visitors
A group of participants in the Designer Bookbinders 2nd International Bookbinding Competition visited St Cross this week as part of a day of tours of college libraries and notable bindings in their collections. Appropriately, it was a very international group as well!
Materials
There is a great variety of bindings in Balliol’s collections. One of the ways in which they vary is in the choice of materials used in their construction. True, we have not yet come across any books covered in the skin of criminals, or less gruesome exotics such as seal skin. Even within the realms of the ‘normal’, different materials give quite different effects. This is apparent in four books from four centuries, bound respectively with calf over wooden boards, pigskin over wooden boards, limp vellum and wallpaper over pasteboards.
A right royal binding A 1492 edition of the ancient philosopher Plotinus, still wearing its original stamped, checkerboard patterned binding in calf over wooden boards. The holes for chain staples and the manuscript title on the text block give an indication of how the volume was once stored and read; chained books would have been stored with their spines facing in. (More about medieval chained libraries here.) The binding was repaired in 1920 by ‘the binders to the Bodleian Library’. The text was translated by the humanist philosopher, Marsilio Ficino, whose academy enjoyed the patronage of the Medici, and printed in Florence for Lorenzo de Medici. This copy is thought to have belonged to the library, in El Escorial, of King Philip II of Spain, husband of Mary I of England. [30 f 148]
It is difficult to date papers used in bindings such as this one for a three volume set of Virgil’s works published in Rome in 1763-5. Papers were imported and exported, used long after their manufacture, and imitated as fashion dictated. This paper is patterned with a wood-block print. The earliest date for a European wood-block print is 1423, but wall paper with a continuous design was invented much later by Jean Papillon (1661-1723). The most common type of decorated papers in France, Italy and Germany were the cotton papers (the blocks, often made of pear wood, were used to print textiles as well as papers). These were first produced c.1735-40 and reached their summit in the 1760s-80s.₁ [30 g 148-150] ₁ Foot, M. M. Studies in the History of Bookbinding. Aldershot, 1993, (pp.253-60).
Use
Bindings can have a whole plethora of functions other than simply providing protection and support for the t
ext block: a commemorative binding to mark an occasion; a prize binding to reward and to confirm the winner’s affiliation with the awarding institution; a personal binding to show ownership; a memorial binding by which to remember; artistic bindings which can be means of expression and things of beauty. Here are just two examples of binding uses from Balliol’s collection.
Mrs Pauline Johnstone presented this Bible to the College in 1978. The binding is a labour of love, designed and embroidered by Mrs Johnstone in memory of her husband, Kenneth Roy Johnstone (Balliol 1921).
Our resident embroidery expert, Mary Addison, gives this description: This splendid Bible cover has been hand embroidered in goldwork and beading to an original design which draws on rich historical precedents. It is a particularly appropriate decoration for a Bible as it brings to mind English embroidery at its apogee. In the Middle Ages Opus Anglicanum became famous and sought after throughout Europe, primarily for ecclesiastical use. Typically, gold thread is couched (applied to the surface and held in place by silk thread) to give a strong linear element to the design and this lends itself well to the depiction of crosses, entwined stems and stylised flowers. The flowers are then embellished with more subtle couching in which coloured silk threads predominate over the gold. Beads are used sparingly to draw attention to details in the design, their ability to catch the light reminding us of the spark of life in the flora and fauna. On the back cover the design includes scrolling foliage (oak leaves and possibly the leaves of a fruit tree) on which sits a garden bird of the utmost charm whose open beak visibly sings Deo gratias (Thanks be to God); below a butterfly contemplates sharing the sentiment. Both design and embroidery are of the highest standard. [Johnstone Bible]
In the past, many books belonging to Francis Bacon (sixteenth-century courtier, writer, and natural philosopher) have been discovered and then discredited. Balliol’s copy of Catholic Archbishop Du Perron’s 1620 polemic is one of only 15 books which can be securely identified as having belonged in Bacon’s large library. Certainty is provided by the book’s binding, which has Bacon’s crest gilt-stamped on both boards. Bacon’s heraldic ‘boar passant ermine armed and hoofed or, a crescent for difference’₁ is a rebus, or play on his name, conjuring up a crisp (but anachronistic) BLT sandwich. [30 f 25] ₁ Murphy, K. “Francis Bacon and Ben Jonson in the College library” in Balliol College Annual Record 2012. Oxford, 2012, (p.46).
Structure
The majority of bindings at Balliol are codices – the familiar western book format. Here are two exceptions that make use of non-western structures.
The 
poet, Algernon Charles Swinburne matriculated at Balliol in 1856. These two bindings are from a recent acquisition for the Library: the collection of leading Swinburne scholar, Rikky Rooksby. ‘On the Cliffs’ is one of four long poems from Swinburne’s Songs of the Springtides, published in London in 1880. The first edition has a blue cloth binding designed to be uniform with his other publications with Chatto and Windus. A centenary (1980) limited edition of Swinburne’s poem ‘On the Cliffs’ printed on folded Japanese paper is protected and enhanced by a simple binding of guard boards covered in dark plum Japanese paper. It is presented in a standing slip case with a paper sculpture by Tuska. [Swinburne Collection]
A late eighteenth or early nineteenth-century manuscript written on palm leaves strung between decorated wooden covers. The Sinhalese Buddist text within concerns the first sutta (sῡtra) in the Pali canon, the Brahmajala Sutta. The wooden covers are painted on the inside with Sri Lankan places of pilgrimage. [MS 472]
Conservation
Bindings, like other parts of the book, gradually decay. The rate of decay depends on the conditions in which they are kept. We try to handle our collections with care, keep them at a constant temperature and humidity, and make sure they are free from pests. Sometimes though, we are dealing with historical neglect or well-meant but unfortunate interventions. It could be that curators of the future will look back at our practice and shake their heads sadly. Balliol is lucky to be a member of the Oxford Conservation Consortium based at Magdalen College. Their advice and sympathetic interventions help us to do our best for our time in terms of collection care.
