da blog

I spent much of yesterday at an event at KCL celebrating the achievements of the AHDS (and the Methods Network) on its final day of existence, and welcoming the phoenix-like birth of CeRch. The day was informative, entertaining and emotional in equal measure and I am very glad I was there.

The morning’s overview of the Methods work was almost all new to me, and extremely interesting. As many attending said (and as Seamus Ross and Susan Hockey said in their informal report on the project’s work) a great deal has been achieved by this group in a short space of time, and it has been done in a way that has engaged many different research groups across the arts and humanities. I’ll certainly be finding time to read the well-illustrated report we all received in more depth soon. And courtesy of Mark Greengrass, I’ve added two new words to my vocabulary: intervenant and performativity.

It was the afternoon that I had really come for, though. Sheila Anderson whisked us through an impassioned and impressive summary of the highlights of AHDS’s achievements, at the subject centres and at the central executive, and we then heard from a range of speakers on how the work of the AHDS had affected them. I thought I was relatively well-informed on what the AHDS had achieved. I learnt today that it had done much, much more. It was wonderful to see Andrew Prescott again, who looked back to the Follett report and forwards to his current role at Lampeter to provide us with a thoughtful and engaging presentation. I will always be grateful to Andrew for his patience and enthusiasm when we worked with him in a small way on helping to preserve the digitised images of the Beowulf manuscript, and his enthusiasm for technology is still undimmed. (How many other university librarians recently switched their desktop from Vista to Ubuntu?) It would be impossible to summarise Barry Smith’s helter-skelter excursion: it had us laughing and thinking at the same time, and involved giraffes and (possibly) imaginary faxes.

And there was a great deal more to which I’ll return to anon. Matthew Woollard sent us away on a positive note, and Malcolm Read expressed (amongst other things) the unusual pleasure of being invited to the closure of a service as opposed to its launch.

I’m glad to say that my colleague Ed Pinsent told us today that we’ve managed to preserve the AHDS web pages as was in UKWAC. Everyone involved with AHDS has got good reason to be proud of its achievements. Good luck to all of you.

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