CANNING CIRCUS

Virginia Woolf was an Astronaut

2012-02-19T10:56:00.006Z

When Neil Armstrong landed on the moon he must have experienced the most extraordinary elation. It was what he had trained for and dreamed of. Then, it actually happened. He stepped into a spaceship and was hurtled at a previously unimagined speed towards another object in space.

London has sometimes been referred to as ‘another country.’ It would be more accurate to term it another planet, as within the UK there is nothing that comes close to its magnitude or its gravitational pull. Few major countries are so utterly dominated by their capital, as is the UK. Paris is similar, but France is twice the geographical size of the UK and so contains entire suits, rather than pockets of energy as is the case with London. The USA is swelled in complexity again by comparison and consequently has a number of great cities emitting and attracting energy. New York remains the contemporary cultural centre of America but it is not alone, and even its pulse has never been equal to that of London.

The rise of Asia is announced with an almost willful curtsey from Western nations. As we live now, there is a popular view that China and the Indian Sub-Continent in particular should be spoken of only in hushed, admiring tones. No doubt, the great cities of the East are transforming at an astonishing rate. Japan of course, has always been notable but Beijing, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, New Delhi and Hong Kong are presented as economically young equals to the ageing capitals of Europe and the 20^th Century powerhouses of North America.

There is no doubt that the global dominance of the West is moving at least towards balance with the shift from effectively mediaeval societies to skyscraper life in the East. A crucial detail though, when watching history being so obviously made in your own lifetime is the importance of remembrances.

According to the UN there are still only two global megacities on the planet, classified by economic, creative, financial and societal power, diversity and influence, New York and London. This is no reason to be complacent, but both New York and London operate a dichotomous public face. Like puppets aware of their strings both cities appear confident on stage, but also nervously glance up at the master who controls them for fear of falling limp before their audience. The transitory financial system at the root of each city’s beat though, should not be regarded as a life-support machine or as life threatening. London and New York remain bursting with options to manage any debt. This of course may not be the case for the rest of either the UK or the US.

Having moved back to London in the last month after almost a decade away from 'the smoke,' I have found it considerably changed for the better. There are some things that are still of course, difficult. Oxford Street on a Saturday afternoon is a place of madness. It will take me a while to get used to never being able to get a seat in a pub. My hair has become hard from the air and water. Allowing crammed tube trains to go past at rush hour and waiting for one with precisely the same amount of space as my body requires remains frustrating. But...

All of this is outweighed by London itself. Standing in Piccadilly Circus at night is physically exciting. Everyone seems so thrilled to be there and young people in particular are infectious – London delivers what they expect and more. A taxi ride early morning along the river past the great squares of Chelsea and the towering hulk of Battersea Power Station, towards Westminster and Parliament and the Eye reminds you of the preeminence of the Thames. London is surely at its most stately along the river. It is more masculine than the floridity of Paris, and more consistent than the waters of Manhattan.

Exiting Leicester Square tube in the heart of the West End to meet up is more beautiful than I remembered. The electric theatres, the multiplicity of languages and faces, the smells and shouts of China Town, the silence of Charing Cross Road bookshops, the exuberance of Covent Garden, the creation of all this happening at once and intervening in people’s lives is extraordinary. I think of all London, and the corner of Charing Cross Road and Trafalgar Square must be amongst my most loved places. Standing opposite the National Portrait Gallery your left eye catches the great fountains of the Square and your right the illuminations of the West End. This is what London is capable of.

Of course, these are all very public experiences. It is often said that in order to fully enjoy the capital you must discover your own London. This is a way of making sense of it. There are some, for whom an entire life can be carved out in Soho. As much as I love it there, that would not be enough for me. Personal London is ideally where you work and where you live. Of course if you choose to live in Soho…

My work is in Bloomsbury and my home is in Fulham. The latter is an area of London new to me on this return. Previously my London life was strictly north of the Euston Road, in Camden, Islington and latterly in Walthamstow. Fulham is a gracious deli borough of large parks rolling to the river and pubs retaining their village green resolution. Home for me in London is a rural town on the Tube. The only clue to its broader setting, beyond the Parish-like atmosphere is the champagne bar opposite the station and the high Porsche to House Ratio (PHR).

Fulham is the kind of area you can introduce your mother to.

Bloomsbury is Bloomsbury. For many years before it was my London. I know every street, every square and the appearance of them all in every season. For instance, Russell Square looks better in winter and Gordon Square in summer. Senate House Library towers at the centre of the district, with the British Museum a great wide presence on its southern shoulder. Bloomsbury has meant many things to as many people. To me it means the intellectual life made real.

This is the greatest concentration of libraries anywhere in the world. So many London colleges, museums and galleries are to be found here it is as if heritage objects have flocked from distant lands to gather like migrating birds on Suffolk wetlands. Bloomsbury is ornithology for scholars.

It is impossible to walk on Bloomsbury’s streets without considering the names of those who have walked before. The ghosts of UCL academics, the future Asian politicians of SOAS, the adventurous donors to the British Museum, the poets of the British Library, the elegantly radical Bloomsbury Group themselves. All those minds, deep in conversation with Woolf, Eliot and Orwell. This is an area that avoided the Blitz but detonated ideas. The first women to graduate in Britain gave the victory sign in reverse to Oxford and Cambridge in these gardens. English Literature itself was first taught in the rooms of Bloomsbury, as was medicine. Bloomsbury is London’s thought centre. It is a daily privilege to become a part of it.

And this is what London really requires of you if your life has arrived here. London is not a passive city. It will not reveal its riches without a deep engagement. It is possible to live a life here similar to a life outside it. Go to work. Go home. Watch television. Go to bed. Go to work…

If that is your experience of London it is probably not worth bothering with. Such an existence can be happily sustained anywhere, at much less expense and with fewer annoyances. To balance them, to make the financial outlay viable it is essential to exploit what is on offer. Research where you live if you live in London as it is sure to be remarkable for at least one reason. Look up when walking the streets. They are not paved with gold but they do contain treasure.

The view of planet earth from London is unique, just as it must have been for Neil Armstrong taking those first slow steps. London is another planet. The view from here makes the world appear small, as so much of that world was discovered on journeys beginning and ending here. The modern human narrative has been centred and collected in London for hundreds of years. If you choose to spend a part of your own journey, your own life in the magnificent chaos of the world’s greatest city ensure that it is an embrace rather than suffocation.

When a man is tired of moon landings he is tired of London.

Maurice Ravel's Shadows

2012-01-22T10:43:00.005Z

What is it about Ravel that seems to speak from another world? I believe him to be the subtlest of composers but also one capable of lifting the listener to physical and psychological peaks of experience and understanding. Over the years, as I have become familiar with his work, I have repeatedly discovered more about myself as a human being. I know of only one other composer who performs this feat through the language of music, and that is Beethoven.

Ravel’s conception of sound is so unexpected, in places relatively simple, in others perhaps some of the most technically complex musical construction available to us. He wrote melodically, unafraid of drawing tunes into works of the highest conceptual art. He built towering chordal structures of extreme beauty. He drove rhythm into new shapes and collided pitch skillfully in almost every Western musical genre. His was a musical intelligence of the maximum possible order, commonly possessed with immense patience when writing but also capable of producing masterpieces at speed when required. Few composers are provided with gifts that allow them absolute control over sound. Ravel surpassed even those few others. He was able to conceive of music that challenges the written word, often making description futile.

Ravel is in a sense not the type of composer I would customarily become engaged with. I prefer the psychologically challenging, such as Britten or John Adams, the intellectually new as in Glass, Reich, REM, Orbital and Cocteau Twins, or the politically and socially charged such as Shostakovich, Sibelius or indeed, Beethoven. Ravel works outside of these classifications. He is surely the finest composer of pure music, by which I mean organised sound as abstract art. For the record, I believe Debussy is pallid in comparison.

Of course, there is any number of interpretations of what many of Ravel’s works might mean. Unusually, this speculation often centres in Ravelian studies on what each piece might show as an insight into Ravel’s own psyche. Musicologists and commentators seem more interested in exploring Ravel’s personality than they do in attaching his music to any particular movement, political event or social trend at the time of writing, which are the common translations of a composer’s thoughts into wider meaning. This has cumulatively increased both the public interest in, for example Ravel’s personal shadows and the mystique around much of his work. Ravel is considered an introverted, self-reflective composer because he was successful in producing enigmatic works of art.

Ravel himself was indeed an enigma, but this does not mean that his music is less concerned with the human condition than other great composers. He simply chose to express his understanding in ways that were deeply personal, purely musical and always original. In his body of work we find tragedy, beauty, loss, distress and immense joy. Human emotion may not be as overtly presented as with other composers but it is there.

It is Ravel’s ability to depict violence in music that provides us with our best insight into his worldview and perhaps his own psychology. Famed for being a ‘dandy,’ with a penchant for colourful neckties and immaculate suits, the public Ravel was small in stature, albeit with considerable physical presence. His appearance was important to him because, I believe, it was a part of his ruse. This is not meant detrimentally. He was a man of the stage as well as the concert hall and enjoyed attention when he chose to. Ravel’s deception was not a lie but an act. It allowed him to cast few emotional shadows.

The private Ravel too, such as it was, collected intricate toys, models and antiques. When I visited his house a few years ago, just outside Paris I was struck by the delivery of his carefully honed persona through his home and by his possessions. Of course, it was an intensely moving experience to walk amongst Ravel’s objects, to stand on his terrace, to brush my fingers across his piano and perhaps most poignantly to stare into his bathroom mirror. A strident sense of Ravel remains in that house.

It is these two prominent aspects of Ravel’s life that hinder a true understanding of his genius. That both were willfully cultivated by Ravel himself, leads me to propose that the persona for which he became known was deliberate, and that any attempt at this by anyone is likely to be an act of concealment.

Occasionally, there are reconsiderations of Ravel’s life that offer theories, following a similar assessment as I have just made, on many private possibilities. His is now a life well dug. Ravel is a one-man archaeological site whose attraction lies in the fact that he produced musical treasures from seemingly ungiving ground.

Biographical excavation is a rich seam for authors and publishers but in the case of musicians the life must always be second to the musical work. The life after all, is momentary.

Ravel’s shadows were hard to view in the bright daylight of his own existence but they are visible now in the ever-shifting dapple of his works.

These shadows are most clear when cast by musical figures. Such is the irony at the centre of Ravel’s art that we only see his true character in the music, hidden far from his public, or even private lives. Perhaps like Mozart, Ravel was so intensely a musical being that it should not surprise us that his most honest and profound expression should only be realised in sound.

There are sections of Ravel’s ballet, Daphnis and Chloe that provide clear examples of his deep gift for depicting human distress. When Chloe is forced to perform dances for the pirates the music is of course rhythmical but the chordal structures are evocative of pain. At the end of ballet, as the entire ensemble dance in rejoicing the couple’s final pairing the music does not, it seems to me, depict happiness.

At the heart of this, and many other pieces is Ravel’s choice of harmonic language. Rather than compose using principally major and minor keys, he preferred to write in modal harmonies. Modes are scales of seven notes and a repeating octave. They do not include all the chromatic alterations, (sharps and flats) of the chromatic scale, which is constructed of twelve notes. In essence, playing a modal scale on the piano means leaving some notes out of the sound world most recognisable to us. Ravel’s multi-layered approach to modal chord structures allowed him a particular canvas. It is as though a painter had discovered colours unused by other painters.

In his use of the ancient harmonies of modes, Ravel created something new. His innovation was different to the rhythmical aggression of Stravinsky, who was writing at the same time. The key point though, is that Daphnis and Chloe is equal in its evocation of violence to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Ravel uses harmony where Stravinsky deploys rhythm. That Ravel’s music sounds perhaps gentler on the whole is again, part of his deception. Terror, anger, loss, loneliness and indeed, joy are contained in chordal skyscrapers of immense complexity.

Of course, Ravel was not averse to using rhythm to great effect himself. Most famously, Bolero is a piece with unchanging rhythm, almost the first piece of minimalistic music. The journey of the piece is given momentum by constantly altering its sound through different instruments and a gradual richening of harmonies. I have always thought that Bolero is the piece that secretly, every composer wishes he had written.

Again, Ravel in La Valse, perhaps his most overtly vehement work uses rhythm memorably, but it is in the choice of harmonies towards the conclusion of the piece where we gain insight into Ravel’s mind. The composer famously disregarded general comment on La Valse as a work depicting the end of an age. It certainly provides a story of this particular dance; opening serenely, moving through sheer enjoyment and ending with the death of the waltz itself, the last bar being the only one not in ¾ time.

Most critics have interpreted the fatality of this dance as an allusion to the end of empires following the First World War. However, Ravel states in the score that it is set in ‘an Imperial Court, about 1885.’ I believe that this is an important, yet overlooked comment by the composer himself. 1885 was an important year in colonial history, particularly in Africa. Ravel was extremely sensitive to national forces, and often critical of what he regarded as extreme reactions based on the narrow fervour of imperialism. In 1885, the Congress of Berlin gave Congo to Belgium and Nigeria to England. The German Chancellor, Bismarck was active in dividing East Africa for commercial gain and Germany took control over Togoland and Cameroon. Late in that year, France declared Madagascar a protectorate and in Canada, an insurrection by French Canadians against the government is crushed. Perhaps ironically, 1885 also sees the arrival of the Statue of Liberty in New York City, a gift from the French government.

Perhaps most pointedly, 1885 is also the year that Khartoum falls, and the well-loved British colonialist General Gordon is murdered by rebels. If Ravel was so careful to provide an indicative date for his destruction of the waltz, and if it is not indeed about the First World War, then I believe the composer is commenting on imperialism at its peak. This is far more politically acute and shows Ravel as a man deeply aware and concerned for his world.

La Valse is to Ravel what the 3^rd Symphony is to Beethoven. It is cast in a different language but the violent message; warning of over-reaching nationalism is the same.

If La Valse is not programmatic of the Great War then the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand almost certainly is. Written for Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm in the war, it is second only to Daphnis and Chloe as Ravel’s greatest masterpiece. This is a work of astonishing originality and power. I have written more extensively on the concerto elsewhere but it should be mentioned here. In terms of both rhythm and harmony, the concerto is the peak of Ravel’s musicality. Throughout the piece, duple and triple time signatures are played simultaneously, which delivers a shifting momentum. The chordal structures are generally dark, echoing some of the passages in Daphnis, but this is transformed at the conclusion of the piece into the most intense sound that Ravel ever managed to create. The last few bars are beyond words. This is Ravel’s greatest work. That he was able to convey the destruction and redemption of war in only 18 minutes is an example of his skills of compression and of his own rich emotional world.

Ravel did avoid casting shadows, where this very private man might have risked attracting emotional attention. His life was full of enjoyment but of course not untouched by loneliness. There is a sense, when walking through his house of a life led in productive contemplation. As a younger man in particular, his public face was gregarious and he frequently spent time with many friends in Paris. He enjoyed travel, both to Britain and very successfully on tour in America. Ravel did not hide away, but he did keep aspects of himself hidden.

For some of his contemporaries, not least Stravinsky, Ravel appeared slightly odd and in his music, the perfection was not always seen as reflective of a composer at one with humanity. To understand Ravel fully however, we need only listen to the music. It is there that the shadows of violence, loss and celebration are most distinct, and it is those shadows that show Ravel to be more than a fine artist. He was also a deeply empathetic and immeasurably great man.

Designing Research 2: Infrastructure - The Inter(Nets)

2012-01-14T20:02:00.003Z

What are you looking at when you look at a computer that is not switched on? It is the world, black and promising, but what if that world were never switched off?

Sir Tim Berners Lee invented the first browser in 1990. It was called WorldWideWeb. Berners Lee wrote the code for what was then the only way to see an Internet on a NeXT computer, designed in California by Steve Jobs’ company of the same name. This computer was 12 inches wide and was supplied with 8MB of memory; the current iPhone is available with either 16GB or 32GB. Increasing speed and decreasing size dominate recent computing history.

It is hard to imagine life now without the Internet. It is less difficult to recall it. The important aspect of being aware of computing history, by which I mean remembering what we could not do before the web, is to consider what we might be able to do in the future.

There have been pitifully few times in our collective history when life has changed so fundamentally, and it could be said that never before has such a scale of change occurred so quickly as is happening now. As late as 1998 I was studying information science at Sheffield University, and we were still being taught how to request information in lines of code via the Dialog system from the US. This is no detriment to the department at Sheffield, which was and still is the UK’s leading research base in information science. Those bright green letters on a dull dialup screen provided, even then the best available resource discovery tool.

The future of the web is likely to be an entity that can no longer be switched off. In most of our homes there remains a desktop computer. This will very soon be regarded as a period piece, as wardrobes have replaced linen presses or enamel and then plastic replaced copper and tin in which to lie and dream of summer.

Eventually, the more beautiful and rarer desktop computers will appear on the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow – viewed on paper-thin screens around our wrists.

In the nearer future, something like a desktop computer is likely to remain in people’s sitting rooms. It will also be something like a television. The battle between TV and the Internet is likely to end in a single, powerful and most probably 3D device. I suspect that, like fireplaces, and the wartime wireless families will continue to enjoy gathering around a focal point. That the radio and the TV will be streamed over the web via vastly strengthened wireless signals is surely inevitable. The wireless wireless is only a matter of time. Just like the web-watch, most technologies will succumb to the dominance of the Internet, either through blurred lines or extinction. Devices will change. Content will adapt.

There have been very few positive global interventions into people’s homes. The first may well have been fire. Secondly, a great length of time passed before electricity blew out the gas. For many years, the rest were not infrastructural but content-driven; radio, television and even the early web. Already, we are experiencing the third in the form of wireless technology. This is delivered of course by cable or satellite but performs for us in our siting rooms like fire and voltage. It is alive and magical. And it is becoming omnipresent, or to use a term in common professional usage: ubiquitous.

Wireless technology appears advanced to us, but we are only at the beginning. It enables inconceivable amounts of content to be transmitted and it will soon remove the walls of homes and the rules of copyright. The structures, which we have built to protect a particular way of life, will inevitably become irrelevant to the dominant and all-pervasive Internet.

Currently, there are Wi-Fi spots in most homes, on trains, in public spaces, in coffee houses and of course, across universities. Although this seems obvious, the growth of wireless technology is advancing at remarkable speed. But what is its destination?

One of the most advanced countries in the world in terms of wireless penetration is South Korea. In 2009, Forbes produced a report on the country that still reads in 2012 as a relatively advanced state when compared with most of the US and much of Western Europe. There is strong vision in South Korea that is derived from the Government’s insistence that the country will be a leading technology nation. It should be noted that such fervour is likely to be as linked to a real military threat as it is to business opportunity. Whatever the incentive, South Korea remains a step ahead of most developed economies in the technology race.

The cultural advance, if you wish to perceive it as that, made by South Korea is that its population expect, indeed embrace, all-pervasive technology. There is no sign of people complaining of a lack of downtime. No one wishes to switch his or her Blackberry off. No one seems to want to switch anything off. This combination of consumer demand and cultural acceptance has created both a market and a test base for all kinds of devices supported by wireless technology. Two of the country’s biggest tech firms, LG and Samsung have been locked in perpetual battle over the hands and minds of the consumer for a number of years. Touchscreens and wireless is a match made in heaven.

In 2009 in South Korea there were already smartphones being worn as wristwatches. Time will tell.

The two drivers for what must be seen as a fundamental technology shift in Korean society are a significant investment in broadband wireless and taking TV mobile nationally. This has provided an infrastructure upon which Internet usage can grow and also delivered popular content using the web. It is an attractive recipe and one that Western governments could easily follow. South Korea has a population of 43 million people in a country smaller than the state of Virginia. It is also a mixed economy, common in Asia of high-tech cities and low-tech rural areas. It is a nation of techies and fishermen.

Another fascinating aspect of the growth of technology in this (a)typical society is the importance placed on design by those leading the way. Samsung are well-known to regard their company has having undergone two ‘design revolutions,’ one in 1996 and another in 2005. LG have taken the concept of design even further into the corporate psyche and now use the word ‘tesign’ to describe tech-savvy design. Both companies have development processes that bring ideas to product launches in around two years and include investment in evaluating design from other industries such as fashion, art, furniture and cars. This openness to enquire into the ideology of other sectors is, for example, almost absent from discussion about customer service and experience in universities.

Academia has an unfortunate tendency to consider itself superior.

