James Elder
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jameselder.bsky.social
James Elder
@jameselder.bsky.social
1.1K followers 700 following 2.1K posts
Business archivist by day; rowing club archivist by night. So, quite a lot of 19th and 20th century British history, and grumbling about digital and A/V preservation.

Not the UNICEF spokesman.

Be nice, I'm trying my best.
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jameselder.bsky.social
Strobing shirts and ties. That's something you don't see any more.
A still from a 1980s training film, shot on 1" videotape - a man sits at a computer. The stripes on his shirt are strobing, due to the limitations of the camera and the video playback.
October 13, 2025 at 3:39 PM
jameselder.bsky.social
Thoroughly enjoyed my week at @gladlib.bsky.social.

Strongly recommend to anyone wanting to do some reading, writing or just pondering, in the stillness and companionable quiet of a Grade 1 listed reading room, surrounded by Gladstone’s own books.

Great food too.
An Edwardian library reading room, with shelving, wooden desks, armchairs and a wooden gallery above. An Edwardian building of red stone with a central section and two wings on the left and right.
October 11, 2025 at 8:35 AM
jameselder.bsky.social
“Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you?
Did she die in vain?”
Tony Hancock in the “Twelve Angry Men” episode of “Hancock’s Half Hour”.
October 9, 2025 at 6:04 AM
jameselder.bsky.social
Carried out my first successful Wikidata query.

Let joy be unconfined.
October 7, 2025 at 7:08 PM
jameselder.bsky.social
Back to work (not actually work).
View of a wooden desk with bronze lamp, laptop, water bottle etc. Beyond it can be seen a library reading room with large windows.
October 7, 2025 at 8:36 AM
jameselder.bsky.social
Sun came out today!
The Gladstone Library - an Edwardian building of reddish stone with a large lawn and trees in front of it - with a very blue sky.
October 6, 2025 at 7:01 PM
jameselder.bsky.social
Fun fact:

Until telephone exchanges went digital in the 1980s and early 1990s, this was how phone bills were compiled.

Every line had a meter which were all positioned together. Once every billing period, a set of high resolution photos of batches of meter readings would be taken.
I man holds a metal piece of apparatus, a bit like a squared off megaphone, against a bank of equiment. A photograph of a series of five digit numbers.
September 30, 2025 at 2:53 PM
jameselder.bsky.social
I mean, come on.

1) Following the link, it’s not a study of “all genres”, it’s English language pop, rock, rap, R&B and country from 1970-2020.

2) The idea that films are all just franchises now is desperately lazy. Some big films of the year: Weapons? Sinners? One Battle After Another?
Pop songs in every genre are becoming shorter, simpler and more repetitive and films are being reduced to endlessly-repeated franchise formulas. Studies suggest that the number of "disruptive" and "transformative" inventions is declining. More money is spent on scientific research than ever in history but the rate of progress "is barely keeping pace with the past". Doubtless many factors are at work, but this is also precisely what you would expect of a generation of researchers who spent their childhoods glued to screens rather than reading or thinking.
September 28, 2025 at 9:21 AM
jameselder.bsky.social
The top one for me. I mean, in her younger days she was Samuel Beckett’s muse for crying out loud.

And of course she was the nanny in The Omen.
Billie Whitelaw firing a machine gun.
September 20, 2025 at 2:14 AM
jameselder.bsky.social
Disney execs have been watching S2 E9 of Andor after it won the Emmy for Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series.
A scene from Andor. Supervisor Lagret (an imperial intelligence officer in a white uniform) says "Shut it down" through gritted teeth. A scene from Andor. Supervisor Lagret (an imperial intelligence officer in a white uniform) shouts from the centre of a large control room filled with uniformed staff "I don't care if you have to cut power to the whole chamber." A scene from Andor. Supervisor Lagret (an imperial intelligence officer in a white uniform) shouts into headphones "Get her off the air!"
September 18, 2025 at 8:36 AM
jameselder.bsky.social
Discogs is not showing the full glory of the playlist.

(I’m sorry for lack of AltText - I can’t get the formatting to play ball)
A 20 song album track list of mid 1990s indie and britpop with a few other oddities. A 20 song album track list of mid 1990s indie and britpop with a few other oddities.
September 1, 2025 at 8:55 PM
jameselder.bsky.social
I’ve realised that, if I’m being scrupulously honest, the album that more than any other makes me incredibly nostalgic and gives me a real Proustian rush, it’s this one:

https://www.discogs.com/release/8755288-Various-The-BestAlbum-In-The-WorldEver-Vol1
40 TRACK CD THE BEST BLUR OASIS SUPERGRASS PULP STONES ROSES ELASTICA SUEDE PRIMAL SCREAM CRANBERRIES NEW ORDER THE SMITHS BOO RADLEYS CHEMICAL BROTHERS RADIOHEAD MORRISSEY MANIC STREET PREACHERS THERAPY? EDWYN COLLINS INSPIRAL CARPETS ASH THA SHAMEN DEPECHE MODE SMASHING PUMPKINS THE CHARLATANS LEVELLERS FUTURE SOUND OF LONDON THE PRODIGY McALMONT BUTLER …IN THE WORLD…EVER!
September 1, 2025 at 8:52 PM
jameselder.bsky.social
Now waiting for replies from my historian followers.
Flynn from the Disney animation “Tangled” stands nonchalantly with his arms crossed, while surrounded by swords pointed at him.
August 24, 2025 at 7:15 AM
jameselder.bsky.social
It’s a British/US English thing I think.

Similarly ‘table’ in a meeting/issue context gets confusing as US and British meanings are essentially opposite aiui.

OED (which is better than Merriam-Webster on etymology - and thanks to my local library card I have access) has this.

