Keeping posts going

Pity the poor British Library, an institution which simultaneously does such great things, yet at the same time seems to have utterly lost its way. The cyberattack of 2023 has created damage not only to its digital infrastructure (the full extent of which I fear has yet to be admitted…) but to the institution’s mindset. The place is cracking up. The news that its chief executive Rebecca Lawrence has stood down with immediate effect after less than a year in post is only one of a succession of mishaps, from COVID to an attack on the Magna Carta, that have afflicted a place that for so long never did anything wrong.

Among the mishaps is the end of Typepad. Typepad was a blogging software founded in 2003 and used by too few people and organisations as WordPress became all-conquering in the world of blogging. But the British Library picked Typepad in 2007 (or thereabouts), and all of its many blogs were published on the platform. Though some cherished the platform, I found it annoying. But it just about worked, and I created two of those blogs – Moving Image, covering moving image topics, naturally, in 2010; and The Newsroom, covering the Library’s news collections and issues around news past, present and future, in 2013.

In August of this year Typepad announced that it was closing down at the end of September. Panic ensued among the blogging community, as writers rushed to back-up what they had produced and to transfer their cherished work to new platforms. The British Library was among those caught out by this unexpected calamity. Its solution has been to keep its blog posts going on a new platform integrated with the rest of its website (rather than relying on an external host), with the decision made to lose the thematic blogs, of which there were many, instead having the one blog page and using tags to guide the user (we hope) to the information they seek. Good luck to the new venture. The problem has been what to do with all the hundreds of old blog posts. A select few have been transferred to the new blog site (with new URLs). For the rest an ‘archive’ is promised, which was announced first as being ready by end of October 2025, then to be just after that date, and now promised to be “available in the coming months”.

Heigh ho. If you find the old Typepad links somewhere, you can put these into the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and find them there. Presumably the BL will do much the same with the UK Web Archive, though this remains unavailable following the cyberattack. But web archives generally require you to know the web address (URL) of the site or blog post you are seeking. If you don’t have this, it’s as good as lost.

For this reason I have decided to add more of the Typepad blog posts that I wrote while employed by the British Library to this site (hosted by WordPress, long may it run). More, because I have previously added posts from the Moving Image and Newsroom blogs to this site, giving the same publication date as they originally had. Each has been republished as it was, verbatim bar a tweak or two, with a link to what was the original post at the end. I haven’t reproduced everything from the Newsroom, as a lot of it was passing stuff about upcoming events and the like, but if anyone wants to check those out, the Internet Archive can help you. The ones I have republished have a bit more substance to them, and two or three I was quite pleased with at the time and I’m still pleased with them (especially The Black Wonder). At any rate, I want the words to survive and to be read again. Inn the ephemeral world of the Internet, in which millions of web pages disappear each year, it seems the only way you can ensure that is to republish and republish. It’s all so fugitive.

Blogs are one of the great literary inventions of our time. Coming somewhere between an essay and a diary entry, they are a form of personal journalism that is intimate and immediate. Most are polished productions, in that the writer has written and re-written the text, often with a good deal of research to back up what look like the simplest of statements, but they also have – or the best of them have – a rough-edged informality that breaks down barriers. They are engaging.

Institutional blogs can tend at times towards the purely promotional, merely telling the reader how wonderful the institution is. Such posts don’t have much to offer. But the best institutional blogs are where the curator, or whoever, enthuses with knowledge and eloquence. They show that the museum, gallery or library, is full of stories. And those stories should not be lost.

These are the remaining Newsroom blog posts that I have added to this site:

• 400 Years of British Newspapers (2021) – marking the publication of Corante, or, newes from Italy, Germany, Hungarie, Spaine and France in 1621
• Ten years of Broadcast News (2020) – ten years of the British Library’s television news archive operation
• Three favourite newspaper books (2020) – part of a series of favourites selected by newspaper historians
• The Black Wonder (2019) – the story of nineteenth-century Black British boxer Bob Travers
• Picture this (2019) – findings from a newspaper data visualisation workshop
• Heritage Made Digital – the newspapers (2019) – announcing a newspaper digitisation programme at the British Library
• New nationals (2016) – can you remember what four new national newspapers were launched in Britain in 2016?
• The news from Waterloo (2015) – how the Battle of Waterloo was reported in the newspapers
• News from the community (2014) – on archiving hyperlocal news websites

The Newsroom blog posts that I have previously published on this site are these:

• Collecting news (2018) – British news history and the collecting of news
• Newspaper data and news identity (2017) – the cataloguing of newspapers and what it can leave out
• Analysing the past (2017) – big data analyses of digitised newspaper archives
• Nobody knows anything (2016) – report on a symposium on the future of news journalism
• Front print to digital (2016) – archiving news at a time of transition in how news in published
• The reading experience (2014) – evidence of historical newspaper reading from the Reading Experience Database
• The concept of news (2014) – a report on a symposium on newsreel history with thoughts on defining news history
• Pathé goes to YouTube (2014) – thoughts on the publication of the British Pathé newsreel archive on YouTube
• Taming the news beast (2014) – report on a seminar about the explosion in news information data
• Reading all about it (2014) – three books on the history and present state of news
• Charlie’s debut (2014) – on the 100th anniversary of Charlie Chaplin’s first film, Making a Living, which has a newspaper background
• New ways, old ways (2014) – report on a seminar on the changes to news being brought about by web-based journalism
• Recording Mandela (2013) – how the British Library archived breaking news on the death of Nelson Mandela and its aftermath on television

And, finally, these are the Moving Image blog posts I thought worth preserving that have also previously been added to this site:

• Ian and Johnny (Ian Carmichael and Johnny Dankworth, an unlikely joint obituary)
• Recommended reading no. 1 – Picture Palace (on Audrey’s Field neglected social history of british cinema)
• Wendy Toye (an obituary for the choreographer and filmmaker Wendy Toye)
• Editing out the Fascists (on Sidney Bernstein and the editing out – or not – of Fascists scenes in 1930s newsreels)
• Recommended reading no. 2 – Filming Literature (on Neil Sinyard’s excellent book on literary film adaptations)
• Recommended reading no. 3 – Kafka Goes to the Movies (on Hanns Zischler’s idiosyncratic study of Kafka’s cinemagoing tastes)
• Adam Curtis – the medium and the message (on the radical programme maker’s extraordinary BBC blog)
• Well, here we are in front of the elephants (the significance of the first video on YouTube)
• The film bookshelf (the Sight & Sound poll of top film books)
• Memory and migration (on John Akomfrah’s film installtion Mnemosyne)
• Recommended reading no. 4 – Halliwell’s Film Guide (in praise of the great film reference book)
• Pandaemonium and the Isles of Wonder (investigating the thinking behind the 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony)

Links:

• Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica gives the background to the end of Typepad
• The Newsroom blog as it used to be can be found on the Internet Archive at https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/thenewsroom and the Moving Image blog can be found at https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/movingimage
• Current British Library blog posts can be found at https://www.bl.uk/stories/blogs