This manuscript, the fifth and last volume of Balliol’s copy of Domenico Bandini’s early encyclopaedia, Fons Memorabilium Universi (The spring of knowledge about the universe), was one of many commissioned in the mid-15th century by William Gray, a member of Balliol and late Bishop of Ely, for the College Library. It was written in 1445 in Cologne for Balliol and is a good example of modern conservation binding using historic materials and techniques. Unfortunately, its original medieval binding was replaced by a later, overly tight binding which made it hard to consult. Its current binding was made by Chris Clarkson of the Bodleian Library’s conservation department. It uses the same kinds of materials and binding structure that would have been used in the original. This means that the text block is now under even pressure, the spine is not under stress and the binding opens much more easily than before.
In 1610 this edition of Virgil’s works was published in Cologne. Around that time it was given a vellum binding, the pages attached with cotton thread around leather cords at three sewing stations. Since then it has fared badly. Where, we don’t know, as it was only recently donated to the Library. Given the state of the vellum, we can surmise that at one stage it was somewhere warm and dry. At another, it may have been somewhere damp judging by the mould stains and the insect holes on the paper. It could do with some TLC. The plus side of this damage is that it has revealed the structure of the binding for our inspection. [Virgil 1610]
- Descriptions by Naomi Tiley, Librarian, 2013.
Lunchtime Talk: Unlocking Archives 4
Lunchtime talk: Unlocking Archives
a new series about research in Balliol College’s special collections
Living with the Jowett Papers
Dr Robin Darwall-Smith
Archivist, Magdalen & University Colleges
Activity in the archives does not lessen as the end of term draws near, and the fourth talk in our new Unlocking Archives series about research in Balliol’s special collections is nearly upon us. This time we’ll hear from an archivist about the sometimes-surprising process of cataloguing a large collection of 19th century personal papers. I do hope some of you will be able to make it for an expert discussion of one of our most interesting collections – please share the announcement. NB this month’s talk is on a Thursday lunchtime rather than the usual Friday.
Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893, Master of Balliol 1870-93) is best known as a translator of Plato into English and an innovative and influential Master of Balliol. His papers are one of the most-consulted of Balliol’s manuscript collections – both because of their content and because they are our best-catalogued collection. They are especially valued by researchers for their vast store of correspondence and documentation of major administrative changes in the late 19th-century college and wider University. Few researchers, however, have Robin Darwall-Smith’s depth of knowledge of what is revealed in the papers about Jowett himself. Come along next Thursday and find out about the man behind the legend!
Thursday 20 June, 1-2 pm
Balliol Historic Collections Centre
St Cross Church, Manor Road
* all welcome *
Robin Darwall-Smith read Classics at Univ. as an undergraduate and a postgraduate, before training as an archivist at the University of Liverpool. His first job after qualifying was to catalogue the papers of Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893, Master of Balliol 1870-93) at Balliol. After spending some years working at Oxfordshire Record Office, he has been Archivist of University College and of Magdalen College since 1993 and 1996 respectively.
Feel free to bring your lunch. The talk will last no more than half an hour, to allow time for questions and discussion afterwards, and a closer look at some of the Balliol MSS discussed.
visitors
Emeritus Fellows of Balliol Prof Diego Zancani and John Prest, with their guests Dr Yutaka Akagawa, Professor Emeritus of Meiji Gakuin University (Tokyo) and Dr Keiichi Matsudaira, Professor at Tokyo Denki University, came to visit the Historic Collections Centre this week. Both Professor Akagawa and Professor Matsudaira have written and lectured extensively on the history of English gardens, and garden history was the focus of the day.
Items produced were:
- John Rea’s Flora: seu De Florum Cultura. Or, A Complete Florilege, furnished With all Requisites belonging to a Florist (London, 1665) (a facsimile is available here)
- John Evelyn’s Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest-Trees and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty’s Dominions, to which is annexed Pomona, or an Appendix concerning fruit-trees, In relation to cider, The Making and several ways of Ordering it. Also Kalendarium Hortense: or, The gard’ners almanac, directing what he is to do monthly through-out the year. And what fruits and flowers are in prime (1664)
- David Loggan’s C17 bird’s eye view of Balliol and
- Williams’ C18 plan of the Broad St site, which emphasises formal gardens so much that I suspect it may be a never-realised grand scheme!
Professors Akagawa and Matsudaira enjoyed seeing first editions of texts they had known so well for decades but had never seen in the original before. Stay tuned for more of Balliol’s garden history as Prof Zancani and our head gardener, Chris Munday, continue their research…
Thing 16
Thing 16 of 23Things for Research is Sharing Research Online – which for me meant Exploring Prezi.
I like the look of Prezi. Zooming around a big canvas is impressive, and the freedom from slide format sounds interesting – my slides are always going over the edges in Powerpoint. But how much more can it really do than Powerpoint? How much better is a good prezi than a good Powerpoint? (yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as a good powerpoint) And how much Prezi learning is needed to make a Prezi significantly better than Powerpoint? Is that investment worthwhile?