22:56 Fri 22 Aug VPN / • 25% 0 oed.com Revised 2002 (entry history) moot - ADJECTIVE - More entries for moot := Browse entry < Share 66 Cite • Contribute Factsheet Etymology Meaning & use Pronunciation Compounds & derived words Nearby entries Single page Forms Frequency Tabbed 1. Originally in Law, of a case, issue, etc.: proposed for discussion at a moot (moot n. 4). Later also gen.: open to argument, debatable; uncertain, doubtful; unable to be firmly resolved. Frequently in moot case, moot point. 1563- 1563 1577 a1650 1658-9 1732-3 1779 1797 1808 1876 1899 That they be not forced to sue the lawe, wrapped with so infinite crickes and moot poyntes. L. Humphrey, Nobles or of Nobilitye sig. Vvi The like question [sc. whether 'fish' or 'flesh'] may be mooued of the sell [= seal], and if it were well canuassed, it would be found at the least wyse a moote case. R. Stanyhurst, Treatise contayning Description of Irelande ii. f. 9/2, in R. Holinshed, Chronicles vol. | I was scarce come into commons, but..l was set at work, arguing a moot-point or law-case on Thursday night after supper. S. D'Ewes, Autobiography & Correspondence (1845) (modernized text) vol. I. 240 ••• Jersey is part of France; so it is a moot point whether a habeas corpus lies. in T. Burton, Diary (1828) vol. III. 46 'My lords and gentlemen', says he, 'it is a very moot point to which of those causes we may ascribe the universal dulness of the Irish. Sir C. Wogan in J. Swift, Works (1824) vol. XVII. 460 ... The policy of our arming slaves is in my opinion a moot point, unless the enemy set the example. G. Washington, Letter 20 March in Writings (1840) vol. VI. ii. 204 Particular times are appointed for the arguing moot-cases. Encyclopœdia Britannica vol. XII. 271/2 ••• If a statute of the United States were to adopt a common law phrase, in the creation of an offence, no common law consequences would follow, because we have no common law. But this is a moot point. Rep. Trials Col. A. Burr vol. II. 78 It remains a moot problem to be guessed at. A. D. Murray, Charnwood 110 Those who are already well informed in essentials and quite prepared to discuss 22:57 Fri 22 Aug VPN > 25% 0 oed.com 2. North American (originally Law). Of a case, issue, etc.: having no practical significance or relevance; abstract, academic. Now the usual sense in North America. 1831- 1831 1899 1946 1973 2000 Whether it is the emanation from the people or the states, is a moot question, having no bearing on the supremacy of that supreme law which from a proper source has rightfully been imposed on us by sovereign power. R. Peters, Reports Supreme Court United States vol. 5 41 Because the plaintiff boarded the cars for the purpose of making a test case, this is a moot case, which the court will not entertain. Atlantic Reporter vol. 42 517/2 • A lawsuit which is, or has become, moot is neither a case nor a controversy in the constitutional sense and no federal court has the power to decide it. Univ. Pennsylvania Law Review January 126 Motion for an order dismissing this indictment for lack of prosecution is dismissed as moot. New York Law Journal 31 August 18/4 ..• Media critics have long argued that networks should not call races until all polls have closed to avoid affecting turnout. It's a moot argument: information will out. Time 20 November 71/3 66 Cite I Historical thesaurus v North American law North American English
August 22, 2025 at 10:01 PM
jameselder.bsky.social
A Norman import I think? This is what Oliver Rackham says anyway:
Rabbit The rabbit in this interglacial is a western Mediterranean animal; Roman authors thought of it as characteristic of Spain and the Balearic Islands. John Sheail (1971) has written a book on its history in Britain. The rabbit appears in England at the beginning of the twelfth century. The circumstances strongly indicate deliberate introduction. It is delicious, and by the next century had become an important commercial animal; but it is not mentioned nor implied in Anglo-Saxon documents or Domesday Book. The earliest secure archaeological finds - discounting rabbits that may have burrowed into earlier strata - are of c. 1100 at Ipswich and at Hadleigh (Essex).84 The first written record is for the Scilly Islands in 1176 (Sheail 1971). The earliest representation that I have seen is of a dog and rabbit on a corbel of Kilpeck church (Herefordshire), ascribed to the 1150s or 1160s. The word 'warren', originally referring to hunting rights in general, soon came to imply rabbits much as 'Forest' (Chapter 6) implied deer. Early warrens were set up on small islands: Scilly, Lundy, Skokholm (Pembrokeshire), the Fame Islands, Isle of May (Fife), etc.* This solved the problem of fencing, for rabbits hate to swim. By the thirteenth century warrens were being established inland and in Scotland®S and Wales. The bigger ones, often owned by monks, were on heathland; others were in parks and later in Forests. Sheail gives a map of hundreds of Warren place-names all over England except for mountains, fenland, and the most intensive agriculture. Coney, the old name for rabbit, gives rise to place-names such as Conygre, Conyfare, and Conifer Wood. The medieval rabbit was not like ours. It was delicate and needed cherishing in this climate. At first it could not dig its own burrow; Sheail records among the tools used in Henry VIll's warren a great auger 'to make and bore cony holes'. Earthworks were made to encourage burrowing. These are clusters of rectangular flat-topped mounds,…
August 20, 2025 at 12:14 PM
jameselder.bsky.social
SCIENCE
TRAINING It is undoubtedly a fact that Beers brewed from the finest, purest and best materials such as those of THE BRAKSPEAR BREWERY (Founded 1779) are a great help to crews in training. First University Boat Race, 1829, at Henley, June 10 First Regatta, 1839, at Henley, June It is well known that very many Winning Crews have been supplied with their Beers This historical fact alone points to the purity & high standard of their Ales If your Grocer does not carry it, drop a posicard to THE BRAKSPEAR BREWERY, HENLEY - ON - THAMES.
August 18, 2025 at 3:47 PM
jameselder.bsky.social
August 13, 2025 at 6:02 PM
jameselder.bsky.social
August 13, 2025 at 5:57 PM
jameselder.bsky.social
I don’t get this.

“Watch most videos ad-free. Ads may appear…when you search or browse.”

Doesn’t searching and browsing cover a lot of YouTube use? It does for me anyway.

