I’m blogging from the balcony of the Cotton Room, overlooking the atrium of the British Library at St Pancras. (I’ve been attending a meeting in London today, and to save money I booked two single, off-peak train tickets: leaving me with plenty of time to explore the BL.)
I’ve based myself here for the day because:
- “The British Library is committed to making information of all kinds as widely available as possible.” Translation: good, reliable, free wifi FTW.
- I particularly wanted to visit the BL’s “Growing Knowledge: the evolution of research” exhibition (hashtag:#blgk), which is all about innovative tools for digital research. It’s worth a look (you don’t have to visit the smart, white digital exhibition suite at St Pancras; you can register online and explore many of the tools over the Web). There’s some good stuff here: some of the services and discussions could be useful additional material for our own ‘Working on the Web‘ staff workshops, and I’m particularly interested in the Research Information Centre (a still-in-development BL/Microsoft Research project to build a scientific VRE [Virtual Research Environment]): of obvious relevance to the University of Lincoln’s own VRE project work (more about which soon). Register/log in, and you can watch a video about the RIC. I also filled in their evaluation survey for Growing Knowledge.
- The other exhibition on at the moment is Evolving English; a trawl through the historical, social and cultural roots of the English language. It’s fantastic. If you’re at all interested in languages, and you’re in London before April 2011, you should go. I sat in a booth and recorded myself reading a Mr Tickle story, for their English dialect/accent map. (Hashtag:#evolvingenglish)
