Tony Gill - a brief autobiography

Tony's Timeline:

1968 - 1982: Letchworth

I was born at 2:47am on 1xth May 1968 in a small Hertfordshire town called Letchworth, weighing 7lb and measuring 1ft 6inch long. My mother had a slightly bizarre pregnancy with me; she took part in a study being carried out by our family doctor, Dr Faulkes, that involved being partially decompressed in an airtight sleeping bag contraption for half an hour each day. The idea was that the reduced pressure would allow an increased flow of blood to my brain, thereby assisting early development.

I didn't attend nursery school; apparently I went for one day and then told my mother that I wasn't going again! I went to the Hillshot Infants' school for one term before transferring to the newly-completed Lordship Farm JMI (Junior Mixed Infants) School, and later moved up to The Willian School for Secondary Education (which has since been demolished to make space for a housing estate).

During this time, I acquired a number of younger siblings; Sharon, David and Vicki.

Letchworth is a strange town for a number of reasons; it's full name is Letchworth Garden City because the designer, a Quaker called Ebenezer Howard, championed the use of green belts and urban vegetation (most of the pavements have grass verges, for example). He subsequently went on to design Welwyn Garden City, which is often mistakenly thought to be the first garden city.

Other peculiarities about Letchworth are that it was the first town to have a roundabout, it's the only place in the country where black squirrels are found (at least there were some when I was a kid), and for many years there were NO PUBS whatsoever in the town.

The pub situation had not improved much by the time I was born, although there's always been a healthy ring of hostelries just outside the town's boundaries. This meant that there was very little for people to do in Letchworth, and one of my lasting memories is of gangs of skinheads aimlessly wandering around looking for something to do with their Stanley knives.

1982 - 1987: Sheffield

Luckily the prospects for an interesting time improved considerably when my father's employers closed down their Welwyn factory and we relocated to Sheffield, although at the time I was gutted ("very unhappy") and made a lot of fuss. We moved into a house half way between Hunters Bar and Fulwood, just behind Endcliffe Park. By this time I was 14.

In Sheffield I went to High Storrs School, where I met a lot of people who are still close friends to this day. This was pretty hard work at first because I had a southern accent which resulted in a number of limited skirmishes, and the curriculum in Sheffield was very different to that in the south.

After finishing my O-Levels in 1984, I enrolled at Richmond College to study A-Levels in Maths, Physics & Economics. A year later, my parents relocated down south again, in fact about as far south in the UK as you can get; they moved to Sandwich on the south coast of Kent, from where France could be seen on clear days.

Myself and Sharon, the older of my two sisters, remained in Sheffield to avoid breaking the continuity of our education, while the rest of the family moved away. Sharon moved in with a friend's family, and I moved into the first of a long list of shared rented accommodation in Neill Road, Hunters Bar.

After a year of having too much fun and not doing enough work, my A-level results were not that great (primarily as a result of oversleeping for one of the exams!). I didn't really mind at the time though, because I was enjoying myself and I didn't feel ready to move away to university at that point (besides which I was still more preoccuied by the loss of my record collection, that got destroyed in a fire in my bedroom). Unfortunately most my friends did feel ready to leave Sheffield, so when term started the fun was a bit thin on the ground for a while until I made some new friends.

After a brief sojourn in Hunter House Road, I moved into Woodstock Road, Nether Edge (where my sister was living by this time), and set about retaking two A-levels on a part-time basis, which occupied me until the end of June 1987.

1987 - 1994: London

Over the summer of '87 I obtained a place on the Physics and Philosophy course at King's College, London. I moved from Sheffield into a house in Walthamstow with Kay, my girlfriend at that time, who'd moved down several months previously.

My three years as an undergraduate will be remembered primarily for the amount of different rented accommodation I managed to pass through. After Walthamstow I lived in Holloway, Forest Gate, Hoxton, Camden, Kentish Town, Hammersmith, Chelsea and Richmond. There were also a few memorable parties during this time, and I must have gone to college some of the time because I managed the inevitable 'Desmond' (2:2, or lower second) at the end of the three years.

I also had a number of jobs: various casual clerical and 'envelope-stuffing' positions for a variety of different organisations. I was also a Saturday cashier in a betting shop and a part-time wine delivery driver for reasonably long periods.

