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Thanks, Jessica, for drawing our attention to Nick Hubble's excellent and
comprehensive review of MOO (Mass Observation Online resource) in Reviews
in History - hadn't seen it before.
I've just read it and would like to thank Nick too and also recommend his
review to anyone with an interest in MO. It might also be useful if you are
trying to persuade your library to buy the resource.
Nick's review encompasses much of the current activities around the use of
MO including news of recent print publications. It is a very useful entry
point for using MOO. In particular his commentary on the resource's online
essays is helpful, as is his tracing of how the resource opens up different
parts of the collection.
I should say that the Trustees have given permission for more original MO
material to be digitised and will eventually augment the existing resource.
This includes more diaries and directive replies, more "Topic Collections"
and eventually the Worktown collection (Bolton & Blackpool 1937-8). Contact
AM Digital and/or Special Collections at Sussex for more details.
Over the years since Adam Matthew started digitising MO, I have been called
to account for the fact that this resource(as are all online resources) is
expensive and only normally available to people who belong to big academic
libraries who can afford to buy it. On one notable occasion, the critic was
the Director of the Wellcome Trust and for one mad deluded moment I thought
he was going to open his Wellcome coffers and give us the cash to make the
resource freely available. It was not to be. I often wish that it could be
freely available but the costs of a digitisation programme for such a huge
collection would have been way beyond the budget of the Archive Trustees.
I am only grateful to Adam Matthew (who publish MOO) for taking the risk
with us. They began years ago by microfilming the collection and so have
built up a familiarity with the material and the way it is organised. I
think their scholarly and sensitive handling of the archive shows through
in the digitised resource and the ease with which it can be used. The
royalties from sales of MOO have been important for the continued expansion
of the Archive and the second phase - the Mass Observation Project - which
is now about to enter its 30th year of existence.
Dorothy Sheridan (MOA, Sussex)
PS Please let Jessica know if you read or publish something about or using
MO. Jessica picked this up because she Tweets but it didn't come up on
Google Alert so we might have missed it.
--On 08 October 2010 09:12 +0100 Jessica Scantlebury
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/969
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