Blogger's return

It has been rather too long since last I updated my blog! It has, however, been an interesting few months. The main project being undertaken at the end of 2008 was the preparation of over 1200 digitised images of Gurney manuscript material in preparation for Gurney to be added to Oxford University Computing Services' First World War Poetry Digital Archive, launched at the Imperial War Museum on 11 November. This extraordinary project is making manuscripts of the work of several 'war poets' freely available online. We hope that the addition of Gurney to the serried ranks available on the site, hopefully available by Easter this year, will help more people to realise Gurney's importance and instill in them a wish to explore his work further, beyond his poetry of war.

Whilst there has been a major development in the 'Gurney world', with the publication of Pamela Blevins's biography of Gurney and Marion Scott in November, there have also been exciting times in the archive. Gloucestershire Archives applied for a grant for materials to repackage a large portion of the Gurney collection which isn't yet packaged to archival standards. This grant application was successful and so my office is now filling up with the necessary materials to carry this out, as the cataloguing process continues. This may be a good point to note that, since the end of November access to the archive has been closed temporarily in order to allow the reorganisation of parts of the collection during the cataloguing. It is hoped that access to the collection will reopen at Easter. In the meantime, visit this blog again soon to read reports of the archive work, which I will be posting at more regular intervals from hereon!