Tuesday, November 27, 2007

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." Sherlock Holmes



The entire lyrics to the Charlie Brown and Snoopy show are now posted on yesterday's post, thanks to the Anonymous. We cannot get enough feedback. Obviously, I now also cannot get enough of singing the Charlie Brown theme tune, but that's a whole other post.

I spent much of this morning, in my incarnation as a Policy Assistant with the Ministry of Cultural Services (recently renamed, do keep up), with the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection, Lancelyn Green Bequest. You can get an insight into this amazing collection, which has truly staggering potential for the development of the city (not least in terms of tourism, but also academic reputation and kudos with the huge international community of Sherlockians), at the City Museum's award-winning exhibition, A Study in Sherlock (do you see what they did there? No? Well, you'd probably have to be a bit of a Sherlockian to truly get that pun). I'd recommend a visit - I've been twice and will doubtless take visitors to it again.

I was visiting only the Archives strand of this important bequest, which is being co-ordinated by the city's fantastic archive staff and a band (unspeckled) of outstanding volunteers, of which I one day hope to be one. The Archives service are dealing with the records of the Collection, inlcuding letters, paper based memorabilia and countless photographs. The complexity of the work being undertaken is astounding, and there is so much work involved for the volunteers and project staff. I was lucky enough to meet two of the volunteers this morning, one who was working on the digitalization of the project and one who was removing duplicates from the photograph collection prior to them being digitized.

What struck me most about my visit (I was preparing an article for Culture Brief, our internal newsletter) was not just the amount of work needed to prepare a collection for public access like the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection, Lancelyn Green Bequest, but the breadth of skills required. The photographs alone cover such an extensive range of subjects and themes, for example.

Currently, the collection's preparation is split across libraries, who are dealing with books, museums who are dealing with the 3d items and the records service, who are dealing with the archives element of the collection.

If you can't get to the Portsmouth City Museum immediately, you can find out more about the collection at its dedicated website, here. Subscribe to the email newsletter online at the Collection's website for news.

In other news, my mojo has returned. I had been fearing for much of last week that a huge aspect of my personality, namely the fun part, had disappeared with the removal of caffeine from my daily diet. However, today, I felt much more like myself, and even found time to irritate the Chief, amuse Miss Sally and distract my other colleagues from their valuable work.

Everyone in the office is understandably relieved by the return of my eight personality - one of approximately thirty competing personalities, the Chief believes.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

on a seperate literary note did you know that today is william shakspeare's wedding anniversary?

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history.do?action=Article&id=4166

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