This temporary employment continued for a year and a half after I graduated in the summer of 1990, at LRT Pension Fund Trustee Company Limited, as a temp through Office Angels. There were a lot of good people at LRT, but nonetheless this was a fairly depressing time due to the tedious nature of the work and the appalling graduate career prospects in the midst of the recession. I stayed with a girlfriend in Clapham for a while and then moved into a dingy bedsit in Bounds Green, continually applying for various jobs without success.

To escape the trap of underemployment, I left LRT and bought a computer, after meeting a freelance designer who seemed to have a comparatively pleasant lifestyle and offered plenty of advice. I went on a Business Enterprise Programme run by the local TEC (Training & Enterprise Council), produced a business plan, borrowed some money and became self-employed as a freelance designer/DTP Operator.

During this time, an old school friend from Sheffield was finishing a Masters course in computing at nearby Middlesex University, so occasionally I would go into college with him, play with some of the computer equipment and help him with his multimedia project.

The following year, another old school friend from Sheffield enrolled on the same course, giving me a better insight into the syllabus, and since self-employment wasn't particularly rewarding financially, I enrolled on the MA Communication in Computing course at Middlesex University for the next year.

I enjoyed the course at Middlesex, particularly since all the fees and some living expenses were paid by the TEC, but undoubtedly the best bit was the 10-week placement in Italy. My initial placement with Fiat fell through at the eleventh hour, so I ended up at the University of Salerno, just south of Naples. After an eventful drive across the continent, I spent a very enjoyable couple of months in a holiday villa in a village called Vietri on the Amalfi Coast, with spectacular sea views from the terrace.

On returning to Britain, a period of homelessness ensued where I alternated between dossing at friends' houses and staying in Sandwich, followed by a month in a depressing bedsit in Muswell Hill; I gave the landlord my notice to quit about three days after moving in. Eventually my girlfriend Katie and I moved into a reasonable one-bedroomed flat in Southgate Road, Islington, where I completed the rest of the taught component of the course, started working on a final project "Information Technology in Museums: User Interface Design for Collection Management Software", and got a job (after initially being rejected) as Technical Outreach Manager for the Museum Documentation Association, an organisation I'd already been in contact with through researching my MA project.

1994 - 1996: Cambridge

After a few months of driving between Islington and Cambridge (55 miles, a journey of 1 hour 15 minutes on average, 55 minutes on one very good day) I decided to take the plunge and move a little nearer to work. To my horror, the traffic in Cambridge was just as bad as it had been in London. I started with Greville Road in November 1994, moved to Hooper Street in late summer of 1995, then moved to Mawson Road shortly afterwards.

During this time I spent most of my time working, due no doubt to a mixture of first-job enthusiasm, genuine interest in the work I was doing and a lot of pressure. I met a lot of interesting people through work though, and spent a number of weekends at my friend's house in Finsbury Park. A solo holiday to Turkey was also very therapeutic, as was a combined holiday/business trip to San Diego where I attended the MCN '95 / ICHIM '95 conference.

During the drive back from the Museums Association's annual conference I applied for another post, and was offered an interview. Unfortunately the date fell in the middle of the following week when I was due to be in San Diego, the Personnel Department did not think it was possible to reschedule, and I moved house the weekend before departure; all I could do was right a letter explaining the situation and pay the Post Office to redirect my mail.

On returning, no further communications about my application were received, so I thought no more of it until one of my flatmates picked up a quantity of mail from our previous house that hadn't been redirected, amongst which was an invitation to attend an interview the following day. A presentation was hastily put together in the small hours and I attended the interview.

I accepted the post of ADAM Project Leader at the Surrey Institute of Art & Design, and tied up as many loose ends at the MDA as possible before leaving in late December 1995.

1996 - 1999: Putney, London

I moved from Cambridge to Putney between Christmas and New Year, driving a rented Ford Transit van through thick snow. The flatshare in Putney had been discovered during a frantic weekend of househunting some weeks earlier, after sitting with a copy of Loot and a bag of 10p's by a payphone in Putney's rather tacky shopping plaza. I'd decided to live in London rather than Farnham if I got the job when I applied, in fact the prospect of moving back to London was one of many appealing factors about the post.

Most of the rest of Christmas, and a sizeable chunk of my free time in the first months of 1996, were spent on the biggest loose end from my job at the MDA; completing a guide book called 'The MDA Guide to Computers in Museums' (I also spent an inordinate amount of time trying to borrow money for another car, as both my job and address were only a month old which potential lenders seemed to find disconcerting; luckily an old school friend who worked for the finance company gave me a reference, and the money was loaned).