Are they saying that you only won’t get ads on subscriptions and Autoplay? If so, that’s a fat lot of good.
Get YouTube Premium Enjoy fewer interruptions with Premium Lite Watch most videos ad-free. Ads may appear on music content, Shorts and when you search or browse. 1-month trial for £0 Then £10.49/month Cancel at any time Try 1 month for £0 For YouTube with no interruptions, take a look at Premium.
August 5, 2025 at 5:39 PM
jameselder.bsky.social
I’m always sharing this, but it’s where I lost patience with Will MacAskill’s longtermism book:
I also lost confidence in the book early on when he made a statement about something I know about from my own career. In the context of talking about Al he says: "In Chapter 1 we saw that Shakespeare and Horace really might have achieved immortality through their poetry. Information can persist indefinitely because the cost to replicate it is so tiny. But software is just complex information. It can be replicated easily. For example, one of the first commercially available computer games was Pong by Atari, released in 1977. You can still play it today online. Though eventually all original Atari consoles will rust and crumble, Pong will live on. The software that defines Pong is replicable, and if every future generation is willing to pay the tiny cost of replicating this little piece of history, it will continue to persist. Pong could last as long as civilisation does." This statement tacitly assumes that: - All information is held digitally. - All digital information can easily be copied. - If a copy of some digital information exists, it can be accessed and read. - All of the above is vanishingly cheap to achieve. MacAskill additionally assumes that this is true not only for information but for software. Not a single one of those assumptions is accurate, as anyone involved in archives, libraries or conservation of analogue or digital information objects could tell you. Preservation of information, whether in the form of manuscript paper records, newsprint, cellulose acetate film, magnetic tape, unstructured collections of digital files, structured databases, websites or software takes time, expertise and money on an ongoing
July 30, 2025 at 7:58 AM
jameselder.bsky.social
There's sometimes an assertion that prior to, say, 1960 commuters were much more likely to queue patiently and politely. This, from Jerry White's Zeppelin Nights about London in 1917 suggests otherwise:
The consequences for overcrowding on public transport were dire. ‘Strap-hanging has become a habit in England, where it was formerly unknown,’ the American R. D. Blumenfeld noted in September. ‘Life in a London omnibus has ceased to be a joy.’ Daisy Parsons found herself one of a quartet, two girls and two boys, travelling to the station to get home to Woodford from Palmers Green late one evening in April. The tram they boarded was ‘somewhat crowded’ and the two girls, climbing to the top deck, ‘were pushed, punched, had our toes trodden upon, all sort of things . . . The number of people on that tram almost squashed us to death’, though Daisy seems not to have minded the squeeze too much. But at tram and bus stops crowding had become intolerable by the end of the year: Getting home during rush hours was a daily terror, especially on dark winter evenings in London. The crowds of office workers were vastly increased and the scramble to get into some of the longer distance trams and omnibuses constituted a bear fight out of which those of both sexes, who were worsted or driven off the overladen vehicles by the conductors, retreated to the pavement with hats bashed in, umbrellas broken, shins and ankles kicked and bruised, in a dazed and shaken condition . . . The dread of the evening struggle in dark streets hung over many workers all the time, adding considerably to the strain of life.50 The disorder in the streets was so bad, and disabled or wounded soldiers were treated so badly in the melee, that the London local authorities agitated for the enforcement of queuing at bus and tram stops, that courtesy entirely foreign to the rush-hour Londoner. In December 1917 the LCC organised a conference on how best to achieve this new departure.51
July 29, 2025 at 12:32 PM
jameselder.bsky.social
One of the nice things about processing and preserving 1980s corporate films is that they often feature great character actors of yore.

Today, James Grout (DCS Strange from Inspector Morse) and Ken Jones ('orrible Ives from Porridge).
Video still of James Grout and Ken Jones
July 23, 2025 at 3:14 PM
jameselder.bsky.social
I also find that a lot of AI boosters do a *lot* of handwaving about the ease of 1) making information machine readable and 2) preserving it.

I wrote about this in my review of Will MacAskill’s longtermism book:
I also lost confidence in the book early on when he made a statement about something I know about from my own career. In the context of talking about Al he says: "In Chapter 1 we saw that Shakespeare and Horace really might have achieved immortality through their poetry. Information can persist indefinitely because the cost to replicate it is so tiny. But software is just complex information. It can be replicated easily. For example, one of the first commercially available computer games was Pong by Atari, released in 1977. You can still play it today online. Though eventually all original Atari consoles will rust and crumble, Pong will live on. The software that defines Pong is replicable, and if every future generation is willing to pay the tiny cost of replicating this little piece of history, it will continue to persist. Pong could last as long as civilisation does." This statement tacitly assumes that: - All information is held digitally. - All digital information can easily be copied. - If a copy of some digital information exists, it can be accessed and read. - All of the above is vanishingly cheap to achieve. MacAskill additionally assumes that this is true not only for information but for software. Not a single one of those assumptions is accurate, as anyone involved in archives, libraries or conservation of analogue or digital information objects could tell you. Preservation of information, whether in the form of manuscript paper records, newsprint, cellulose acetate film, magnetic tape, unstructured collections of digital files, structured databases, websites or software takes time, expertise and money on an ongoing
July 19, 2025 at 6:40 PM
jameselder.bsky.social
I love the complexity and nuance of this story, recounted in Jerry White’s “Zeppelin Nights: London in the First World War”.

