Almost two months ago, I put out the call for speaker suggestions for Web Day Out. I got some good responses—thank you to everyone who took the time to get in touch.
The response that really piqued my interest was from Aleth Gueguen. She proposed a talk on progressive web apps, backed up with plenty of experience. The more I thought about it, the more I realised how perfect it would be for Web Day Out.
Find out about the most important capabilities in progressive web apps and how to put them to work.
I’m really excited about this line-up! This is going to be a day out that you won’t want to miss. Get your ticket for a mere £225+VAT if you haven’t already!
Given the agenda for this event, I think you’ll agree that Jake is a perfect fit. He’s been at the forefront of championing user-centred web standards, writing specs and shipping
features in browsers.
Along the way he’s also created two valuable performance tools that I use all the time: SVGOMG and Squoosh, which has a permanent place in my dock—if you need to compress images, I highly recommend adding this progressive web app to your desktop.
He’s the man behind service workers and view transitions—two of the most important features for making websites first-class citizens on any device.
So what will he talk about at Web Day Out? Image formats? Offline functionality? Smooth animations? Something else entirely?
All will be revealed soon. In the meantime, grab yourself a ticket to Web Day Out—it’s just £225+VAT—and I’ll see you in Brighton on Thursday, 12 March 2026!
I don’t get out to gigs as much as I’d like. But for some reason, the past week has been packed with live music.
On Tuesday I saw Ye Vagabonds. I’m particularly partial to their nice mandolin playing. It was a nice concert that felt like being in a Greenwich Village folk club in the ’60s. It’s great to see how popular Ye Vagabonds are with indie kids, even if I’m slightly perplexed by the extent of the popularity—see also Lankum.
On Thursday it was time for Robert Forster and his band. I’m a huge fan of The Go-Betweens, as well as Forster’s solo work. He gave us a thoroughly enjoyable show, interspersing some select Go-Betweens tracks, including quite a few off 16 Lovers Lane.
On Saturday Jessica and I made the journey over to Lewes to see The Wilderness Yet at the folk club. We know Rowan and Rosie from when they used to live ‘round here and it was lovely to see and hear them again.
Then last night we went out to see DakhaBrakha. The Ukrainian population of Brighton came out to give them a very warm welcome. The band themselves were, unsurprisingly, brilliant. Like I said last time they came to town:
Imagine if Tom Waits and Cocteau Twins came from Eastern Europe and joined forces. Well, DakhaBrakha are even better than that.
If you work at a clever company, then you should let them know about sponsoring Web Day Out.
All the details are in this PDF sponsorship pack. Basically there are three (and only three) spots available, at three different levels of sponsorship.
One of the best things about the venue for Web Day Out is that always having an excellent auditorium, the Studio Theatre has a really nice space for the breaks. It would be the perfect spot to set up a stand and chat with all the smart attendees.
All the attendees will, by definition, be smart because they got tickets for Web Day Out—a steal at just £225+VAT.
The beauty of opting into web platform features as they become available is that your site becomes contextual. The same codebase adapts into its environment, playing to its strengths, rather than trying to build and ship your own environment from the ground up. Meet your users where they are.
That’s a pretty neat summation of the agenda for Web Day Out. So I thought, “Hmm …if I was able to pester Harry to turn a LinkedIn post into a really good blog post, I wonder if I could pester him to turn that blog post into a talk?”
I threw down the gauntlet. Harry accepted the challenge.
I’m sure you’re already familiar with Harry’s excellent work, but if you’re not, he’s basically Mr. Web Performance. That’s why I’m so excited to have him speak at Web Day Out—I want to hear the business case for leaning into what web browsers can do today, and he is most certainly the best person to bring receipts.
You won’t want to miss this, so be sure to get your ticket now; it’s only £225+VAT.
If you’re not ready to commit just yet, but you want to hear about more speaker announcements like this, you can sign up to the mailing list.
Half of the line-up of speakers for Web Day Out is already on the site. One more is already confirmed.