Well, here is a link to my first Prezi. It is not complete – I haven’t filled in the text under the Cataloguing frame, which is the important and complicated one, because I had a whizzy idea or two that I didn’t make time to figure out. (I didn’t embed it as apparently Prezi and WordPress have some issues to iron out there, or at least WordPress does.) Well, actually it’s the second – the first one was hopeless; you can probably see that on Prezi too, but don’t bother. As with all these things, the how-tos are fine but really you have to dive in and fiddle about for ages to get to grips with what’s going on. The ‘How to make a great Prezi Prezi’ is lovely, but it should be called ‘This is what a great Prezi can be like once you are really really good at it’ (not least because a couple of the basic editing tools have changed their appearance and workflow a bit). Eventually I figured out a few of the basics, like what does not work, and it’s not until that happens that specific how-tos become useful, e.g. ‘how the dickens do I rotate these stupid footprints? this is easy in Powerpoint!’
My conclusion, having clicked impatiently through a good few of them, is that the vast majority of Prezis, like the vast majority of presentations prepared with any e-tool, are not great quality. There is capacity within Prezi to do some interesting fresh things, but most don’t use Prezi’s features to greatest capacity or best effect – so most of the time those features are wasted. For this topic (all I could think of for the moment – do good Prezis require innovative subjects?) Powerpoint would have been just fine, and perhaps better. Certainly quicker for me! Maybe this looks a bit newer, but so what, this is not a film. Maybe I’ll come up with a topic that screams Really Cool Prezi at me.
In fact, I already have one of those. I”m giving a much-illustrated talk at a conference in a couple of weeks, and I wish I could use Prezi for it because it looks so slick, and the zoomy quality would be useful, but I’ll be sticking with ye olde Powerpoint this time because I just do not have time before then to sit down and learn enough to make a Prezi look really good. It makes me wonder who does. Seriously, I’d have to fiddle with this for a seasick-making week before I was sufficiently good at it to make it enough better than Powerpoint to be worth spending a week on. (I had to do that with powerpoint too, years ago, but there was no predecessor to Powerpoint and I was a student then…) Also, how would you print a Prezi? those boring slide notes prints can be really useful at (and after) conferences.
And Prezi, for goodness’ sake improve your search function! I couldn’t even find my own Prezis without logging in!
Lunchtime Talk:Unlocking Archives 3
announcing the third talk in our series about research in Balliol College’s special collections
Tales of the Unexpected: Mont Blanc to Everest
Dr Stephen Golding, University College
Friday 24 May, 1-2 pm
Balliol Historic Collections Centre
St Cross Church, Manor Road
* all welcome *
While researching a history of the ‘Chalet des Anglais’ near Mont Blanc, scene of a century of Oxford student reading parties, Dr Golding has made unexpected discoveries about the pioneer mountaineer George Mallory who died on Everest in 1924, adding a new dimension to what is known of this legendary climber’s life.
Feel free to bring your lunch. The talk will last no more than half an hour, to allow time for questions and discussion afterwards, and a closer look at some of the Balliol MSS discussed.
=====
27 May update: Many thanks to Dr Golding for a fascinating paper! It will be presented to another audience at a later date, and, we hope, the new research (and photographs) will be published as well, so no summary here. Stay tuned!
Q&A: Access to St Cross Church and Balliol’s special collections
I am often asked about the status of St Cross as a church, and about how members of Balliol College, the University of Oxford and the wider community can get access to the building and the collections housed in it. Here is a collection of those questions and answers.
Q: I walked past St Cross church yesterday and tried the door. It was locked. Churches should be open! Why isn’t St Cross open?
A: St Cross is no longer a parish church. It was decommissioned in 2008. In latter years at least, the door to St Cross was usually locked even while it was a parish church – visitors could borrow the key from the lodge at Holywell Manor, next door.
St Cross’ door is normally locked because it is now part of Balliol College’s library. Many people come by the church every day, and a good number try the door handle. It would be very disruptive to staff and researchers to have visitors walking in and out of a library reading room – and extremely draughty!
Q: So St Cross has been deconsecrated?
A: It has not been deconsecrated; the chancel and sanctuary furniture and arrangement are as they were. The font has been moved (with all the required permission of course) to the north side of the chancel step, under the Freeling memorial. The chancel is now a chapel of ease to the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, and occasional services are celebrated in the chancel by St Mary’s clergy or the Balliol chaplain.
If anyone can provide a link to a good clear explanation between the terms closed, redundant, decommissioned and deconsecrated regarding churches, please leave a comment below!
Q: Can I come to St Cross to see the historic parish records? Or records of burials in Holywell Cemetery?
A: All of St Cross’ parish records have been deposited and can be consulted by appointment at the Oxfordshire History Centre on Cowley Road; this is the repository for parish records in the Oxford diocese. Holywell Cemetery records are also there. Balliol does not have copies of these records at St Cross.
Q: St Cross is part of Balliol now, and hey, it has wifi! Why can’t members of Balliol come in when they want with their swipe cards, the way they can in other parts of the college? And if it’s part of the college library, can Balliol students use it as a reading room?
A: Several reasons – first, you try getting permission to mount swipe card or security tag kit on a grade I listed building! Second, those using the special collections have priority in this building, because they cannot consult copies anywhere else – there aren’t any. Then too, for obvious preservation reasons (bearing in mind that everything we have here is unique and irreplaceable, and it is all old and fragile, or will be one day) any special collections reading room has considerably stricter regulations than the college library does: food, water, gum and sweets are not permitted. Neither are outdoor coats or any bags at the table. Neither are pens – pencil only. [further details here and here]
All that said, of course students can come in and use any of the collections here for research. Making an appointment is pretty easy – it just requires a little forward planning. Aside from curriculum-related research, there are numerous opportunities for current and past members to visit St Cross and see the collections during special events throughout the year. (Students can request and help to plan said events, too!)
Q: It’s sad to see empty churches. I suppose St Cross is always empty now that it is not a parish church?
