Until the arrival of social media, being a curator at the British Library remained a solitary, out of the way job. In many ways it still is for Julian Harrison, curator of pre-1600 historical manuscripts. Behind the scenes he cares for the priceless collections that include copies of Beowulf, some of the world’s oldest Bibles, the Lindisfarne Gospels and the state papers of Henry VIII. He curates exhibitions such as the current Magna Carta: law, liberty, legacy. The difference for Harrison these days is that he does all this with a virtual audience of thousands.
Harrison has been working at the British Library since 2006. “I can’t think of how we could have communicated what we do back then apart from an occasional story in the media,” he says. The shift began in 2010 when the library started an experimental blog to chart the digitisation of the Greek manuscripts. “It was a niche thing for a niche audience,” he adds.
This experimental project evolved into the British Library’s Medieval Manuscripts Blog, a lively and enlightening account of the curator’s life. “We use it to promote what we do,” Harrison says. “One popular post explains why we don’t wear white gloves to handle manuscripts, but we also try to cater for a non-academic readership. Our most popular post is Knight v Snail that looks at why images of armed knights fighting snails are common in illuminated manuscripts.”
These pictures have proved very popular online. “People are often unaware of how beautiful the illuminated manuscripts are and how technically skilled they were in the medieval age,” he says. Then there’s images with a comic twist. Harrison’s posts include one entitled Lolcats of the Middle Ages. Another features a doodled figure, which looks curiously like Yoda from Star Wars. The images appeal to the same online audience, Harrison points out, that enjoys watching cats playing the piano on YouTube.
When Harrison took over the Medieval Manuscripts Blog it had a modest readership of two hits a day. Now his record daily traffic stands at 36,000. Supporting this is a Twitter account with 23,400 followers, and it’s clear that rather than being a quiet, hidden-away job, his daily life as a curator is being presented in a new, exciting way.
“We’ve an incredibly international readership,” Harrison says. “We have viewers in Antarctica, Greenland and every country you can think of, with perhaps the exception of North Korea. We get lots of enquiries from people who want to do the same job as us. Lots of young aspiring curators. Social media has certainly changed the dynamic.”
Harrison talks of the enriching effect of social media; how it allows a mass of people to peek into a world that was hidden from them before. And just as Harrison has found an audience with his description of the curator’s life, a shepherd called James Rebanks has attracted an extraordinary social media following with his daily tweets charting his work on the Lakeland fells.
Rebanks tells me that he has long sought to write about his work as a shepherd, a job that is still governed by the ancient rhythms of the annual calendar. There is the lambing of spring, summer when he sends his herdwick sheep to the fells, the autumn fairs and the darkness of winter. His life is bound closely to the landscape. “As far back as 1998 or 1999 I have written for magazines about what we [shepherds] did,” he says, “but the Twitter part is completely accidental. It started when some friends encouraged me to tweet about the farm.”
He wrote his first tweet on 18 January 2012, an image of his flock on the faun green fells under a bleak winter sky. It set the tone for what was to follow. Beautiful images of sheep being herded through the skinny northern lanes, playful shots of his collies at work, snippets of rural wisdom and insight. “I was nervous,” Rebanks says. “I started off anonymously and didn’t appear at all in my first 13,000 tweets. There are lots of shy and modest people in the community. I never put pictures on of people who don’t approve.”
But soon Rebanks was attracting a following, a Twitter flock of his own that numbered tens, then hundreds and then thousands. “It took a while to get 700 followers,” he remembers. “Then it doubled in 2014 and now it’s really started taking off.”
Today Rebanks has 57,000 followers on Twitter who travel up and down the fells with him, and back and forth to market. Last month he live tweeted the birth of 10 sheepdogs, posting a video clip on Vine that has been watched 780,000 times. All this attention has propelled him into the mainstream. This month his debut book, The Shepherd’s Life, was published by Penguin. It is currently being read as Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4.
“The reason I do this,” Rebanks says, “is because I feel we are the forgotten people on the landscape. The Lake District is the chocolate box, the picture postcard. People forget about us. What I’m really doing on Twitter is saying ‘We’re still here.’” He puts his success down to his passion. “It’s about having an infectious enthusiasm about what you love and sharing it with other people.”
Like Harrison’s, Rebanks’ success lies in opening windows into hidden worlds, one of the enduring charms of social media. It’s something that the novelist Claire King has also tried to achieve. She had never documented her writing life before but decided to begin a blog when she was working on what would become her debut novel, The Night Rainbow.
Her posts chart the writing process, practical tips on the novelist’s craft, and her experiences of the publishing industry. “I wasn’t really expecting people to listen to what I had to say as there are a lot of writing blogs,” she explains. “But it was a way of publicly stating my intentions and so holding myself accountable.”
These regular, well-crafted mediations from a working novelist found a likeminded, engaged audience on Twitter. King lifts the lid on an industry that many aspire to enter, but has long been considered enigmatic and exclusive to outsiders. Have any of her readers or followers gone on to get publishing deals of their own?
“Yes, several have and I’m always delighted to hear and share their good news. We all need a bit of cheerleading in this world,” she says.
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