From the outset I envisaged a website that would reflect the project’s progress, and a conversation with Melanie Philpot from the University’s iSolutions IT support team opened my eyes as to how ambitious this could be.\u00a0 Much of this week has been taken up with work unrelated to Fairey, plus a very pleasant day with sport historian Dil Porter and his family\u00a0in Bosham, the tiny West Sussex\u00a0harbour\u00a0famed for its association with King Canute (his daughter is buried in the church, and the village competes with Southampton as to the spot where he made his point to fawning courtiers\u00a0about the limits of [tidal] power).\u00a0 However, I have spent some considerable time completing the framework for ‘Biography of Sir Richard Fairey, aviation pioneer and industrialist’, on the basis of which Melanie and her colleagues will build the website.\u00a0 A combination of the nature of the content (all those images of aircraft!) and the\u00a0potential for what can be done technically means that the final outcome should\u00a0look pretty good.\u00a0 The home page will lead to four galleries, each of which will have sub-sections: Work in Progress and Contacts;\u00a0Document Gallery; Photo Gallery; Sources.\u00a0 I’ve already fed in initial material, and am in discussions with Barbara Gilbert at the Fleet Air Arm Museum, and Karen Robson who heads the Hartley Library’s Special Collections, re creating a virtual gallery of still and moving photographic images as\u00a0shot by CRF\u00a0and a virtual library of key documents related to his life.\u00a0 There are issues of copyright and cost which need sorting out, and I don’t underestimate the problems in securing open access for this material, but at least the process is under way.\u00a0 This is a wholly new experience for me in that previously I have just got on with researching and writing – turning my [professional] life into literally an open book necessitates major changes to my working practices – there’s no place to hide!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From the outset I envisaged a website that would reflect the project’s progress, and a conversation with Melanie Philpot from the University’s iSolutions IT support team opened my eyes as to how ambitious this could be.\u00a0 Much of this week has been taken up with work unrelated to Fairey, plus a very pleasant day with … <\/p>\n