Lights, Camera...

First off, sorry for not updating this in a couple of weeks. Sadly, because this blog is meant to be at least partly a record of the highs and lows of research, this silence is pretty appropriate, as the last few weeks have been about plodding through documents without anything much exciting happening.

Today, however, did see something out of the ordinary. When I arrived at the Detroit Public Library I found there was a camera crew setting up. Naturally my first thought was that word had got out about the dashing English historian working there and they'd come to interview me. But seriously, I assumed that they were from a news or documentary program who were doing a piece on the library.

When they began filming, however, it turned out that they were filming a commercial for some description of information-management company, and they'd decided that a historical library would be as good a set as any. While I'm sure they're right about this, what I found odd and somewhat uncomfortable was the idea of commodifying both this public space and a more general sense of history and historical knowledge - this was a historical library, after all, and the crew were careful to get the bronze statue of Lincoln into the shot. I appreciate that public libraries in the US, in particular, are needing to find every possible source of money, but one would hope they'd resist this sort of compromising of their identity.

Or maybe I'm just cross that they didn't ask me to sit in shot!