People visit the Lake District for so many reasons – its history and traditions, fresh air, walking, fell running, climbing, biking, boating, mountains, lakes, changing colours and great landscapes. As a reflection of this perhaps, the Lake District National Park has this month won first place in a readers’ survey as the best of the 14 national parks in the country.
But just why does the area continue to exercise this strong hold on our imaginations? The more time I spend in Cumbria and the Lakes, the more I become fascinated with how the present has been fashioned from the past, how far the ebb and flow of people’s lives here have changed over the years, how the demographics of the area are altering and what the future holds in a rapidly changing economy.
I plan to explore some of these questions by talking with people in the area and getting their insights for this blog. If you know anyone who would be interesting to interview, please let me know.
In the meantime there’s a resource, which can be of use to anyone else interested in these questions. Google Books is a project for creating digital copies of all the world’s 129 million books and has been under discussion since 2004.
Although there’s been dispute about aspects of the project, already 15 million books have been copied and are available online. It’s an example for me of how technologies are opening up spaces, which in the past we could never dream of occupying.
This view is not shared by all as I found when reading Michael Holroyd’s recent comments at the Edinburgh Book Festival, lamenting the decline of biography: “I have a nostalgia for visiting private houses to find letters and journals and to root around in the attic,” he said. “But the fact that a lot of material now is on the computer takes the romance out of it, and now it’s about examining what lies behind the delete button – the horror”.
I understand his nostalgia, but why regret the fact that so much more is now available on a computer which a writer can draw upon with ease from her desk without travelling for hours to a distant library? For many years to come the unpublished letters and papers will still be there in the attic!
Nor is this a resource just for the scholarly. The web opens up radical new ways of informal learning for all, which we are only just starting to explore. Some of the emerging themes on this issue can be seen in a recent discussion on the ‘Ambient Learning City’.
Back then to Google Books! When we were at the ‘Savage Grandeur’ landscape exhibition at the Wordsworth Trust in May, I was fascinated by a late 18th century book, West’s Guide to the Lakes, but the glass covered case only allowed me to see two pages.
Now with Google books I have had access to the entire book! The lovely engraving opposite of the Lodore Falls in the Derwent Valley and taken from the Guide provides just a glimpse of the treasures now available for all. And there is a bonus too – you can save on your petrol costs by not having to drive to a distant library!