About a month ago I posted a copy of my report Emerging technologies for the provision of access to archives on Scribd. It’s already edging up towards a thousand reads, so I thought it was time I put a link in from here.
The basic message is we need to experiment and find the spaces both within and between our institutions to foster such experimentation. Is that asking too much? Anyway… read, enjoy, use!
Ben Gascoigne, a young New Zealand physicist, stepped off the train at Canberra station. It was August 1941. A tall, good-looking man strode across the platform to greet him.
‘Woolley’ he said, offering his hand, ‘Do you play bridge?’.
That evening Ben Gascoigne found himself seated at a bridge table in Woolley’s residence at the Commonwealth Solar Observatory (CSO), atop Mount Stromlo, some fifteen kilometres south-west of the nation’s bush capital. Richard van der Reit Woolley had been appointed Director of the CSO less than two years before, in December 1939. At the age of 33, Woolley had arrived in Australia, direct from the ancient halls of Cambridge, determined to breathe new life into the observatory, which had languished for ten years without a permanent head. Cla Allen, one of observatory’s astronomers, wrote excitedly that Woolley was determined ‘to make the CSO an observatory of which the Empire can be proud’. War, however, had put these plans on hold. Continue reading »
Everything The shed Shoebox