I’m very grateful to you for including some work for me on what was evidently a crazy busy trip. Plus you sound a good deal more competent with a scanner than I am in archives with my dodgy digital camera, so I wouldn’t beat yourself up too much over that …

File management is the bane of my life as well. One of my colleagues at Strathclyde, Cristina Ritchie, is working with what must by now be thousands and thousands of images of scanned magazine pages for Faye Hammill & Michelle Smith’s project on Magazines, Travel and Middlebrow Culture in Canada. I briefly saw her database where she manages all the files, and it was impressive. Cristina is finishing up a PhD in library science, and I found myself wishing that somewhere in my own doctoral training I’d been taught a few principles of information management, as that’s increasingly central to my work these days, and probably even more so to those EMiC-ers working on digital editions with a lot of material. But there’s more than enough to get done during a PhD (especially nowadays when digital skills seem to be expected alongside subject expertise, teaching experience etc etc), so I don’t really know how one deals with this problem.

Anouk