On 29 January we invite you to our Open Day to learn more about the Library’s work, and for a series of events and talks with guests. It is my pleasure to be in conversation with Peter Finch and Niall Griffiths about the ‘Real Wales’. Have a look here about the varied sessions of the day, but we will link the Library’s current major exhibition Small World – Travels in Wales and Beyond, with the highly successful ‘Real’ series, and no doubt explore various literary avenues, by-ways and paths along the way. Peter is a distinguished and prolific poet, Chief Executive of the academi, instigator of the ‘Real’ series with his books on Cardiff and Wales. Through his extensive websites, which are part of our web archiving activities, he maps our cultural heritage online as well as in book form. Niall contributed books on Aberystwyth and Liverpool to the ‘Real’ series, is a wide ranging travel journalist, but best known no doubt as a prominent novelist depicting the landscape of Ceredigion, North Wales and beyond and its characters.
His papers are one of the most recent acquisitions to NLW’s modern literary archives. Both Niall and Peter kindly took part in research for the Welsh Literature Archive Project, looking at born-digital and hybrid archives last year which looked at how we might go about saving our digital heritage since writers, like many of us, and all reading this blog, are part of an evolving digital Wales. That project nodded to the eternal, and storing materials forever, which is part of what the Library does. Join us for the here and now on the 29th.