RSP Summer School 2008

I had a quick trip up to the Wirral on Wednesday for the Repository Support Programme Summer School 2008. The event was held at Thornton Manor, a fabulous country pile built by Lord Leverhulme of the Sunlight soap empire. I was only at the summer school for Wednesday afternoon but the RSP team pulled their speed networking card again, and I learnt a lot about the state of other repositories just from five minutes of introduction and synopsis from other attendees.
I gave a quick presentation as the Graduate of last year’s summer school, but the*really* interesting talk came afterwards, when we were treated to a telling of Leverhulmes’ life and achievements. The speaker called Lever one of the most well known men of his time, a real mover and shaker, one of the first to take corporate responsibility for his employees.
Then, ironically yesterday when I returned to work, I had a paper to upload which had been sponsored by BBSRC and the Leverhulme Trust. So that sent me over to the Leverhulme Trust website. Of course I’ve heard of UniLever and we had Sunlight soap when I was knee high to a grasshopper, but I would never have thought there was such an amazing story behind it all..
The RSP Summer School continues today and tomorrow, and I’ll try to link to any blog posts I find on the event.