Seventeenth Century Benefactors Books

One of the things I love most about teaching is the opportunity to engage with subject areas that neighbour my own research interests.

In recent years I’ve been fortunate to supervise dissertations by several students working in Oxford and, in supporting the development of their research, to gain a deeper awareness of some of the libraries in the university system there.

One of these dissertations was further developed into an article. The Bodleian’s Binders’ Book is just one of the many manuscript resources that record library practices in the Early Modern period. Such manuscripts have local interest within the city but an obvious significance in library history more widely.

Tonight’s library history seminar discussed another group of library records – the benefactors’ books maintained by most of the colleges from the early 17th century. The speaker, Dr William Poole ( New College), provided an introduction to these sources, which he sees as useful in connecting the history of intellectual ideas and the history of the book. He provided us with examples in which we can trace the vernacularization of scholarship; the shift from manuscripts donated as working documents to their donation as antiquarian objects (e.g. Books of Hours donated after the Reformation); the specialisation of particular college collections (e.g. Plant Science at Magdalen); and, from the 1630s, when the Anatomy School Museum was founded, the separation of non-book collections from books in libraries.

The influence of Bodley can be seen: the Bodleian benefactors book was begun in 1602 and displayed prominently, with clear instructions on whose names would be entered in it and whose would not. In 1604-5 All Souls’s benefactors book was begun. Bodley himself was influenced by practices at Leiden, a model for various practices at the university at that time.

The seminar demonstrated how provenance information can be of local significance while exemplifying techniques with wider application. The organisers recorded Dr Poole’s paper, and so I hope it will be available as a podcast soon – certainly it will be useful for Historical Bibliography students as an example of how provenance research techniques can be used by scholars.

If you could not make the seminar and are looking for resources on this topic, ahead of the podcast’s becoming available, here are some listed on Dr Poole’s handout:

Jonathan Bengston. ‘Benefaction Registers in Oxford Colleges’. Library History 16 (2000), pp. 143-52.

Arthur MacGregor et al. Manuscript Catalogues of the Early Museum Collection, 1683-1886. (Oxford, 2000-2006).

Paul Morgan. Oxford Libraries Outside the Bodleian. 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1980).

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Image: bookshelf at Christ Church, Oxford, taken on a visit during last year’s Rare Books and Special Collections Group Conference.

“Good Feeling and Brotherliness”: the Society of Public Librarians

Earlier this week Dr Michelle Johansen gave a seminar for the Institute of Historical Research on the leisure activities of the Society of Public Librarians, based on its archive at the Bishopsgate Institute.

Too much information was shared in the two hour session to be represented fully in a short blog post, so what follows represents only a few of the things that struck me. I’m interested in the topic because I’ve been looking into the old Library Association exams, and, as one of the main organisations that functioned outside the LA in its early years, I was interested to hear Dr Johansen’s findings.

In the course of its 35-year existence (1895-1930) the Society included over twenty chief librarians working in London libraries and living across the city, mostly in its suburbs. Most members remained active for 5-20 years, and most had been born in London and then trained on-the-job in libraries outside the capital. (The complex history of establishment of free, rate-assisted libraries in London meant that while the Libraries Act 1850 led quite quickly to public libraries’ being established across the country, in the capital public libraries as we would recognise them today did not come into existence until the 1880s).

The men who formed the society were, as Dr Johansen put it, “simultaneous producers and consumers of leisure activities,” arranging lecture series and classes, book groups and salons, often staying on the premises late into the evening to support these activities. As a result of this, “the line between public and private” and between work and leisure is hard to draw. Dr Johansen also made the point that whereas for many people and groups of people, the home was the locus for leisure, for these men their workplace was the centre of their activities outside of work.

Of course, we are tracking their activities via the Society’s archives, so we have to remember that they may have also taken part in other common activities, such as attending the theatres, music halls and, later, the cinemas, been interested in sports and / or taken part in other social events in their local area, such as those centred around churches.

However, based on the evidence of the SPL archive and the length of time that members stayed in the society, it is safe to conclude that they were men who enjoyed what Dr Johansen termed “rational recreation.” There were three regular fixtures on the SPL social calendar: the Summer Outing; Winter Social and Annual Dinner. These involved a mixture of society business and social activities, and the archive contains group pictures of the librarians, their wives and families.

So, what were society members like?