I’m ridiculously excited about the way the line-up is taking shape, and judging by the zippiness of ticket sales, so are lots of my peers. Seriously, don’t wait to get your ticket or you might end up missing out completely.
I’ve already got a shortlist of other people I could imagine on the line-up, but I’m open to more suggestions. If you’d like to speak at Web Day Out—or you know someone you think would be great—send an email to jeremy@clearleft.com
I won’t be checking my work email while I’m away on holiday next week but it would be lovely to come back to an inbox of exciting suggestions.
A couple of pointers…
I’d rather not have too many people like me on the line-up. White dudes are already over-represented in this industry, especially at conferences.
If you’ve never given a talk before, don’t worry. I’d love to help you put your talk together and coach you in presenting it. I have some experience in this area.
No product pitches. That includes JavaScript frameworks and CSS libraries.
If I get even a whiff of “AI”, your proposal doesn’t stand a chance. There are many, many, many other events that are only too happy to have wall-to-wall talks about …that sort of thing.
If you end up speaking at Web Day Out you will, of course, be paid. We will, of course, cover travel and accommodation too. We can’t afford the travel costs of bringing anyone in from outside Europe though (and we’d like to keep the carbon footprint of the event as small as possible).
Web Day Out has an opinionated agenda all about showing what’s possible in web browsers today. Some potential topics include:
I’m going to cut right to the chase: Clearleft is putting on a brand new conference in 2026. It’s called Web Day Out. It’ll be on Thursday, March 12th right here in Brighton. Tickets are just £225+VAT. You should be there!
If you’ve ever been to Responsive Day Out or Patterns Day, the format will be familiar to you. There’s going to be eight 30 minute talks. Bam! Bam! Bam!
Like those other one-day conferences, this one has a laser-sharp focus.
Web Day Out is all about what you can do in web browsers today. You can expect talks that showcase hands-on practical uses for the latest advances in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript APIs. There will be no talks about libraries, frameworks or build tools, and I can guarantee there will be absolutely no so-called “AI”.
If you care about performance, accessibility, and progressive enhancement, Web Day Out is the event for you.
Or if you’ve been living in React-land but starting to feel that maybe you’re missing out on what’s been shipping in web browsers, Web Day Out is the event for you too. And I’m not talking about cute demos here. This is very much about shipping to production.
Jemima’s talk gives you a flavour of what to expect at Web Day Out:
In this talk, we’ll take a look at how to use HTML and CSS to build simpler alternatives to popular JavaScript components such as accordions, modals, scroll transitions, carousels etc We’ll also take a look at the performance and accessibility benefits and real-life applications and use-cases of these components.
Web Day Out will be in The Studio Theatre of the Brighton Dome, which is a fantastic intimate venue. That means that places are limited, so get your ticket now!
Ever since Salter Cane recorded the songs on Deep Black Water I’ve been itching to play them live. At our album launch gig last Friday, I finally got my chance.
It felt soooo good! It helped that we had the best on-stage sound ever (note to the bands of Brighton, Leon at the Hope and Ruin is fantastic at doing the sound). The band were tight, the songs sounded great live, and I had an absolute blast.
I made a playlist of songs to be played in between bands. It set the tone nicely. As well as some obvious touchstones like 16 Horsepower and Joy Division, I made sure to include some local bands we’re fond of, like The Equitorial Group, Mudlow, Patients, and The Roebucks.
I can’t wait to get back on stage with the band! These songs sound great on the new album but I can guarantee that they’re going to absolutely rock when we play them live.
Support will be provided by our good friends Dreamytime Escorts, featuring former members of Caramel Jack. They’ve also got a new EP on the way.
Doors are at 8pm.
I’m really, really excited about this. It’s been far too long since Salter Cane were last bringing the noise live on stage. I hope to see you there!
Brighton is blessed with plenty of traditional Irish music sessions. You need some kind of almanac to keep track of when they’re on. Some are on once a month. Some are twice a month. Some are every two weeks (which isn’t the same as twice a month, depending on the month).