A: The building is definitely not standing empty these days! Balliol’s Special Collections Centre at St Cross is usually staffed Monday-Friday, and there are researchers using the collections here on most weekdays, as well as tour groups and individual visitors. All visitors need to make appointments except for advertised public open days, which are held on weekdays and at weekends. More than 1000 people visited St Cross in 2012.
Q: I suppose only members of Balliol can use the building now. Can’t the public get into St Cross church at all anymore?
A: Although it is now leased, maintained and occupied by Balliol College, St Cross has not been made permanently inaccessible to the general public. Anyone who is interested can make an appointment to tour the building, and anyone with a bona fide research question can make an appointment to consult Balliol’s special collections here. [contact]
The church is open to the public – in the sense of the door being open – at least once a month, for open days, public lectures, exhibitions and services. Please contact staff for the next dates. [contact]
Q: Why all this need for appointments? I’d rather just be able to turn up when I want.
A: Some larger (e.g. county) archive services are able to accommodate visitors without appointments, but most archives and special collections libraries with few staff require appointments, and even if they are not required, you are likely to get a better service if you arrange your visit in advance. There are several reasons why appointments are necessary for all visitors; the intention is to accommodate as many visitors as possible as well as possible, not to keep them away.
- St Cross is a busy place these days, and we need to make sure that users can all make the most of their visits – for instance, we tend to avoid scheduling tour groups on days when individual researchers will be working, and vice versa.
- The number of researchers who can be accommodated on any one day is fairly small, restricted by the space available; by arranging your visit in advance, you will be sure of a seat and can plan your time.
- Staff need to be able to plan their work schedules, and may need to arrange ahead of time for extra invigilation cover for researchers.
- There are times when the Centre is closed or can only provide support for internal College enquiries.
- Visitors often come from far away, and we need to make sure they – you – are able to make the most of their, or your, limited time at St Cross.
- If you are making a visit for research, pre-ordered items will be ready for you when you arrive, maximising your research time. In addition, staff will be able to advise you on other relevant collections, provide finding aids in advance in most cases, and notify you of any materials which are not available for consultation.
Many things have changed at St Cross over the last several years – we hope that most of them have changed for the better!
not least the state of the building itself – must post some new photos of the interior, restored and in use. Coming soon!
new accessions
We don’t often have visiting archives, but last week brought an exception. The letter below has kindly been loaned to Balliol for the rest of 2013, during which the college celebrates its 750th anniversary.
A nearly-complete transcript:
My dear Vice Chancellor,
I will gladly preach
in the afternoon of Sunday
June 18th as you kindly propose
I hope that I may be able
to say something useful to
the undergraduates.
I remain
Yours very sincerely
B. Jowett
Ball. Coll.
May 17
If anyone can untangle Jowett’s dreadful spidery hand and finish the last word of the 4th line, I’d be glad to hear about it! It should of course be a word meaning something like either suggest or offer, but it’s neither of those, nor I think proffer. Update: two blog readers responded immediately with the suggestion of ‘propose’. Thank you! I agree.
Aside from the words, this letter, though not of any great historical substance alone, might bring up many questions and possible connections:
- What year was this letter written?
- Who was the Vice-Chancellor?
- Why is the Vice-Chancellor issuing invitations to preach? As it’s the V-C inviting, which pulpit is Jowett going to preach from?
- Is there any other correspondence about this sermon? What was it about? Does its text survive? Did other people comment on it later?
How might we go about trying to answer some of these questions? what clues can we find to connect this letter to others? Archival research and archival description are all about making meaningful connections.
The verso is annotated in pencil, probably by a later collector, ‘Dr Jowett – President of Balliol Coll.’ This is (probably) incorrect on two counts: Jowett did not have a DPhil from Oxford and only acquired a doctorate in 1884, an honorary Doctor of Laws (LLD) from Edinburgh; so unless this is quite a late letter, the title ‘Dr’ is not correct; and although Balliol’s head of house went by various titles in the first centuries of the college’s history, certainly well before Jowett’s time the title had settled as Master, not President.
If I were beginning research to integrate this letter into Balliol’s collections, here are a few of the first places I’d look for clues:
-
the catalogue of Jowett’s papers held at Balliol
-
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry (see if your local library has an online subscription – many do)
-
Wikipedia’s list of V-Cs of Oxford (yes indeed, used judiciously, Wikipedia can be a great research tool!)
- Wikipedia entry for BJ
- timeanddate.com
- National Register of Archives Personal name search
Thing 15
Thing 15 for 23 Things for Research is Podcasts & Videos. I’d been putting it off because I did have an idea I wanted to try , and I knew it would take some time to filter through the suggested platforms and try things out. Unfortunately, it took less time than I expected.
Enquirers are generally pleased to have digital images of items from the collections, and they are generally satisfied with their quality, but they often have difficulty finding their way through Flickr’s rather too many layers of display to the biggest Original size at highest resolution, which is of course what you want if you are trying to read a medieval title deed etc.
So I thought a screencast would be a good way of demonstrating the less than obvious path to those who are having difficulty discovering it for the first time – once you have it, it’s tedious but clear. I wanted a silent film, as more appropriate for viewing (and creating) in a library setting. And I wanted the option of adding highlighting and text. In fact, I had already seen what I wanted using Videopress, but it’s a paid service. I may have to go for that, but I won’t be making a lot of such things and I wanted to at least be able to test out a first attempt for free. But I also have the restriction that I cannot download any software whatever to my computer at work, and many people can’t. The free versions of Screencast-o-matic and Jing both require downloads. Non-starters for me, unless I lug my own laptop to work :(
I knew I could do what I wanted, at least for this presentation not using video, with PowerPoint. But it does take ages and I wanted the challenge of trying something new. Hey ho. Instead, I made a little guide using a few still images plus some highlighty circles (generated in PowerPoint) and posted them as a set on Flickr. I have a feeling that looking at screen shots of Flickr on Flickr may well prove confusing for some… here it is. For a fancier version, I think I’d stick with Powerpoint for now. I’ll have to revisit the possibilities again later, because the conservators and I would like to do a series on correct handling of different formats of documents, bound, flat and otherwise.