There has been considerable effort to deliver information in what might be seen as a pretty way. Priority has for some time been given to how websites look as opposed to how they might be used. This has produced some great work but it has also, when scaled up through national funding, resulted in huge amounts of content that are unsupported by leading-edge infrastructure. The growth of the web as an organism, separate to people’s lives, or at best as an addition to them has been the story of a lack of vision. The web in the future should not be an entity people have to go to. It should be there anyway. The words associated with web usage; ‘click here;’ ‘visit www…;’ ‘Surf;’ ‘site visitors,’ are all too submissive for the future. The web’s true prospect is pervasive almost to the point of invisibility. And in the design of research environments there is potential for intuition to be carried to new levels of service quality. Scholars should be presented with paths less travelled without having to grapple with metacartography. It is likely that such developments will occur outside of universities, as despite the achievements of great institutions there is no doubt that the driving force of the information age is to be found in commerce. The key for those of us designing research environments in universities is partnership with leading design and technology companies.

Presented in the right way, this is a partnership. Universities have, in huge numbers, precisely what these companies want – a user base to develop products with. Additionally, in the best institutions there are genuinely innovative intra-departmental research teams at senior levels that only exist in the academic sector. We need to be far more confident about approaching potential colleagues in industry.

Infrastructure-first services are rarely developed without content. For example, fibre-optic cables are not laid in cities without reason. They themselves cannot be sold, but TV content can be. The reverse is often the case with content-first services. How many digitisation projects are completed regardless of the absence of a preservation infrastructure? How many websites are built for the short-term? How many decisions are taken on corporate IT provision without accurate predictions on bandwidth demand?

We are working now at a critical point in the information revolution. There is the possibility of a wireless world; indeed it is a reality in many places. So much of our thinking though, in designing research environments is formed of old technology models. The important aspect of wireless technology is not the absence of cables. It is the inevitable shift from providing institutional hardware to providing infrastructure to support personally owned hardware. Touchscreens and wireless is a match made in heaven.

At the present time, wireless infrastructure in most countries (and in most libraries) is constantly playing catch-up with hardware innovation. Few libraries are prepared each September for the uplift in bandwidth demand as greater numbers of iPads and other devices enter the building. This is a no longer a trend. It is the future. Addressing this will not be successful by scrabbling for funds to upgrade campuses building-by-building, node-by-node. To work more cleverly with the global shift in computing away from static devices, will require national engagement with international companies.

In South Korea no one has been omitted from this change. The Korea Agency for Digital Opportunity and Promotion, (KADO) is the country’s national body with responsibility for Internet penetration. Unlike many other developed nations, Korea has placed an equal importance on rural and underdeveloped areas’ bandwidth as it has for the large cities. As far back as 2007 over 55% of rural fishermen were online. There is a large national programme for those with disabilities too. KADO has cost the Korean government hundreds of millions of dollars but it is believed to be a good investment. In Korea, access to the web is regarded as definitive of quality of life. This is an ongoing process and is one being pursued in parallel with UK, (for example), public library closures.

The West has an unfortunate tendency to consider itself superior.

The infrastructure under continual development in South Korea is indeed breathtaking. The country already has the world’s fastest broadband connections, integrated into the vast majority of its domestic properties. According to a recent report in The New York Times, by the end of 2012 the Korean government intends to provide every home with I gigabit per second broadband. That will be a tenfold increase on the already world-leading speeds and average 200 times faster than web connections in US homes.

The domestic web policy is of course strategically linked to wireless technology. The cabling may for many, be delivering access t via desktops but for as many it is not, and the near future is being prepared for mobile devices. This is the case in people’s homes but also in public and corporate environments. When viewed over a period of five years, the future for Korea is, eventually going to be echoed in Europe and the US.

The man in charge of South Korea’s broadband wireless expansion is a 28 year-old government engineer, Choi Gwang-gi. As the NYT report says, he is preparing the country for how the Internet is likely to behave over the next few years. The word ‘behave’ almost personifies the web, and this is the key. It is going to be more and more personal and less and less visible. It is never going to be switched off. “A lot of Koreans are early adopters,” Mr. Choi said, “and we thought we needed to be prepared for things like 3-D TV, Internet protocol TV, high-definition multimedia, gaming and videoconferencing, ultra-high-definition TV, cloud computing.”

Cloud computing only works if you are always connected. Cloud computing is at its most powerful when delivered to mobile devices. Mobile devices demand wireless connectivity. The future of the web will operate and develop in this circle.

In South Korea, one of the highest uses of the superfast bandwidth is multi-player gaming. This is a country that likes to work hard and play hard – both on computer screens. However, there are enormous business benefits too, particularly in high-end videoconferencing and perhaps too, in business practices that cannot yet even develop until I gigabit per second wireless becomes common.

The risk for us, as designers and providers of research environments through library and IT services is that we lose sight of how far ahead others are thinking. In common parlance, this really is not a threat but an opportunity. The poorly designed web interfaces to token-gesture digital collections frequently seen in universities and national libraries are at risk, not just from a lack of preservation infrastructure. Academic research in the west is in danger of trailing commercial development in Asia.

This is a moment for honest, even humble requests for new partnerships.

Sir Tim Berners Lee created the web in 1990. Apple still dominate the mobile devices market, but it is in visionary and inclusive countries such as South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan that the real next stage of the Internet revolution is now happening – a serious and well-funded focus on wireless infrastructure. This is an urgent priority for all research libraries in the west. Presently, the great university and national libraries of Europe and America provide slower wireless bandwidth to researchers than South Korea does to its isolated fishermen.

Designing Research 1 - The Holograph Hologram

2011-12-09T10:53:00.003Z

Much has been achieved in the attempt to bring the world’s manuscript and incunabula collections online. Millions of dollars have already been spent on digitisation projects and related activity, and for the most part, with considerable positive impact on public access, scholarship and research.

One of the earliest major initiatives was ‘Project Gutenberg’ in the US, which has continued to grow, releasing out of copyright, mainly canonical literature freely onto the web. Perhaps ironically, named for Gutenberg, not just the first movable type publisher but also a designer in his own time with a precursory ethos akin to William Morris, the digital service is itself very poorly designed. In the early days it was not possible to manipulate HTML much beyond the excitement of text on screen. In those days a spinning @ sign was the web at its most scintillating. Now though, the Internet has seeped into environments beyond We expect to interact with it on multiple devices anywhere, from 3” touchscreens to 60” flatscreens. We have become used to broadband speeds experienced on our sofas inconceivable to the military in the 1970’s and 1980’s. We play, we learn, we travel virtually.

There is not a great deal of point in predicting the future, as we never seem to remember that what we are experiencing at almost any given moment was itself rarely predicted. The only secure conjecture might be that the entity that is the wireless Internet is likely, in the future to be viewed on both smaller and larger screens at ever increasing speed and at greater levels of pervasiveness in terms of both society and individual psychology. Additionally, it might be possible to say that less and less data will be held personally. The Apple iCloud is a glimpse of how our devices are likely to use cloud computing. This is not a new concept of course. Corporations have used this kind of sharing technology for some years. iCloud though, is the first to propose using it for shopping lists.

So much has been accomplished. Two of the most important step changes in commercial computing are actually based on successful marketing and sales rather than principally on hard programming. The financial success of Microsoft Windows and Apple’s iPod, two very different business icons have each enabled their parent companies at key points in the development of the web to reinvest very considerable amounts of money in further research and development. In this sense, everyone who bought Windows in the 1990’s and every person who owns an iPod, iPhone or iPad is an active player in the information revolution, not merely a passive consumer. Our age is truly, as was the case with the industrial revolution, a collective effort.

Having placed us in our current (which is not a word with much long-term currency), context we should think of the inevitable. Computing will continue to transform our daily, personal and professional lives. It is the last of these that is at the heart of this sequence of blogs on what I will refer to as designing research. This first essay is concerned with digitisation and academic/commercial partnerships in the digital humanities. Senate House Library is hosting a series of seminars for the University of London over the coming months also called Designing Research, which myself and our Associate Director for Digital Environments and Partnerships, Joe Honywill will be leading. The series will culminate in a national event, the First London Designing Research Conference 2012. This series of blogs will support initial thinking for each session. Virtual made physical made virtual: the circle of modern life.

Project Gutenberg was important, and even now as a repository it remains useful, but its conception was not one based on clear design principles.

Following the success of Gutenberg, the second major leap in the field of digital texts and manuscripts is one that now, I would argue, represents something of a developmental plateau. It is has been the state of the art for many years. ‘Turning the Pages’ is now in use across universities, archives and museums around the world. The British Library was amongst the first to explore fully the possibilities of multi-layered digitisation to create movable images. The ability to, albeit awkwardly recast the experience of interacting with a codex (more commonly known as ‘reading a book’), has proved very fashionable with both funding agencies and scholars. Digital manuscripts are now more accessible and more visible online. Turning the Pages and its comparable technologies have only one paradox – we appear to have reached the last page and no one seems to know where to turn next.

In addressing problems of technology in research it is considered good practice to ask this question; what problem are we trying to solve? This can be a valid approach of course, but I do not think it is necessarily sufficient for a discussion led by design questions. To be blunt, this is the most pedantic, dry and functionalist way to approach the future. To view the future of digital research simply as a process of solving problems would be analogous to addressing climate change by debating the colour classification of wheelie bins.

In any case, in the field of digital manuscripts, ‘the problem’ has in effect already been solved. To begin with there was nothing wrong with the original objects. It has yet proved impossible to produce digital surrogates of the physical materials that also reproduce their sheer power and authority. I have seen autograph manuscripts of Virginia Woolf’s novels in both digital form and as the original; long, angled spider-drawn handwriting on rough yellowed paper, smelling of faded gardens, with aggressive crossings-out indenting the next page. These are objects of immense and indiscernible human weight. Holding a Woolf manuscript is to hold death and life at the same time.

As an aside, the most powerful physical object I have ever held followed a long journey deep underground beneath the British Library in London. My colleague drew from the shelf a large box, thin but rising past my waist from the floor. She lifted it carefully onto a table and opened it. Pulling back the acid free paper she lifted the volume out. It was a music manuscript. As she raised the front cover and pulled it open I could see, quite clearly, neat rows of staves. There were exactly forty of them dropping from the top of the pages to the bottom. The piece began with only one voice but quickly grew more complex. As we turned the sheets. I saw that this was the Forty Part Motet by Thomas Tallis, the great Elizabethan composer. My colleague said, ‘I want you to hold it before I tell you something.’ I took the item in my white-gloved hands and waited. She told me that in the original performance the forty singers surrounded Elizabeth I in a circle in order for her to experience the full splendour of Tallis’ masterpiece. ‘This,’ said my colleague, ‘is the copy that the Queen was holding during that performance.’ The circle of Elizabethan life.

How do we respond, when designing digital environments, in order to come close to replicating what it means to researchers, perhaps even emotionally as human beings, to be near objects with such power? What might we be able to design which moves beyond increased access by the digital surrogate or the frankly, second-rate experiences offered by touchscreen versions? What problem are we trying to solve, is not a question inspirational enough to meet the demands of researchers wishing to interact with, discover new ideas within and perhaps even be moved by historical materials.

A more engaging question might be – what might we not yet know? As this question is in essence unanswerable it seems to me to be a good place to start when considering how technology might intervene between a researcher and their object. Research in the humanities is concerned with unearthing. As in archaeology, our role in designing research environments is more than providing the appropriate tools, it is also about presenting an environment rich enough to offer up discoveries in the first place. Bare earth is useless, as are small libraries and underfunded digital projects.

There have been attempts at designing what amounts to virtual reality in the fields of cultural heritage and historic collections. Most recently, the bespoke but relatively flexible technology offered by Second Life allowed for a number of interesting bodies of work. In recent years, at King’s College London, a team of researchers have very successfully replicated some of the architecture of antiquity by rebuilding Roman theatres in considerable detail using innovative techniques in humanities computing. Some of these environments could only now exist in virtual worlds. In Rome only the bare skeletons of the stones lay forever whitening under unrelenting sun. In Second Life they are given new life and perhaps for the researcher a richer one, as it is possible to go inside the structure of ancient buildings in a way impossible previously. In other academic disciplines too the use of computing has at worst been intriguing, at best transformative in terms of opening new paths of investigation, or in some cases whole new sub-disciplines.

There have been many attempts over the last ten to fifteen years by the humanities research community and indeed by libraries, to engage with new communities and disciplines. Most consistently, there has been an active dialogue between librarians and archivists, often supported by academics working across many fields of enquiry. This has produced real content and it has helped to engage the public too in research materials and processes. The popular success of genealogical investigation on television is as much down to the availability of collections on the web as anything else.

Although there has been progress in the research community searching beyond itself for ideas and partnerships there has yet to be a meaningful engagement between academia and commerce in the field of digital humanities research.

In 2007 the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, (EPSRC) funded a potentially important network that was intended to develop links between academic computing and the games industry through work being carried out in Artificial Intelligence. Based at Imperial College London, the initial network of 24 academics and six gaming companies were certainly asking interesting questions. Unfortunately, this was a project conceived in academia rather than the industry. Its ambitions were, if I might be so bold, typically low and predictable. The primary outcome was to be a series of events bringing interested parties together. This was achieved but little else appears to have emerged. From the three years of funded work, only one principal research paper is currently available on the project website, published in 2007. One problem might be that this was the only nationally funded project of its kind between the gaming industry and computing academics in the UK during that period. The project was intended to bring together UK Higher Education, with its 6 million students and 300,000 academics and the commercial research and development departments. The project was awarded around £83k to engage with an industry worth, according to Reuters in 2011, and estimated $65 billion worldwide.

Reading through the project aims in relation to an industry second only in financial success to film in the creative arts, (and quickly catching it), gives the impression that not only was the ambition not matched by the funding, but that also there may have been a lack of real purpose to the discussion. It is not enough to simply nod sagely and agree that it might be important for universities to work with industry. There must be a reason to do so.

Such a reason is to be found not by asking the question, what problem are we trying to solve, but rather the question, what might we not know?

In 2007 the next phase of the information revolution was ushered in by the release of the first iPhone. This device brought touchscreen technology into daily life and should be recognised for doing so, despite other smaller scale initiatives. It was a leap beyond the iPod because it was pointing towards human connectivity via handheld devices, not purely the act of building personal collections. There will always be other companies involved in the unstoppable tide of product and service development but Apple are currently the most important and focused of the large corporations. A strategic lead towards personal devices and away from desktops, to communal collecting on iTunes and presumably shared handheld digital lives through the successors to iPad and iCloud are all notable not purely because of their invention, but also because of their scale. Where Apple have led most consumers and other companies have been keen to follow.

Where we are now is not the only place we can be. We have a unique ability to assess the past and build the future.

When a researcher looks at the original of, for instance, an illuminated manuscript, what are they looking for? The medieval age seems almost unbounded in its continued ability to surprise us. Presently, a researcher can search for the physical location of such a codex, visit it for an agreed and invigilated period of time, perhaps even touch it. As with the Woolf materials this experience is not currently possible to exceed through the use of computing. There is no problem to solve. The physical interaction is simply as good as it gets. However, if we ask what might we not know about this manuscript, we open up further research questions that might genuinely be transformed by technology.

An autograph in the professional world of special collections is a manuscript in the hand of the author, as in the case of Woolf’s novels or Tallis’ Motet. A holograph is an item in the hand of a person, such as a letter, or in extreme cases, death warrants, plots, adulterous notes and confessions – libraries are not generally records of happiness.

To engage new research questions we should begin to work on these kinds of documents with a significant industry, or at least through some of its technology in creative ways, beyond the textual replication of Project Gutenberg and even the more interactive surrogates of Turning the Pages. It should be possible to coordinate, through the large educational consortia available to us, initial discussions with commercial technology companies. We live in an age defined by information, perhaps even more so than science and yet it is science, technology, engineering and medicine disciplines that have dominated the interaction between commerce and academia.

The creative industries are net contributors to national GDPs in most European countries, North America and Japan. The same is the case for the pharmaceutical industries, yet it is those who have close working relationships with universities and academic researchers. Product and service development in the digital arts and humanities have consistently failed to attract inward investment from related industries for many years, despite being the principal training grounds for most of that industry’s workforce and possessing enormous potential as research bases for blue-sky technologies.

The past is a place of riches. We find ourselves, or at least versions of one another there. Museums are microscopes onto the activities of the lost. Libraries contain what they thought.

A holograph redefines the phrase ‘ghost written.’ Holographs are all that is left of most of us. The public interest in the supernatural has always fascinated me. Its nondisprovability provides the natural gathering place for a fundamentally agnostic society unable to fully disbelieve in God. The risk is too great for most. Regardless of belief systems, the combined profits of all those pseudo-documentaries shot by infra-red cameras in cellars and rural staircases could easily support the investigation of the living dead – those holographic materials held in libraries.

The most dynamic technology change now occurring across film, computing and television is the development of 3D. High Definition has for the most part arrived and analogue is dripping away. The 3D experience is set to filter down to lower-priced hardware over the next couple of years and research and development is advancing towards being able to trick the eye without the addition of glasses. The gaming industry too is a major player in the development of human-computer interaction.

If you lift a Woolf autograph up the indentions of a desperate pen can clearly be seen through the paper. Holding the Tallis manuscript at eye level it is possible to follow the notation in exact strikes of chords. I once watched a conservator raise red paint from a medieval illuminated manuscript with a knife so small it could only be performed under magnification. Beneath the paint he found unknown gilt and a reworked shape. It showed a 14^th Century error and provided a 21^st Century new understanding.

Project Gutenberg and Turning the Pages were important steps but if we ask what might we not know, then discoveries of our past could be made using technology such as 3D imaging. In order to make progress when designing research environments it is essential to think the unthinkable. If we need hologram versions of holographic materials we will also need to create the partnerships between academia and the commercial companies capable of funding such work. These partnerships are essential in any case to a vibrant academic community. Science has already proved that theory.

We play, we learn, we travel virtually. We meet, we share, and we design in reality.

Future of Research Libraries

2011-11-21T17:57:00.003Z

The full video of my 2011 Charles Holden Lecture on the future of large research libraries is now available on iTunesU, YouTube and here:

Stuff of Celebration

2011-10-30T10:46:00.003Z

Well, Ireland has done it again. Michael D Higgins is now the 9^th President. Following Mary McAleese and Mary Robinson the country seems to have an unparalled ability to elect remarkable people as its head of state. When President Higgins moves into the Áras an Uachtaráin, the Presidential Palace in Dublin’s Phoenix Park he will have a considerable task in transforming the view currently taken of Ireland as a broken country. I believe he will succeed.

Higgins was born into poverty in the west of Ireland. His life story though, is one of extraordinary honesty and inspiration. He saw education as his means of escape and has written powerfully about its ability to lift people from one life into another. He has written, ‘what happens in education is crucial in the life of the person, and it defines the values of the society.’ He draws much of his energy from the memory of his primary school teacher, William Clune. He has said of him, ‘there was not one person who came into his school yard, from any background, with shoes or without, who wasn’t respected as a carrier of wonderment.’

Ireland’s complexities, which have seen it divided, are perhaps now its greatest strength. McAleese, like myself was born in Belfast and went to Queen’s University was also an academic, indeed she was the University’s first female Pro Vice Chancellor. A Northern Irish President of Ireland was a fascinating and important step for both countries. They are two but also one.

Higgins too is an academic. He has also published three books of poetry and a number of powerful essays that traverse the worlds of politics and literature. It is perhaps fitting that a country known globally for its political environment but also for its arts, should elect a career politician fluent not only in Irish but also in the force of poetry.

Ireland was seen has having thrown off its weaknesses during the Celtic Tiger years, when Dublin became a major international business destination. Critically though this is precisely the period Higgins dismisses. He views that Ireland as a temporary and dangerous failure. He is right. Ireland should not attempt to merely copy Canary Wharf or Manhattan. It has something running deeper with which to find direction. Of his own collected essays, President Higgins writes, ‘what follows are descriptions of what was, after all, shared – or a yearning for what might be shared. They are, then, pieces written in anticipation of, or against the flow of the extreme individualism that emerged from the 1980s, that invites us to have hearts of stone, when there is so much for which we should weep. In this changed world, it is that much more important for us to do creative work, the stuff of celebration.’

This is Ireland’s new President and its renewed opportunity. I’ll leave the last words to Higgins himself, and the full text of his acceptance speech.

'The mandate I have received and for which I will seek with heart and head to implement over the next seven years had its four pillars.

An inclusive citizenship which is about equality and participation and respect, in a creative society, creative and excellent in everything we Irish do, making an Irishness to be proud of in a real republic.

This was a vision of a real republic, where life and language, where ideals and experience have the ring of authenticity, which we need now as we go forward.