Sometimes when the stars align just right, you get a whole week of sessions in a row. That’s what happened last week with sessions on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I enjoyed playing my mandolin in each of them. There was even a private party on Saturday night where a bunch of us played tunes for an hour and a half.
There’s nothing quite like playing music with other people. It’s good for the soul.
In short, it was excellent. The venue, how smoothly every thing was organised, the talks …oh boy, the talks!
Benjamin did a truly superb job curating this line-up. Everyone really brought their A-game.
As predicted, this wasn’t a day of talks just for researchers. It was far more like a dConstruct. This was big, big picture stuff. Themes of hope, community, nature, technology, inclusion and resilience.
I overheard more than one person in the breaks saying “this was not what I was expecting!” They were saying it in a very positive way, though I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a silent minority in the audience who were miffed that they weren’t getting a day of practical research techniques devoid of politics.
As host, I had the easiest job of the day. All I had to do was say a few words of introduction for each speaker, then sit back down and enjoy every minute of every talk.
The one time when I had to really work was the panel discussion at the end of the day. I really enjoy moderating panels. I’ve seen enough bad panels to know what does and doesn’t work. But this one was tough. The panelists were all great, but because the themes were soooo big, I was worried about it all getting a bit too high-falutin’. People seemed to enjoy it though.
All in all, it was a superb day. If you came along, thank you!
Gotta be honest, #ResearchByTheSea is one of the best conferences I’ve been to in yeeeeeears. So many good, useful, inspiring, thoughtful, provocative talks. Much more about ethics and power and possibility than I’d expected.
From 2005 to 2015 Clearleft ran the dConstruct event here in Brighton (with one final anniversary event in 2022).
I had the great pleasure of curating dConstruct for a while. I’m really proud of the line-ups I put together.
It wasn’t your typical tech event, to put it mildy. You definitely weren’t going to learn practical techniques to bring back into work on Monday morning. If anything, it was the kind of event that might convince you to quit your job on Monday morning.
The talks were design-informed, but with oodles of philosophy, culture and politics.
As you can imagine, that’s not an easy sell. Hence why we stopped running the event. It’s pretty hard to convince your boss to send you to a conference like that.
Sometimes I really miss it though. With everything going on in the tech world right now (and the world in general), it sure would be nice to get together in a room full of like-minded people to discuss the current situation.
Research By The Sea is most definitely not just for UX researchers—this sounds to me like the event to attend if, like me, you’re alarmed by everything happening right now.
Next Thursday, February 27th, this is the place to be if you’ve been missing dConstruct. See you there!
I’ve been reading lots of modern takes on Greek classics. So when I saw that there was going to be a short of run of Sophocles’s Electra at Brighton’s Theatre Royal, I grabbed some tickets for the opening night.
With Brie Larson taking on the title role in this production, it’s bound to be popular.
I didn’t know anything about this staging of the play—other than it was using the Anne Carson translation—which is how I like it. I didn’t know if it was going to be modern, retro, classical or experimental.
It turned out to be kind of arty, but not in a good way. Arty like art school with all the clichés.
The production somehow managed to feel packed with gimmicks but also seriously underbaked at the same time. There must have a been a lot of “yes, and…”s during the workshopping, but no subsequent round of “no, but…”s. So we got lots of ideas thrown at the wall like spaghetti. Very few of them stuck.
Instead of enhancing the core text—which is, thankfully, indestructable—most of the gimmicks lessened it. It’s like they were afraid to let the play speak for itself and felt like they had to do stuff to it. Most of it ended up creating an emotional distance from the story and the characters.
It wasn’t bad, per se, but it definitely wasn’t good. It was distinctly mediocre.
Now, take all of this with a big pinch of salt because this is just my opinion. The very things that turned me off might tickle your fancy. Like the way it was half way to being a musical, with characters singing their dialogue in that monotone way that they do in Les Mis (but this is like Les really Mis). And the vocal effects that did nothing for me might be quite effective for you.