Q&A: digitisation
I was recently asked: ‘I noticed that quite a bit of material from your archives has been digitized, and that you have put it to fine use by widening access to the collection on the website and through online exhibitions. I wondered how you are going about digitizing the items – are you working in-house, or are you using an external organization to do it, or a mixture of both? Please could you tell me how this is being financed, and if you are aiming to digitize the whole archive or just a part?’ This isn’t the first time I’ve been asked about my digitization programme at Balliol, and it prompted a bit of an essay on how I do things now and how that has changed since I began in October 2010. So here’s is an update to what I was thinking then.
Who does the work?
I do the digitising myself – I have an excellent A3 scanner and a serviceable but outdated camera which I’m about to replace. I allocate a few hours a week to scanning & photography so that it progresses regularly, if not quickly, but I am posting about 2000 images a month these days.
The occasional exception is when someone wants to photograph an entire manuscript or series for their own research; in such cases I ask for copies of the images and permission to publish them online and make them freely available to other researchers, with credit to the photographer of course. So far the few people I’ve asked have been very happy to do this, since they have had free access and permission to photograph. (Sometimes their images are not as good as mine, so then I don’t bother!)
There are also numerous documents in the collections that are just too big for me to photograph – eventually, if and when they are asked for, we will have to think about having someone in to photograph them systematically. So far the multiple photos of each that I or the researcher have been able to do has sufficed.
For now at least, I have decided against a systematic digitisation of our microfilms of the medieval manuscripts. This would involve a lot of time and effort to fund and arrange, the images would all be black and white, and of variable quality, and there are knotty questions of copyright as well. Some of the MSS were only partly microfilmed, and none has more than a single full-page perpendicular view for each page – no closeups or angles to get closer to initials, erasures, annotations, marginalia or tight gutters, so there would still be considerable photography to do anyway. Also, see below.
Why don’t you apply for a grant and have a professional photographer do more than you can do yourself?
So far, I’m able to fulfil reprographics orders in a pretty timely manner and to a standard that satisfies enquirers. Aside from cost and time management for individual orders, because I can respond individually and fit them in around my other tasks, the great advantage of doing the digitisation myself is that I am getting to know the collections extremely well. If we had an outside photographer do it, all that direct encounter with each page would go to someone with no real interest in the collections, what a waste. This way, I’m checking in a lot of detail for physical condition, learning to recognise individuals’ handwriting, discovering/replacing missing or misplaced items, prioritising items that need conservation or repackaging, noticing particularly visually attractive bits for later use in exhibitions and so on, and not least ensuring that items are properly numbered – which many are not!
What is the cost?
Because I work reprographics orders into my regular work schedule, there is no extra cost, except the £50 or so fee every 2 years for our unlimited Flickr account.
Do you charge for access?
I always mention that donations are welcome, but in general I do not charge for reprographics. Most of the requests are from within academia, and I think HE institutions have a responsibility to be helpful and cooperative with each other and with the public, particularly when it comes to access to unique items. On the one hand, I know that special collections are extremely expensive to maintain, and often have to sing for their supper, but on the other I know how frustrating it is to be denied the chance to take one’s own photographs and then to be charged the earth for a few images. Institutions like ours, whose own members may need such cooperation from other collections and their curators, should probably err on the side of the angels er scholars! Most of the other requests for images are for private individuals’ family history research purposes, and since many of those enquirers would otherwise have no contact with Balliol or Oxford, I think it’s good for the relationship between college, university and the wider public to be helpful in this way. Family history is usually very meaningful to researchers, and they remember and appreciate prompt and helpful assistance.
Balliol College reserves the right to charge for permission to publish its images, but may waive this for academic publications.
Are you planning to digitise all the collections or just parts? What are your priorities and how do you determine the order of things to be done next?
Most of the series I’ve put online don’t start with no.1. All the reprographics I do now are in response to specific requests from enquirers, and I don’t seriously intend, or at least expect, to digitize All The Things. Although 40,000 images sounds like a lot, and there’s loads to browse online, I’ve barely begun to scratch the surface; most collections aren’t even represented online – yet… This way, everything I post online I know is of immediate interest to at least one real person – if we did everything starting from A.1, probably most of it would sit there untouched. For the efficiency of my work and for preservation of the originals, digital photography is marvellous, enabling me to make every photo count more than once rather than having to photocopy things repeatedly over the years.
On the other hand, if someone asks for images of one text occupying only part of a medieval book, I will normally photograph the whole thing; or if the request is for a few letters from a file, I will scan the whole file. It’s more efficient in the long run, as a whole is more likely to be relevant to other future searchers than a small part.
What about copyright?
I probably should mark my own photos of the gardens, but I don’t think anybody will be nicking them for a book and making millions with it. As for the images of archives and manuscripts, of course I am careful to avoid publishing anything whose copyright I know to be owned by another individual or institution, but for older material that belongs to Balliol, I’m with the British Library on this one. I think as much as possible should be as available online as possible, for reasons of both access and preservation.
We do have some collections whose copyright is held by an external person or body, and in some of those cases I am permitted to provide a few images (not whole works) for researchers’ private use, but cannot put images online or permit researchers to take their own photos.
How do you make images available?
Now that other online media are available, I am reducing image use on the archives website, to use it as a base for highly structured, mostly text-based pages such as collection catalogues, how-tos, research guides etc, as this information needs to be well organised and logically navigable. These days I am using this blog for mini-exhibitions discussing single themes and one image, or a few at a time.