I started working at the Surrey Institute of Art & Design as ADAM Project Leader on the 3rd January 1996. ADAM was a project to build a subject gateway (a quality-assured academic portal) to Art, Design, Architecture & Media resources on the Internet, which was funded by JISC as part of its Electronic Libraries (eLib) Programme. I acquired an office, a parking permit, a boxed computer and a small part-time team comprised of several young librarians and a techie distributed across partner universities throughout the United Kingdom.

We set about building a subject gateway, with the feeling that we were contributing something new, interesting and good to the still-infant World Wide Web.

Less than a year later, we successfully bid for additional JISC funding to host the Visual Arts Data Service (one of 5 service providers that fell under the umbrella of the Arts & Humanities Data Service), for which I was also Project Manager for the first 18 months.

It was during this period that I attended an eLib-sponsored event about resource discovery metadata at the University of Warwick's conference centre, secluded in a bleak and starkly landscaped part of Coventry. This meeting was later dubbed "The 2nd Dublin Core Workshop", and the main deliverable was the "Warwick Framework", a set of fuzzy and nebulous requirements for a metadata wrapper architecture that eventually evolved into RDF.

The ideas behind Dublin Core seemed so desirable and yet so attainable to me as a novice subject gateway developer that I became more active and involved in the Dublin Core community. Before too long I was talking and writing about Dublin Core, and (along with Paul Miller and a few others) receiving additional funding from eLib to attend further DC workshops. I attended the third workshop in Dublin, Ohio, the fourth in Canberra, Australia, the fifth in Helsinki, Finland, and the sixth at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.

I also received generous sponsorship from the Getty Information Institute to speak about Dublin Core at the MCN Conference in St Louis, at the Getty Information Institute itself and at the Research Libraries Group -- an introduction that was to have very beneficial consequences several years later!

My life outside work was also highly satisfactory for the most part; for the first time since before college I wasn't in debt, I had a decent car (my second VW Golf), I was sharing a comfortable flat with people that I got on with, and the vast majority of my friends were living, going out and having fun in the same city. Throw in a few memorable holidays to places like Greece and Thailand, and a few interesting albeit short-lived romantic episodes, and that was my recipe for a very happy few years.

However, the money for ADAM was gradually running out, and some time before the Surrey Institute offered me a 6-month contract (to follow my third consecutive 1-year contract), I'd already decided it was time for a change. I had only been on a few interviews when the e-mail from RLG arrived, directing my attention to a description of what appeared to be the perfect job on the web and inviting me to consider applying for it. I did, and the rest, as they say...

I interviewed with RLG immediately after the 6th Dublin Core workshop towards the end of 1998, and was formally offered the job a few days later. Of course, I knew there would be some immigration hoops to jump through, but RLG was paying a lawyer to get me a visa -- how long could it take?

Much longer than I anticipated; 7 months in end. I left the Surrey Institute at the end of December 1998, having worked exactly the three years I signed up for at the start of the project.

1999 - 2002: San Francisco

After spending the first few months of 1999 in a state of high readiness for my impending transcontinental relocation, I eventually realized that the visa lawyer always said it would take another 6-8 weeks, seeming not to acknowledge the multiple periods of 6-8 weeks that had elapsed since he last offered that advice.

In the end, I got bored of hearing "4-6 weeks" and gave up being on high alert, settling in to a relaxing period of "garden leave". This alllowed me to do a number of interesting consulting assignments for a variety of clients, and to tackle some other pressing issues such as moving all my photographs from shoeboxes to albums.

I eventually moved to San Francisco on 8 June 1999, after a short, frenetic and stressful period of activity that would have failed without the well-timed 11th-hour assistance of a friend (Lucy, I'm forever in your debt).

I arrived in the Mission District of San Francisco at the height of the dot.com boom, and have so far lived in two different apartments in the neighbourhood; initially I moved in to a shared flat, and a year later into my own studio apartment on Capp Street.

During that time, the dot.com bubble well and truly burst, which was an interesting if not always happy event to witness.

I also spent a very happy three years as a Program Officer for RLG (a.k.a. The Research Libraries Group, Inc.).

2002 - Present: New York

New York blurb coming one day...

Tony's Timeline:

San Francisco, 16 May 2000, updated New York 13 February 2003

© Tony Gill 2000 - 2003 -- Disclaimer