Worst Journey in the World

McMurdo, Ross Island, Antarctica (Mount Erebus in the distance)
Flickr Creative Commons, © August Allen

This evening I shall join a virtual journey to Ross Island at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, following in the footsteps of Edward Wilson and Robert Falcon Scott on the Terra Nova expedition of 1910-1913.

This is just one of numerous events taking place across the world to celebrate the centenary of the British Antarctic (Terra Nova) expedition - see the calendar of events at http://www.scott100.org/

To view some spectacular photographs of the Antarctic, historic and modern, look no further than SPRI's picture library.  This includes their Freeze Frame project, which includes photographs from the original Terra Nova expedition, which can be viewed as a slideshow, and an 'image of the day'. Alternatively, you can search SPRI's picture library by expedition - and view pages of images from the Terra Nova expedition.

A fresh start or perhaps a polar dip?

The Arctic dip at Paradise Harbour (Credit: Iain B. of Over, Flickr CC)

Another academic year has flown by and and I'm bracing myself for a second frantic summer tackling 23 Things.  Having got so much out of the programme last year, I am keen to refresh my Web 2.0 skills, and reconsider how I currently exploit the possibilities they permit, as well as tackle the Extra Things promised.  I envisage an adventure-packed summer!

I have been blogging regularly for three years - see the South Asia Archive and Library Group (SAALG) blog - and recently assisted Clemens Gresser and Margaret Jones present a Library Skills workshop on Team Blogging. I've also recently starting blogging using WordPress for the UL's Special collections blog
http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/specialcollections/blog/
The basics are very similar, but I have not found the instructions for working with images etc. as intuitive as those of Blogger. It will, however, be a great way to promote some of the non-South Asian gems in the Royal Commonwealth Society collections.  The blogging take-up has been so great that we have had to carefully schedule when posts are published. 

I have had fun this week tweaking the layout, settings and widgets displayed on the SAALG and Polar adventurer blogs, inspired by Week 1's Extra Thing.  I do still feel that pictures speak louder than words, so will endeavour to post as many as possible.