 Well, hello and thank you very much. I'm going to talk about our being human event we did at the IHR Library at the Centre House in London, which took place a year ago now, last November. So it's an event within a library, how we use that space, but also use the interactive elements and our collections, but also the experience of working in a library as well. So I'm going to look at what we did, I'm going to discuss some of the technology and the people we worked with, and then try and quickly draw some conclusions about that. So firstly, it was part of the being human festival, which is just finished. And if you want to take part in it again, this Festival of Humanities is a national, indeed international event, it lasts for a week or so in November. And there's some pots of cash you can apply for as well, so look out for those when they're advertised. It's organised by the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and orchestrated from the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, where the IHR is as well. So what were our aims? Why were we doing this? Well, partly because we wanted to, we wanted to see what would happen, which was an aim in itself, we wanted to see what happened if we opened up the library and then how people would respond to what was within the rooms within the books. But it was also to expand our audience. The IHR has been around for a while, 100 years nearly, and a lot of historians have happy memories of it, but we're aware that we need to keep people coming in and maybe expand it beyond straightforward historians, but to be more interdisciplinary and to bring a wider, younger range of people in, and also the wider general public, perhaps a younger public, to come to the many events that take place in the evening at the IHR and at the school. So we wanted to expand our brand, I suppose. We wanted to show what research was like as well. It wasn't so much showing our collections, but to try and share what it was like to do research, the excitement, maybe even the emotion of historical research, and also the contemporary relevance. We wanted to do something that was drawn from history, but clearly had, again, resonance with the current political situation, and it tied into the theme of being human last year, which was hope and fear, and I'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment. And there was also an internal reason as well. It was important, I think, for the IHR to play its part within the school and maybe raise its profile within the activities that take place. So those are our range of aims. This was also within the context of a fairly modest budget. We managed to apply for some money, so we had £1,500 to spend, and a certain amount of staff resource, which is essentially the library team of about five full-time people and a postdoctoral researcher, the time we could devote to it along with our other normal works. So I'm going to talk now about what we actually did, and the night at the library, Books of Hope and Fear, was an immersive event, an escape game, which I guess many people are familiar with, and they, at the time last year, suddenly were hitting sort of the mainstream, and there were timeouts and so on, and we'd have lots of reviews of them. The Crystal Maze was back on the telly and so on, and we didn't realise initially we were coming up with an escape game, and we wanted to recreate the process of research and set some puzzles in rooms, and we discovered what we were actually doing was an escape game, in fact, a quest game as aficionadoes of the genre will tell us. So I'm going to show a short film, which will give a sense, hopefully a little bit better than me talking about it, of what the experience of this event was within the Senate House. So this is a 19... built in the 1940s, designed in the 1930s, the big tall white building next to the British Museum, and four stories of books of the traditional library, and this is what we tried to do with it. Clock this morning, a sudden and lamentable fire broke out in the city, beginning not far from Thamstridth near London Bridge, which continues with great violence and had already burned down to the ground many houses thereabouts. Thomas Nuka, I am the King's printer. So, we set up a series of puzzles in a room, the flavour of what the three rooms were like with the actors, and you'll notice some Dutch accent there as well, which is quite important, and each room was framed by an actor, and here's Charles II emerging from our atlas room, and he presented the participants of which we had three groups going at one time and two sets of three groups and about 90 people in all were set their challenge, their puzzle, which related to something to do with their character, something to do with a problem that they had, and these visitors could help them find it. Teams had to work together. They didn't necessarily know one another, so here they are pouring over some clues by the candlelight, electric candles you'd be pleased to know in the library. They didn't necessarily know one another. We wondered if that was going to be an issue, but actually it was fine. They quickly got into working as a group very quickly. We also, as I said, wanted it to be about research, the process of research, of finding things out. So you heard the Dutch woman speaking earlier there in the video. The challenge in this room was to try and find where her son had been taken to, and he'd been arrested for being Dutch and the Dutch were blamed for the fire, and we drew out the issues towards immigration that's still going on, but was particularly going on at the time as well, in that particular room. But using the books around the room, you could find out by looking at the contemporary sources where her son was taken to if you caught his name, looked them up, and then that would lead you to the next clue and so on. We had a few practices, a few rehearsals, and