Flickr is a good image repository for reference, not so much for exhibitions – I’ve written about that at http://balliolarchivist.wordpress.com/2013/05/01/thing-17/
I expect I will have rethought the digitisation process again in a couple of years’ time!
Thing 13
Thing 13 of 23 Things for Research is Finding presentations and podcasts. Well, the world of podcast lectures etc etc is huge and growing. It is exciting and full of all sorts of great content. It is also full of worthless rubbish – lots of it. And of course it’s amorphous, badly organised, hard to navigate… that is, tremendously time-wasting. I needed to search in a very focussed way, and I deliberately chose two subjects I thought a) would lend themselves well to this kind of presentation and b) would probably be poorly represented in the world of online presentations and podcasts, at least so far: medieval manuscript studies and professional issues for archivists. At least investigating available sources for both of these is as job-specific and non-time-wasting as possible!
1) Podcasts – audio only, usually can be streamed or downloaded
a) University of Oxford podcasts (I was steering clear of download-requiring things, so used http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk rather than iTunes):
- a search for ‘manuscript‘ turned up a lovely series by Bodleian curators of the Crossing Borders exhibition (2010), about how Jews, Christians and Muslims have contributed to the development of the book, plus Bodley’s Librarian (and Balliol Fellow) Dr Sarah Thomas in conversation with Dr Alice Prochaska, Principal of Somerville, discussing the ‘infinitely expanding universe of memory’ and collections in the digital age.
- ‘Medieval’ yielded many more but a still browsable number of results, including several lecture series on more or less curriculum topics from Old English literature to Tolkien (ok not a huge hop!) to medieval Muslim madness and medicine. There was a good range of types of talk: lectures, panel discussions, interviews, audio tours and readings.
- ‘Archive’ thanks to its IT connotations brought up a rather mixed bag, but I picked out a good series by the WW1 Poetry Archive and one about digital preservation of seismographic data!
- ‘Archives’ introduced me to CLAROS and issues of doing archival research in former Soviet states
- ‘Archivist’: no results!
b) podcast.com: null points immediately for not having a search function! can this be true? and its site map doesn’t work. And one seems to be able to look at only the first half dozen podcasts it presents you on whichever very broad category, within which there do not seem to be any subdivisions. Gave up, bewildered! useless as far as I could tell… moving swiftly on.
c) BBC podcasts – gets a slap on the wrist for having a weird popup search/categories function (which made me go back and check for similar on podcast.com! not there) while the obvious search box at the top of the page trawls the whole of the BBC website(s). But once you realise the little green arrow is the key to everything, it’s organised and clear. So, searches: ‘Manuscript’, ‘archive’, ‘archives’, ‘medieval’, ‘middle ages’: also nil. I searched for ‘football’ just to make sure a) there were any at all and b) the search was working! Eventually I noticed that the search function was for podcast title, not content or descriptions. Sigh. So the only way to find anything relevant was to browse the ‘sub-genre’ categories. I looked at History. There were 26 series listed and no way to browse their contents. So much good listening and no way to get at only the individual podcasts you might want. The BBC is so rich – perhaps they find it difficult to organise all this material. Overall, BOO.
d) TED talks – hum, well, a good series of talks on medieval manuscripts by the ever-interesting William Noel. I thought it might be better about archives, archivists and archival issues, but I got a smattering of information management and digital preservation and, horrors, the word archivism, which means nothing to me, and looks ugly. (Opinions on this blog are my own…) TED talks strike me as better for Tuning In to Talks about Things that will Make You a More Aware Citizen of the World. Which is good but doesn’t tell me anything about the subjects I was searching for. Surely somebody has done a TED talk about the records continuum…
So, I wonder whether podcast searches are better when they start off already focussed on a subject, such as the Oxford ones. Here are 2 other places I like to look:
- BBC-British Museum collaboration A History of the World in 100 Objects. I might just have to listen to all of them.
- National Archives (UK) podcasts videos and other media stuff
good Google search results for ‘archivist podcast’:
- goodness me, there is a 23 Things for Archivists! Woohoo, summer project! I might have known. In fact, why didn’t I know? It’s been around since summer 2011, and they keep adding Things – they’re up to 46! Well, I’ve started this, so I’ll finish. Nearly there.
- interactivearchivist from the SAA
- medievalarchives – a good example of what one independent interested person can do, for very little investment except time and effort
2) Presentations – note, I only searched the non-signed-in versions of all these sites. I have enough logins! And I’m not yet convinced of the usefulness of publishing slide presentations. Can other people just nick and use them? How transferable is most of this information? and if it’s for reading rather than re-presenting, is the presentation without the presenter an effective medium? There has to be a fine balance between complete information and crowded, over-wordy slides. Few get it right.
a) Slideshare: online powerpoints, more or less. Mostly, it seems, just the slides, not accompanying notes. Well, there are certainly lots of things for/about archivists! 3 I’m going to look at, with the idea that they might be useful for me, researchers or archives trainees:
b) Scribd: a ‘digital library’. I remember trying to use this in the days when it was a sort of open JSTOR-cum-Gutenberg that didn’t work. Hm. It is still kind of like that, except it works better. Published articles are available to read here. My interest is flagging! not a place for quick browsing, so I moved on. This kind of falls between the cracks. Might as well just use a search engine.
c) Note & Point – for good-looking Keynote & Powerpoint presentations. Search box at bottom of page. I always wonder, when web pages do that, what they are trying to get you to look at rather than the things you are looking for… ok, so no search results at all for archivist, medieval, manuscript or football. I gave up – what is this site for? It’s about presentation design ideas, not content. Whatever! Duly noted for whenever I eventually get around to making something.
d) Speaker Deck – more like Slideshare. Finally got a few decent hits with ‘digital humanities.’ OK, done with Presentations.