And during a long campaign, which for me as I have said was almost 14 months since I first sought a nomination from the Labour Party, I said I saw and felt, and feel the pain of the Irish people.

I recognise the need for a reflection on those values and assumptions often carelessly taken that had brought us to such a sorry pass in social and economic terms for which such as high price has been paid and is being paid.

I recognise the righteous anger but I also saw the need for healing and to move past recrimination.

I love our shared Ireland and its core decencies.

I love it for its imagination and its celebration of its endless possibilities for our people that are there for the achieving as we leave behind a narrow individualism that valued the person for what was assumed to be their accumulated wealth but neglected the connection between the person, the social, the community and the nation.

That is what we leave behind now for which a million people have given me a mandate.

Now we must respond collectively and cooperatively to what we all must recognise as our shared problems be it unemployment, mortgage distress or any form of exclusion.

We must now work to our strengths at home and abroad, not only cooperatively and collectively but sustainably for the benefit of all of our present generations and those to come.

The necessary transformation of which I speak, and of which my presidency will be a part, is built on turning creative possibilities into living realities for all our people.

And I believe – and this is the wonderful thing about going around the country so often – I believe and recognise that that transformation has already begun.

During the long campaign, I saw it in one community after another – be it in those who are creating strategies with and for the unemployed, those working in care, those working in pre-school and after-school clubs, those great citizens.

Everywhere, good people have commenced a journey to a version of Irishness of which we can be proud.

And this campaign we must never forget involved a choice as to which version of Irishness we would choose for the next seven years as what we wanted as ourselves at home and abroad.

This necessary transformation, which has now begun, will, I hope, result in making the values of equality respect, participation in an active citizenship that are characteristic of the next seven years.

The reconnection of society, economy and ethics is a project we cannot postpone.

I have encountered on this long campaign an enthusiasm for an Irishness which will be built on recognising again those sources from which spring the best of our reason and curiosity.

But even more important, the powerful instinct for decency which must be at the heart of a real republic. The celebration of the power of the collective in pursuit of the best of ourselves. And based, too, on the power of culture, science and technology deliver through the contemporary genius of our people.

Ireland has made its choice of the future and it has chosen the version of Irishness it will build and I will work with head and heart to be part with all of you in creating that future, one in which all of us can be part of and proud, too.'

2011 Charles Holden Lecture

2011-10-29T09:05:00.004+01:00

I know this sounds a little odd, but I am going to try an experiment by using my blogger and wordpress sites slightly differently. For the next few months I will run both. So, this post can also be found at christopherpressler.com

I must apologise for the sorry lack of posts recently. I have been finishing a book on the Senate House LIbrary collections and also writing a lecture. In the previous week I wrote over 37,000 words. Either this is impressive or obsessive, or perhaps both. Anyway, thanks to so many people who came to the lecture and who've asked for the text. I thought it best to upload it here. The video will soon be available on iTunesU as well. Settle back...

Borges meets Orwell: The 21^st Century Research Library

The 2011 Charles Holden Lecture

I would like to begin by thanking the Friends of Senate House Library for inviting me to give this year’s Charles Holden lecture. I would like to take this prestigious opportunity to offer some thoughts on where I believe the priorities and strengths lie for research libraries in the 21^st Century. I will view the future of research libraries alongside the future of research universities as their fates are inextricably linked. For the most part in this lecture I am also considering collections in the humanities and social sciences, as this is my own professional field and also the principal role of our libraries at Senate House. Finally, I will view the world of knowledge through the eyes of two writers. At first glance, there may be little similarity between the works of Borges and of Orwell. From the perspective of a librarian however, I hope to explore how each man has constructed and investigated truth. And it is the elusive concept of truth that is at the heart of this year’s lecture, as it is also at the centre of how I believe, through the act of collecting, libraries find purpose and meaning.

Senate House Libraries and our research role

To elaborate on the essential contribution made by libraries to the research process, it is important to first provide a context. Most importantly it is critical to note what may be seen as the obvious, that all libraries are not the same. The context of libraries is defined by three areas; Coverage; Intensivity; Scale.

Coverage: Science libraries differ from humanities libraries.

It is possible to measure the value of science libraries by usage, either physically or online. Science and medical librarians rarely interpret their collections, their principal role being to provide access. Few people enter the library profession with higher science degrees. In the humanities, the partnership between librarians and their users is often deeper owing to shared academic experience. Usage is key to the humanities too, but what happens beyond the library gate is very different between science and humanities collections.

Intensivity: Teaching collections are not as complex as research collections.

Management processes drive teaching-intensive collections. The role of the library is to follow course tutors in the provision of multiple copies of books and online materials that support reading lists. Acquisition and disposal are repetitive and uncomplicated tasks. There are important training and information literacy contributions made by the library, but the collection development itself is not the key role. In research-intensive collections, the reverse is true, where some teaching support is provided, but the roots of expertise lie in knowledge of extensive holdings and in their coordinated growth.

Scale: Large libraries change in different ways to small libraries

Scale is definitive, in that the future of small libraries is likely to be fundamentally divergent to that of large libraries. The future of small libraries has already been transformed by the Internet age. In the next five years, a relatively small teaching collection will be effectively redundant due to mass digitisation programmes of texts and the greater availability and acceptance of eBooks. These libraries will focus on training and designing collaborative spaces. The large research library has a more complex future. Many millions of materials will remain in print and analogue form. Many more will continue to be produced in those forms, or with digital surrogates. The interpretation, management and expansion of research collections will become ever more multifaceted. This will be most acute in the arts, humanities and social sciences.

The three facets of the above context in which libraries operate within universities present themselves in a particular way at Senate House Libraries. These constitute very large research collections in the arts, humanities and social sciences. The librarian’s role is complex because of a higher degree of subject knowledge than is common in science. The collection is complex because it is based on expansion and depth, rather than relegation and recycling. The scale is important because it affects the libraries’ ratio between future print and digital collections, a ratio fast disappearing in smaller institutions.

Libraries in other research-intensive environments share these characteristics, such as in the larger members of the Russell Group. However, there are two additional factors that define the role of libraries in the process of research facilitation at Senate House Libraries. Firstly, many of the collections are not only large but are amongst the finest of their field in the world. Secondly, a considerable percentage of these collections are held on the open shelf in central London. This provides a unique provision of internationally important materials made easily accessible, and defines the role of Senate House in the sector and as a partner of the British Library, whose collections are closed access.

The nature of humanities, social science and arts research still requires engagement with and the development of, large physical collections. The principal research outputs in these fields are still in printed form. Research libraries in the broader humanities though, are not merely stores. A research project is a partnership between the researcher and the library from the earliest survey of current materials, through the interpretation of materials or digital environments, finally to the placement of that research in the setting of the library. Research is concerned with discovery. Libraries are the essential mode of travel.

Funds spent on libraries as a generic service are an entirely different matter to those spent on world-class, unique, rich collections in the heart of London. The remit of the School of Advanced Study, University of London is to act as a focus, as a symposium for research facilitation in the arts, humanities and social sciences in the United Kingdom. This is performed in central London for a reason: as part of the greatest concentration of libraries anywhere in the world. Nowhere else in the UK can offer this combination of access, intellectual importance and geographical setting.

In 1936, the architect of Senate House, Charles Holden began building this art deco masterpiece. The library is designed to be a building that would only stand naturally in London. There are echoes of the lives of other great universities, such as in the inclusion of cloisters, but Holden did not design faux-medieval or classical copies. The cloisters at Senate House are new ideas born of Elegance, Purity, Integrity and Coherence. As in all the vast spaces of Senate House, they are epic in every sense.

Senate House was designed to stand at the centre of the third great English university. It was to be a university rooted in the contemporary world, and only at home in the world’s capital.

Holden designed to a level of detail unusual amongst even the finest architects. There is a ‘Greek’ motif, variations on which decorate not only the architraves of the front elevation but also the backs of chairs, the staircases and railings, the moldings of doors and cornices and even some of the wood paneling in the Senate Chamber. Every single one of thousands of light fittings is an art deco original.

Perhaps the most striking infrastructural feature of the building is its least known. Senate House can only ever be a library. From Floor 7 to Floor 19, the supporting mechanism for this early skyscraper is bookshelves. They are welded into the skeleton girders and rise in perfect symmetry for about two hundred feet over London. If you ever want to sense what it is to have millions of books directly above your head, just stand in the foyer of Senate House.

The public floors of 4 to 7 are, particularly in the cases of floors 5 and 6, spaces of almost indescribable immensity. There are some views where it is almost possible to see roughly from the North to the South of the building. It is as though the great circle of The British Museum Reading Room had been rolled out flat. There are others, for instance when walking into the Goldsmiths’ Reading Room, where your breath will be removed for a short time before being dutifully replaced in order that you might continue researching.

Goldsmiths’ is a room built specifically for a collection of the same name, the Goldsmiths’ Collection of Economic Literature. Dating from the 15th Century to the 21st Century there are some exceptional items, and important strata, such as the history of slavery. The room itself has lines of bookshelves carved from English walnut and a ceiling in Canadian cedar. Resulting in a large stained glass version of the University arms, two rows of high windows provide extra height to a room that I believe to be the most beautiful academic library space in Britain. (For the record, the number two spot might be claimed by the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge and the number three by the John Ryland’s Library at Manchester.

There are many further examples of Holden’s genius and clarity of vision throughout his great white library. The essential thing to note though is that this is an epic building made of comparative microcosms. Its architectural coherence means that when you close your fingers around a door-handle you are symbolically holding the entire tower.

In the next few weeks our long refurbishment will be one stage closer to completion. This has painstakingly recast Senate House in its original 1930’s élan. Every piece of furniture, all of which were also designed by Holden has been reconditioned. Light fittings have been removed and cleaned. It will give back to London its tallest art deco structure.

Following so much original care under Charles Holden’s pencil, and the enormous effort of the refurbishment project we must be equally thoughtful about how we create a research experience that is not only surrounded by art deco wonders, but is inspired by them. Senate House was born of clear design principles.

There are many projects to be undertaken at the library, but perhaps one of the most important now is to rethink our physical and web presence in terms that would meet with Holden’s agreement. For a man who designed almost every armchair in the building he could, I am sure, be guaranteed to have had an opinion.

There are many great, new library buildings but in general they are either driven by public or teaching agendas, which moreover means there are generally very few books, or there are thousands of similar ones. Senate House is a tower of research materials, millions of individual titles.

We should be clear concerning what we are aiming for. An EPIC library is not one solely defined by its collections, but one where its products and services, to appropriate terms from commerce, are recognised to be driven by principles not just profit, or in our case reader numbers.

This means that we intend to develop services around those four words; elegance, purity, integrity and coherence. This would be an aim that would sit easily with most large libraries but at Senate House we have an added incentive; Holden built the entire library and designed most of its contents on very similar principles. Our responsibility is not only to English Heritage to ensure that the light fittings are correct. Our accountability is to Charles Holden. We must, as far as is possible, place nothing in these spaces that wrestles with the original design. We must, again as far as possible, create services within the building and on our websites that are true to Holden’s ideas on simplicity and usability. In short, the Senate House Library design principles were written in 1936 but now need to be reinvigorated for the 21st Century.

For a research library of the intellectual depth of Senate House, no detail should be considered too small. That the collections are held in a building formed from design principles of modernist simplicity is an important opportunity. Senate House confirms its function and usability by adhering to those principles. Integrity is derived through clearly stating purpose. The purpose of Senate House was made physical by Holden and will be secured for the future by allowing the objects and designs of the contemporary world to integrate with their art deco surroundings. Every technology, every sight line, every website, every product and every service in such an important building needs to be considered in terms of design, as something people interact with. Everything we do in the library must have a rationale.

A word on the act of collecting

The library is not a new idea, in fact librarians may well lay claim to being one of the oldest professions – although I doubt we are the oldest.

The Latin author and grammarian, Aulus Gellius describes the birth of the library as both a concept and tactile collection like this in around 150AD:

The tyrant Pisistratus is said to have been the first to possess books of the liberal arts that were to be supplied for the public’s reading at Athens. Later the Athenians themselves augmented them in a learned and accurate manner; but after Xerxes had obtained the whole abundance of books and had burned the city apart from its citadel, he took them away and brought them to Persia. Then the Seleucid King, called Nicanor, took care that all the books were returned to Athens a long time later.

As an aside, this may be the first recorded case of that bain of the librarian’s life – the late return of books! The narrative, which is quoted in full in a recent book by Yun Lee Too, ‘The Idea of the Library in the Ancient World,’ is a description of the beginnings of the library in Greco-Roman antiquity. Not only is the description a clear attempt to claim the idea of the library as Greek, rather than Babylonian or Assyrian but it is also a clear picture of the library as a collection of texts that is passed down from ruler to ruler, from society to society, across cultures until it arrives in Alexandria – the great iconic library of the past. It crucially retains, as Yun Lee Too notes, the ‘identity of ‘library,’ indeed the library. In this sense the library of antiquity is also ‘global,’ being the only collection of its time. Smaller certainly than our own world collection, but then the world too was smaller and less known then.

What I believe we share with ancient culture in our understanding of the role of the library is a sense that knowledge can be passed from generation to generation. It may happen faster and in more ways now, but information was a shared, precious and powerful commodity in antiquity as it is for us. Texts were carried from past to present and it is this narrative, unbroken and incorruptible that gives the library its power and validity. In antiquity the very act of collecting, of bringing together many texts injects into each book an added command over the population. The early library is the material meaning of the phrase ‘safety in numbers.’

As the library is passed through the centuries it results in fascinating concepts that outlive anyone who cares for it – our lifetimes are nothing in comparison to the immortality of the collections we receive and add to and leave for others. This process of what might be called textual adoption creates canonicity and, as Xerxes and Hitler and many others knew, books mean power. So, the library, that has been passed to us in many forms and is most recently constituted as the Internet, is a trajectory of political power, of stories, of wealth, of failure and of the determination of human beings to record and collect and organise and preserve. The library of today is a continuum of the library recorded by Aulus Gellius – indeed, all research libraries prove that knowledge is not linear because of rediscovery. Libraries are labyrinths.

Borges

The writer perhaps most concerned with the power of books is Borges. This writer can be ‘read’ in as many ways as he wrote; as magical realist, as literary science fiction, as surrealist poet or as avant-garde essayist. Behind all of these epithets though there remains an extraordinarily honest mind. Borges’ ability to imagine mazes was in one sense the life-long achievement of the finest deception. It is a fiction made of lies in the strictest sense because the work proposes the existence of worlds that cannot be true. However, it is based on the reality of Borges’ own mind, his personal world view and I would be the last to call any great writer a liar simply because he could not prove the physical presence of one of his creations.

Borges’ heroes and heroines play out their lives in what, at first glance appear to be environments unknown to the laws of physics or the convictions of religion. Incidentally, it is this aspect of his work that makes him more than a writer of beautiful stories. It means his stories are also genuinely controversial in the challenges they set to our own understanding of what is possible in terms of science, or what may be possible in terms of religion.

Borges is important as an artist because he takes a position between the two great modern sides of the debate on human purpose, or its absence – on one side the apparently unassailable evidence found in atoms and on the other, the equally impregnable certainty held by billions of people, that they are in direct contact with a deity. Borges’ position though is not that of the agnostic, which would get him nowhere and would make his labyrinth nothing more than a mental toy. His writing is derived from a third truth; that art itself can offer an answer to the confusion of life.

In Borges’ labyrinth we find a place literally built on the entire measurement of human knowledge and experience. This is his literary vision. Additionally, we see an environment that most closely resembles the only atmosphere that could support such epic, discoverable life: the library itself.

When Borges achieved his long-held dream of becoming the Librarian of the National Library of Argentina it was a dream realised initially as a nightmare. He said, ‘God finally gave me all the books I had craved and then removed my sight.’ It was a cruelty akin to Beethoven’s deafness or Ravel’s apraxia, but it did not halt either Borges’ reading or his ability to conceive works of art.

In his short story, ‘The Library of Babel,’ Borges merges his professional understanding of libraries with his personal view of the ultimate authority of texts. The Library is endless, containing all the knowledge in the world. It is populated by people (acting here as eternal librarians), who move amongst the endless shelves and point-less spirals of books. They are searching for a way to comprehend this place of comprehensive knowledge.

In the hexagonal rooms of Babel, Borges created the most compelling description not only of libraries but also, it might be said of the Internet. Owing to the epic deception of his imagination we are also shown the truth about libraries from a rare perspective; that of a librarian who was also a writer of genius. Borges holds a view common to librarians that it is the knowledge itself, the books indeed, which are the real purpose. The act of collecting is its own religious fervour and its own scientific proof.

The purpose of libraries is not to reflect human knowledge or trends but to exist beyond these things. In imagining something from nothing, Borges uniquely describes aneverything. It is a literary device no doubt, but also one envisioned by professional conviction, resulting in a Library containing all other lies and truths. This library needs to be understood for what it is, a precious and valuable resource. The Library of Babel is in that sense no different from any other. It is a construct owned by the public. Books form libraries and each book is created in private for public use.

A single book is a library of references, reflections and rediscoveries. When placed beside another it becomes a collection. As part of a group of millions it transforms towards Babel.

Borges perhaps could not have predicted that librarians who began practising in the last ten years have had the phrases, ‘the death of the book,’ and ‘the end of libraries’ ringing in our ears for much of our careers. Yet, relegate a book to the store and you invite letters to national publications. Reduce opening hours and be prepared to sit through aggressive student committees – and in both cases, sometimes rightly so. If libraries are dying, a lot of people haven’t noticed.

Libraries in all their forms are organisations managing the delivery and care of intellectual content to all disciplines and to all aspects of society. They are multi-million pound services, often with hundreds of staff serving tens of thousands of people, and they are linked across the world as the ‘global library.’ Individual libraries have never been the only source of information, but they have always been the most significant point of access.

One of the finest characteristics of humans is our ability to share. In the academic library context this has meant, and is still defined by libraries’ contribution to the archiving and rediscovery of human action. This has allowed us to provide access to quality research through the global library and to offer help, space and time to students and researchers in traditional reading rooms and collaborative learning centres.

At the heart of all universities, the library in its many facets continues to balance tensions between print and digital collections, between the demands of teaching and research, between the arts and sciences, and perhaps most importantly, between the commercial supply of research information and support for its creation in academic practice.

Libraries are present at the generation of ideas, in delivering content to the desktop and the desk top. They deliver in perpetuity for results and theories. Libraries bring people into contact with innovation, with innovators and with each other. They draw an inconceivably long line of thought in every discipline to the minds of current thinkers. Libraries are critical in our need to share and to discover. They are vital in allowing access to our recorded thoughts by those who follow us.

Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science are principles upon which the practice of librarianship still rests:

I. Books are for use.

II. Every reader his [or her] book.

III. Every book its reader.

IV. Save the time of the reader.

V. The library is a growing organism.

These typically succinct compressions of what it means to manage vast quantities of information for an immeasurable number of readers, have carried the world’s library services through some unsettling times. The question is, are they still relevant in a world where so much content is beyond the library walls?

The Internet is the railway of our generation. It has transformed life, at least in the western world. The library profession took a while to realise that it, unfavourably caricatured as it often is, had found itself in the midst of the greatest shift in human society for generations. Librarians, once guardians of knowledge had become its inertia. Or so it has been alleged by parts of academia.

I have heard keynote speakers at conferences challenging the profession to wake up (in the early years of the web) or give up (more recently). We have all read statements by people critical of libraries who are not themselves criticised for collection management decisions, (affectionately referred to as ‘the bin’). People who do not sit in student union meetings trying to find an answer as to why it’s no longer possible to read D.H. Lawrence at 3am in the library. People, in summary, that do not actually manage libraries, or perhaps people (and this includes many in government), who seem to think that all libraries are the same.

It is perhaps not fully comprehended that for the most part, the use of one library is in fact the use of all the world’s libraries. The systems of Inter-Library Loans and now, shared digital resources allows access to quantities of books and electronic content across countries and continents, halted only by licences and local laws. It is also not fully recognised that librarians have been at the forefront of challenging commercial practices that are detrimental to students and to the sharing of ideas, indeed to society.

Commentators, who use the term ‘the future of libraries,’ do imply an understanding that all libraries are in some way linked. What is missing, in defining the future of libraries in this way, is that not all libraries serve the same purpose. Even in higher education the differences are stark.

The twenty-five or so libraries which form Research Libraries UK hold data and physical collections on a scale not replicated in other parts of the sector. This is derived from age. Collecting takes time and enough time offers breadth and depth. In the UK sector this is most notable in Oxford and Cambridge, but other large print collections exist at Manchester, Leeds, Edinburgh, Senate House Libraries, SOAS and the LSE. In these cases a combination of investment, attraction to benefactors or even geographical location serves to increase the scale of collections.

