Dear blog,

First, an apology, apparently all of the filming that was done at St Deiniol’s has not been saved properly (I like the fact that I’m using the passive tense here when really the only person to blame is me) and so none of the wonderful presentations that were filmed will be appearing on the social space. Perhaps some people are grateful for that but I’m still very sorry for being technically incompetant. I really need to find out how to do this properly for the next event. We do though have some of the presentations captured and soon the amazing Cristina da Costa will be transforming the website learning resources page into a page that has real resources, with links to presentations, reading lists, and evaluations, etc. The website was always intended to be a learning resource that survived and was useful beyond the two-year life of this training programme and the new resources page shows how this can be achieved.

A new development on the social space that I’d like to draw your attention to is the appearance of Scott Brewster’s audio and text of his talk, which he would have given at St Deiniol’s had he not been prevented to by snow. I’d very much like people to read and/or listen to this 25 minute talk and discuss ideas raised on the discussion group set up to accompany it. It’s remarkably generous of Scott to offer the text of his paper, particularly since it is a work-in-progress (as yet without footnotes!). It’s the beginnings of a book that he is writing and he’s told me that he’d very much like to hear what people think. Scott’s sabbatical from the University of Salford (and from his job as Director of our Subject Group) begins today and he has time now to work on the book. I thought it would be interesting to see how academics begin monograph projects even if the topic isn’t right in your area. That said, I think the issues raised in Scott’s talk are really very pertinent to LitSciMed no matter what your historical period or subject.

So, this week has been good. There’s been much marking and preparation for the start of the new semester. I had an interesting and hopefully very successful meeting to talk about the University’s archives, which you can find out more about here: http://www.ils.salford.ac.uk/library/resources/special/. We need to bring more people’s attention to these since they are underused at present, but there are some real gems, particularly relating to Salford’s industrial heritage of which we are rightly very proud. We have treasures like the Walter Greenwood collection (he wrote Love on the Dole) and the Duke of Bridgewater’s archive (the ‘Canal Duke’), as well as some very fun things, such as Richard Badnall’s eccentric idea of the ‘undulating railway’: http://www.ils.salford.ac.uk/library/resources/special/badnall.xml. This collection charts Badnall’s invention from 1832-4 which seems to posit that trains could work better if they followed an undulating path (rather like our roller coasters today). The idea was clearly taken seriously by Robert and George Stephenson and patents were taken out, though he was attacked in The Mechanics Magazine. I’m sure there’s an academic article in this for someone…

Finally, following the Wellcome money and the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry grant (http://www.ambix.org/), this week we’ve been awarded an internal University of Salford grant too. This will also be used for the Calendar of the Letters of Humphry – first we’ll pay for the creation of a database in which to enter letters (and which will be online and searchable, accessible to all), and then pay for the copytyping of letters into this database. It’s all very exciting.

Remember – the deadline for applications for event 2 is Monday (1st February). I can report that there are 18 applications at the moment so there are still places!

Best,

Sharon