In the last two weeks I’ve had the delight of staying in both London and Dublin. It seems to be my year for speaking engagements! In 2018 The Economist newspaper will be 175 years old and a European Research Council funded project at University College London has been looking at the status and practices of this singular publication. On 24-25 September UCL hosted a conference about The Economist with the aim of identifying a set of people and themes which will lead to a book of essays on the past and present of The Economist to be published to mark the 175th anniversary. I was asked to speak about the archives of The Economist (where I have been helping to identify and arrange material) and to suggest areas for potential research.

The following week I was off to Ireland to speak at a one-day conference on “Issues in Contemporary Records Management” at University College Dublin. Records Management is still somewhat in its infancy in Ireland, so all credit to Julie Brooks of UCD for obtaining the funding and pulling together an excellent cross-section of speakers, mostly from the UK, who spoke about different challenges, including Julie McLeod on current research in the field, Zoe Smyth on dispositioning in the Northern Ireland Civil Service, Conan Tormey on the corporate world of banking, Alan Bell on FOI and the challenges of RM in the university environment, Claire Johnson on her experience as a consultant, Mark Farrell on the scope for working in the RM sector in Ireland, and my own talk on the “big bucket” approach to retention scheduling. There’s clearly a demand for this type of training and for information about RM as the event was fully booked within a day of being advertised. The audience came from all sectors of work and included the students on the UCD course. The panel at the end of day faced a multitude of questions and the audience clearly had more but most of the speakers had long journeys home, so a halt had to be called! A very enjoyable and successful day. 
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There was an interesting article in The Economist a while ago about the recent economic crisis and the problems of using history analogies. Reporting on a lecture by Barry Eichengreen, economic historian, the article argues that the 2007-2009 has been judged to be the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The problem with using historical examples, however, is that there is rarely agreement about what history teaches us or, indeed, even about the facts themselves. The author cites examples such as the fear of 1930s style debt inflation that causes the central banks to cut rates whenever markets wobble, or the belief that World War II would resemble the defensive stalemate of World War I, which allowed the Allies to be pushed back. He concludes that historical analogies can be thought-provoking but that the parallels should not be taken too literally since history rarely repeats itself exactly.