also with different target audiences. Potential applicants for the community collection funding may also be interested in RunCoCo’s training workshops later in 2010. If you are thinking about running a community collection the RunCoCo team would like to hear from you.

So you think you could curate a collection?
We leave you with a game from Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery.

Try the Curator game! Can you put the right objects in the right box without smashing them?

Image credits:

• Christmas on the Front. This item is from The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford (www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit); © Imperial War Museum Photographic Archive
• Pozieres, by Isaac Rosenberg. This item is from The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford (www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit); © The British Library / The Isaac Rosenberg Literary Estate
• Princess Mary Christmas Fund Gift Tin with Contents. This item is from The Great War Archive, University of Oxford (www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa); © Lewis Trickey
• WWI German Soldiers Celebrate Christmas 1916, from a photo on Flickr reproduced with the kind permission of Sunny Brook, all rights reserved.

Ever wanted to read a first hand account of Benjamin Franklin’s kite-flying experiment, or Stephen Hawking’s paper about black holes? Perhaps you want to see how Captain Cook preserved his shipmates’ health on long sea voyages? Well, now you can view them online, thanks to the Royal Society’s Trailblazing website. To mark it’s 350th anniversary, the Society has selected what it considers to be 60 of the most influential or groundbreaking papers from its archive of more than 60,000 publications.

The site is beautifully presented in the form of an interactive timeline. You can move between historical periods of 50 years and choose articles that catch your interest – clicking on them initially shows a short summary of the content, and you can them proceed through to view the original paper – all for free!

Visit the Trailblazing website today!

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has suggested that currently free museums should “robustly” encourage visitors to donate. Johnson suggests that a ‘New York’ model which pressures visitors to donate what they can afford might be more appropriate than the current, rather discrete, donation boxes. He also claims that attaching a value to entry might allow the “cynical young people who go to these museums and think they are seeing something that is not prized or valued at all [to] at least see the value that other people attach to it”. There are many arguments against such an approach – the Department of Culture, Media and Sport suggests that it is unfair to expect tax payers, who have already contributed to creating and maintaining the collections, to pay a second time to visit. Likewise the economic arguments are less than clear cut – visitors do, after all, only have a certain amount of cash to spend (be they on holiday or locals) museum admission charges may mean less money spent elsewhere.

In this age of belt-tightening, museums are short on cash (and things don’t look likely to improve for a while), but, it must be said, so are most of their visitors! It is worth remembering that visitor numbers to previously charging national museums such as the V&A rose by 124% after abolition of charges in 2001. Likewise always free Tate Modern’s 4.9 million visitors certainly helps the musuem make the case for the significant grants it receives.

Getting people in through the doors must be considered an important objective in itself. If museums are to have a social agenda (reaching out to communities that don’t usually visit, for example) entry fees clearly provide a huge barrier to access – and the idea that they could somehow encourage ‘cynical young people’ to value the contents of the building is a curious one. Indeed, most museums have objects that are particularly valued by the communities they serve – be it the record of a city’s glorious past, or objects reminding refugee communities of their homelands.

Likewise, in an age where everything is freely available online, value has to be created and accrued in other ways. Some museums are already forging ahead, encouraging visitors to contribute to and interpret their collections and programmes, and by building these relationships ensuring repeat visits, further the social agenda (with savings to budgets elsewhere) and perhaps donations.

Stripped of their rhetoric, Johnson’s points may have some merit – perhaps some museums still need to improve their relationships with their visitors, and his call for greater philanthropic contributions from big business is also welcome. Cutting down visits and making museums exclusive and ‘valuable’ places where young people (cynical or not) seems a retrograde step. Maybe there is a model for paying what you can afford, but perhaps putting the turnstiles back in isn’t it.

Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 16 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3JA, 10 to 4.30 p.m. on Wednesday 9th September 2009.

This study day, which is jointly organised by the ARLIS / UK and Ireland Cataloguing and Classification Committee and the Visual Resources Committee, is aimed at both library cataloguers of print and electronic publications, who need or wish to find out about how to adapt their skills to visual resources, and at ‘ACADIans’, visual resources curators and anyone responsible for the management and discovery of digital images, whether in HE, Art Colleges, Museums, Galleries or Art Collections.

It will explore approaches to the business of cataloguing images, looking at different metadata schemas, data standards & controlled vocabularies & how these have been applied to real life resources including digital image collections, the moving image, art websites, material in digital repositories, and even primary art objects. Speakers include representatives from the museums world, Higher Education & the JISC.

The programme can be downloaded from either of the committees’ Web pages. For further information about the event, contact Clare Hemmings C.Hemmings@soton.ac.uk.

Cost, including lunch: £85 ARLIS members; £42.50 ARLIS Students/unwaged; £105 Non-ARLIS members; £65 Non-ARLIS Students; £63.75 Retired members.

Please complete the slip attached to the booking form, and return it to:

Elizabeth James, National Art Library, Word & Image Dept., Victoria and Albert Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7 2RL (e.james@vam.ac.uk) by 2nd September 2009 at the latest.

For bookings cancelled after 26th August a charge of 10% of the total fee will be levied. For bookings cancelled after 2nd September the full fee may be charged.

London’s taxpayer-funded National Portrait Gallery is suing an individual Wikipedia user for uploading images of Victorian paintings that have long been in the public domain. Wikimedia and the Wikipedia Foundation are refusing to back down, and take the stance that…

“faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain, and that claims to the contrary represent an assault on the very concept of a public domain”

This is a free event run by the Research Information Network and the Royal Society aimed at library and information services professionals working within learned and professional societies.

It will be held on 5th August 2009 at the Royal Society, 7 Carlton House Terrace, London. Registration opens at 9:30am and the programme finishes at 4:20pm. A Pimms and strawberries networking session will follow until 5:30pm.

The main aims of the one day event are to:
- address current issues facing learned and professional society libraries;
- share ideas, experiences and examples of good practise;
- provide networking opportunities;
- facilitate communications between different organisations;
- bridge the gap between learned and professional society libraries and those in higher education institutions.

For further information and to book a place see the event’s website or contact Branwen Hide (branwen.hide@rin.ac.uk).