Phew - its been busy. Ok - so we now live in Ely in a nice but slightly small house and I moved all our stuff there single handedly last weekend. I work for the British Library on their web archiving programme and I spent the rest of last week in Copenhagen at the Black Diamond with regard to this. Oh and we have another child due in 5 weeks.
Actually, apart from not having a second to myself for a while, its all good. The new job is excellent and is going to be really exciting to work on. Essentially all of the worlds libraries are turning their attention to collecting and preserving digital content as well as the more traditional paper based stuff they are used to. The International Internet Preservation Consortium initiated largely by the inimitable Julien Masanès (who I had the good fortune to meet last week and will be working with) has begun to get the various libraries working together on the technology to make this happen. My role is as project engineer for the British Library in the project. I will be making sure that the work we commit to happens and that the grand visions of the Curators and other non-technical participants get turned into working technology. I'm working in quite a new environment compared to the small companies I have frequented in later years. The BL is as you might imagine a slow moving, venerable British institution will all that that entails. On the other hand the project is cutting edge, fairly fast moving and based around a small team. This in itself presents an interesting challenge. Our work is to be Open Sourced and our entire working environment based on open source software. We will have a project server on line shortly (when I've built it) where I will be maintaining a work blog.
Hopefully as a little more sanity and normality return to my life I will have other things to comment on.
Posted by Mark at June 14, 2004 01:28 PM