Today, we had a presentation from the Head of British Collections at the British Library in anticipation of our visit there, tomorrow (which, by the way, means that we'll be in London and I'll be offline until Friday). It was a good talk, although I got a curiously evasive reply when I asked him about their UKWAC (sort of the UK union archive) data storage and redundancy. Apparently, they're currently outsourcing everything to corporate third party but have vague plans to bring it all back in-country at some point in the future -- Somehow that seems unlikely, especially once they've offloaded terabytes of data.
Oh well, I encountered something similar when asking the head of the Oxford Digital Library about their partnership with Google and just how "black-box" the OCR QA technology is. That may not mean anything to you, but it definitely demonstrates how significantly the UK libraries are leaning on outside sources to leverage their digital initiatives. Of course, that kind of information is always shrouded by non-disclosure legal stuff, anyway.
We also had an interesting talk with one of the heads of the London Libraries Development Agency, as well as a lecture from the Assistant Director of the University of Bristol about her studies regarding the integration of Academics and Librarians in the various strata of UK higher ed.
Then, we attended a tour of the Oxford University Press and fondled some lead type and first-edition Lewis Carroll. Interestingly, the OUP doesn't actually print anything, themselves, any more. They resell the physical printing and binding to hundreds of smaller shops around the world.
Finally, I made a solo run-through of the Ashmolean Museum (mind you, I haven't had to walk more than two blocks for any of this), which was pretty cool, though much limited due to the extensive renovations that are underway. Then, a quick stop by Sainsbury's for some trail mix and I'm back here prepping for dinner.
Tonight, I believe, some of us are going to go dig around one of the nearby libraries (the Sackler library, perhaps). Alternately, there is also a crew going to the Eagle and Child pub, which -- known locally as the "Bird and Baby" -- was the hangout for those "Inkling" malcontents, especially C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein (speaking of whom, did you know he did much of the editorial work on the Ws in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, due to his philological mastery of Germanic and Scandinavian languages? I actually read a letter he'd written about the etymology of the word, "hobbit," today.)
Whew! OK, I'm off for food. The weather has been cloudy but dry and I understand that tomorrow is going to be sunny, humid, and hot.
Cheers!