In the past size has been important. Universities have used their libraries not only to appeal to students but also to researchers, who in turn have added depth to the collection. In this way, libraries have been major contributors to the formation of hierarchy in British universities, not only in themselves but also in what they support and whom they attract.

Google currently holds the cards to the ability of these institutions to continue to think of their libraries as special in this way. When Google extricates itself from the courts they will be able to release ten million (and counting) digitised books onto the Internet. In the UK this has the potential to level the playing the field between the Russell Group, those with important but smaller collections in the 1994 Group and those with very different libraries in the rest of the sector. Google will mean, if not immediately then certainly soon, that all universities will have similar library collections.

However, despite its current position, Google is only an example of how the world is changing around our libraries. Very few companies exist forever, or survive unchanged and unchallenged. Many of the materials in research libraries will outlive us and will need care long after Google itself becomes a footnote. The content of libraries teaches us much, but the most important lesson is that change is constant.

With or without Google, mass digitisation of books and journals will be a strong trend in combination with pervasive computing. The legal implications of these developments are yet to be resolved. Google’s mass digitisation programmes, now including languages and cultures beyond the English-speaking world, are the largest single transfer of knowledge from one format to another in human history. However, they are also only part of that history, not its conclusion.

Additionally, printed or digitised, Ranganathan’s laws remind us that the library is made up of more than books. A library is space – collections – readers – librarians. Google is focused on collections, as is the case with almost all technology. As an advertising company it is not surprising that it wishes to use content to attract advertisers to its services, in fact we could learn a lot from them. What might be learnt reciprocally is that the library as a space filled with people is part of Google’s future. It is not closed by it.

I remember two things most clearly as a trainee librarian: the unpredictability of questions at the Enquiry Desk: the demanding queues at the Issue Desk. I still see both in libraries. Even with many services available online and self-issue now ubiquitous, readers continue to visit the physical library and they still expect to find librarians inside it. This is especially so for subject specialists in large research libraries. The web has greatly improved our ability to communicate but, as with dating sites, it is a tool for actually meeting people rather than a substitute for human contact. Libraries in the future will continue to embrace technology but only to enhance existing services, not to replace them.

In the late 1990’s, as the Internet was beginning to impact on academia, we began to use the phrase ‘the hybrid library,’ to describe the emerging environment of print and digital collections. The term has been out-of-use for some time but may be appropriate now, not to describe the collections, as such a fusion is now common, but to describe the readers’ future experience of the physical library. A reader still wishes to work in the library but will increasingly work with greater access to digital collections via mobile devices. The library will continue to provide suitable environments for both solace and collaboration, but will be enhanced by the web. Reading rooms will increasingly merge with websites.

Of course, there are discipline variations for the academic library. Its physical use is less important to science than to the humanities, although content is still managed in both fields by the library.

There are also the differences in libraries. For most academic libraries, electronic resources have been transformative. ‘Early English Books Online’ put the Bodleian onto the shelves of universities that could never acquire the original materials. For the large research libraries, the opportunity to redefine historic and special collections as the heart of their service is the next iteration of the hybrid library. The web encourages physical meetings. Digitisation of manuscripts brings greater demand to see the original.

The near future for all libraries will depend on genuine innovation in their web presences. The distant future for research libraries will be defined by an acceptance that size is no longer everything, but that close collaboration between librarians and academics in exploiting the complex scientific research web, in parallel with dynamic access to historic collections (some of which are already born digital), will be what readers want. In the future the library will continue to be a ‘growing organism.’

Orwell

George Orwell was inspired to use the library at Senate House as the Ministry of Truth in his novel Nineteen eighty-four. His wife at the time was working in Senate House during WWII, as it had been commissioned by the government to provide accommodation for the Ministry of Information. On the roof of the library, there are still the disconnected phone lines direct to the Cabinet War Rooms. Senate House was the tallest building in London during the War, (apart from the crucifix atop St. Paul’s Cathedral), and the library acted as a viewing tower to watch for the Luftwaffe coming up the line of the Thames to bomb central London. The library played an important part in the defence of London. Orwell still plays an essential role in the defence of freedom.

‘The notion that you can somehow defeat violence by submitting to it is simply a flight from fact…Underneath this lies the hard fact, so difficult for many people to face, that individual salvation is not possible, that the choice before human beings is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils. You can let the Nazis rule the world; that is evil; or you can overthrow them by war, which is also evil. There is no other choice before you, and whichever you choose you will not come out with clean hands.’

George Orwell wrote this in his anti-pacifist essay ‘No, Not One.’ This seems to me a clear and realistic position to take on the matter of aggression and a viable response to it. I have struggled with an innate pacifism for many years, formed on the streets of late 20th Century Belfast. When you live amongst violence you quickly grow to hate it. Yet, I was aware that others, older and braver than myself stood between the bombers and me. Now these people are younger but they still stand between my life and those who, despite how distant this might seem to many in Britain, want to kill us.

Orwell authored hundreds of essays. These are often published alongside reviews of other people’s books, as it was often his habit to use a book review to discuss his own views of the novelist’s concerns. ‘No, Not One,’ is a famous dismissal of pacifism but it is in fact a book review, this time of Alex Comfort’s ‘No Such Liberty,’ which was published in 1941. Orwell thought most reviewers were idiots, forced by the need to be paid to say that all books were good, as the publishers were advertising in the Sunday papers.

The thrust behind ‘No, Not One,’ is that society is imperfect. It is faced with brutal decisions as a permanent state of being, and that any attempt to say otherwise is precious, unrealistic and dangerous. When Orwell writes as Nazism becomes dominant in Europe, it is too easy to reduce the authority of his voice to a particular time. He writes of his own desperate present, but also of ours and of the future. There will always be war. There will always be violence. There will always be conflict. There will forever be a need for some to stand between the armed and the unarmed.

Orwell believed that society depended ultimately on coercion. He adds a subtlety that the police officer does not hold this society together, but the common goodwill, which does sustain it, is powerless without the police to support it.

As one of the most important observers of English culture, (although it is hardly different from any other), Orwell makes two fairly blunt statements in this ‘book review.’ Firstly, that the working classes are never pacifists because they live so close to violence, or as Orwell puts it, ‘their life teaches them something different.’ Second, that those who are pacifist hold a fake moral superiority based only on the real sacrifices made by others. They conveniently forget about those who stand, between what Orwell calls ‘their research-lives,’ and the gun. The police are ignored or criticised by people who at that moment have no need of them.

To Orwell, pacifism was a sign of luxury. This is not to say that war is good. It isn’t. The question is how do we respond to violence? Orwell at least had the defence of western civilisation to call for, and he knew his enemy.

I did not think anything of seeing, on the walk to school in Belfast, a Landover with its rear doors open and soldiers with machine-guns hanging out of the back. I thought nothing of going to bed with the constant sound of helicopters, and the frequent, mostly distant sound of bombs or gunfire. I only experienced a bomb physically once, which was enough to shake me out of any real thought for pacifism that I may have otherwise tended towards.

This is not to say that violence is ever justified as an end to itself. Defence is one thing but peace is a greater aim. The problem is that many people do not want peace.

The choice between submitting to Nazism and fighting it was no choice at all, and Orwell knew it. He knew that it mattered who won, even as he was honest in criticising Britain’s own imperial aggression. The choice between simply praying for peace and supporting the police in Northern Ireland was also no choice at all. There were people trying to kill us when we were shopping. There was evil on both sides because both sides were violent, but a choice had to be made between which was lesser and which greater.

Orwell makes us face this choice just as he did his own readers during the Blitz. He balances this overt support for the state of course with vicious attacks on it. In his major essay, ‘Why I Write,’ he says, ‘Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’ This is not contradictory. It is reality. Orwell physically fought in Spain but his contribution was to write books. He stands for knowledge and stood for honesty. To stand against violence means to stand in the line of fire.

The Line of Fire

When the musket ball tore through the jacket it carried with it some of the gold braiding from the Admiral’s uniform. It drove through his shoulder and came to a halt inside one of his lungs. Nelson never stood a chance.

The surgeon steadied himself on the creaking boards of HMS Victory and cut into the dying man’s chest. He pulled out the musket ball and held it up to the light between his fingers for a few seconds. He made an historic decision. This was no ordinary musket ball. Not only had he just retrieved it from within Britain’s finest military hero but it also glittered as the gold braid had burned into the metal on entry. He handed it to a colleague who pocketed it. The surgeon heard the whisper of Nelson’s voice, ‘Kiss me, Hardy,’ before dying in front of his fellow sailors. He was lost but Britain was saved.

Over 200 years later a film crew arrive at Windsor Castle to make a documentary on the Royal Collections. The highlight of the entire programme is the camera slowly panning across a polished tabletop before halting over a gold locket. We only see how tiny it is when white-gloved fingers begin to open it. Inside is a musket ball with small pieces of gold braiding embedded in the rough sphere.

The UK cultural heritage sector is persistently under direct financial threat and being asked to justify its purpose. Simultaneously, billions of pounds are spent in the UK every month on placing contemporary soldiers and sailors in the line of fire. Britain has always been a fighting nation. It would be fair to say that it has probably started more wars than it has been drawn into. Only a few have genuinely been in self-defence but to be honest, that is not a concern on the whole. The debate for or against war usually ignores the fact that war will happen anyway.

What’s important is that there is an absence of balance in the national budget; our history is viewed as less important than our future. It begins in school, where the sciences, those great disciplines of discovery are plainly seen to be more significant than the other great disciplines of unearthing in the humanities. It continues in universities, where the humanities are always considered to be of less use to society because they cost less to teach and research. They only cost less because they do not receive enough money.

At the other end of the scale, the Large Hadron Collider, (whose purpose, if you’ll forgive me seems gravely pointless, as a need for God will still exist in people’s minds even if it is proved that two entities colliding resulted in the universe – where did those particles come from if they are responsible for everything?) is a machine that has cost almost enough to fund all historical research without limit in every university in the world for many, many years. What more could have been understood about humanity with that money?

Beyond education and into the world of government funding, the questions become more serious on a daily basis. I do not dismiss, for example the need for Britain to have global military reach. I do challenge the assumption that the present and future can be experienced without reference to the past. In other words, that any soldier can march in Afghanistan without knowing why he or she is there based on access to properly funded museums, libraries, universities and galleries which are developed through suitably funded research.

We are informed endlessly by the government that the country needs to ‘cut its cloth accordingly,’ or that ‘we cannot live beyond our means.’ These statements are irritating enough because they are so obvious. Every person in the UK does both each time they enter a supermarket.

The UK has enough money to fund defence and culture. Stop triggering sales in art galleries. Stop threatening museums. Stop closing libraries. Nelson took a bullet not for war itself but because he believed in what he was fighting for – the cultural significance and standing of Britain. That tiny gold-spattered shot represents our history. We can hold it only because the cultural sector exists.

The research library in the 21^st Century has a secure future if we can confidently state its purpose. It is a role in support of education of course, but also, and perhaps nowhere more acutely than at Senate House, it is a role in collaboration with other cultural heritage organisations. Orwell shows us why sometimes we may need to fight. Borges weaves images of what we are fighting for.

Borges, in his miniature story staring Shakespeare called Everything and Nothing,describes how when Shakespeare meets God the poet says; 'I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and myself.' The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: 'Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one.' In Borges’ last story, Shakespeare’s Memory, a man is given the entire mind of the poet. As it gradually overwhelms him he passes it on. Borges believed that the words of one man are the words of all men, and that the construct of the library is where they are to be found. In the library, we are all Shakespeare.

The purpose of research libraries in the 21^st Century is simply to exist. Without them we are lessened.

Orwell and Borges each discovered that art is an essential force. Both writers believed that books contain truth. It is why books were being burned in Nazi Germany. It is why Orwell sought to defend them. It is why Borges believed the library to be a labyrinth. It is why libraries remain linked to dreams, to memory, to political freedom, to educational opportunity and to truth.

Thank you.

Christopher Pressler, Cambridge

ALL NEW POSTS

2011-09-21T18:26:00.001+01:00

please visit www.christopherpressler.com for all new posts

many thanks,

Chris

Borges' Breadcrumbs

2011-09-15T09:52:00.006+01:00

Writing about writing commonly demands more honesty than that demanded of the novelist. Writing is a deeply personal act that results, if all goes to plan in something owned by the public. As in all art this strange contradiction is only made possible by the peculiar personality of the artist, but it also continues to enhance or in some cases to destroy the personality that enabled it to act in the first place. To create or imagine something from nothing is an activity performed by most human beings incessantly; just think of mothers inventing fairy stories to quieten children – transforming wooden spoons into Punch and Judy is a widely held gift. To produce original and lasting work with narrative power and emotional resonance is to lift those stories into the realm of art.

The novelist at least can blow opaque glass around herself in the form of characters. I do not believe, after years of writing and of studying the writing of others in relation to their biographies, that any writer truly designs characters without reference either to their own or to those of others. Even writers, for example Graham Greene who were especially skilled at personality deception within their own lifetimes, are eventually found out. I work every day with humanities academics and I am certain that a kind of Inspector Morse-like persistence runs through those choosing to write books about others who write books. Academics are closer to being detectives than artists themselves.

So it is rare to find a writer who accepts such a state of affairs and who writes, either without their own blown glass, or who writes about their own writing openly. The trick for academic study here is to find in such texts, what tricks the writer is still playing by slight of hand and double bluff. In the case of some such books the writer hides no deception by explicitly intending it, a triple bluff.

The writer who brings such games to the heights of great art is Jorge Luis Borges. This writer can be ‘read’ in as many ways as he wrote; as magical realist, as literary science fiction, as surrealist poet or as avant-garde essayist. Behind all of these epithets though there remains an extraordinarily honest mind. Borges’ ability to imagine mazes was in one sense the life-long achievement of the finest deception. It is a fiction made of lies in the strictest sense because the work proposes the existence of worlds that cannot be true. However, it is based on the reality of Borges’ own mind, his personal world view and I would be the last to call any great writer a liar simply because he could prove the physical presence of one of his creations.

His profession defined Borges as much as politics and artistic antecedents influenced him. No writer has reimagined the entirety of human knowledge in such compellingly brief detail. (The only other notable attempt, although not a literary one was by Dewey). The ‘library’ for Borges, himself a librarian of international importance, became eternally associated with the concept of labyrinths. Within this construct we find the true Borges. He never walked through the entrance to one of his stories without a handful of breadcrumbs. Those clues to his travels, perhaps through the realism of his own magical words have never become stale.

From an early age, Borges was writing astonishingly original visions of how human history is not linear. His heroes and heroines play out their lives in what, at first glance appears to be environments unknown to the laws of physics or the convictions of religion. Incidentally, it is this aspect of his work that makes him more than a writer of beautiful stories. It means his stories are also genuinely controversial in the challenges they set to our own understanding of what is possible in terms of science, or what may be possible in terms of religion.

In order to properly describe Borges’ library I will quote extensively from the work of New York-based software engineer and fellow blogger, Adam Lee. Many thanks to him for ‘doing the math,’ as our American cousins call it:

‘Until I read Daniel Dennett's discussion of it in Darwin's Dangerous Idea I had not properly understood just how vast this library was. According to Borges' description, each book in the Library is 410 pages; each page is made up of 40 lines each consisting of 80 positions, and there are 25 possible alphabetic symbols that can fill any of these positions. This works out to 410 x 40 x 80 = 1,312,000 positions per book, each of which can be filled in 25 distinct ways: 25 x 25 x 25... and so on, 1,312,000 times. In other terms, the Library of Babel contains 25^(410x40x80) = 25^1,312,000 books. This makes the total number of atoms in our universe look like a tiny number.

Since it is impossible to conceive the size of this number, let’s imagine something more manageable: the number of variants of just one book, say, War and Peace. (I do not know if this book actually has something like the 1,312,000 characters possessed by each book in the Library of Babel, but say for the sake of argument that it does.) In all the vast Library there is only one book that replicates it exactly as it was written by Tolstoy. But how many slight variants are there, versions that differ by just one character?

Again, there are 1,312,000 positions in the book, each one of which can differ from the canonical version in 24 ways (since the original character at that position can be replaced with any of the other characters). Thus there are 24 x 1,312,000 = 31,488,000 one-character variants. By the same logic, there are an incredible 991,493,388,288,000, or about 991 trillion, copies of this book that vary by just two characters (31,488,000 ways to vary one character, times 24 x 1,311,999 = 31,487,976 ways to vary a different character). The number of three-character variants is exponentially larger, and the number of four-character variants larger still; and then there are the versions that differ by five, by six, by seven... (Dennett points out that even a copy with several typos on each page would still be quite recognizable.) And none of this includes translations of the book into other languages, retellings of recognizably the same story in different words, abridged versions, summaries, versions with scrambled page order, versions with alternate endings, commentaries, commentaries on the commentaries, reviews, parodies, scholarly analyses, denunciations, deconstructions...

Just how big a number is this? The estimated volume of the observable universe is 10³³ cubic light-years, or about 10⁸⁷ cubic centimeters. Assume that the thickness of a sheet of paper is 0.1 mm, and that each sheet is of standard 8.5 x 11-inch dimensions (about 21.6 by 28 cm). Then the volume of a single book is 21.6 x 28 x (400 x 0.01) = about 2400 cubic centimeters. It would take 4.16 x 10⁸³ such books to completely fill the volume of the observable universe. How many variants on War and Peace would this be?

Incredibly, all the books that were exact duplicates of War and Peace, save for a mere twelve or fewer single-character differences somewhere in the text, would more than fill our observable universe.’

In the hexagonal rooms of Babel, Borges created the most compelling description not only of libraries but also, it might be said of the Internet. Owing to the epic deception of his imagination we are also shown the truth about libraries from a rare perspective; that of a librarian who was also a writer of genius. Borges holds a view common to librarians that it is the knowledge itself, the books indeed, that are the real purpose. The act of collecting is its own religious fervour and its own scientific proof.

The purpose of libraries is not to reflect human knowledge or trends but to exist beyond these things. In imagining something from nothing, Borges uniquely describes an everything. It is a literary device no doubt, but also one envisioned by professional conviction, resulting in a Library containing all other lies and truths. This library needs to be understood for what it is, a precious and valuable resource. The Library of Babel is in that sense no different from any other. It is a construct owned by the public. Libraries are formed by books and each book is created in private for public use. Writing about writing demands honesty but so does writing about libraries. Authors and librarians drop breadcrumbs.

A single book is a library of references, reflections and rediscoveries. When placed beside another it becomes a collection. As part of a group of millions it transforms towards Babel. If you walk into a library of this size you are following Borges’ breadcrumbs. Treasure every step. Libraries are the greatest creation of the human species.

The Swimming Pool Library

2011-09-13T12:42:00.004+01:00

Reading this year’s Times Good University Guide I was very pleased to see the library regarded as the most high profile service offered at university. Each University featured in the TH Guide contains positive and negative vox pops by the President of its respective Student Union. Despite what we are constantly told by expert panels, students still place the library at the top of their assessment of a University’s facilities. A respectful note to Vice-Chancellors – swimming pools count for a lot but promote the library and students will flock to your campus.

There are of course as many different kinds of academic library as there are universities. The majority of these are now exceptionally well-designed, welcoming places for large numbers of undergraduates to work either alone or together in groups, and most are filled with leading-edge technology. The candle-lit uyndergraduate library of the 19^th Century is gone. So too are the many 1970’s interiors, which was the previous great period of academic library development in Britain. Now, unless the library provides frappe mocha cappuccinos (why is coffee now this complex?), free wireless and vibrantly coloured soft furnishings you might as well not bother opening the doors.

One of the large ‘learning spaces,’ to which these libraries are often referred professionally, that I managed at Nottingham University even had its own dress code. This was let slip by the Student Union President to me in a meeting, and went along the lines of, ‘On Level 1 of the Library you have to have a certain look.’ The students themselves undid all that work we did to widen access to an elite university for students from less privileged backgrounds. I pass no comment.

Regardless of whether a student shops in Hollister or Primark, the library is regarded as easily the most essential building on campus outside the lecture theatre (and more so by some students). Incidentally, although I usually feel left behind in style terms by students, despite immense personal effort, there was one area in which students may remain a little behind the curve themselves. Students do not want eBooks.

It does not matter how many times the argument is made that in order to provide collaborative learning spaces, the physical book stock must give way to technology, students still want to use printed books. An e-licence can provide multiple accesses to a single copy. It can be downloaded anywhere. It can even be bought and used on the most essential piece of equipment a contemporary student owns, their iPhone. None of this alters the demand for print materials.