Even as I was watching it, I was thinking to myself, “Well, this isn’t really for me, but I can kind of appreciate that they’re trying to experiment.”
But then towards the end of the play, it went too far. Over the PA came samples of reporting of recent news stories; graphic, grisly, and crucially, real. If you’re going to attempt something like that, you need to earn it. Otherwise you’re just cheapening the real-world suffering. This play absolutely did not earn it.
Elektra has finished its run in Brighton and is now heading to London where it’s supposed to play until April. I’m curious to see how it goes.
Remy was on the team too. He did the heavy lifting of actually making the thing work—quite an achievement in just five days!
Coming into this, I thought it was hugely ambitious to try to not only recreate the experience of using the first ever web browser (called WorldWideWeb, later Nexus), but to also try to document the historical context of the time. Now that it’s all done, I’m somewhat astounded that we managed to achieve both.
Remy and I were both keen to talk about the work, which is why we did a joint talk at Fronteers in Amsterdam that year. We’re both quite sceptical of talks given by duos; people think it means it’ll be half the work, when actually it’s twice the work. In the end we come up with a structure for the talk that we both liked:
Now, we could’ve just done everything chronologically, but that would mean I’d do the first half of the talk and Remy would do the second half. That didn’t appeal. And it sounded kind of boring. So then we come up with the idea of interweaving the two timelines.
After putting so much work into the talk, we were keen to give it again somewhere. We had the chance to do that in Nottingham in early March 2020. (cue ominous foreboding)
The folks from local Brighton meetup Async had also asked if we wanted to give the talk. We were booked in for May 2020. (ominous foreboding intensifies)
We all know what happened next. The Situation. Lockdown. No conferences. No meetups.
But technically the talk wasn’t cancelled. It was just postponed. And postponed. And postponed. Before you know it, five years have passed.
Part of the problem was that Async is usually on the first Thursday of the month and that’s when I host an Irish music session in Hove. I can’t miss that!
I really enjoyed giving the talk and the discussion that followed. There was a good buzz.
It also made me appreciate the work that we put into stucturing the talk. We’ve only given it a few times but with a five year gap between presentations, I can confidentally say that’s it’s a timeless topic.
I have a feeling that 2025 is going to be a year of reflection for me. It’s such a nice round number, 25. One quarter of a century.
That’s also how long myself and Jessica have been married. Our wedding anniversary was last week.
Top tip: if you get married in year ending with 00, you’ll always know how long ago it was. Just lop off the first 2000 years and there’s the number.
As well as being the year we got married (at a small ceremony in an army chapel in Arizona), 2000 was also the year we moved from Freiburg to Brighton. I never thought we’d still be here 25 years later.
2005 was twenty years ago. A lot of important events happened that year. I went to South by Southwest for the first time and met people who became lifelong friends (including some dear friends no longer with us).
I gave my first conference talk. We had the first ever web conference in the UK. And myself, Rich, and Andy founded Clearleft. You can expect plenty of reminiscence and reflection on the Clearleft blog over the course of this year.
2010 was fifteen years ago. That’s when Jessica and I moved into our current home. For the first time, we were paying off a mortgage instead of paying a landlord. But I can’t bring myself to consider us “homeowners” at that time. For me, we didn’t really become homeowners until we paid that mortgage off ten years later.
2020 was five years ago. It was also yesterday. The Situation was surreal, scary and weird. But the people I love came through it intact, for which I’m very grateful.
Apart from all these anniversaries, I’m not anticipating any big milestones in 2025. I hope it will be an unremarkable year.
I went to FFConf on Friday. It did me the world of good.
To be honest, I haven’t much felt like venturing out over the past few days since my optimism took a big hit. But then when I do go and interact with people, I’m grateful for it.
Like, when I went out to my usual Wednesday evening traditional Irish music session I was prepared the inevitable discussion of Trump’s election. I was ready to quite clearly let people know that I didn’t want to talk about it. But I didn’t have to. Maybe because everyone else was feeling much the same, we just played and played. It was good.
