Serendipity, or, Why There’s No Such Thing as a Waste of Research Time

Today my main goal is to complete the marking of the Historical Bibliography essays submitted a week and a half ago, and I am rewarding myself (and keeping my focus) by breaking after every four essays and sorting through some of the extra research photos I took in Oxford a couple of years ago.

What do I mean by “extra” photos? Well, the purpose of the trip was to build up a swatch of handwriting samples from the de la Mare papers to compare with the writing in the annotations in the books at Senate House. I finished this with a couple of days to spare and instead of heading off into the summer sunshine like any normal person might, I took some photos of some of the pocket books in the archive. I didn’t need them for the handwriting sample, but I thought they might come in useful at some point later in my research.

Analysing de la Mare’s handwriting proved to be pretty dismal as far as dating is concerned. There’s a clear shift in the last couple of years of his life, and his teenage writing is very like his mother’s and becomes more distinct when he starts work at the oil company, but that leaves a span of around fifty years in which nothing changes so drastically that I would like to look at an annotation in one of his books and date it with any feeling of confidence beyond “not very old and not young either”.

So, in the end, the trip felt a little bit of a cul-de-sac. I proved a negative: that handwriting analysis was not going to be helpful to me. I learned a little bit more about that sort of analysis, and I got some good practice in the palaeography of de la Mare’s quite distinctive hand. Nothing more.

I assigned sorting through the “extra” photos to be my marking displacement and wake-up task. (It’s really important to refresh yourself regularly while marking, so that no student suffers impact from boredom with the process on the part of the marker).

Fast forward to this morning. And lo! Notes from one of the early notebooks about what he’s reading. The very thing I have on my seek and locate list for the summer, as described by Whistler:

At about this time too he began making exercise books on waste sheets of paper from the Oil Office. The first is in an alphabetical notebook for November 1892. (The Life of Walter de la Mare: Imagination of the Heart. Duckworth, 1993 (2003 imprint), p. 50)

I’ve not got images of them all, and I hope the years I don’t have are waiting for me in the boxes at the Bodleian, but it’s pretty exciting to find some of the very things I am seeking sitting on my own hard drive.

Thank goodness for the Bodley’s policy for researchers to take their own images. And thank goodness I didn’t go off in the sunshine once I’d finished my main research task. What was the focus then turned out to be not so important, while the marginal, the extra activity, could be really very useful indeed.

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Image: flicking through images on my hard drive

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/

Library Day in the Life 7. Day 1

So, this week is Library Day in the Life 7. As it’s the summer holidays, some of you may be surprised that I’m still at work. Certainly most of the emails I receive kindly wish that I’m enjoying my “extended vacation,” and on Saturday I was berated at a family barbecue for taking salary over the summer, when, apparently, I and the rest of academe are “not working”.

In reality, summer is about research: our own research and that of our students, who are currently preparing the dissertations for their MA LIS. It’s not quite a holiday but it is 8-10 weeks focusing on some of the best parts of the job: finding out new information and helping other people to do the same.

Yesterday (Day 1 of Library Week in the Life) didn’t get off to the best of starts, with transport and administrative issues eating into time. However, by the end of the day, I had: