I spent several hours at the Yeats exhibition at the National Library of Ireland earlier this week. It was very nicely done and I will come back to some more specific thoughts it prompted about evidence and exhibition, and shared interests between libraries, archives and museums.
Motivations for the exhibition include acknowledging the generosity of the Yeats’ family, and encouraging use of the collection. On the former, here is the Economist:
Yeats’s son Michael, an Irish senator like his father, had been asked to open the exhibition as a way of honouring him as the person principally responsible for the riches of the archive. Although the Yeats estate still benefits from reproductions of the master’s poetry, over a period of 45 years Mr Yeats has given most of his father’s archive and his books to the National Library. “If they’d put the papers on the open market, they’d all be multi-millionaires,” says Catherine Fahy, one of the curators. [Irish letters | Word made flesh | Economist.com]
On the latter, now that I am back at home, I was curious to explore the exhibition’s web presence. It is really only a high-level pointer to topics. It is interesting that the impact of this major investment of effort and thought is limited in this way.