after speaking to some people, we realised we had to set the bar quite high. It was quite a tough set of puzzles, and pretty much everybody did it, but that's partly due to the audience. Either they were people who were perhaps more used to the libraries than we'd have hoped, or they were escape gamers aficionados, and they really liked the puzzles to be quite tough. Not all of them were that tough, but there were jigsaw puzzles, so a lot of 3D things at tactile old-school puzzles that people could use. We had some maps jumbled up, printed on these wooden jigsaw puzzles, and once the people realised they were jumbled up, they could unjumble them, make the map, notice the differences between the two places, and that led to the next clue. Being human is also about real research, communicating research, and we were communicating the process of research. We worked very closely with Stan Yvonne Rossum, who was our postdoctoral fellow. He was moving to Brown very soon to be there, curative European books, but he was doing a lot of work on our Dutch holdings, but also together we were going through the London Gazette, and we noticed that the typeface changed our issues we have out in Egham, and we brought them down to have a look at them, and the typeface changed as the fire went on, and we realised the poor printer had his typeface and printer melted and burnt, so he had to run and use somebody else's, and it's recorded in the actual physical paper, so that was one of the clues that the people had to solve, and here you can see us setting up a print room in, I think it's in the German room, but anyway, we had prints on the paper from Paper Chase, scanned issues of the London Gazette, but the prints here had just set the type. That was probably the trickiest room, and I don't know if we can hear the sound on this or not. The mortales, home in home or quick price that, still to intelligence, quick interest. That's somebody reading Terence, in fact, an American academic, who was exploring how Latin was pronounced at this time, and he recorded this sound for us, and the sound artist, who was based at Senator House Library at the time, worked with us to create a series of installations, and if you walked in front of the right book, the sound would start playing, it was either atmospheric, or it would actually give you another clue, and if you heard the Latin, that would feed into some other clues, and you'd realise that the Book of Terence, which was a paper back and out of place in that room, within it would be a key to unlock this lock here, and there was a story which they would have read to give us this clue about the schoolboy sat watching St. Paul's burn down whilst he read a copy of Terence, so they were slightly esoteric, rather like crossword clues, but most people managed to follow them, and in so doing learned a little bit about the Great Fire of London, which I may not have mentioned, the whole thing was set in the Great Fire of London, but you've probably got that already. Yes, on the left is a real tennis ball, which the kind people up at North London University up there made for us for the real tennis courts, and these were what the Dutch and also the French were blamed, were accused of throwing into windows to set fire, and they said there were fireballs, and there were accounts we had dotted around, and if you found one of those, you found one of these balls, within it there would be another paper clue, and one thing led to the other. The final thing I'll mention here is the hourglass, and a sense of time is really quite important to keep people going, as it were, and give a sense of urgency. We just gave them 10 minutes, made sure it was quite tough to do it. A couple of other things we found were quite fun to use, thinking about print and ink, and drawing attention to the nature of what people were exploring, but also referencing heat and fire was the thermochromatic ink, and if you put your thumb on that and rubbed it, a clue would emerge, and that led to a certain... Well, in there we'd open a door, there was a number there that opened one of our padlocks we had lying around in the reading room that led you into the little kitchen and another clue, and so on. But that was quite fun to play with this thermochromatic ink, and there's all sorts of interesting things like that which you can muck around with. We also had digital elements as well, and this is sort of where we started with, and these are some eye beacons which I guess people are familiar with, and they just basically blast out a little bit of Bluetooth, and Android phones, I think they've stopped this now. Certainly on the iPhone, if you have Chrome browsers, they pick them up, automatically now you have to install a bit of software, but Android phones pick them up. They're used in conferences like this to track where you're going around in exhibitions, or if you walk past them advertising, they say, I don't know, whatever the thing is selling. But we used it to... If you could find your way to it using an iPad that would set up, which we called the book sniffer, that led you to a page to display, another clue on there, the next clue and so on. It let people feel that they were wandering around finding things in the library, and for us, it's a chance to experiment with the eye beacon technology, which is really easy to use, and really has a lot of potential, but it's very hard to get people to use it, so we discovered that giving people the device was the way to do it. We had a lot of help from developers and so on, just in their free time, just to show us what we could do, so it was very helpful on that. And it gave a certain amount of development expertise for IHR Digital in using these things. So I'm almost at the end. Social media, we made sure there were hashtags and so on, so you could tweet or Instagram yourself or King Charles II, who was one of the actors we were able to