The considerable achievements of digitisation, particularly of rare materials have transformed most libraries’ ability to support research. Indeed, colleagues working at a senior research level rarely enter most libraries. There are of course exceptions, such as Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester and Senate House Libraries, University of London. These and a few others retain research and historic collections beyond the reach of current technology. It could be observed that for once, unlike the pervasive use of social networking tools such as Facebook, lecturers are more advanced than students in their employment of technology when it comes to eBooks and digital collections. Or are they?

Reflecting on national strategies in the UK of about ten years ago, I remember a phrase then in common conference use named ‘the hybrid library.’ This phrase has since fallen from professional favour and been generally replaced by ‘the digital library.’ In some cases this has progressed to simply describing a library containing both digital and printed collections as, innovatively, ‘the library.’

Having proposed that those of us of a certain age are ahead of our younger students in at least one field of the web, let me burst, sadly that one remaining bubble. No matter how we rebrand our services as Learning Resource Centres, Collaborative Spaces, Learning Hubs, Knowledge Cafes, Information Commons, Digital Access Rooms or anything else, students still say to each other, ‘I’ll meet you in the library,’ even if it is via Twitter on an iPhone.

For most students in the modern university, as is confirmed again this year in The Times Good University Guide, the library remains not only the most important building on campus (perhaps knocked into a close second by the Union Bar), but also remains a library in the traditional sense.

Of course, the information revolution has not halted, in fact we too easily forget that we are only at its beginning. The use of eBooks will rise in academia just as it has in commercial bookselling. Demand for fast wireless access will increase. Mobile devices will kill-off desktop computing. Social networking will become more academically useful. But all of this will happen in a future where printed materials remain a definitive measure of the value and intellectual status of a University and its Library.

Cambridge University students know that one of the greatest aspects of their university is its 100+ libraries. Everyone knows this. To deny or ignore this fact, repeated again by students themselves in the TH Guide, is to be blind to a future where the library delivers 21^st Century technology alongside its high-demand printed textbooks and its medieval manuscripts.

Tails of the Unexpected

2011-09-08T11:09:00.003+01:00

There is a strong sense of vocation in some professions, notably the law, medicine, teaching and the church. Others amount to a similar fundamental desire through a particular talent or propensity such as writers, chefs, musicians, sportsmen, designers or dancers. The decision to enter some professions does not usually demand a definitive aptitude or even, a calling. My own profession of librarianship, although not one normally associated with natural gifts or devotional origins, is yet filled with people who would never wish to do anything else.

There are many reasons for this as the library profession is a complex one. It is constructed of highly skilled experts in some fields, for instance bibliographics or rare books whilst also including very senior managerial staff with strategic or financial acumen on the very large scale. It is not a profession with many comparators but the one I always like to employ is that of the police. Librarians are similar to police officers principally in that everyone starts their career at the same point. During their professional lives each member of either profession will find a level at which they operate best. Interestingly this makes for obvious hierarchy at the same time as respect for talent at every level.

I used to think, until today that my strong vocational drive to enter the library profession originated at the age of 13, when I first became a school library assistant (and yes, it was just as cool as it sounds – we even had badges saying ‘Librarian’). Until that is, I talked with my mother this morning.

I had sent her a copy of the latest Senate House Libraries Strategy last week for a file she keeps on my two brothers and I – all three of us do this. I am particularly pleased with the document, as it is a compression of enormous complexity in terms of stakeholders, collections and future priorities. The detail is not important here but it did trigger a fascinating reminiscence from her on the nature of my life-long passion for libraries.

For the record, my continued belief in the power of collections available to share is primarily fueled by my equal conviction that education can alter the direction of people’s lives.

My mother told me that between the ages of one and two and a half she used to take me every fortnight to our local library, which at that time was Stowmarket Library in Suffolk. I can just remember this, especially after my brother was born because he always used to go in a great black pram and I would speed ahead by then on my red tractor with yellow wheels. Incidentally, I have a similar passion for sports cars so you can see where this is going – I rode the tractor so fast and so far that I actually wore the wheels right down to the spokes and it had to be thrown away.

In the local library I was set free, well comparatively anyway. To me at that age this was only a moderately scaled down version of the vast collections I am now Director of in London. There was a seemingly inexhaustive quantity of books. We did always take a good selection apparently but there was one that obsessed me. It was called ‘The Tiger Who Came To Tea,’ a simple story of an innocent and vulnerable child and her mother sitting down for tea and cake and, as was clearly common in the south of England in the seventies, being disturbed by a hungry tiger. Fear not though, this couldn’t be further from the perhaps predictable scene of horror one might have expected given the situation. The tiger ate all the cake and then everything else in the kitchen. He then drank all the water in the taps and left, never to be seen again.

My mother estimates, as no request was ever put in at Stowmarket Library (not even a desperate one by her, meaning I could renew it every two weeks), that she must have read this book to me approximately one million times. Additionally, and not a record I am particularly proud of, when my Nana came to visit she was also forced to plough through the tiger’s greedy tale. The agreed estimate for Nana is about ten thousand readings. I apologise to both but I loved that tiger.

My ability to bore parents and grandparents to near madness is however, not the purpose of this story. The tiger stands for the unexpected. In those days, when we had very little money which prohibited visiting bookshops, it was in the library where the unexpected was to be discovered. That the tiger always came to tea in our house is neither here not there; he would not have visited at all had it not been for Stowmarket Library.

People who have grown up with enough money to buy books have no idea how important local libraries are. Many of these people, as is the way of the world choose professions that result in authority. Some of them become MP’s or local councillors. The reason that public libraries are now under attack by this government and its local councils is that they are used by unprofitable members of society; the elderly, the young and the poor. They are easy targets.

Public libraries are of course seen as irrelevant to wage earners, those of working age and, perhaps the childless. Those who can afford to buy books, computers and access to the web cannot understand the position of those that can do none of these things. Anyone proposing the closure of a public library is not only advocating cultural vandalism but is publicly displaying ignorance of how many people in Britain are forced to live.

Finally, the root cause of the current national debt and its related financial crisis needs to be reiterated. Public spending under Labour was high, but it was serviceable. Irresponsible public spending is not the driver for the cuts programme, but rather the use of vast public funds to bail out private sector banks. The people who use public libraries are not to blame for the UK economic downturn, but they are the ones paying for it: literally in terms of the banks and intellectually through library closures.

I needed a public library to find my tiger, to discover and to grow. I chose the library profession because I believe libraries in all their forms make a difference to people’s lives. I also do not believe that amateurs can run them, however well meaning. Cameron wants a 'big society' and at the same time orchestrates library closures, or services without professional librarians.

David Cameron and George Osborne come from the kind of families that have their own libraries. How can we expect them to give a tinker’s toss about those for whom without public libraries, the tiger would never come to tea?

BBC Trust

2011-09-04T10:28:00.006+01:00

The BBC seems to be almost constantly under attack. When Labour was in power they were vicious in their comments surrounding the BBC’s coverage of the UK’s involvement in Iraq. The famous ‘sexed-up’ dossier story, which the Beeb covered in a very balanced way, especially considering it was true, brought Labour from behind its mask of self-described honesty. Now, we discover that Blair was writing Gaddafi’s speeches. Nothing more needs to be said.

I am terribly frustrated by politicians. The Tories under Cameron are now attacking the BBC for its policies on cuts. This, from a government that is joyfully implementing Thatcherism under the cover of the financial crisis. Etonians are finally able to reengineer society without redress – it’s the only option we are told. Labour complained that the BBC unfairly targeted government policy when it was the government and now claims it is not targeting government enough now it is in opposition. The Tories have said the same thing. If the BBC is irritating both parties regardless of which one of them is in No. 10 then I believe it is doing its job.

What might be described as our ‘media bill,’ the amount spent each month on the web, television and mobile phones is astonishing when compared with the BBC licence fee. Most people in the UK pay £40 for cable television, £20 for the Internet and £30 for a mobile phone. The BBC delivers great television, world-class radio, the most trusted news website in the world, education and learning initiatives and much more all for £14 per month. Value and quality are rarely available together.

Additional to this, and British politicians should pay more attention to it, is the fact that even in America, the most trusted news feed is the BBC. In countries all around the world the BBC is held in the highest regard. This means that the BBC is partly responsible for the positive view of Britain taken by people in other countries. It’s the politicians who are responsible for the negative views.

My frustration with politicians derives from the fact that I love politics. I believe it can be a force for good. Infrequently, a politician will appear who actually delivers on this rather idealistic view. The most important in recent times for me was Mo Mowlam, who skillfully achieved consensus in Northern Ireland. For the most part though, there is just hypocrisy, lies, short-termism, self-interest and dirt. This is so disappointing it is hard to contemplate.

Despite what is said publicly, ‘ambition’ is a word used by politicians about themselves rather than being for the country.

So, why do all politicians of whatever political bent continue to attack the BBC? I suggest it is because it tells the truth, which makes them uncomfortable. It also stands for quality, which throws into relief their knee-jerk policy-making and finally it is loved and trusted by the British public (and many others), which is what all politicians want but know they can never have.

Here’s a great video from David Mitchell on politicians and the BBC.

Mr Incredible and the Toy Story

2011-08-30T17:09:00.005+01:00

Was I the only person in the world who did not know that Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple was also the creator of Pixar Films? Reading about his retirement as Apple CEO, although he remains as Chair of the Board, was an enlightening experience. Stephen Fry has said that Steve Jobs has made the greatest contribution to human culture in recent years of anyone in any field. This remarkable statement is based on Apple’s success, namely that hundreds of millions of people across the world own one or more of their products and hundreds of millions more use iTunes.

From the first Apple computer, created by Jobs in the late 1970’s, through some dark periods of being perceived as too ‘out there,’ to the triumphs in recent times of the iMac, MacBooks, iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPad, Steve Jobs has driven Apple to its place last year as the largest corporation in America.

I used to dismiss Apple. That was before I owned one of their computers. I have worked in a number of IT-related posts in my career (libraries are always IT-related), and for many years I accepted what IT professionals told me – Apple computers are expensive and not suitable for a corporate environment. They are toys, the trains of your childhood, not the ones needed for adult commuting.

I have long been fascinated by human inertia. Fascinated because I do not understand it. I have a similar interest in dark matter, the ‘stuff’ in the universe that exists seemingly against physical laws. I do not understand it but it is fascinating. Human inertia is the practice of unchanging. It is common in all walks of life, which is itself a contradiction because we are designed to change, to progress. In my own professional life change has been a constant since I qualified from Sheffield in 1998. Libraries have been at the centre of the information age. Some of what we do has gone, more will follow but so much more has altered for the good. I think I would highlight the digitisation of manuscripts as the most significant consequence of computing in libraries. Inertia in my field would have meant certain irrelevance. Libraries have changed fundamentally because they had to.

I do not see this regularly with my colleagues in university IT departments. I see a great deal of innovation of course. I have learnt enormously from working alongside IT professionals and have always defined those partnerships as their focus being on infrastructure and that of librarians on content. It works for me. What I would tentatively observe is that the reaction of libraries to the first tempest of the information revolution has not formed a reverberation in the reaction of IT departments to the second storm. The first brought us the web’s content in waves. The second is bringing clouds – computing without local hardware.

The combination of personal portable devices and pervasive wireless will be the greatest challenge facing traditional IT departments all over the world. Their desktop computer business models are under threat in precisely the same way that our world of printed books was in peril about ten years ago. We adapted, and I am sorry to say that for the moment I do not see the same flexibility in corporate IT strategies.

Inertia for some is based on laziness. This is not the case with those above. Traditional IT sluggishness is based on a perceived threat and its consequent self-interest. When I was running IT departments I felt the same. I was under the illusion that the only spend worth talking about was the immediate one. I thought that the need for the installation and support of desktop computers would last forever. I enjoyed the control such an environment gave us as a department. We could shut the entire business down if we wanted (we didn’t by the way), and we could Control The Internet.

The desktop environment also spawned a secret, vast, pulsating sibling. Every single company, however small, and every university in the world created its own server architecture. Colleagues before have taken me around these white rooms of flashing lights, tall racks of black humming machines. I am told not to touch anything. I am told not to cough for fear of introducing too many moisture particles. I am told not to breathe.

This is the environment that Steve Jobs ran from. In his resignation email he said that Apple’s greatest moments were ahead of it. I think he knows what he is doing. Beautifully designed computers are only part of the story. Dominance of creative content in iTunes is only part of the story. Market leadership in phones and tablets is only part of the story. What Apple has achieved is remarkable. What I believe it is aiming for is devastating.

Apple was born into a fight with Microsoft. From one perspective this seems odd because Apple produced hardware and Microsoft delivered software in Windows. Of course, the incompatibility fueled their stand-off and almost killed Apple more than once as HP, Dell and many others produced cheaper computers operating Microsoft Windows. But Apple was working on more than hardware. The OS I-X operating systems that run Apple computers without Windows were advancing massively. Already known to be more secure, they were becoming more sophisticated and were improving in parallel with their hardware.

Steve Jobs’ masterstroke really began with the iPod. This was the tiny computer that enabled people to store data – a cold way of describing music – via the use of their home desktop. The first iPod was a stepping-stone. It started the cult of online music transfer. It was tiny but it spawned global change. Content began to move onto the web.

In the iPhone, Apple produced another small computer that happened to be a phone, and an iPod. iTunes was expanding rapidly by then so the strategy of hand-held devices linked to the web began to accelerate. iPhones could interact with the web without the interim machine on people’s desks. With the addition of the App Store, hundreds of thousands of tools, games and other content arrived only months after the launch of iPhone 1. iTunes would be destined to effectively replace most people’s own CD libraries. iPhone allowed direct contact with the web – no desktop needed for downloads. Music was in the clouds.

In November (probably) of this year we will see the launch of iPhone 5. iPad 3 is not far away and at the same time, iTunes tightens its hold on content. The only exception presently is eBooks, which are controlled by Amazon. Apple is the richest company in America. They could take Amazon anytime they wanted and wipe the Kindle out in an instant with versions of the iPad. This is almost certain to happen.

Strategically, Apple design iMac and MacBook computers for discerning people who wish to own beautifully designed machines. No other company in the industry has prioritised pure design, or perhaps even could manufacture products to Apple’s specification. Anyway, there would be no point as the brand loyalty to Apple is so strong. Apple desktop computers are not the main threat though, to corporate IT departments. They remain relatively expensive, even when less support owing to better security is added, which would mean over a five year period an Apple computer in a university library would cost less to run than a PC. A PC is a false economy. If you buy cheap you buy twice.

Apple is not currently targeting Dell and HP. I expect they believe they will outlive them. They are not targeting any individual company. Steve Jobs has never been driven by the desire to crush but rather by the desire to create. If less innovative companies are put out of business in the process then so be it, but that is not why Apple continually reinvent the information landscape. They do it because that is what they do.

The greatest threat to traditional IT departments is also the greatest testament to Jobs’ vision. By combining the strategic growth of iPhones and iPads with developments in OS X software and with the exponential growth in web content, Apple are building a global Internet without cables and without desks. The patent they hold for much of the iPhone touchscreen technology is one of their most potent. Everyone said that no one needed the iPad. Now over one million units are sold every month and every other computer company is trying to build its own tablet, unsuccessfully. Everyone said that the iPhone was an executive toy. Now, it is the dominant phone. It is even the dominant camera. iPhone 4 is used more than any other camera to upload to Flickr.

Eventually, Apple may stop producing desktop computers and laptops. Their idea of the future is one dominated by very high specification handheld devices. The iPhone and the iPad are astonishing technologies but they will look like museum pieces relatively quickly. The multi-billion dollar profits made by Apple every quarter are financing more innovation, not less. That innovation will result in more control, not less. IT departments happily managing PC desktops need to look at themselves and ask what the future holds for them. If everyone is in possession of a personal hand-held device with wireless access to almost comprehensive content, what purpose does a managed desktop have?

Pixar films is responsible for creating, amongst others, Finding Nemo, Cars, Wall-E, The Incredibles and Toy Story. Under Steve Jobs’ leadership it has transformed the animated film industry. He set up the company with $5 million and sold it to Disney recently for over $7 billion. Incidentally, he is also now the largest shareholder in Disney Corporation. Mr Incredible believes that anything is possible. He reinvents the computer repeatedly. He changes cinema. He alters reality.

Steve Jobs once defined Apple’s philosophy by quoting the great American ice-hockey player, Wayne Gretsky, ‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is.’ Apple know where computing is going because, against all the odds of cheaper PC infrastructures and the massive vested interest in maintaining it amongst IT professionals, they have designed their way to dominance. Jobs may have overseen Toy Story but Apple does not produce toys.

The logo on Mr Incredible's chest is surely not a coincidence.

Hearing

2011-08-28T10:20:00.005+01:00

I have received such a high level of interest in the piece I wrote on my music teacher, Mr. Ronnie Lee that perhaps the only post to follow that one is a list, this time of what I believe to be the finest pieces of classical music written to date. Mr. Lee was a hard taskmaster at GCSE and A level, particularly concerning musical analysis. He was a musician capable of astonishing intuitive performance, but also one with a deep understanding of the structures and rules of music. Each of these characteristics creates a musician who is listening to music emotionally and analytically at the same time.

As is the case with most musicians, when I listen to a piece I am hearing chordal structures, rhythms and tempi, as well as responding emotionally, perhaps evoking mental imagery and memories. It is of course not necessary to have studied music in order to love music, but as a chosen course of study it adds enormously to the experience.

Clearly, as is always the case these lists are personal but I have tried to be as objective as possible in this one, very obviously in no particular order, of the finest classical genre musical works:

Adams – The Death of Klinghoffer

Ravel – Daphnis and Chloe

Ravel – La Valse

Ravel – Piano Concerto for the Left Hand

Britten – Peter Grimes

Britten – War Requiem

Britten – Frank Bridge Variations

Britten – The Turn of the Screw

Glass – Einstein on the Beach

Glass – Music with Changing Parts

Byrd – Five Part Mass

Shostakovich – Symphony 11

Shostakovich - Symphony 5

Shostakovich – String Quartet 8

Shostakovich – Viola Sonata

Brahms – String Quintets

Ades – Asyla

Tallis – Spem in Alium

Beethoven – Symphony 3

Beethoven – Symphony 5

Beethoven – String Quartet 14

Beethoven – All the late piano sonatas

Beethoven – All 5 piano concertos

Tippett – Child of Our Time

Reich – Music for 18 Musicians

Reich – Drumming

Parry – I Was Glad

Wagner – Der Ring des Nibelungen

J. S. Bach – Partitas and Sonatas for Solo Violin

J. S. Bach – Mass in B Minor

J. S. Bach – Goldberg Variations

Bryars – The Sinking of the Titanic

Tchaikovsky – Symphony 6

Mozart – Don Giovanni

Mozart – Symphony 40

Mozart – Requiem

Mozart – Serenade 10 for Winds

Sibelius – Symphony 5

Sibelius – Symphony 2

Sibelius – Symphony 7

Bruckner – Symphony 9

Bruckner – Symphony 7

Mahler – Symphony 2

Stravinsky – The Rite of Spring

Monteverdi – L’Orfeo

Elgar – Enigma Variations

Dvorak – Symphony 9

Janacek – Sinfonietta

Berg – Wozzeck

Bartok – Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste

Bartok – Concerto for Orchestra

Vivaldi – The Four Seasons

Poulenc – Organ Concerto

Vaughan Williams – Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis

Vaughan Williams – The Lark Ascending

Gershwin – Rhapsody in Blue

Prokofiev – Piano Concerto 3

Prokofiev – Piano Sonata 7

Prokofiev – Romeo and Juliet

Walton – Belshazzar’s Feast

Chopin – Ballads

Rossini – La Cenerentala

Puccini – Tosca

Handel – Israel in Egypt

Debussy – Preludes Book 1

Copland – Appalachian Spring

Josquin des Prez – Missa Penge Lingua

Rachmaninov – Vespers

Hindemith – Mathis der Maler

Holst – The Planets

Ives – Three Places in New England

So there you are, personal taste aside I do feel these are the finest pieces I have yet heard or in some cases played. This post took far longer than I was expecting to write but I really didn’t want to put anything on this list I would not be able to defend.

The Maestro - Ronald Lee MBE

2011-08-17T14:18:00.010+01:00

My father sent me a photograph this morning. Well, it was actually a newspaper cutting that included one. It was taken in Belfast in 1986 and it is of my school choir. Now, this may sound quaint, provincial and slightly unimpressive but be assured it is none of those things.

