It's Always More Complicated

Some years ago, when I was still actually going out and doing research in BL, TNA, etc as well as Former Workplace, I would remark that it was pretty much the standard thing that I would run into Person I Knew somewhere during the day.

Today I went out for a research trip to An Archive in Senate House Library.

And lo and behold, there was another reader there who looked vaguely familiar, and who came up to me and said they thought we'd met, and indeed at least our names were familiar to one another as toilers in similar fields of endeavour (I will just say, It's A Filthy Job, But Somebody Has To Do It).

And we were, indeed, looking at the same collection of the papers of someone who for years was i/c the Private Cupboard at what was then the British Museum Reading Room as well as being a private collector in the field himself. The collection is vast but at this present moment I was only interested in his correspondence with Alfred Kinsey ('Dear Prok': they were on those terms).

Vague plans to meet and chat.

Am a bit under-impressed by the system for the Palaeography Room (wherein one consults archives and mss) at Senate House, which makes it out to be far more complex than it is - it was certainly not so much in demand that one needed to book a seat (hourly slots, even) and scan a QR code, as informed during the ordering process.

Also deeply underwhelmed by the wifi in Senate House which failed to recognise me. Don't You Know Who I Am.

I was also however able to download a chapter of a book which, although online, is not available offsite (chiz), that I wanted to look at for entirely different research purposes.