Basil Considine

My feature Corporate Musical Gems in the Hagley Library Collections is now online. For a little background on the Hagley Library and my research there, see this earlier post.

You never know in advance what you’ll find during archival research. Very often, you don’t know what other people are trying to find, too, until you ask them. For example: in 2011, I was awarded a research grant by the Hagley Library in Wilmington, DE. The Hagley is the largest independent business library and archive in the United States, but it would be erroneous to think that its holdings are all dull business ledgers and dry reports. Perusing the list of 35 fellowship and grant recipients for 2011 shows an incredible diversity in topics ranging from architectural decorations to filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille to the material culture of tea drinking to duct tape(!) in American social imagination. My own project about music making in corporation environments is the only one on music, but it’s far from the outlier: these projects are a collective testimony to the richness of archives.

A report presenting a small extract of my research will be published on the Hagley Library blog later this year.

Information saturation and overload are common user problems with social media. Most social media services are designed to maximize the time that you spend with them, whereas a user’s best interests probably lie in spending time only where there’s a high efficiency and quality of content but few distractions. Where does Academia.edu fall? I suspect most users are using at as free CV service and an inexpensive (i.e., free) alternative to having their own professional website, but the site’s “follow” function is little different from Twitter and Facebook in Academia.edu’s attempt to become a social network for academics.

Here I am on Academia.edu: http://bu.academia.edu/BasilConsidine.