News from the News from the Mass-Observation Archive

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• Mass-Observation in the 1990s: latest topics for research

  The contemporary mass-observers are currently sending in their views and experiences on their cinema-going habits - the costs of an outing to the cinema, changes over their lifetime, views on censorship and favourite films. The second part of the Spring Directive covers current national and international issues including the war in Kosovo. This material will be available for research in September. The summer 1999 directive will focus on people's views and experiences of public libraries. It is a collaboration with Dr Alistair Black of Leeds Metropolitan University. The research is supported by a grant of £4,000 from the British Library.

• Mass-Observation goes to America

  Dorothy Sheridan, the M-O Archivist, has just returned from Temple University, Philadelphia, where she was invited to give public lectures on the work of the Archive. This is her second lecture tour in the USA and represents a growing interest by Americans in the idea of using an M-O type project to document everyday life in their own country. The book about the new M-O project, Writing Ourselves: Mass-Observation and Literacy Practices (Sheridan, Street and Bloome), is to be launched in the USA at the American Education Research Association annual conference in the spring of 2000.

• End of an era

  It is now over 60 years since M-O was first launched in Britain, and there are very few of the original Mass-Observers still around. Sadly this year, three central figures died - Naomi Mitchison, a wartime diarist for M-O died, in January at the age of 101; Mollie Tarrant, one of the most active field workers during the Second World War and later a managing director of Mass-Observation died in February; and in March the M-O heard that Len England had also died. Len, whose son, Hugh, is a lecturer at Sussex, was always generous with his time (and memories) to talk to students who wanted direct information about the early days of M-O. Len was responsible for most of M-O's research on cinema-going in wartime. It was he, who in his role of managing director of M-O in 1970, arranged with our then VC Asa Briggs, to bring the papers to Sussex to create the Archive.