h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Rain, rain, go away... The rain is coming down in soft torrents. It's grey and horrible. Apparently the temperature outside is only around eight degrees C. The wind is gone, but Canberra can still be a bitch, like that.

We've nearly fixed the hole in the wall. It took a bit of fiddling, which my flatmate did, seeing as he has the experience at that sort of thing. Ultimately, however, with a bit more Spakfilla and a little patience, the filling job was done. We're sanding it down before the agent comes to look at it tomorrow, but if the agent complains about the quality of the job, I think I'm just going to move.

Interview tomorrow. I was invited in to the Memorial today to have a chat with one of the people who'll be interviewing me, and in the process met another of the people who'll be on the panel. I also saw the Reference Centre for the first time, which was interesting. The documentation of Australians in the various conflicts in which they've served is extensive, and filed and sorted well. Most enquiries at the Reference Centre are apparently personal - people looking for information about cousins, uncles, fathers etc. and what they each did in ‘the war' - whichever war that happens to be. The film and photographic collections are also quite extensive and interesting, but I suspect that the most useful collection of the lot is the cartographic one - trench maps, battlefield schematics, operational plans, etc. Some of the more recent of these are still classified material, too, which is interesting. I was intrigued, although not really surprised, by the close relationship of the Memorial with the Australian Archives, and their extensive interdependence.

The Memorial's web site is one of the keys to its access. The web site is here:-

http://www.awm.gov.au/

and allows searching of all the relevant catalogs. More information is continuously being added to the site, and in many respects it is at least as relevant a reference work as the ‘Guide itself, although with a more graphic interface. I like the prospect of working within such an ‘information-heavy' site, where the quality of the answers that the service provides is at least as important as how fast they're given. There should be more like it.

It will be interesting to see how this interview goes, but I'll be sure to let people know...!