This morning I arrived at work shortly after eight intending to spend an hour or so on uSpace quickly re-reading all the papers for a significant meeting this afternoon, only to find that uSpace was down - and it remained so for some time, only coming back shortly after nine.  I won't say that I panicked, but I was getting anxious that I would have to revert to calling the originating department for the meeting and asking them to send me e-mail pdf attachments which I could then print out and take to the meeting - and I knew there were several hundred pages of documents.  Utlimately all was fine and I took my laptop to the meeting and kept the relevant papers open throughout.  But it was reminder of how incredibly dependent we have become on technology, and how we don't always have back-up plans if it falls over.

Last night I was talking with two colleageus from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities (a historian and a philosopher) and we got to musing over the ways in which information searching has become dominated by technological solutions which lead the researcher straight to the keyword they have typed in or the on-line reference.  This is all very laudable, yet the downside is the lack of the possibility of the serendipitous discovery of something a little offbeat but relevant, or of being sent off on a new train of enquiry as a result of being attracted to another item on the same shelf.  The historian was in some ways lamenting the downside of the digitalisation of newspaper archives such that the researcher can no longer experience the materiality of the document, or read it in the way that people of the past would have read it - skipping between items on a page and taking in the trivial as well as the significant.