Still, I was ready for the weekend and I wasn’t really feeling psyched up for FFConf on Friday. But once I got there, I was immediately uplifted.
It was so nice to see so many people I hadn’t seen in quite a while. I had the chance to reconnect with people that I had only been hearing from through my RSS reader:
“Terence, I’m really enjoying your sci-fi short stories!”
“Kirsty, I was on tenterhooks when you were getting Mabel!”
(Mabel is an adorable kitty-cat. In hindsight I probably should’ve also congratulated her on getting married. To a human.)
The talks were really good this year. They covered a wide variety of topics.
There was only one talk about “AI” (unlike most conferences these days, where it dominates the agenda). Léonie gave a superb run-down of the different kinds of machine learning and how they can help or hinder accessibility.
Crucially, Léonie began her talk by directly referencing the exploitation and energy consumption inherent in today’s large language models. It took all of two minutes, but it was two minutes more than the whole day of talks at UX Brighton. Thank you, Léonie!
Some of the other talks covered big topics. Life. Death. Meaning. Purpose.
I enjoyed them all, though I often find something missing from discussions about meaning and purpose. Just about everyone agrees that having a life enfused with purpose is what provides meaning. So there’s an understandable quest to seek out what it is that gives you purpose.
But we’re also constantly reminded that every life has intrinsic meaning. “You are enough”, not “you are enough, as long as there’s some purpose to your life.”
I found myself thinking about Winne Lim’s great post on leading a purposeless life. I think about it a lot. It gives me comfort. Instead of assuming that your purpose is out there somewhere and you’ve got to find it, you can entertain the possibility that your life might not have a purpose …and that’s okay.
I know this all sounds like very heavy stuff, but it felt good to be in a room full of good people grappling with these kind of topics. I needed it.
The quality of the presentations was really good this year, probably the best yet. Usually there are one or two stand-out speakers (like Tom Kerwin last year), but this year, the standard felt very high to me.
But…
The theme of the conference was UX and “AI”, and I’ve never been more disappointed by what wasn’t said at a conference.
Not a single speaker addressed where the training data for current large language models comes from (it comes from scraping other people’s copyrighted creative works).
Not a single speaker addressed the energy requirements for current large language models (the requirements are absolutely mahoosive—not just for the training, but for each and every query).
My charitable reading of the situation yesterday was that every speaker assumed that someone else would cover those issues.
The less charitable reading is that this was a deliberate decision.
Whenever the issue of ethics came up, it was only ever in relation to how we might use these tools: considering user needs, being transparent, all that good stuff. But never once did the question arise of whether it’s ethical to even use these tools.
In fact, the message was often the opposite: words like “responsibility” and “duty” came up, but only in the admonition that UX designers have a responsibility and duty to use these tools! And if that carrot didn’t work, there’s always the stick of scaring you into using these tools for fear of being left behind and having a machine replace you.
I was left feeling somewhat depressed about the deliberately narrow focus. Maggie’s talk was the only one that dealt with any externalities, looking at how the firehose of slop is blasting away at society. But again, the focus was only ever on how these tools are used or abused; nobody addressed the possibility of deliberately choosing not to use them.
If audience members weren’t yet using generative tools in their daily work, the assumption was that they were lagging behind and it was only a matter of time before they’d get on board the hype train. There was no room for the idea that someone might examine the roots of these tools and make a conscious choice not to fund their development.
Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context. A chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.
But none of the speakers at UX Brighton chose to examine the larger context of the tools they were encouraging us to use.
One speaker told us “Be curious!”, but clearly that curiosity should not extend to the foundations of the tools themselves. Ignore what’s behind the curtain. Instead look at all the cool stuff we can do now. Don’t worry about the fact that everything you do with these tools is built on a bedrock of exploitation and environmental harm. We should instead blithely build a new generation of user interfaces on the burial ground of human culture.
Whenever I get into a discussion about these issues, it always seems to come back ’round to whether these tools are actually any good or not. People point to the genuinely useful tasks they can accomplish. But that’s not my issue. There are absolutely smart and efficient ways to use large language models—in some situations, it’s like suddenly having a superpower. But as Molly White puts it:
The benefits, though extant, seem to pale in comparison to the costs.