3) Youtube - research & presentation material. Well, I certainly haven’t searched Youtube for work before! Some channels to surf:
- National Archives UK
- British Museum
- British Library
- and a number of others, especially several in Oxford, that I’ve already linked to at right under Worth Watching.
- lots of document handling tutorials (many of the better of which I’ve already collected, might need updating); try searching for ‘medieval manuscript’; and ideas about archives outreach and training videos to make one fine day… What about Vimeo?
This Thing was time-consuming. I think archives, archivists, archival researchers and archives professional theorists/thinkers/teachers have yet to move into the Presentations arena much. There is certainly potential for teaching presentations of all sorts. Are we behind? A little, probably.
Next!
Thing 17 P.S.
‘Other image sharing & search tools are available’ and here’s my take on those on the list kindly assembled for us by the 23Things for Research team:
- Picasa (need a Google email/account to upload to this): worth checking if you’re looking for an image of something particular, but I found the Flickr search more focussed, with fewer but better results. Picasa doesn’t seem to have the search and community group functions of Flickr – or built-in statistics, either. So I won’t be considering joining that.
- Wikimedia Commons high profile, connected to Wikipedia (sometimes!), probably lots of traffic. Worth investigating further.
- Instagram – well, I love the arty filters, but that’s not what I need. And as there’s no desktop version, and I don’t use a mobile device to take photos, this is a non-starter.
- Photobucket – definitely seems aimed at personal accounts and networks, though descriptions include business use.
- SmugMug – what a name! that alone is enough to put me off using it personally or (especially) professionally. They seem geared toward social media use – it developed from a game site.
- Shutterfly – main feature is the capacity for creating and editing photo books, cards, calendars etc using your own images, as well as just storing and sharing photos. A bit like online scrapbooking. I think it would be a good option for personal or perhaps small creative business use.
I checked some reviews and the Wikipedia entries for each site as well as their own About or Tour etc pages. On the whole, a quick look at this list shows that Flickr is clearly the best match for my purposes, but that Wikimedia merits consideration as well, probably for a fairly small number of images on specific topics – intended from our end to draw viewers to our other platforms as well as to share information! which may not be Wikimedia’s idea of the thing at all…
I wondered about the MYRIAD photo sharing sites out there – a search for ‘photo sharing sites review’ was completely overwhelming. Sticking with Flickr for now!
Thing 17
Thing 17 for 23Things for Research is Exploring images. Basically, it’s exploring Flickr. Which I use. So that’s handy!
I’ve uploaded about 40,000 images to Flickr by now, and have had more than 106,000 views of individual images. The bulk of the images are of (mostly entire) medieval manuscripts, but I’ve also added old photo albums, medieval title deeds, 19th century sketchbooks, letters, diaries, literary manuscripts, administrative records, transcriptions & finding aids… and my own photos of Balliol’s gardens in all seasons, which have proved surprisingly popular!
Flickr doesn’t fill my criteria for an online exhibition facility, because it’s set up so that photos have to be viewed in a highly structured, linear way. However, it makes a very good repository for zillions of images that do need to be arranged in a highly structured, linear way – e.g. a collection of Balliol’s medieval manuscripts, containing numerous sets, each of those containing images of each page of a manuscript, presented in (usually!) the same order as in the original book. It mirrors the structure of the real collections and their contents, and it’s easy to refer enquirers to freely available, high-resolution sources.
I also refer enquirers to Flickr when they ask for visual information about some building or other physical aspect of Balliol as it is now – because they will find a better pool of those images on Flickr than the college has itself. One good reason to continue to use and to add to it is that Flickr is becoming well known as perhaps the top place to go online to search for images of whatever particular something – much more effective than the image tab on search engines. So if it’s the best, more people will be using it, and it’s worth having a presence there. For instance: wish you’d got up early enough to catch all the merry May Day madness in the streets of central Oxford this morning? For a flavour of the atmosphere, you could do worse than start here.
What do we then do about online exhibitions? For a long time I wanted some kind of image slideshow facility on the college’s website, but now that seems dated and limited, no more interesting than what Flickr can offer (and more expensive!) Instead, I’m inclined to try some of the presentation tools I’ve investigated during 23Things – for instance, Prezi and some of the newspaper/magazine tools such as scoop.it, because they provide ways of presenting images and text in more visually flexible and interesting ways – one item doesn’t simply have to follow another; you can relate several things to each other in different ways. This also takes more planning and therefore time but I think I’ll end up with better presentations in the end. And blog posts are a great way of highlighting a single item, especially isolated ones such as my recent mystery postcard accession.
What about copyright? Well, I probably should mark my own photos of the gardens, but I don’t think anybody will be nicking them for a book and making millions with it. As for the images of archives and manuscripts, of course I am careful to avoid publishing anything whos copyright I know to be owned by another individual or institution, but for older material that belongs to Balliol, I’m with the British Library on this one. I think as much as possible should be as available online as possible, for reasons of both access and preservation.
Flickr has lots more potential than just getting good-quality images from A to B – indeed, I wish it were rather less clicky to get from one original-size image to the next in the set, and that there were a filename-preserving way of allowing viewers to download whole sets. I do use several other Flickr features:
- tags: obviously, this is the most efficient way to ensure that your photos are picked up in searches!
- descriptions: I use set descriptions to provide basic information about the source material, and to refer the viewer back to our website for more structured in-depth information, catalogues etc. So far I haven’t used individual photo descriptions much, as it would take huge amounts of time and would duplicate information on our website – I don’t really want to add a lot of new information to Flickr, because it’s hard to keep track of. But on the other hand, there is potential here for crowdsourcing/community projects such as mapping and transcription – more investigation and planning needed.