Digital Bibliography

 

The latest issue of Library Review presents, as editor Judith Broady-Preston writes, “a range of papers from the best of the current crop of postgraduates, based on their theses and dissertations, showcasing the work of new entrants to the profession and providing readable access to cutting edge research.”

Alongside papers from City University, Loughborough, Ottawa and others, we have a calling card for the kind of research alumni of the Historical Bibliography module (INSTG012) are producing. As Elizabeth McCarthy, Sarah Wheale and I put it in our article, such work “exists at the nexus of three disciplines: librarianship, bibliography and digital humanities (utilising computing in the pursuit of humanities research” (p. 562) and, I would argue, is at the forefront of the nascent field of Digital Bibliography – the utilisation of Digital Humanities techniques within the older discipline of Bibliography. In my chapter in the recently published Digital Humanities in Practice, I discuss the use of technology by bibliographers and rare books librarians, and the two case studies in the chapter – by H.R. Woudhuysen and Marieke Van Delft – are available online.

The current paper, ‘Early Modern Oxford Bindings in Twenty-first Century Markup‘ is based on Elizabeth McCarthy’s MA LIS dissertation research, and, we hope, represents an appropriate balance between the technical skills required to enhance 17th century binders’ records with TEI and the bibliographic and subject knowledge necessary to appreciate the value of the pilot study Liz conducted within the wider context of bindings research and library collection management in the early modern period. Our presentation of the significance to the Bodleian of the manuscript Binders Book that is the object at the centre of the work was enhanced by Rare Books Curator Sarah Wheale’s contribution. As a lecturer, I hope that our assertion is true, that the project provides “an example of the kind of work that can be undertaken by library employees as part of their graduate studies, which allows for innovation and the incorporation of new research methodologies within traditional library projects.” (p. 562).  Certainly, in the case of the Binders Book in TEI,

The researcher [Liz] was able to step outside the constraints of an existing library management system and encoding standard (MARC) and think about the scholarly concerns of analytical and descriptive bibliography: how could the entries in the BB best be represented? She was able to consider specialist users with an interest in Oxford bindings, and to build a resource with their needs in mind … (p. 573).

Melissa Terras has written elsewhere about the choices academics make when they decide to co-author a paper with a student or former student, and the inherent ethical considerations – principally the contribution that the academic makes to the work. This article not only is a terrific achievement on Liz’s part, but also the first of a little clutch of publications – some solo-authored and a couple written with Hist Bib alumni during or after their time studying at UCL – that sets out my wares as a Digital Bibliographer and a supervisor of Digital Bibliographers. As such, I’m delighted that Liz’s MA LIS research is first out of the publication box; that it’s representing UCL in Library Review‘s issue ‘Showcasing Postgraduate Research’; and that it’s come out right in the middle of our recruitment season for the MA LIS and MA DH. Students and prospective students with an interest in cataloguing need not worry, though, cataloguing research and supervision is, and will always be, equally core to my practice.

I’ll link through to Liz’s own blog on the article when it goes live, and, for those of you without online access to Library Review, copies of the authors’ final text will be available as soon as is possible (and legal) on the Oxford and UCL institutional repositories.

References

Broady-Preston, J. (2012). Showcasing postgraduate research. Library Review. 61 (8/9). Full-text available at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?issn=0024-2535&volume=61&issue=8&articleid=17065501&show=html

McCarthy, E., Welsh, A., & Wheale, S. (2012). Early modern Oxford bindings in twenty-first century markup. Library Review, 61 (8/9), 561-576 .DOI: 10.1108/00242531211292079

Terras, M. (2011). Computer games and author lists. Melissa Terras’s Blog, 25 November 2011. Available at http://melissaterras.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/computer-games-and-author-lists.html

Van Delft, M. (2012). Case study: Watermarks in paper: four related online projects. In C. Warwick, M. Terras, & J. Nyhan (Eds.), Digital Humanities in practice. London: Facet. Full-text available at http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/dh-in-practice/chapter-7/

Welsh, A. (2012). Historical Bibliography in the digital world. In C. Warwick, M. Terras, & J. Nyhan (Eds.), Digital Humanities in practice (pp. 139-165). London: Facet. Retrieved from http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/title.php?id=7661

Woudhuysen, H.R. (2012). Case study: The Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts, 1450-1700. In C. Warwick, M. Terras, & J. Nyhan (Eds.), Digital Humanities in practice. London: Facet. Full-text available at http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/dh-in-practice/chapter-7/