Following on from the story that Northamptonshire County Council planned to severely restrict opening hours at the Record Office and introduce charges to use the archives, comes the news that councillors have voted to close 28 of the county’s 36 libraries. Three options were tabled but all involved closure, none to retain the status quo. Being a rural county, many of the libraries offer a community service way beyond that of lending books and with a poor public transport system people will lose access to food banks, children’s clubs, issuing of bus passes and so much more. Petitions have been launched and the campaign to the save the libraries has high profile supporters like authors Alan Moore and Philip Pullman. Here’s hoping that that campaign is as successful in overturning the council’s decision as was the reversal of the proposed cuts to the record office following the public outcry.

You can read more in this article in The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/28/northamptonshire-may-close-up-to-28-of-its-36-libraries

Attended the Business Archives Council conference earlier this week, which was great, as always! One of the afternoon sessions really caught my interest as it featured three sets of speakers highlighting their joint academic-archivist collaborative projects. Ryland Thomas, from the Bank of England spoke about how daily transactional ledger data from the bank’s archive has been used to test whether, and to what extent, during the mid-nineteenth century the Bank of England adhered to Walter Bagehot’s rule that a central bank in a financial crisis should lend cash freely at a high interest rate in exchange for “good” securities, and found that the bank’s behaviour broadly conformed. Another set of customer ledgers has shown that the securities the Bank purchased were debts owed by a geographically and industrially diverse set of debtors and, using data on the bank’s income and dividends, they found that the Bank and its shareholders profited from lender of last resort operations.

The full paper can be read here: http://www.ehes.org/EHES_117.pdf

It was a fascinating insight into the academic use the bank makes of its own archives and the parallels it had been able to draw with practices today. Interestingly, during the Q&A session, the bank’s archivist admitted that they are not keeping the equivalent ledgers from today…

Last night, in New York, a work believed to be by Leonardo da Vinci, Salvator Mundi, sold for $450 million dollars (including fees), the highest amount paid for a work of art to date. Interestingly, it was placed in a sale of contemporary artwork as it was felt there is more money in that sector than amongst collectors of Old Masters. Christie’s described it as “the greatest art rediscovery of the twentieth century”, yet not all art critics agree: one described the painting’s surface as “inert, varnished, lurid, scrubbed over and repainted so many times that it looks simultaneously new and old”. After all, it sold for just £45 in London in 1958 when it was thought to be by a follower of da Vinci. The buyer(s) is, as yet, unknown, but who would pay so much for a work of questionable attribution…? 

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