Hooray, #Silo is back for Season 3 - with Season 4 (the final one) already shot, we know we’re going to get a well-planned story with a beginning, middle and end. If you’re not watching, it’s one of the best things on Apple TV - which is high praise.

Lovely story, and thankfully devoid of the clichés and errors that are often present when finds in archives are reported.

@jonnelledge.bsky.social You may already know, but the audiobook of 47 Borders is an Audible members’ deal for the next month - £3.99 iirc

If Wonderwall is to be a football anthem, I want the younger generation to discover the Mike Flowers Pops cover, which reached No. 2 in the singles chart while the original was still on release. Lounge music and easy listening was having a moment at the time. It’s my preferred version.

If anyone wants to use every opportunity to gain insight into Matt Brittin, the new Director General of the BBC, he’s part of the commentary team at Henley this week:

To celebrate the start of the Henley Royal Regatta today, it's our very close neighbour Henley's turn on the postcards! 🚣 Recognise any of these locations? 👀

📣 🧐 Come see over half a million freely available records. Dive in and explore! 👇 View 194,000 new releases and 10 new features in one place 👇 www.virtualtreasury.ie/2026-new-rel... New to the Virtual Treasury? Check out our Help page for mini-videos and a User Guide www.virtualtreasury.ie/help

If anyone wants to use every opportunity to gain insight into Matt Brittin, the new Director General of the BBC, he’s part of the commentary team at Henley this week:

I am reading Jeff Hecht “City of Light: the story of fiber [sic] optics” for work. Very good, and contains this great nugget about the dangers of American exceptionalism.

Humphrey Smith has died. This longread about him from 2024 is well worth reading.

Henley #Henley

Hmm. If Birmingham City, rather than Aston Villa, had been the most prominent and consistently successful Birmingham side for multiple decades, would it have given Birmingham a slightly higher national profile and identity? Genuine question.

I’ve begun watching the Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt ‘The American Revolution’ which has arrived on iPlayer. So far, very good. A varied crowd of historians as talking heads and the usual effective panning and zooming across paintings while actors read contemporary quotations.

Hmm. I guess Cooke & Wheatstone’s Scottish & Irish patents for the electric telegraph which we hold in a planchest in the strongroom at work and which we show to visitors on a regular basis.

A bit late for this heatwave, but for the next one I found this website with some very practical and affordable ideas for shading and increasing airflow British homes. One suspects that the market for temporary external window shades will start growing. https://www.heatwavetoolkit.com/solutions

This is remarkable.

Britain is more than halfway towards reaching Net Zero. Most people don't realise this, not least as the fossil-fuel fanatics want us to think achieving it is impossible. Via YouGov

A successful experiment: I paid £93 for a night’s stay in a single bed ‘nest’ in OtherWander, a new capsule hotel in what used to be the youth hostel in Dean Street. With air conditioning in the nest. That managed to keep the temperature reasonable.

Somewhat depressing that although the British Library is one of the headline cases, the article (and seemingly the report behind it) then pivots to talking solely about Galleries and Museums, ignoring Libraries. And Archives aren’t even mentioned. Don’t forget the L and A in GLAM!

A lot of people don't realise this but in the UK we have to replace our Prime Minister every two or three years or else the rights revert back to Marvel

Has anyone ever stayed at the Otherwander capsule hotel in Soho? Have to go into the archive/office Tuesday-Thursday and seriously considering staying somewhere central with air conditioning for a couple of nights.

If the forecast proves to be to right, this week in London is going to be hell.

Anyone else heading to watch the Reading Amateur Regatta this weekend? 🚣 Did you know that we've recently catalogued some new material relating to the Regatta, including flyers on the Regatta's 180th anniversary back in 2022? Check out the collection on our online catalogue, reference D/EX1192 ☀️

This evening’s film was the 2023 documentary ‘Pictures of Ghosts’, about the past and present of the Brazilian city of Recife. A companion to The Secret Agent, this also touches on archives and oral history, as well as the power of cinema. Great soundtrack too.

A subset of my list of history books to read for work. There are lots more. And a separate list of books, articles and courses on AI, Knowledge Graphs, Linked Open Data etc. Not entirely clear how I will get through all this while, y’know, doing my job.