The most influential person in my life to date, outside of family was my music teacher at Grosvenor Grammar School, Belfast. For seven years, Mr. Ronald Lee MBE taught me how to live through music. I put it like that because although there were the endless exams that got me a place to read music at Queen’s University Belfast, it was what he taught us all beneath the techniques of music that was so formative. Being with Mr. Lee was what I imagine it would be like if God had been a music teacher: wise, firm, challenging, caring.

I think about him often, every day. I know others in the choir have similar feelings and equally powerful memories but as it turned out, it was only I from the entire bunch who went on to study music at university.

Mr. Lee had two choirs. The school choir, which won Sainsbury’s Choir of the Year at the time of the photograph and the Renaissance Singers, which was an adult choir principally made up of alumni of Grosvenor. The Renaissance Singers also won Sainsbury’s Choir of the Year. No one else has conducted two choirs to victory. Additionally, the school choir also won First Prize at the Montreux International Choir Festival, beating about 20 professional choirs. Mr. Lee’s achievements were remarkable even when compared to professional musicians. That he was doing this in an ordinary school in East Belfast during periods of appalling violence makes him not only remarkable. It has made him legendary.

His manner was one of explosive energy. Mr. Lee was actually a very fine pianist and his effortless control at the piano enabled him to hold choirs together from the instrument. This is more unusual than it sounds as often, the conductor will also be directing a pianist sat alongside the choir. Mr. Lee could do it all. There were some ferocious outbursts. A short, it has to be said portly man with a liking for green jackets with beige slacks, Mr. Lee did not look capable of passion. How wrong that assumption would have been. He was, at root as great a secondary school teacher as he was a musician. No one ever contradicted him. He had enormous confidence in the classroom and I learnt a great deal about public speaking from him as well as musicianship. I do remember though, many, many occasions when we performed brilliantly as much from fear as from respect.

There are so many performances I have indelibly printed on my memory that it would be hard to pick one for this profile of Mr. Lee, had one performance not been the single most exciting artistic experience of my life. It will come as no surprise to readers of this blog that the composer involved was Maurice Ravel. Working with the Ulster Orchestra on both a concert and recording of Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe remains a powerful, intoxicating and brutally beautiful memory. The orchestra was then under the great French conductor, Yan Pascal Tortelier, a striking and massive presence on the stage. He was just that when he came to our school music room to rehearse the piece. Tortelier is one of the world’s finest professional musicians. It was obvious that he had enormous respect for Mr. Lee’s own musicianship as the great conductor used to call him ‘Maestro.’

The recording is available here. The concert unfortunately will only be a memory for those who were there. Ravel’s most mind-blowing, overwhelming and life changing work, Daphnis and Chloe stands for me as the greatest piece of music ever written for orchestra. I know this is a considerable statement, but trust me, it is true. The closing passages are so exciting that you are left with a sense that something almost primordial has happened in your body. No other art form can do this and no other piece of music does it so completely. In performance the sensation is intensified and under Lee and Tortelier the effect on us, and on the audience will be life-long.

My mother was in the Ulster Hall that night and she said afterwards that Tortelier jumped at least three feet in the air as he swept the baton from as far right to as far left as possible on the final chord. I will never forget those five or six seconds of silence as the audience came to terms emotionally with what they had just heard, before themselves releasing it in the most extraordinary applause I have heard in the concert hall. Tortelier took a moment to stand utterly still in front of the orchestra and choir before raising his hands to receive the acclaim.

As Mr. Lee was brought onto the stage I think he must have known, as the audience got to their feet that he had created one of the most outstanding performances of his career. I like to think that, as this was relatively close to his death, he looked across his old haunt the Ulster Hall and the crowds standing cheering and knew what he had done. They were applauding an entire career.

Mr. Lee’s funeral was held in Belfast Cathedral on a very wet Irish morning. Both choirs were brought together to perform the service, in seats we had all occupied year after year in the equally legendary Grosvenor Carol Service. This was a school carol service that filled a cathedral and was the major Christmas event in Northern Ireland. I can recall perfectly how I felt that day. It was almost impossible to sing. After the service we went outside and one of the other teachers came up to me and said, ‘Chris, when I heard of Ronnie’s death I immediately thought of you.’ I must say I then collapsed. I had lost someone immeasurably.

The carol service was directed by Mr. Lee to the exact format of the world famous Nine Lessons and Carols performed every year at King’s College, Cambridge. My first view of the city in which I now live was on a choir trip to Cambridge after we had won Sainsbury’s Choir of the Year. I believe uniquely, we were given permission to sing Choral Eucharist one afternoon, replacing the King’s College Choir. I have never been past King’s without thinking of Mr. Lee. He had a deep respect for the English choral tradition, and I believe it was this that lay at the root of his pursuit of excellence and although we reached them, almost impossibly high standards. I remember him standing once, in that small hot music room at Grosvenor and halting a rehearsal. He lifted his head to look at us, stood up, placed both hands on the lid of his piano and said, ‘no, that’s not right. You must sing as they sing at King’s…. King’s means everything.’

It is a phrase that has echoed through my life ever since and it is one that instantly comes to mind when I see the College. Years later, now living in Cambridge I took my mother to Choral Eucharist at King’s. It was an intensely personal and emotional experience for both of us. When the choir started to sing in that astonishing medieval space I knew, and my mother knew, that Mr. Lee had always been right. King’s means everything.

A supremely gifted schoolteacher and a choral musician of genius, Mr. Lee also meant and continues to mean everything. It was an honour to be anywhere near him, and because of what he said many young people’s lives, including mine were transformed into lives of artistic wealth and emotional responsiveness. Pausing beneath King’s College Chapel is like standing at a monument to him. I am forever grateful, always thankful to have known him.

Philip Larkin's Riot

2011-08-10T16:25:00.008+01:00

The poet laid his head against the chair

And moved his hand towards the dial of

The record player, fingers twisting clockwise

For jazz to pour out in a bee swarm.

He thought about the Prime Minister

And her vicious attractive stare

As she eyeballed the men who climbed

Every day beneath the earth for money.

He thought of her face behind a riot helmet,

Her small body hidden by a numbered shield.

He saw her standing as government stands,

Unblinking into black faces.

After the battle the poet recalled the politician

Delivering a speech about thugs.

‘These people should do what they’re told,’

Was the gist of it.

The needle slid to its next track and slowed,

With a hollow saxophone leading the sad

Thoughts of its listener as he considered

What it takes for a man to punch a policeman.

The poet’s library came into his mind with its

Knowledge and, in the face of violence

Its purposeless collecting of all the deeds

Of men from eternal battlefields.

The needle accelerated on its last orbit

And became lodged imperceptibly against

The careless spinning centre of the machine,

Condemned, like history to repetition.

Brand Awareness - England's Riots

2011-08-09T10:13:00.004+01:00

England is on fire, ‘motivated,’ to use a phrase employed by a police commander in Nottingham, by events in London. The street violence begun in Tottenham has spread to Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol and indeed, Nottingham. There is one factor and one factor only behind this motivation – poverty and its coexistent coveting.

The areas worst affected by riots and looting are all, in each city either those with the deepest poverty or those to whom the looters run for cover after a city-centre spree with bricks. By example, the nest for looters in Nottingham is the area of St Ann’s, a notoriously stricken estate of the unemployed and the bored. The police are not hated for their actions on the most part; they are hated because they are the face of authority. They effectively implement government policy on the ground in these areas, and that policy has seen massive job losses followed swiftly by loss of dignity.

It is no surprise that the most popular stores for looting are filled with sports clothing. This is the uniform of choice for a youth whose only defence against a life deemed purposeless is to gather together. All people under threat form groups. When the intense stress of living every day without money is combined with endless advertising and celebrity, or when wealthy areas are beside the deprived the strain has to be released somehow.

There is a small amount of justified criticism of the police, although this usually comes from people who have not had bricks thrown directly at their person. There is far more nonsense printed about the them. This morning’s news is already wasting time on the analysis of community and police relations. Much has improved, for instance in Tottenham on this issue since the 1985 Broadwater Farm riots. That year the Met only had 30 ethnic minority officers, now it has over 3000. There is more to do, but this will not stop bored young people rioting in the face of a ceaseless culture of money and fame,

There are other kinds of riots. There are those for whom politics is a genuine motivation. Whether one agrees with the current brand of anarchism or not, this is street violence driven by principle. It is an uncomfortable opinion because in every example of revolution to remove one elite another forms in its place. All animals are equal but some are more equal than others. It may be pointless and flawed but it is not simple, such as is smashing windows to get a new pair of trainers.

In the riots this summer across England the only response can be creative action in those communities and a fundamental discussion concerning poverty in this country. If the government chooses to brand looters purely by their actions it will happen again – it is brands they are looting for.

In Northern Ireland, where street violence this summer did not gain the same coverage as that in London there was a lot of piffle written about root causes too. There were many theories postulated about the actions of police, about the traditional marching season and about discontent. These may have been contributory factors but the base of all Northern Ireland’s problems is division.

In London it is between rich and poor. In Belfast it is between Protestant and Catholic. Northern Ireland still has an education system analogous to those of pre-War Yugoslavia and pre-Luther King USA. I didn’t meet a Catholic during my own education until I was 19. That this continues, and is supported by the majority of both communities still shocks me and should do the same for everyone.

London wakes this morning to burnt cars and smoldering buildings. It should wake up too and face the inconvenient truth that these rioters are not just thugs. They are thugs, but not only that. Deep-rooted violence is fed by discontent. It does not appear from nowhere. If the shooting of one man genuinely appalled these people they would march on Parliament. They believe there is no point to that and in any case, this is their opportunity for short-term gain. Nothing can be viewed in the long-term when you are without money.

National Admissions Policy

2011-08-05T17:44:00.004+01:00

The current state of universities is intriguing. For the first time in around fifteen years a purely intellectual education for everyone is being aggressively questioned. Or at least it is in the UK. France and Germany are increasing state funding for young people to learn at the highest level and although there are difficulties, the US system is still healthily based on personal financial outlay.

In the UK for much of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, and in some cases long before that, it was accepted that knowledge of classics, philosophy, music, history, art, theology and literature was only required at the summit of society. We have lived for brief periods during widening access initiatives. These are now again narrowing.

Despite many top universities offering bursaries, far more are not doing so. Education in the humanities is returning to the ‘halcyon days of Oxford,’ to appropriate Monty’s recollections in ‘Withnail and I.’ In other words, unless you are relatively rich, in the near future you will be unlikely to attend a good university with top-flight lecturers to learn about something other than science.

In an unexpected twist the UK government has also recently announced that it will be rewarding universities financially for admitting students with AAB or above at A Level. This will make the lives of those students, I understand from any background much easier. They will be gold dust for gold diggers. The reward should be passed to students and will be an enormous incentive to work hard during sixth form or college.

The national admissions policy, (and yes, that is what all these strategies amount to) is being rewritten almost by the week. It is as if, shall we say, the government does not know what it is doing. Surely this cannot be the case? To drop the sarcasm for a second, I do not think it is the case. Government does not purely consist of elected officials but also of unelected ones. If the distracting political wing of government ducks and dives in the firing line of student and professorial snipers, then the administrative advance of the Civil Service is cleverly covered.

What is being created is a university system based on access by achievement. There is considerable support for teaching and research in science, technology, engineering and medicine anyway, and almost all of it goes to the Russell Group of top universities. Over 60% of research funding in these disciplines goes to only those 20 universities from a pool of over 200 institutions. The Russells also account for over 70% of doctoral students, and of those, over 80% are researching in the sciences. It is easy to forget just how much design has already been implemented in UK higher education.

For about ten years a phrase has been used to describe good departments in poor universities: ‘pockets of excellence.’ For the humanities, these pockets are to be expanded in the great institutions through elite admissions policies and closed everywhere else. This for instance, will protect at least in principle, the Department of Music at Queen’s University Belfast and render unsustainable the infamous ‘Meja’ departments in the new universities. The Civil Service has always wanted to do this. It was never comfortable with Blair’s ambition to send 50% of the population to something called a University, regardless of quality or its ability to deliver real prospects for its students. In the coalition it has found a natural partner in the Conservative Party. As a lifelong supporter of the Liberal Democrats I will leave further comment for another post on them. It is ironic though, that the Conservative cloak over Civil Service strategy is to be ‘explained’ (defended) by Simon Hughes MP, a member of the Lib Dems who is forced to act as if he really believes in what the coalition are doing.

The national admissions policy will, as has already been the case be introduced very slowly. It is a drizzle not a thunderstorm. The issue this year concerning the removal of the cap on student fees was a mistake not only because of the policy but because so many people noticed it. And so, many for some time will perform the delicate pirouettes that are also U-turns, such as the AAB initiative.

There have been strong political figures that have managed to steer, or temporarily change the view of the Civil Service. Blair managed it. Thatcher agreed with it but took all the criticism. This is precisely what Cameron is doing, except unlike Thatcher he is chary of attacks. He is the perfect Prime Minister as the Service gets what it wants but avoids the shots.

So what does it want? I think the national admissions policy, which is now free of social inclusion targets, is designed to return the UK to its two-tier education system. There will be a small number of elite universities teaching and researching across all disciplines (ideally for most in the Service this only means two institutions which enjoy rowing – but there are some modern thinkers who accept there might be at least twenty). Beneath these, in every conceivable sense from dining rights to student prospects there will be many more vocational institutions without research but with high student numbers.

The national admissions policy is intended to allow the UK to deliver very high quality research in science and in the humanities in a focused, well-funded environment. Students from poorer backgrounds with strong academic ability will have a place in university, and they are likely to be better supported even than now. Other young people will study trades or increasingly, creative subjects such as design, writing, journalism and art in environments that mark their progress more intuitively than is usually performed in universities by exams.

The policy has been in development since the 1970’s with only the occasional lurch in direction. It has its merits. Only those of strong academic ability will achieve a place at University. Those with equal but different abilities will begin their careers in tailored environments, but without being handed a worthless degree at the end of it.

The question for the political side of government is can they ensure that this is properly funded. France and Germany already have these structures and are increasing investment. The days of social tokenism are over. The national admissions policy will adapt as it always has done. The class issue associated with access to university must be dismissed as irrelevant by support for bright, disadvantaged students. This is an opportunity?

Holding Faberge - A week in Spain

2011-07-21T11:04:00.004+01:00

Spain is a country of the mind. It conjures up images of pure energy and perhaps joy. The bullfight releases an intensity in the audience of awe and fear, of a deliberate attempt by the Matador to cheat death. The colours of the Tapas on a heated summer evening reflect the sky. The red and yellow of herbed pork with collapsing sliced peppers turns to cooler blue in fish as the air drops. The relief of a late meal without the sun.

On the coast, sat under white parasols the sea reaches the beaches in brilliant white waves, glinting like over-exposed photographs being taken again and again. Large gulls fly low across the bays, exploiting the warm air from the water, not moving their wings but still achieving speed. On the shopping strips the famous and those who enjoy appearing with them dip in and out of names from London, New York and Paris, before chasing the gulls into the mountains in Ferraris.

Up there, in the haze of peaks and snake roads you first see the Pueblo Blancos, the white villages clinging to cliffs like goats. They are in the distance for what seems like hours as the car wills itself to make the ascent. Looking back, across the ravines to the Med the great nautical pyramid of Gibraltar juts upwards, and beyond it the line of Africa. Nowhere else can another continent appear from the sea like a fiction.

The last corner the last bend the final twist in the road and in its shocking white, Gaucin, its ancient castellated casas are in view. For thousands of years the height of this place has given refuge and sometimes failed. A flashpoint between religion and royalties, between beliefs and ideologies. Phoenicians, Romans, Visigoths, Moors - the horror of Civil War. All have come here for safety or a fight, or gold. Gaucin, ‘hard rock’ is a museum of violence and beauty turned now into happiness.

Simply because it sits so temptingly the town has been a prize. To control Gaucin meant to rule these mountains. To visit it now means to govern memories.

We follow the streets up to our destination. The streets with their aching houses, held up it seems only by the heat. A child peers through the common door blinds. She is dark, beautiful, quiet. Her pink dress floats in the relieving wind of the hills and then, with a blink of white eyes she vanishes. We have travelled this morning from England, a country for so long in competition with Spain for land and ocean. Now, we only need respite from work, from commuter trains, from rain.

The final hill and the car slides into a space opposite our house for this week. Casa Mosaica is on top of the town. Outside it is a long white shadow in the haze as we collect our bags from the car. Its name emblazoned beside the door the only hint at the wonder inside. We wait. Five minutes in Spain is nothing. A local friend runs down the hill with keys and introductions. An artist. I find her immediately special and engaging as she shows us into the house. She is of my other life as an imaginative person. The life that is within. The sustaining existence beyond the deadlines, away from the platforms of King’s Cross.

Inside Casa Mosaica the cool silhouettes of the house, stunning shapes, perfect proportions, and the coordination of colours leave us standing for a moment in silence. Seeing this house for the first time is like holding Faberge. It is an authentic experience. It is a shock. It is moving.

As we walk around the effect is cumulative. Red corridors and brass, darkly glinting. The calmest choice of greens in quiet rooms. High windows onto a garden of pools and reflections. Long terraces under reeds to hide the sun. Polished plaster bathrooms in a colour swept from the sea floor. A bright blue swimming pool viewed through solitary Agapanthus. Generous wine glasses. The kindness of particular breads. The creaking of crickets calling. Cumulative in its detail and care. Casa Mosaica is an achievement of mind over matter, just as are the millions of tiny colours which have created it. We are here.

Yet, I write this back in Cambridge. Spain is a country of the mind. Its images so strong that they are permanent gifts. That house and the country which surrounds it will always be with me.

For more images see my photostream.

Sailing from Belfast to New York

2011-07-08T08:42:00.008+01:00

The role of libraries in the 21^st Century is generally understated. Let me spend some time stating it. Previously on this blog I have proposed a number of assumptions:

- All libraries are not the same.

- Libraries are about educational opportunity, not just content.

- Collections remain important in both print and digital forms.

- Access to information is not equal across the world.

- Libraries enable discovery of the new, not only storage for the old.

- Libraries and archives exist in all areas of human endeavour.

The fact that these six facts are facts seems to have passed many people by. In universities, or at least shortsighted ones, the library is regarded as some kind of out-dated mode of travel. Why travel by ship to New York? In other organisations, such as government the archive is known to be important because it can be used to defend past actions, or used as a graveyard for files. Filing for most civil servants is much more secure than shredding. The library is a problem because it keeps expanding, but at least it has its purpose.

Universities and government agencies are the principal funders of libraries in the western world, indeed in most parts of the world. There are of course others, such as private foundations and trusts, but the majority of decisions, the principal sources of power concerning the future of teaching, research, public, prison and health libraries are on the Councils of Russell Group and Ivy League universities and in the corridors of governments.

One other aspect of libraries that is sometimes overlooked is that their management is still a professional vocation. People in all fields are generally held to account by others not qualified in the fields they fund. This is perfectly natural. As Hacker once said to Sir Humphrey, ‘Ministers are specifically chosen because they know nothing.’ The broad overview of government is on the whole, a good thing and should be protected. However, what may have broken from the leash recently is that such power does not by default result in wisdom.

It is not always the case that those holding the proverbial purse strings make the best decisions. Our acceptance of their need to watch the pennies has resulted in a belief that our particular professional view counts for little when our own funding withers.

Librarianship then, is a professional field. Being both a musician and a writer I have been struck time and again by the awe in which people who can create music are held, and the relative unimpressed view taken of writers. Everyone can write. Hardly anyone can create music. I am equally surprised by the commonly held, but rarely admitted position that librarianship is in some way less complex than for instance, original research. This allows no one who has not produced a single authored monograph to hold a view of the research process, and everyone who uses a library to become an expert in library management.

This is by no means a defensive position; it is far colder than that. It does not matter one way or the other that people have tiered views of writing and music, or of research and library management. All four will continue to exist anyway, and I would certainly rather run large libraries surrounded by vocal people who also care about them, than by willful disinterest. I have worked in both environments. The former can be a little frustrating.. The latter is dangerous to the future of information. It would be interesting to try an experiment; listen to professional librarians before cutting funding. We may be able to help. The voice of the senior public librarian in Britain in 2011 for example, is seen by Government as at best irrelevant, at worst a joke.

The library in the 21^st Century is an entity that is manifest in many, many forms. One library’s future does not set a precedent for all the others. For instance, the Internet will kill some services but others will be replenished by it. Libraries and librarians are certainly engaged in the care of collections but they are also ‘doing things’ with that content. We are not gatekeepers. We are engaged in the educational and research processes at depth. We also purchase, listen and make long-term decisions. There is no such concept as out-dated. Almost all aspects of human culture are cyclical, and in any case sometimes the choice between flight and sail is helpful.

