Finally, in this short series of reviews of 2022, we have images. Below is a selection of favourite photographs from the year, excluding images of the Lake District, which form the theme of the previous review post. All have links to higher resolution copies on my Flickr pages. The images document the year as itRead More
Two years I wrote about an exhibition of the remarkable infographics of W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and said that I was working on an exhibition of infographics myself, due to be shown at the British Library in August 2020. Then fate intervened.Read More
Here’s some breaking news for you… On 22 April, and running until 21 August 2022, the British Library will be hosting a major exhibition on the history of news in Britain. Entitled Breaking the News, it will (according to the press release) spotlight the role news plays in our society, exploring issues of choice, interpretation,Read More
It is good to be involved in a good thing. Last week, after years of development and the coming together of assorted initiatives, the British Library made one million pages from historic newspapers freely available online. Next year it will publish one million more, and million the year after that. At the same time rawRead More
Back in my time working as a cataloguer at what was then called the National Film Archive, then the National Film and Television Archive, and is now the BFI National Archive, we used to produce shotlists for some of the films in the collection. They weren’t, strictly speaking, shotlists, since we cataloguers seldom described theRead More
A few years ago I thought it would be a useful thing for the British Library (my employer) to have a shareable list of its newspapers. I had been speaking to an American archive with whom I wanted to share the records we had, and it seemed a reasonable thing to do. There had beenRead More
One medium that has shone out during the coronavirus pandemic has been radio. From the very start of the crisis, through lockdowns one and two, and life under tiers, radio – and I’m thinking particularly of community radio – has responded with alacrity and great enterprise. All media has responded to the pandemic with urgencyRead More
If I’m not writing as much as I would like to, it’s because I’m working on a great many things, and when it gets to the evenings I’m just tired. But I hope it’s all going to be worth it. One of the projects is a small exhibition of infographics, to be held this AugustRead More
I have this vague plan to bring all of my blog posts under the one site. I have too many websites, either active or passive (but still kept live), and it is increasingly difficult (and costly) to keep on top of them all. Whether having all posts from different sites will work, I don’t know,Read More
In two years’ time, it will be the four hundredth anniversary of the newspaper in this country. The first known newspaper in English, Corrant out of Italy, Germany, &c. was published on 2 December 1620, in Amsterdam. A year later, on 24 September 1621, the first newspaper was published in this country, the Corante, or,Read More