Wednesday 6 June 2007

And now for a change of pace

Today I stumbled over the Dear Miss Griffis blog (not very quick off the mark I'm afraid - it started in March last year).

The blog's got it all: love, war, suspense, censorship, weather conditions - and it's all horribly out of date. Which is why it's great.

The blog is being run by the Glenbow Museum in Calgary. In their archives are a stash of 200+ letters written between two Calgary sweethearts during World War One: Miss Emma Griffis, a nurse who went to England and worked in a military hospital, and Harold McGill, a doctor who served with the Canadian forces.

Every week, in chronological order, the Museum is loading one of Emma and Harold's letters up to the blog. You can follow their story by visiting the blog, or signing up to the RSS feed.

What I love about this is the very simple use of Web 2.0 technology (which is the newest sparkliest thing out there in the museums and libraries world) to surface a collection item that normally wouldn't get a lot of attention.

I'm also quite struck by the funny little likenesses and dissimilarities: the weekly posting maintains the pace of international mail, and the sense of a story unfolding over time, and yet this is a very public posting of private emotions.

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