The past is never straightforward, and defies simple narratives.
1 AN IMMENSE SENSE OF WAITING MAY DAY, LONDON, 1914. Thousands of workers took a holiday on this warm sunny Friday and marched from all corners of the city, as for some years past, to a great demonstration in Hyde Park. The day was notable this year for the large numbers of foreign workers present. They were given their own 'international platform, where several languages were spoken', French and German prominent among them. The London building workers, embroiled in an ill-tempered lockout, had two platforms to themselves, and The Times's good-natured report noted specially the 'Juvenile Socialists' around the stage of the London Socialist Sunday School Union, whose meeting opened with a hymn. 'The demonstration passed off very quietly, the paper thought.' But not quite. Earlier in the day, some 600 marchers from west London, including a section from the National League of the Blind, were crossing the Edgware Road at Church Street, Marylebone, close to the slum district of Lisson Grove. At the front of a queue of traffic waiting in her car for the procession to cross was Mrs Hilda Beatrice Hewlett, a famous flyer, the first British woman to hold a pilot's licence. According to the police, Mrs Hewlett waited about three minutes and then drove on, 'scattering the processionists in all directions'. 'She stopped after being called to three times, and when her name and address had been taken, she remarked, "Now move them (i.e., the crowd) out of the way or I will drive over them." The crowd 'was incensed, and but for the intervention of the police would have overturned the car'. In her defence at the magistrates' court in early June, Mrs Hewlett claimed she had driven off only when the marchers had passed and left a space, when she 'at once sounded her hooter and crossed the road'. But she too confirmed the mood of the crowd as ugly. 'Immediately a large crowd of very rough people collected round and mounted the car, yelling "Suffragette! We will teach you how to behave to the working classes." As a matter of fact, she herself belonged to the working class' - Mrs Hewlett stretched a point here: she was a Church of England vicar's daughter - 'and was not a suffragette. Had she not had her big dog with her in the car she believed that they would have attacked her? The magistrate accepted that her words to the police were not a threat but merely concern for the crowd's safety and fined her 40s for dangerous driving with 2s costs. This was an incident small but telling. For London in that early summer of 1914 was a divided city where the divisions were not held in check by politeness or reserve. The widest fracture had opened along the fault line of class and Mrs Hewlett and the May Day workers' march had exposed an open wound of mutual mistrust and loathing in which violent language, even violent actions, were never far from the surface. The outbreak of war, less than two months away though utterly unthought of when Mrs Hewlett received comeuppance of a sort, would heal some divisions. But the festering class divide in London would prove the most difficult of all to paper over. If London in the last few months before the outbreak of war in 1914 was in many ways at war with itself, it remained a city of unparalleled greatness, like nothing else the modern world had ever seen. With a
July 14, 2025 at 8:47 PM
jameselder.bsky.social
Bots are widespread, although not universal. Of 43 respondents, 39 had experienced a recent increase in traffic. Twenty-seven of the 39 respondents experiencing an increase in traffic attributed it to AI training data bots, with an additional seven believing that bots could be contributing to the traffic. This increase in traffic has been hard to anticipate because few respondents were actively tracking bot traffic prior to the bots triggering a crisis in their collection. Many respondents did not realize they were experiencing a growth in bot traffic until the traffic reached the point where it overwhelmed the service and knocked online collections offline. Some respondents have been seeing an increase in bot traffic since 2021, while others did not experience their first spike until 2025. Some bots clearly identify themselves, while others take a range of measures to hide their source. When bots come, they tend to swarm for relatively brief periods of time. The frequency of these swarms may be increasing. Robots.txt is not currently an effective way to prevent bots from overwhelming collections. Respondents are deploying a range of home-grown and third-party firewall-based countermeasures to try to screen out bots based on IP address, geography, domain, and user agent string. Some of these efforts appear to be effective, although few are confident that they will be sustainable in the long term. Respondents are reluctant to take more aggressive steps to move collections behind things like login screens for a variety of reasons, including concerns about how effective those measures will be in the medium term, that implementing those changes can have negative impacts on welcome users, and whether login-based restrictions run counter to their larger goal of making the collections easily available online. Respondents worry that swarms of AI training data bots will create an environment of unsustainably escalating costs for providing online access to collections
June 27, 2025 at 12:05 PM