There are no ethical uses of current large language models.
And if you believe that the ethical issues will somehow be ironed out in future iterations, then that’s all the more reason to stop using the current crop of exploitative large language models.
Anyway, like I said, all the talks at UX Brighton were very good. But I just wish just one of them had addressed the underlying questions that any good UX designer should ask: “Where did this data come from? What are the second-order effects of deploying this technology?”
Having a talk on those topics would’ve been nice, but I would’ve settled for having five minutes of one talk, or even one minute. But there was nothing.
There’s one possible explanation for this glaring absence that’s quite depressing to consider. It may be that these topics weren’t covered because there’s an assumption that everybody already knows about them, and frankly, doesn’t care.
To use an outdated movie reference, imagine a raving Charlton Heston shouting that “Soylent Green is people!”, only to be met with indifference. “Everyone knows Soylent Green is people. So what?”
I’ve been on a sabbatical from work for the past six weeks.
At Clearleft, you’re eligible for a sabbatical after five years. For some reason I haven’t taken one until now, 19 years into my tenure at the agency. I am an idiot.
My six-week sabbatical has been lovely, alternating between travel and homebodying.
Belfast
The first week was spent in Belfast at the excellent Belfast Trad Fest. There were workshops in the morning, sessions in the afternoon, and concerts in the evening. Non-stop music!
This year’s event was a little bit special for me. The festival runs an excellent bursary sponsorship programme for young people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to attend:
The bursary secures a place for a young musician to attend and experience a week-long intensive and immersive summertime learning course of traditional music, song and dance and can be transformative.
Starting from today, and for the whole month of April, any donations made to The Session, which normally go towards covering the costs of running the site, will instead go towards sponsoring bursary places for this year’s Belfast Summer school.
Needless to say, I was thrilled! The Trad Fest team were very happy too—they very kindly gave me a media pass for the duration of the event, which meant I could go to any of the concerts for free. I made full use of this.
That said, one of the absolute highlights of the week wasn’t a concert, but a session. Piper Mick O’Connor and fiddler Sean Smyth led a session out at the American Bar one evening that was absolutely sublime. There was a deep respect for the music combined with a lovely laidback vibe.
Brighton
There were no shortage of sessions once Jessica returned from Belfast to Brighton. In fact, when we got the train back from Gatwick we hopped in a cab straight to a session instead of going home first. Can’t stop, won’t stop.
The weather hadn’t been great in Belfast, which was fine because we were mostly indoors. But once we got back to Brighton we were treated to a week of glorious sunshine.
Needless to say, Jessica did plenty of swimming. I even went in the ocean myself on one of the hottest days.
I also went into the air. Andy took me up in a light aircraft for a jolly jaunt over the south of England. We flew from Goodwood over the New Forest, and around the Isle of Wight where we landed for lunch. Literally a flying visit.
I can attest that Andy is an excellent pilot. No bumpy landings.
Cork
Our next sojourn took us back to the island of Ireland, but this time we were visiting the Republic. We spent a week in the mightiest of all the Irish counties, Cork.
Our friends Dan and Sue came over from the States and a whole bunch of us went on a road trip down to west Cork, a beautiful part of the country that I shamefully hadn’t visited before. Sue did a magnificent job navigating the sometimes tiny roads in a rental car, despite Dan being a nervous Nellie in the passenger seat.
We had a lovely couple of days in Glengarriff, even though the weather wasn’t great. On the way back to Cork city, we just had to stop off in Baltimore—Dan and Sue live in the other Baltimore. I wasn’t prepared for the magnificent and rugged coastline (quite different to its Maryland counterpart).
Boston
We were back in Brighton for just one day before it was time for us to head to our next destination. We flew to Boston and spent a few days hanging around in Cambridge with our dear friends Ethan and Liz. It was a real treat to just pass the time with good people. It had been far too long.
