The Greatest Show on Earth?

Meeting today to look at the agendas for some important meetings coming up - CiCS User Group, and a departmental meeting. Two completely different audiences and we're going to try a bit of an experiment - using our voting software we're going to ask people to rank some possible new developments in terms of priority, and then compare the results. Will be interesting to see if our users have the same opinion as our department. Then we looked at how we might use the skills of our designers in the department to pull together a more coherent look and feel for all of our publications and information that we produce. Currently too many different styles in use by different sections of the department.

Then a meeting to discuss the arrangements for the Institutional Web Managers Workshop which is being held in Sheffield this summer - lots of AV/IT/web access things to talk about. Looking forward to it.

Finally, a pleasant end to the day with the opening of a new exhibition space in the University Library, and an exhibition called Humbug! about the legendary showman P T Barnum. A great newly commissioned statue of him by Anthony Bennett was the centrepiece, and some great banners by Mark Copeland - my favourite being of Jumbo, the world's apparently largest elephant. Very sad story about him, and he was bought by Barnum from London Zoo, and he didn't want to leave, and a campaign was launched to keep him there. Eventually Barnum won and he was removed in chains in a crate. Difficult decision for an elephant - Zoo or Circus?

The exhibition was curated by our own Professor Vanessa and is open to the public until May 27th - well worth a visit.