pay. We worked very closely with this and that productions, a young and cheap, but we paid the appropriate rate, but they were very keen to really get stuck in and develop scripts and created a really engaging interface. That's the right word between the puzzles and the audience. Librarians are on hand to subtly give clues as well, but having actors who really got into the role really helped, and they also helped to develop the experience and aware of logistics and showmanship and so on. Charles II, of course, was keen of his Charles II poodles and so we had a little doggie bits lying around the reading room as well, which people kept trampling on, so I don't know what the cleaners made of that. If you got your way through the three different rooms which ran in a sequence, then you got to the top of Senate House Tower, which was actually quite a prize at night and the Bottle of Fizz and the View of St Paul's, which of course was burnt down and had risen from the ashes, so there was a link and Senate House Library, and Senate House Tower for many years was a regular building in London equivalent to St Paul's, so that was a nice prize, and the people who didn't win it were really disappointed, so that just shows how much people wanted it. Now, I think I have just five minutes left, so what were the lessons learned? You'll notice in the director of the festival at the back there that we didn't realise that she was in the winning team, but it just so happened. Right, the feedback, again, evaluation was sort of baked into the festival and that was one of the nice things about working with being human. They get the money from British Academy, the Arts, Humanities Research Council, so their evaluation is very crucial, but that was good to me. We had it set up for us, so there were feedback forms and various evaluation criteria which we had to meet, which was very good in terms of us learning about the events and what people got from it, and the qualitative feedback was really helpful. It really encourages us that people did feel they learnt some history, they learnt more about the library, they were more aware of the library than they and the school and centre house than they would have been before. They enjoyed the event, they would have done it again and so on. Three words, there's always three subjects in any talk, and these are my vague conclusions. It was nice to be able to foreground research in this project. Research that Postdoc Stan had done, the research that we had done to find out about the event, and also the sense of doing research. Of course it's not the same as doing a PhD or an MA or family history research, but it was people doing quite high level historical research using some quite complicated sources which they managed to do within an allotted time to help from librarians, but not too much help. It was very resource intensive, but we could also learn we could do things on the cheap in a way or draw on other people, but resourcing is a real issue in doing this sort of thing, and then finally it was thinking about how we ensure that this is relevant and people can sort of see why we were doing it. It wasn't just a fun event, it was about the library, it was about the festival and it was about the humanities to help us to view the present. Rebecca Radee, or Riddle, very kindly set the event up with a short talk from her book, so she gave a five minute introduction to The Great Fire, but not just The Great Fire, the year itself, the fears of Dutch invasion, the religious strife and fears that were there at the time and so on, which gave people a bit of a context which really helped them as they sort of immersed themselves in this world. We did a bit of research on the history of libraries, what got burned, what got lost and so on. We did a blog post about that and found it a bit more about libraries during The Great Fire and that may lead to a proper bit of research at the end of it. We had some real research as well about what an earthen escape game was, so we spoke to several people, the guy who ran this website was probably the main reviews and site for escape games. He was really helpful, he came, I think he enjoyed it and he helped us judge the level that we should picture that. We're not the first library or the only library or museum to do this. Cambridge University Library and museums have also experimented with the format and we spoke to the museums there and they talked about it and other librarians have experimented with it as well and a lot in America and I think you can even get a pack of things to do in a smaller library. I mentioned this and that productions, it's really important to work very closely with the actors but really the production team and they brought a lot to the event. We had a shared Dropbox and Google documents where we worked on a script, the background to the characters, what they would actually say and what they needed to mention to give people the right clues and so on. A lot of work on flow and logistics as well but having this in one place and having people really understood the theatrics was really helpful. We plugged into other things that were going on, that's always a good thing to do so it's been a great, far free 50 anniversary so we've got ourselves listed on there. Free thinking was tied into the festival as well and we managed to persuade them to come and do a late night radio review of the event so we reached an audience of 250,000 or something like that that the member of people would listen to free thinking as well as which we've got to try it out for the first time. We had some internal goes first as well but tried it on punters for the first time but it's interesting to think about where else you can get this stuff out there and Radio 3 in particular is an interesting way of reaching a wide audience. Local radio similarly is a good way to reach a wide audience. That's 20 minutes, thank you.