I did manage to squeeze in an Irish music session in the legendary Druid pub. ’Twas a good night.
After all the excitement of Frostapalooza, Jessica and I went on to spend a week decompressing in Saint Augustine, Florida.
We went down to the beach every day. We went in the water most days. Sometimes the water was a bit too choppy for a proper swim, but it was still lovely and warm. And there was one day when the water was just perfectly calm.
When we weren’t on the beach, we were probably eating shrimp.
It was all very relaxing.
Brighton
I’ve spent the sixth and final week of my sabbatical back in Brighton. The weather has remained good so there’s been plenty of outdoor activities, including a kayaking trip down the river Medway in Kent. I may have done some involuntary wild swimming at one point.
I have very much enjoyed these past six weeks. Music. Travel. Friends. It’s all been quite lovely.
The Brighton chapter of codebar was the second one ever, founded six months after the initial London chapter. There are now 33 chapters all around the world.
Clearleft played host to that first ever codebar in Brighton. We had already been hosting local meetups like Async in our downstairs event space, so we were up for it when Rosa, Dot, and Ryan asked about having codebar happen there.
In fact, the first three Brighton codebars were all at 68 Middle Street. Then other places agreed to play host and it moved to a rota system, with the Clearleft HQ as just one of the many Brighton venues.
With ten years of perspective, it’s quite amazing to see how many people went from learning to code in the evenings, to getting jobs in web development, and becoming codebar coaches themselves. It’s a really wonderful community.
Over the years the baton of organising codebar has been passed on to a succession of fantastic people. These people are my heroes.
It worked out well for Clearleft too. Thanks to codebar, we hired Charlotte. Later we hired Cassie. And it was thanks to codebar that I first met Amber.
Codebar Brighton has been very, very good to me. Here’s to the next ten years!
I love libraries. I think they’re one of humanity’s greatest inventions.
My local library here in Brighton is terrific. It’s well-stocked, it’s got a welcoming atmosphere, and it’s in a great location.
But it has an information architecture problem.
Like most libraries, it’s using the Dewey Decimal system. It’s not a great system, but every classification system is going to have flaws—wherever you draw boundaries, there will be disagreement.
The Dewey Decimal class of 900 is for history and geography. Within that class, those 100 numbers (900 to 999) are further subdivded in groups of 10. For example, everything from 940 to 949 is for the history of Europe.
Dewey Decimal number 941 is for the history of the British Isles. The term “British Isles” is a geographical designation. It’s not a good geographical designation, but technically it’s not a political term. So it’s actually pretty smart to use a geographical rather than a political term for categorisation: geology moves a lot slower than politics.
But the Brighton Library is using the wrong label for their shelves. Everything under 941 is labelled “British History.”
The island of Ireland is part of the British Isles.
The Republic of Ireland is most definitely not part of Britain.
Seeing books about the history of Ireland, including post-colonial history, on a shelf labelled “British History” is …not good. Frankly, it’s offensive.
(I mentioned this situation to an English friend of mine, who said “Well, Ireland was once part of the British Empire”, to which I responded that all the books in the library about India should also be filed under “British History” by that logic.)
Just to be clear, I’m not saying there’s a problem with the library using the Dewey Decimal system. I’m saying they’re technically not using the system. They’ve deviated from the system’s labels by treating “History of the British Isles” and “British History” as synonymous.
I spoke to the library manager. They told me to write an email. I’ve written an email. We’ll see what happens.
You might think I’m being overly pedantic. That’s fair. But the fact this is happening in a library in England adds to the problem. It’s not just technically incorrect, it’s culturally clueless.
Mind you, I have noticed that quite a few English people have a somewhat fuzzy idea about the Republic of Ireland. Like, they understand it’s a different country, but they think it’s a different country in the way that Scotland is a different country, or Wales is a different country. They don’t seem to grasp that Ireland is a different country like France is a different country or Germany is a different country.
It would be charming if not for, y’know, those centuries of subjugation, exploitation, and forced starvation.
