Retrospect: You can run but you can't hide

The video [wvx] of my presentation at the University of Edinburgh is now available. I have received several kind comments and enquiries – surely it wasn’t two and a half hours long 😉 I still cannot get used to the fact that many presentations are often not ‘private’ to you and the immediate audience any more.
I was delighted to be in the Edinburgh last Monday. Several ten year things again. John MacColl, with whom I started Ariadne ten years ago, asked me to talk at the University en route to the JISC/CNI meeting in York. The occasion was the ten year celebration of the JISC-funded data centre, Edina.
John proposed a title and we agreed it would be webcast. When the title was advertised on a variety of mailing lists I realised that I would actually have to stick with my stated topic 😉 In the event, I quite liked the way things went.
The JISC/CNI conference also had a retrospective opening, as several speakers looked back over the years in which the conference has been held and the digital library programs that opened that period. This conference is distinctive in that it brings together folks from the US and the UK, and also some from elsewhere, in a way that is not common elsewhere. I will have some observations about the program later. A major topic was how the publicly funded UK infrastructure provision created an environment that was very different from the more decentralized US context.