Feels like a lot of STEM guys believed coding was the hardest thing a human could do, and assumed that once somebody invented an AI that can code, it would follow naturally that the AI can do all of the lesser non-coding things that other dumber people were doing

Odd, after months of political reporters repeating awed whispers from anonymous Labour figures about the alleged brilliance of Al Carns, to see him spouting nonsense like this. Doesn’t speak very well of anyone’s critical thinking.

“Everything we do here is to provide access and to preserve,” said Angie Davis, who works at the State Historical Society. But those two values “often are at odds with each other, because the more access you have to a thing, the more at risk potentially a thing can be.” @idahocapitalsun.com

Sudden memory of the Pye TV we had when I was young; the last TV we had with no remote. The buttons were labelled BBC1, BBC2, IBA and 4; IBA being Independent Broadcasting Authority. Until the early 90s, although everyone called it ITV, that term wasn't used on screen or (I think) in the TV Times.

Starmer plan to disadvantage GCSE revision for people born after April just dropped

This sounds very exciting.

The most disgusting behaviour I’ve ever witnessed in public spaces was directed at Sadiq Khan by ‘anti-Ulez’ protesters, who of course received way more coverage, much of it friendly, than the scheme’s incredible success ever will.

RIP David Hockney

This happens a lot informally, but it should become a professional norm that authors give a digital (searchable) copy of their book to the archives that they used heavily in its writing - to only be used internally by archivists to better understand their collection and to help future researchers.

When someone on your project suggests we can include another case (@palesl.bsky.social)

On a brighter note, secular goddaughter (5 1/2) lost her front tooth this morning, just in time for her class photo. She is very pleased and impossibly cute.

Everyone on X and elsewhere who called for a violent response should be charged with incitement. Everyone involved in the pogrom should be locked up with exemplary sentences. Govt should make it clear that will be the response in future anywhere else. Enough.

I wish that the BBC were still making the Timeshift and The Secret Life of … history documentary strands which used to be regulars on BBC4 back in the glory days when it had a production budget. And I wish that more of the programmes that were made were available more permanently on iPlayer.

AI developers are seemingly all coming to the conclusion that taxonomy is vital to the solution of a lot of problems, but I don't think so many in government, policy and business have yet clocked this. And it's a thing that librarians and archivists have been thinking deeply about for decades.

Joe Mulhall is director of research for Hope Not Hate. Obviously this is unconfirmed as yet. But feels significant if it is. Robinson is long overdue a probe into potential foreign interference.

This was a huge undertaking in terms of research. And there were lots of arcs to weave and so many more that were not included. Taxonomies are the interoperability surface, between human and machine worlds. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. open.substack.com/pub/jessicat...

I realise this is: - an advert - somewhat derivative (Weapon of Choice) - 8 years old but I’d never seen it, and it’s great. I particularly enjoyed the laser fingers.

While a lot of Bluesky discourse is informative and useful, it really is noticeable that a *lot* of (male) economists and those in adjacent professions really seems to fancy themselves experts in any number of subjects: history (all periods, all sub-disciplines), archaeology, epidemiology...

After enjoying the first ep of Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials I read this v sniffy review by Lucy Mangan which compares it unfavourably with the Sarah Phelps adaptations on grounds of lack of realism and of the latter’s “rich, adult inflections”. Nonsense as far as I’m concerned.

Famously, Stalin was dead against the opening of a second front in the west by his Allies. (Sarcasm, for the avoidance of doubt)

How is it that Zotero, an open source bibliographic referencing project, is so much better at metadata management than Microsoft Sharepoint?

The phrase "two-tier" policing first entered Britain's political mainstream in August 2024, when people supporting the Southport rioters were complaining of their treatment But it is not a mainstream term - it originated with far right and conspiracist groups trying to push their own narratives

Look forward to reading this. Giovanni Colavizza & Lise Jaillant’s previous writing on this subject has been very thoughtful and nuanced.

Well, I watched it. Heavy-handed? Maybe. Pretentious? Quite possibly. Dated? Not sure. Arguably quite timely. In any case it’s a beautiful watch (although it was so influential that you have to keep remembering that it’s not clichéd but pioneering) and the music is of course sublime.

Oof.