In disregarding some aspects of the past we also dismiss certain kinds of quality; space, time; comfort; reflection; serendipity; accuracy. The bracing mid-Atlantic deck in mid-thought can be more valuable than the jet-speed enclosure. The best libraries of course offer both, but each is needed.

The world is known to be divided into the information rich and the information poor. This will always be the case so long as it suits one party to keep it that way. As it always will, then libraries remain essential, not only in developing nations, but on the housing estates and deprived areas of western countries. Libraries are an easy target for cuts because the majority of people who use them are easy targets. They do not have a voice until they enter a library. Famously, libraries are not there for silence – they are there for disruption.

Libraries unsettle, they disturb the status quo because they provide the educational opportunity for people to have a voice. This is my background as a child in Belfast visiting his tiny public library and bringing its treasures home to read every week. Libraries are precisely why I have a voice. To enable lives to change - in school, college, university, hospital, prison, the workplace, the deprived city, the broken country, this is the purpose of libraries in the 21^st Century. It always was. It always will be.

Libraries and Discovery

2011-07-02T14:15:00.009+01:00

Coverage: Science libraries differ from humanities libraries.

Intensivity: Teaching collections are not as complex as research collections.

Scale: Large libraries change in different ways to small libraries

Senate House Libraries

The three facets of the above context in which libraries operate within universities present themselves in a particular way at Senate House Libraries.

These constitute very large research collections in the arts, humanities and social sciences. The librarian’s role is complex because of a higher degree of subject knowledge than is common in science. The collection is complex because it is based on expansion and depth, rather than relegation and recycling as is the case in teaching collections. The scale is important because it affects the libraries’ ratio between future print and digital collections, a ratio fast disappearing in smaller institutions.

Libraries in other research-intensive environments share these characteristics, such as in the larger members of the Russell Group. However, there are two additional factors that define the role of libraries in the process of research facilitation at Senate House Libraries. Firstly, many of the collections are not only large but are amongst the finest of their field in the world. Secondly, a considerable percentage of these collections are held on the open shelf in central London. This provides a unique provision of internationally important materials made easily accessible, and defines the role of Senate House Libraries in the sector and as a partner of the British Library, whose collections are closed access.

Libraries and research

If the researcher were to attempt a project without access to collections, in the absence of curatorial expertise or to be without a final intellectual home for the work in a library, the project would be a mixture of fiction, speculation and perhaps most importantly, would be unread.

The Internet does not devalue libraries. It is an additional resource, in the context of extensive holdings in research-intensive humanities libraries, to aid the pursuit of research as a constant partnering between the library, its staff and the principal investigator of a project. Humanities research is concerned with discovery. Libraries are the essential mode of travel.

Funding

The libraries at Senate House and at the Institutes are specifically designed, over a process of many decades to deliver an environment tailored to the remit of SAS. They are of incomparable depth as accessible, open shelf collections. The subject experts curating the collections are in a unique position to work closely on individual research projects, or in support of national programmes. Finally, all of this is performed in central London, as part of the greatest concentration of libraries anywhere in the world. Nowhere else in the UK can offer this combination of access, intellectual importance and geographical setting.

And so, research journeys and the discovery of new ideas are made possible by libraries, either through print form or online. In London, we are privileged to crew one of the flag ships which make those voyages possible.

Orwell, Tolstoy and the Fool

2011-06-27T17:33:00.006+01:00

From 1921 to 1991, the iconic British magazine, The Listener provided a platform for journalists, writers, artists and intellectuals to fling articles and essays into the national consciousness. Orwell wrote hundreds of them, perhaps more than anyone else. He treated The Listener as bloggers treat the web. The Collected Essays contain all of these short journalistic pieces.

In one, he deals with two questions, Tolstoy’s view of Shakespeare and art as propaganda. This short piece is in fact a precursor to one of Orwell’s major essays, Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool, on the same topics. In the essay, Orwell deftly defends Shakespeare from Tolstoy, not on the grounds of being a great thinker but on the grounds of being a great poet. Orwell ends by pointing out that in relation to Shakespeare’s work, Tolstoy’s essay would have been entirely forgotten had he himself not been the author of War and Peace and of Anna Karenina. It is fascinating to be able to follow Orwell’s concerns over periods of say, a few weeks. The articles in The Listener are published regularly so it is possible for example to look at the previous weeks’ article to discover an entire piece on art and propaganda.

Tolstoy was born with a mouth filled by silver spoons. He spent much of his life as a formidable member of the Russian nobility whilst at the same time developing ascetic ideals. One trip to Paris saw him witness to a public execution. This had a profound effect on him and he swore afterwards never to serve another government. His marriage, to Sonya Tolstoya was passionate, although she became increasingly frustrated when later in life he relinquished his title, lands and copyrights. He died only a few days after finally achieving his aim of turning himself into a peasant. Thousands of his newly joined class lined his funeral procession.

In 1903 Tolstoy wrote his vicious attack on Shakespeare. This essay allowed Orwell, some thirty years later to consider why Shakespeare was completely untouched by Tolstoy’s vitriol, despite the great Russian’s fame and literary influence. Tolstoy and Orwell shared many characteristics. They were both capable of plunging themselves into a poverty they could each easily have avoided. Tolstoy threw the silver spoons away. Orwell found himself down and out in Paris and London. Their views of the state were similarly wary, both being deeply affected by first hand experience of violence. Both writers too, had a Christian base to much of their work, at least in terms of their conviction in the existences of Good and Evil. Tolstoy took this to new heights of religious extremism, being regarded as a Christian Anarchist by the end of his life. He placed the words of Jesus above the propaganda of the State. Orwell, whilst hardly a practicing Christian asked to be buried by the Rights of the Church of England. The most powerful shared aspect of the two great writers was, however it is derived in their life and work, a searing honesty.

Tolstoy turned this on himself. He could not live with his wealth and construct a meaningful philosophy at the same time. Orwell, faced with hypocrisy and fascist aggression, used his integrity as a spider uses a web – it is instinctive, beautifully spun and deadly.

Where the two writers differ most acutely is on the relative worth or otherwise of William Shakespeare. The poet’s life, what we know of it, and his hastily produced plays were anathema to Tolstoy. He considers Shakespeare to be a poor writer because he was not a great thinker. Poetry has nothing to do with it. Orwell takes precisely the opposite view. For Orwell, who by creating the nightmares of ‘Room 101’ fully understood the dreadful authority of dreams, Prospero’s island and Puck’s forest are the creations he most admired. Orwell also could not help but notice that Tolstoy chose to attack Shakespeare through King Lear, an ageing aristocrat, casting away his wealth and descending into despair. Tolstoy was throwing stones at his mirror.

Tolstoy regards Shakespeare as unimpressive because he does not, in his opinion write anything ‘important to the life of mankind.’ That Tolstoy’s personal ambition was to die shivering in a shack whilst waiting for Jesus, it is hardly surprising that the sheer life-force bursting from Shakespeare’s plays offended him.

Orwell respects Tolstoy, even admitting that Shakespeare may not be considered the great philosopher others have claimed. He draws a line though at dismissing him. Tolstoy turns his not inconsiderable fire onto the English poet but it is as though Shakespeare himself is a dream. The shots go through him as they might a ghost.

Orwell understands why. There is something, if we are to be scrupulously fair with Tolstoy that may have been lost in translation. The Russian fails to recognise the beauty of Shakespeare’s language and in so doing misses his target. An inability to be moved by a foreign language does not provide enough evidence though, for the sustained assassination attempt on Shakespeare by Tolstoy. The root of Tolstoy’s anger is fear.

Orwell refers to Tolstoy’s relationship to Shakespeare as akin to a tired father being pestered by a noisy child. Shakespeare’s exuberance, both in his work and in what can be suggested by the chaos of London at the turn of the Seventeenth Century, is too much for Tolstoy. As an old man, his personal objective to narrow his consciousness as far as possible towards Calvary meant that Tolstoy was no longer capable of enjoyment. He could not suffer fools.

This is the business in which Shakespeare excelled, and is at the centre of Orwell’s case for his defence. In King Lear, the Fool, who, while telling jokes also speaks the truth, follows the King into his madness. His voice is playful but direct. This is the voice of Shakespeare and it must have intimidated and irritated Tolstoy almost to destruction that he could not destroy this voice, this poet who taunted him with success and art.

Orwell knew the Fool. He created it himself in Animal Farm. The tragic-comic character of the great Shire horse, Boxer, who is eventually murdered is a voice of honesty cut short by the growing power of the pigs. And in Nineteen eighty-four Winston Smith, although not cast as a Shakespearean fool is made foolish by the state and the rats. Winston spends most of the novel clinging on to his own honesty, his own sense of self. At the end he accepts the Truth of Big Brother. Winston is a fool twice, engineered by Orwell’s invention of doublespeak. It is a masterstroke from a writer who understood Shakespeare deeply. It is an echo in English literature and one that is directed at Russia.

Tolstoy had his own reasons, which were far less altruistic that he tried to portray for assaulting Shakespeare. Orwell had his reason too for defending him. It was not a coincidence that Tolstoy chose King Lear and no more a coincidence that Orwell selected Tolstoy in order to defend freedom.

Tolstoy emerges from the debate that he began as a great writer. Shakespeare remains entirely untouched by his attack and Orwell stands as the finest modern story-teller. He at least, could never be accused as not having written works ‘important to the life of mankind.’

Borges, in his miniature story staring Shakespeare called Everything and Nothing, describes how when Shakespeare meets God the poet says; 'I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and myself.' The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: 'Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one.' In Borges’ last story, Shakespeare’s Memory, a man is given the entire mind of the poet. As it gradually overwhelms him he passes it on. Borges believed that the words of one man are the words of all men. We are all Shakespeare.

Orwell and Borges both discovered that art, even in the shape of a Fool is a powerful force. Both writers believed that books contain truth. That is why Tolstoy attacks these plays. It is why Orwell sought to defend them. It is why books were being burned in Nazi Germany. It is why Borges believed the library to be a labyrinth. It is why libraries remain linked to dreams, to memory, to political freedom, to educational opportunity and to truth.

If Shakespeare was a Fool then I am content in his company.

The British Library and UK Higher Education

2011-06-18T11:08:00.010+01:00

Changing landscapes

The British Library operates many services that support the Higher Education sector. It now works in a financial climate that is likely to alter fundamentally within the next three to five years as teaching funding for the arts and humanities begins to affect students’ decisions to progress with postgraduate degrees.

The student population is traditionally split into undergraduate, taught postgraduate and research postgraduate communities. Beneath this there are trends in both discipline numbers and concentration of students. In the most recent (January 2010) HEPI\BL report it is observed for instance, that the highest proportion of taught postgraduates are in 1994 Group institutions and are studying business and education courses. Also, that the highest percentage of research postgraduates are in the Russell Group, studying STEM, (Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine) subjects.

The BL highlights its role in HE as one focused on arts and humanities fields, particularly as a named ‘Research Organisation’ status with the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council). It should be welcomed that this is seen to be important to the British Library, but qualified that this is a small area in terms of emerging researchers, and one that is likely to be under increasing pressure. The BL role in supporting tenured academic research is perhaps obvious, but could be more clearly promoted.

The role of libraries and information services confirm reports on student numbers and academic activity. For example, the largest research collections and richest scientific information environments are also in the Russell Group whilst the most comprehensive e-learning infrastructures can be found in universities, such as London and the Open University that are delivering the highest numbers of distance-learning courses. Senate House Libraries is delivering both large e-learning content and research collections.

It’s helpful to split the HE sector into areas of engagement where the BL might continue or improve on its partnership with universities and their libraries.

Areas of engagement

Undergraduates

· The physical access to the British Library by undergraduate students is welcomed, although it should be better regulated by collection need rather than additional reading space.

· The Hathi Trust in the US is digitising millions of books. Combined with Google this will transform access to standard texts. The BL needs to lead on a UKRR (United Kingdom Research Reserve) for monographs, or similar projects.

· Thematic guides to historic collections at undergraduate level are key to engaging students in considering further study.

· BL curators should seek to present collections and services directly in lecture theatres. Whilst this may seem daunting, it could at least be achieved in the major cities and online.

Taught postgraduates

· Further work should be considered on targeting support for business and corporate engagement, where large numbers of students need advice. The current Business and IP Centre is very valuable.

· The BL should be a presence within course materials where appropriate. A feasibility study could be performed with the OU.

· Technology should enable the Library to be perceived as accessible outside London. One method would be to market BL services inside university libraries and on their VLE’s (Virtual Learning Environments).

· Social networking tools are often the ‘peer review’ at this level and the BL could provide greater support to libraries in targeting discipline areas, such as English Studies to create ‘groups’ on known sites such as Facebook.

· Integrating BL services into universities is weak. BL Direct, where journal articles can be ordered needs far more promotion.

· Training days in nations and regions, as well as London would be welcomed.

Research postgraduates

· The EThos service needs further investment, both financially and in purpose. A link could be made to other PhD projects, such as DART-Europe and additionally to social networking to create a community around content.

· UKRR is one of the BL’s recent achievements in collaboration with universities. The opportunity to prove the value of HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England), investment here should not be lost – these are efficiencies despite high funding.

· The National Deposit Act, which allows published materials to be acquired by Oxford, Cambridge, Trinity College Dublin and the National Libraries should be reviewed. This is needed to fully understand its cost, not least in terms of storage and to establish its relationship to mass digitisation projects now and in the future.

· The research landscape has always included cross-sectoral work. This could be made much clearer, even in London. An agreed strategy for research collections in libraries, archives, museums and galleries is urgently required in the capital to respond to diminishing funding.

· The research provision roles of the BL, Cambridge, Oxford, LSE, UCL, KCL and Senate House, as the seven largest ‘Golden Triangle’ libraries should be clearly and innovatively restated.

Academic researchers

· BL could be more vocal on the Affordable Subscriptions to Periodicals (ASPI) initiative through RLUK (Research Libraries UK). The UK HE sector spends 10% of QR (research) funding on journal subscriptions, but this is an international problem and would benefit from National Library support.

· A process whereby the major research libraries could bring BL curators in early on research proposals at their universities would be timely.

· The School of Advanced Study, Senate House Libraries and the five current nationally funded libraries (Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, SOAS and Manchester) have roles beyond their institutions. A seminar towards greater coordination would be welcomed.

· Digitisation of materials is critical. There is little coordination on this.

· JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) is changing to a member subscription service. There is an opportunity for the BL to play a greater role in web developments.

Essential role

The British Library is already essential to the UK HE sector. Much of its work is recognised as innovative and transformative. However, despite the long history of partnerships between the BL and both libraries and researchers there is an equally long issue concerning the Library’s ability to move flexibly with the sector. The most recent example of this is the real difficulties in making EThos efficient and effective throughout the UK.

The most critical strategic question concerns the Library’s ability to adapt to a sector that will undergo a considerable period of change in 2012-2014. The undergraduate base will be more demanding, the postgraduate base will focus even more intensively on science in fewer institutions and the research postgraduate base will expect far richer content to be digital. Each major library will need to address all of these in a context of more commercial interest in the provision of information direct to readers, not least from Google.

The Russell Group libraries, the major libraries of the 1994 Group, the great heritage institutions and the NHS information services will all be asked to do more with less. The British Library is key to much of this new environment, not least as JISC and the European Commission shift both their business models and emphases to coordinated delivery of research content and away from investigative pilot projects.

I believe that although the BL needs to increase its presence across the UK, that the existing concentration of students, researchers and libraries in London offers a real opportunity to build new partnerships. Shared digital services and coordinated physical access policies will enable the BL to engage with HE and HE will help the BL remain essential to research in the ever-changing information age.

The Armed and The Unarmed

2011-06-12T16:17:00.012+01:00

George Orwell wrote this in his anti-pacifist essay (although there were many others), ‘No, Not One.’ This seems to me a clear and realistic position to take on the matter of aggression and a viable response to it. I have struggled with an innate pacifism for many years, formed on the streets of late 20^th Century Belfast. When you live amongst violence you quickly grow to hate it. Yet, I was aware that others, older and braver than myself stood between the bombers and me. Now these people are younger and braver, but they still stand between my life and those who, despite how distant this might seem to many in Britain, want to kill us.

Orwell authored hundreds of essays. These are often published alongside reviews of other people’s books, as it was often his habit to use a book review to deftly discuss his own views of the novelist’s concerns. ‘No, Not One,’ is a famous dismissal of pacifism but it is in fact a book review, this time of Alex Comfort’s ‘No Such Liberty,’ which was published in 1941. Orwell thought most reviewers were idiots, forced by the need to be paid to say that all books were good, as the publishers were advertising in the Sunday papers.

Much has changed since Orwell was in journalism, and much hasn’t. He used reviews to pay the rent, but also as regular platforms from which to proclaim. That these miniature tracts are beautifully written, and also true means that his appropriation of a form that is meant to converse about someone else’s work can be forgiven. Orwell used book reviews as other novelists have used poetry, short compressions of the grander thinking behind the major books. The politics of Orwell’s essays led directly to Animal Farm and Nineteen eighty-four.

Pacifism is a sign of luxury and a perceived safety. This is not to say that war is good. It isn’t. The question is how do we respond to violence? I am not claiming that all war is justified; indeed very recently in this country we have undertaken military conflict on very flimsy grounds. Iraq is still chaos and Afghanistan remains an utterly pointless exercise. Libya is interesting, as the entire Arab region needed attention years ago. Now we look like we are firing blanks, too little too late.

Orwell at least had the defence of western civilisation to call for, and he knew his enemy. The United Kingdom in 2011 is now at war in three countries and counting, and is also engaged in covert warfare in many others and online. The security services within the UK are working to halt an ever-present threat in our cities. The police are forced to waste time controlling radical elements in otherwise valid marches.

If people look at the world and think there are bigger issues to shout about than war and street violence, they are misled by either a gentle form of ignorance or by a life of comparative luxury. A public galvanised by an immediate threat read Orwell. The achievement of Al-Qaeda is that most people are not frightened, immediately making them vulnerable. That thugs can infiltrate legal protests is the opportunity presented by naivety. We should not spend our lives in fear, but equally we should not forget or criticise those who protect us, whether we realise it or not. Our guard is currently down.

I did not think anything of seeing, on the walk to school in Belfast, a Landover with its rear doors open and soldiers with machine-guns hanging out of the back. I thought nothing of going to bed with the constant sound of helicopters, and the frequent, mostly distant sound of bombs or gunfire. I only experienced a bomb physically once, which was enough to shake me out of any real passion for pacifism that I may have otherwise tended towards.

This is not to say that violence is ever justified as an end to itself. Defence is one thing but peace is a greater aim. The problem is that many people do not want peace.

Orwell makes us face this choice just as he did his own readers during the Blitz. Pacifism is not possible for anyone who is in contact with the real world. Orwell balances this overt support for the state of course with vicious attacks on it. In his major essay, ‘Why I Write,’ he says, ‘Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’ This is not contradictory. It is reality. To stand against violence means to stand in the line of fire.

Orwell's Clocks

2011-06-09T09:17:00.011+01:00

George Orwell was inspired to use the library at Senate House, where I am Director, as the Ministry of Truth in his novel Nineteen eighty-four. His wife at the time was working in Senate House during WWII, as it had been commissioned by the government to provide accommodation for the Ministry of Information. On the roof of the library, there are still the disconnected phone lines direct to the Cabinet War Rooms. Senate House was the tallest building in London during the War, (apart from the crucifix atop St. Paul’s Cathedral), and the library acted as a viewing tower to watch for the Luftwaffe coming up the line of the Thames to bomb central London. The library played an important part in the defence of London. Orwell still plays an essential role in the defence of freedom.

One of the most formative periods in Orwell’s life was triggered because his parents could not afford to send him to university. Instead, he became a police officer in the Indian Imperial force in Burma. As a young man, when most of his contemporaries were dining in Cambridge, Orwell was discovering, observing and perhaps most importantly, writing.

There can be few authors whose career and publication chronology so clearly move towards a final masterpiece, as was the case with Orwell and Nineteen eighty-four. This is a writer who constantly flexed his technical and intellectual muscles by writing vast quantities of journalistic pieces and essays. I believe him to be the greatest essayist in the English language. These small pieces are never far from the creation of longer, more sustained works of art. Earlier novels, such as Burmese Days, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air and A Clergyman’s Daughter are almost Forsterian in their camera-like capture of the English. They are strong novels, but not those for which he will forever be remembered. Orwell was proud of some aspects of these four books, but viscerally dismissive of other parts, describing A Clergyman’s Daughter as ‘tripe.’ However, on the whole, each book was critically well received. In reviews of the time, it is possible to find phrases such as ‘efficient indignation’ and ‘irony tempered with vitriol,’ being used to describe the books. Both characteristics were well practiced by the time Orwell used them in his later masterpieces.

