Gordon Barr
www.gbarr.info
Current
In April 2010, I was appointed as the first Heritage Development
Officer for the Maryhill Burgh Halls Trust. The Trust was set up five
years ago to breathe new life into the former Burgh Halls complex at
the heart of Maryhill.
Find out more about the Trust, the fantastic building, and the unique
series of stained glass panels depicting the industries of Maryhill in
the 19th Century on our new website at www.maryhillburghhalls.org.uk
Consulting
In my spare time, I write, agitate about poor planning applications,
give walks, talks and tours relating to Glasgow’s history and heritage,
and also provide IT, web and design-related consultancy services to a
number of private and public sector clients.
If you’re interested in hiring me, get in touch.
Cinemas
I am also co-editor of the Scottish Cinemas and Theatres website, a web resource dedicated to recording and archiving our historic cinema architectural heritage, and to act as a information resource for people interested in that often overlooked part of our social history. In addition, we host the Scottish Cinemas Database, an online resource of all of Scotland's cinema buildings, from 1902 to the present day. This is fully searchable and constantly updated as new information becomes available. It currently contains information on over 1,100 cinemas. The Scottish Cinemas Website and Database can be found here.
Additionally,
I am a committee member of the Cinema Theatre Association, the national
body for the study and protection of traditional cinema buildings, and
active in their Scottish branch, CTA Scotland. More information on the
CTA can be found here.
Chemistry
For many years, I was a post-doctoral research fellow in the Theoretical Crystallography group, part of WestCHEM at the Department of Chemistry, University of Glasgow. I was also involved in helping with IT support in the Chemistry Department, in particular working on special projects, including the Chemistry Plasma Information Screen System, and other updating many of the database and web-related systems used in the department.
For more information on the research into cluster analysis in Chemistry, or details of the PolySNAP and dSNAP data analysis and visualisation software I developed, please visit my old work website here.
Thanks to my work at Glasgow, I’m an alumni of the prestigious 2008 NESTA Crucible
Program, and have been involved in the ongoing DataMIX
interdisciplinary project involving data analysis and presentation
techniques. More about that can be see on the DataMIX project website.
Cow
Along with the late, great Andy Parkin, I was jointly responsible for Chem-moo-stry.org - the Chemistry Cow! A unique member of the 2006 Edinburgh Cow Parade, Chem-moo-stry.org is a scientific bovine, interested in explaining science through art – displaying some of the modern, cutting-edge chem-moo-stry research from the cow-laborations between the Scottish Universities forming ScotCHEM.
The cow is now retired, and happily currently grazing at Glasgow Science Centre - for more details on this Public Promotion of Science project, please visit the archived version of the Chem-moo-stry website here.
Contact
I can be found at gbarr [at] mac [dot] com or on Facebook here. Some random
selections of my writing are on my Blog.