In his one of his collections of essays and journalism, Decline of the English Murder, Orwell’s brilliantly controlled anger is unleashed on many topics. The keen political sense, which is at the heart of his genius, is shot through every essay. Orwell was a literary sniper who never missed his target. I do not believe there is a single weak sentence in the entire output of essays. He was and is, lethal.

The longer essays, which today might even be considered as travel-writing, (albeit of an extraordinarily intense kind), such as The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London are both uncomfortable, awkward, impassioned works about people who would be unlikely to ever read them. The poor and disposed of Wigan, London and Paris stood and fell for Orwell as examples of failed societies. His desperate care for those he saw at the hopeless underside of our culture has huge resonance in today’s world. Everyone who has enough money to buy books and enough time to read them should own and read these two astonishingly cruel and wise pieces.

Orwell, however great a journalist and essayist, of course achieved his notoriety and fame through fiction. Alongside Jonathan Swift, the great Dublin-born writer, Orwell is literature’s other great satirist. Animal Farm has as its subtitle, A Fairy Story. Orwell deliberately uses perhaps the most innocent literary form to warn of mankind’s most devious and destructive capabilities. Told in a way that can still be read to children it chronicles the corruption which Orwell believed almost inevitably follows the attainment of power. The pigs throw the humans off the farm, and then become more and more like their erstwhile oppressors until, at the end, it is impossible to tell the difference between man and pig. Animal Farm is a very short piece of writing, but all the techniques of a journalist are brought together with great storytelling into perhaps a story of the most beguiling brutality in English literature.

Animal Farm remains as one of the greatest depictions of totalitarianism in any art form. Only one person could create something even more powerful, and that person was Orwell himself in Nineteen eighty-four. The famous first line, ‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,’ immediately sets the scene of a world following catastrophe. This world is made up of three superstates, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, each in perpetual battles and alliances with one another in the wake of a global atomic conflict. Britain is named in the novel as ‘Airstrip One,’ and the principal character, Winston Smith lives in the ruins of London.

Nineteen eighty-four is a novel, like many others, about love, war, resistance and the human spirit. It is a novel, like no other, that succeeds in creating a world so terrifyingly close, in cruelty and corruption to any period in human history, that it will never date. The greatest irony of the book is that its title is a date. That the clocks strike thirteen ensures that the story is an analogy, and so, forever 1984 will be associated with this book, and with its warnings.

Winston is caught. He betrays Julia, his lover to Big Brother. He is tortured in the Ministry of Love (the others are Peace, Plenty and Truth). Eventually, after being handed a death sentence he accepts the teachings of the Party and learns to love Big Brother – the system which every day holds required periods for the entire population called ‘Two Minutes of Hate,’ where images of enemies are streamed on the telescreens to allow the population to release all the hatred against something other than the Party that controls them.

When Orwell was fighting for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, he was shot through the throat. His adventures in Spain produced Homage to Catalonia, a remarkable account of his time fighting Communists. Orwell observed many horrors at war, but one aspect that struck him like a clock striking thirteen, was how in war, propaganda is portrayed as Truth.

This is not merely a writer of fictions and fairy stories. Orwell was a man who lived what he believed. His experiences in Wigan, Paris and London were not viewed from hotel bedrooms. In London he became a tramp on the streets. In Paris he took a number of menial jobs and lived in the poorest arrondissements.

I have been in many libraries and held countless treasures. Those in Senate House are amongst some of the most memorable. As Orwell’s wife worked alongside the books that chronicle England’s history, could she have conceived that her husband would add to their number so many important works of art, and that one of them, his greatest, would derive at least part of its inspiration from the building in which she worked? Orwell routinely destroyed his manuscripts. The only remaining one is Nineteen eighty-four. This is held in the archive of University College London and I once held it. The power of seeing the famed first sentence form almost before you is almost impossible to relate.

Nineteen eighty-four - manuscript

Orwell’s neologisms have already altered the English language, indeed many languages. Big Brother, Room 101, Thought Police, even the term ‘Orwellian’ to describe totalitarian states. But it is the life and personality behind these words, the writer that Orwell became through living passionately and dangerously, which are his continuing gift. No dictator can exist without the mirror of Orwell’s writing showing him for what he is. The innocence of revolution will also echo what Orwell saw and what he wrote. Many writers attain a place in the canon of literature, few grow in importance eternally.

Orwell wrote of Dickens (but surely this is also autobiography):

‘He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.’

The Final Piece

2011-05-30T11:09:00.004+01:00

The future university is often termed in the singular. Similarly, the future of libraries assumes a common destiny, as if all libraries, all universities were the same to begin with. This of course, is not the case. Each one is a different piece in the jigsaw that forms the education sector.

Universities in the future will perform in many different ways. As now, there will be institutions focused on teaching and others where research depth, both in terms of staff and income, is the principal aim. In each, the supporting services will reflect these priorities. In particular, libraries and information services will consist primarily of intellectual content (what used to be called books), or large digital teaching platforms. In a few cases, institutions will deliver both teaching on a large scale and research in most disciplines. These ‘dual’ universities will be the most expensive to attend, the hardest from which to obtain the offer of a place, and will be the strongest international brands.

In other words, not much is likely to change at the institutional level except for a considerable increase in pervasive technologies for both research facilitation and teaching. The impact of this on both original academic output and on the student experience is that the future, if it is to be defined at all, will be defined as collaborative.

The greater change, certainly in Western countries will be a reduction in the number of institutions capable of awarding degrees, especially higher degrees. The international university sector will alter dramatically over the next ten years, as a natural effect of the greater concentration of research funding in a smaller group of institutions. These universities will also become more adept at using their research culture to attract and retain students. This will mean they will be more expensive to attend, but the degrees awarded will consequently be viewed as valuable. Many more students will also choose to study further for Masters and Doctoral awards.

The larger body of teaching-led institutions will see mergers and closures. In the UK, there is an astonishing disparity of quality and resources between universities currently planning to charge the maximum £9000 per year at undergraduate level. This will have to be resolved in order to make any sense of choice for students and to ensure that higher education can be clear to employers. Presently, commerce must think that many universities have lost their minds.

In terms of disciplines, the ‘grand’ humanities subjects such as English, History, Classics, Philosophy, Music, Art History, Archaeology and Modern Languages will retain their status at the heart of the research-intensive curriculum. They will though, gradually become ever more interdisciplinary at the higher research level. Again, technology, in terms of the digital humanities will shift from its current position as a quirky sub-discipline to a dominant role in all core fields.

Science, often viewed as more innovative in its use of technology will need to be more radical with its students. Science research is leading edge but much teaching and staff-student contact is very traditional. Students often have to wait until their PhD before they are fully immersed in new work. Many of them never see it. I have seen evidence of this in large institutional surveys, where undergraduates in science are frequently underwhelmed by their experience of teaching. This must and will change.

With greater clarity over the roles of differing institutions, rather than, as is the case now, all universities claiming world-class status, will come a better relationship between education and the wider world. The employment sector will seek out talent from both vocational and research institutions. Universities in the future will also be able to carve out new roles in international relations and politics; a natural development of stronger brand recognition.

Technology partners, such as Google and Apple will be more attracted to universities with an intellectual brand to match their own in retail. This has already begun. iTunesU is usually promoted using Stanford, UCL and Oxford. Marketing of research culture will increase.

Whatever the future holds for our sector it is likely to be an improvement on the current state of affairs, as long as universities themselves are given a strong, open voice at the table of government. That is the one piece of the jigsaw I cannot find. I wonder if anyone will discover it?

Opportunities

2011-05-29T11:21:00.004+01:00

It is difficult to see the truth when it hides behind well-groomed intelligence. David Willetts, the UK’s minister for universities is the considerate, clever face of a government which either does know what it is doing, and if so should be honest about it, or doesn’t know what it is doing, and if so should be stopped.

The sixth form student, Padge, above is part of a BBC interview concerning young people who wish to go to university but are put under pressure by their families to get a job instead. Padge did better at his GCSEs than even he expected. He wants to study biology at university, but his builder father is discouraging. Not least, because he himself always avoided debt.

There are few things that make me angry (any more), but the current government policies on education certainly account for many of them. Without going into detail, I would not have been able to go to university, in my case Queen’s University Belfast, unless the government had helped me. It did, and although I supplemented the grant with performance fees (I studied music), I did live on just over £1000 per year. I managed this of course with family help, but the grant was essential. I also left Queen’s without student debt.

The problem that the coalition government is trying to fix does exist. There are too many universities, which are devaluing degrees and forcing employers to make distinctions that once were made between people with or without a degree. The truth is that degrees from some universities in the UK are viewed by employers as no better than being without one. Not only have students wasted time they have also begun life in debt for something almost worthless.

At the same time, the government is allowing the cost of degrees to the individual student to soar. Even the basic economics is not logical. The product is becoming devalued, so rather than improve the product, it is retailed at a higher price. Who in government is responsible for this thinking?

There are 20-30 universities in the UK which will always be at the top of the national league tables. There are two or three, possibly four which will also be ranked at the top of the international tables. There are another 30-40 universities which, whilst not possessing the vast research depth of the top 20, remain very strong institutions. They should be supported to become more focused on quality in fewer areas and discouraged from competing with the larger research-intensives. Additionally, the UK has some of the world’s finest art schools and music conservatoires. These should be protected and promoted.

The government misunderstands the sector fundamentally, perhaps even willfully. If you take these policies to their logical conclusion the UK would have an entire university sector made up of institutions like Imperial College London, and very few of them. We would be excellent at producing a low number of science graduates. These would go on to superb jobs in the US or Asia and never come back.

For everything else, mediocre would be acceptable. Second-rate humanities departments would produce debt-ridden, unemployable graduates without ambition or learning. And this would be fine because in the eyes of the government the humanities ‘don’t really matter’ anyway. Who would care that currently one of the world’s most creative and historically rich nations had lost its ability to reflect on its place in the world?

Well, many people care.

The solution proposed by the government to a problem defined as financial, is to pass that problem to young people. It does not solve anything. It just spreads the difficulty further. One of the most destructive drivers for student fees rises is that those in power tell us the nation cannot afford to run higher education anymore. That is half true.

A successful university sector in the UK would consist of around 100 institutions of differing kinds, all offering free places to the best students. Padge would realise his ambition and there would be less waste. Padge is a UK student who even wants to study science for heaven’s sake. Why is he not being given every possible support, every opportunity?

Theseus and the Minotaur

2011-05-22T09:40:00.007+01:00

This week, Waterstone’s, the UK’s most significant chain of bookshops was purchased for £53million by the Russian tycoon Alexander Mamut. He has now installed the respected bookseller, James Daunt as the new Chief Executive. This is in the same week that the Minotaur, the supermarket chain Sainsbury’s, was named as UK Bookseller of the Year. The former story is a lifeline to the sale of printed books in Britain, the latter is a disgrace.

James Daunt is the current boss of Daunt Books, a London chain of six bookshops, the first of which was opened in Edwardian Marylebone. He is now faced with a chain of over 300 shops in nearly every town in the UK, each of which is beaten down to selling wrapping paper, coffee and ‘celebrity’ biographies from people only half-way through their lives.

This does not distinguish it from other major Western chains, particularly in America. Battling the supermarkets (again – Sainsbury’s?) on one side and Amazon on the other has led to a complete loss of purpose at Waterstone’s. James Daunt, the Theseus of the hour, may be the person to rediscover this. Waterstone’s stakeholders seem to have spent too much time on the Internet and nowhere near enough time in real bookshops.

Entering a bookshop should guarantee a surprise. The reader must be delighted. The physical experience of the best bookshops can withstand the price-fixing of the supermarkets and the generalist appeal of the web. Bookshops and libraries are both part of the same industry and although I am not a bookseller, in a sense I am exactly that - a provider of books. The weakest libraries are those that replicate or surrender to the web. These are filled with sofas rather than shelves. The greatest libraries use what the web cannot offer – beautiful spaces to read, extensive collections of books the reader does not expect to find.

Yesterday, I walked into one of these bookshops. Topping and Company of Bath and Ely (I was in Ely), are precisely the kind of bookshops the previous Waterstone’s management forgot to visit. The shop itself is a labyrinth, which is always recommended when designing bookshops or libraries. Our minds act instinctively, as Theseus did when faced with the Minotaur, towards serendipity and interconnectivity within labyrinths.

Amazon tries to replicate this through the ‘People who bought this also bought this’ technology. It is dry, often laughable and frequently inaccurate. It also misses the point. People, whether in great libraries or in great bookshops do not want to be guided in this way. They want to find their own paths in the labyrinth. Theseus used thread given to him by Ariadne in order to escape. All bookshops and libraries need to do is publish their opening times.

Ely Cathedral sits amidst almost inconceivably large, flat fields. It is as if the 1000-year-old building has been transported to the American plains. The small city encircles the stunning cathedral and on one of these streets is Topping Bookshop. Inside its labyrinth each book is wrapped in cellophane. This shows care for the books, but also makes opening at home a special event. The depth in each section is full of surprise, including my own personal love of US editions, (perhaps we were in America?), and my purchase was the New York edition of Borges’ Non-fictions. A blog from another era, this book is its own labyrinth. Topping had both the UK and the US versions. I bought the more expensive US one because I love their shop.

Waterstone’s has a chance. If they release their managers in each store to make their own decisions and create their own labyrinths, then they will be using the one aspect of their business that cannot be replicated by the Internet: the freedom to wander the labyrinth.

New Guillotine of the Masses

2011-05-20T10:31:00.008+01:00

Ai Weiwei

‘A society lacking individual consciousness is truly gloomy and cold, and widespread abandonment will cause the very last green leaf to wither; it is capable of extinguishing the very last candle.’ Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei is the most significant living Chinese artist. He is also one of the world’s most influential designers, architects and bloggers. On the 3rd April 2011 the Chinese government arrested him as he was about to board a flight to Hong Kong. The charges are typically opaque; ‘economic crimes.’ His studio in Shanghai was closed, computers and hard drives removed, his assistant has disappeared and many other staff and relations have been arrested. Only four days ago, on the 16^th May his wife was allowed a brief visit for the first time.

Weiwei was contracted as the design consultant for the famous ‘Bird’s Nest’ stadium, the centerpiece of China’s Olympic park. His art works and installations have been exhibited in every major gallery in the world and both international governments and the art world have demanded his release from custody.

I am reading a collection of his blogs at the moment, published by MIT Press in the US. This is an interesting book for two reasons; firstly, his writing is vicious and brave on all aspects of politics and art; secondly it is an important book because it is a book. Weiwei is notorious for crossing standard boundaries, particularly when working as both artist and architect. This time he has printed the Internet.

Weiwei has been especially scathing of the Chinese authorities over their handling of the devastation following the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. His blog was removed when he published an (incomplete) list of nearly 6000 children who had been killed by collapsing buildings at school because of poor flooring and ceilings built without any support. The Chinese government still denies that a lack of building quality in its schools is to blame. Following an interview for state television, where Weiwei repeated his claims, he was badly beaten. At an opening of an exhibition in Germany soon afterwards he was taken into hospital where German doctors discovered a cerebral hemorrhage. He has survived worse.

‘How foolish and obscene must a person be to lie to the families of the deceased, to bully parents who suffer from the loss of their children and their ruined futures? They cover eyes, stuff throats, wiretap phones, track whereabouts, and threaten, they buy people off, detain, beat and persecute the common people.’ Weiwei

It was to be expected that the move towards greater openness in China leading up to the Beijing Olympics would be restrained once the Games had been completed. The current crack-down on dissent is far stronger than anticipated though, apparently because of the ‘Arab Spring’ revolts in the Middle-East and the Chinese government’s fear of a similar uprising in China. Weiwei is by far the most prominent person to be detained. There will certainly be many thousands more now in prison or dead.

As the West deals with the threat from al-Qaeda, the growing tension across North Africa and the complexity of an aggressive Iran it is astonishing that for the most part, except for press comment on Weiwei, China is reported as little more than a business opportunity. I have direct experience of this through Higher Education, but that is small-fry compared to the view taken by global commerce of the vast resource in manufacturing and retail presented to an economically-challenged Western world.

Google’s decision to leave China is its best and bravest decision since its formation. The trigger for this was a response to a series of web hackings dubbed ‘Operation Aurora’ by Western security agencies. It is proven that this extensive illegal activity originated in China, and was therefore almost certainly funded by the Chinese authorities. Google’s accounts were all hacked. So were Weiwei’s, his personal date stolen and bank accounts accessed.

Proof that the Internet is now the most important tool to humanity is that so much of it is banned in so many countries. In China, Twitter, the new guillotine of the masses cannot be accessed. If it were available it would be even more powerful than in the West, as 140 characters in Chinese equates to 140 words, not letters. Deeply profound statements would undoubtedly result from a Chinese version of social networking. Facebook, Google, YouTube and other websites are also banned or censored.

The ‘last candles’ in Weiwei’s China are still alight, but flickering. This country is a business opportunity beyond the dreams of most corporatists, but at what cost?

The Survival of Antiquity

2011-05-14T08:54:00.006+01:00

The process of re-engineering the life of the book continues apace. There appears to be a defining of the future as purely digital. It is assumed that as a process has begun, namely the transfer of print to digital books, then that process must have a conclusion. There is inevitability about the dominance of the screen. iPads are objects of desire, and ones we thought we didn’t even need, until we held one.

I believe that my once treasured DVD collection is now dead. Over the last few years it has moved from pride-of-place in the sitting room to being further and further away from where I actually watch films. Even the core of the collection, an (almost) complete set of Woody Allen’s films is now slumped at the top of the stairs gathering dust. I am not proud of this because in a sense it was not intentional. I didn’t even notice the frequency with which my decision-making was being influenced by both TV film libraries and more recently, by the web. My DVD collection is dead and I may as well throw it out.

Why has the same process not happened to my CD collection? There must be a variable in there about age, but I think this is overstated in the media. I know ‘the kids’ no longer buy singles to the same degree that we did, but they do buy physical albums, more than ever in fact. My CD collection is 20% pop music and 80% classical music. I can honestly say that I can remember where and why I bought almost every single one. For instance, to raise funds in order to buy the 1993 Pet Shop Boys album ‘Very’ I had to paint an artex ceiling in Belfast. All those details are important, they were trying times and that was a difficult ceiling. More recently, I went to the wonderful Heffers here in Cambridge and bought a Boulez recording of Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand. This fantastic release is genuinely heavy with extensive liner notes and photographs. It is already a valuable object.

And so to my books. I have carried these across the UK in the course of my life so far. They have been sworn at, when boxed and waiting at the bottom of flights of stairs. They have been on far too many Ikea bookshelves in the days before decent salaries. They have been in the backs of cars and the bellies of lorries. They have been found in more bookshops than I can possibly remember, or recommended to me by friends… or Amazon. A few have travelled with me all over Europe, to America and to China. One; Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ has been held at night like a bible, during times of difficulty. Another; Larkin’s ‘The Less Deceived’ has been read since I was at school, still having the power to transform an ordinary afternoon into something memorable.

Aby Warburg, the great German bibliophile said to his younger brother Max when they were both children, that he would give him his birthright to the family fortune if Max would agree to buy him all the books he wanted for the rest of his life. Max agreed and over the decades, Warburg created something remarkable. The University of London now cares for his library, but the original library building, from which Warburg fled the Nazis, was more than books. It was a comprehensive and unique view of life.

Built in a circle and with oval shelves, the books were classified purely on how Warburg believed they contributed to his core beliefs; that humans rediscover aspects of the past, of tradition for themselves in every age, and that libraries should be anti-linear in order to aid that discovery through serendipity. Defining characteristics of the age of Enlightenment and of the Renaissance for example, were provided by the reuse of Classical forms, structures and intellectual ideas. Warburg called this ‘the survival of antiquity.’ The circle of ideas.

Change is inevitable, indeed welcome but it must be observed and monitored as well as absorbed and enjoyed. As the world moves to ever more pervasive digital culture, we should remember that the physical still has meaning. As a librarian, my instinct is the same at home as it is at work. I accept that my DVD collection is of the past, but I respect the origins and remaining authority of my CD and book collections. Warburg continues to show us through his library and its remarkable, almost corporeal presence that the future is not defined by the digital alone. All libraries, like life are circular.