- flickandshare: a 3rd-party app that allows you to send, or include in your set description, a link that lets viewers download whole sets of your photos. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to preserve your filenames, so viewers may have to download the images one at a time from a list of filenames, which is tedious but at least less irritating than having to click through to and download each individual original-size image direct from Flickr. Come on app people!
- map: when marking up sets that relate to a particular place (especially outside Balliol, such as college livings, formercollege properties or addresses on old letters) I like to pin one or two (more makes it crowded and messy) to Flickr’s map – even though it does then label each mapped photo as taken in that place, which is hardly ever true in our case! This means that users who browse the map for a place that interests them will happen across Balliol’s relevant historic photos during their own search, rather than my waiting for them to make a structured investigation for e.g. documents about that place, which they might never do. And then they might just get interested…
- groups: I’ve joined and posted photos to a number of Flickr group pools – these usually have quite narrow remits, and are a way of becoming visible to different and perhaps unexpected potential audience. Here’s my list of groups – some predictable (Archives & archivists on Flickr), others perhaps not quite so much so (Tulips in Bloom) Come and have a look!
- Manuscript Journeys (16 members)
- Oxfordshire Churches (241 members)
- Art of Heraldry (390 members)
- Tulips In Bloom (80 members)
- Manuscripta mediaevalia (395 members)
- archives & archivists on flickr (226 members)
- The Great War Archive Flickr Group (540 members)
- Oxford Colleges (82 members)
- Oxfordshire Gardens (25 members)
- Historical Type and Lettering (553 members)
- Sealing Wax (95 members)
- ArchivesOnFlickr (298 members)
- Handwritten Ledgers (19 members)
- converted buildings (15 members)
- Archivists (23 members)
- Old Paper (15 members)
- Book Inscriptions (169 members)
Any recommendations of other Flickr functionalities I should explore? suggestions welcome!
To sum up: Flickr has a dual function for my image collections: as a structured ‘digital repository’ – of facsimiles only, I hasten to add! – to refer enquirers to who have already been in touch about something specific; and as an opportunity for serendipitous discoveries that may provoke a view or two, or may lead to more browsing, focussed interest and an enquiry.
23 Things for Research roundup
It’s taking me a long time to work through the Bod’s excellent 23Things for Research exercise, but I haven’t forgotten about it, or stopped working on Things, and I’m already thinking of Things I’d like to add to a more archivists/manuscript curators/archival scholars & researchers-specific similar project… here’s a roundup of the Things with links to the Bod’s posts setting out each Thing task, and to my posts about them – more posts & links to come:
Things 1-3: Project orientation, create a blog, set some personal project goals - my post
Thing 4: signing up - no post
Thing 5: Explore others’ project blogs – my post
Thing 6: Online personal brand – my post
Thing 9: Social stories tools – my post and P.S.
Things 11 & 12: LinkedIn & Academia.edu - my post
Thing 13: Presentations & podcasts – my post
Thing 15: Podcasts & videos – my post
Thing 16: Sharing research online – my post
Thing 17: Exploring images online – my post and P.S.
Thing 18: Creative Commons & copyright – my post
Thing 19: Reference management tools – my post
Thing 20: publishing links – my post
Thing 21: online scheduling tools – my post
Thing 22: GoogleDocs & Dropbox – my post
Thing 23: to sum up – my post
mystery gift!
An anonymous deposit was waiting for me in the pigeon post this morning: a late 19th or early 20th century photo postcard showing St Cross Church, a bit of Holywell Manor, and two children standing in front of cottages where the English faculty building now stands, at the northeast corner of Manor Road and St Cross Road.
The postcard, quite a faded print
St Cross and the Clewer Sisters’ chapel with its little steeple rather misleadingly just behind a pole of some sort – electricity? Only the south wall of the chapel remains; the rest is part of the Praefectus’ Garden at Holywell Manor. Tweaked and at high resolution
Children and cottages, tweaked and at high resolution
reverse
Many thanks to the donor, whoever it was! This postcard will be filed with our small dossier of information on the history of St Cross – all the official parish records and other historical bits and pieces about the church are in the County Record Office.
Digitisation
Medieval & early modern manuscripts digitised in 2012-13, with dates for completion of posting online images:
- MS 248D
- MS 248C
- MS 248B
- MS 248A
- MS 224
- MS 350
- MS 329
- MS 262
- MS 461 – 12 June 2013
- MS 382 – 27 April 2013
- MS 72 – 24 April 2013
- MSS 341, 338, 340, 342, 343, 344, 345, 396, 402, 405, 406, 414, 430, 438, 439 – 9-10 April 2013
- MS 37 – 8 April 2013
- MS 210 – 5 April 2013
- MS 149 – 22 March 2013
- MS 129 – 22 March 2013
- MS 239 – 20 March 2013
- MS 367 – 27 February 2013
- MS 282 – 18 February 2013
- MS 24 – 12 February 2013
- MS 222 – 8 February 2013
- MS 95 – 6 February
- MS 40 – 5 February 2013
- MS 20 – 9 November 2012
- MS 248E – 5 November 2012
- MS 88 – 5 November 2012
- MS 18 – 6 October 2012
- MS 39 – 21 September 2012
- MS 202 – 20 September 2012
Archives, early modern MSS & modern papers to do:
- Selections from the Falk papers
- Photographs from the Eldridge papers
- medieval deeds of foundation livings
- Browning thesis – transcription & apparatus for MS 354 (completion)
- JCR papers order
Medieval books to complete photography – some images online
- MS 48, 63, 67A, 80, 86, 137, 225, 263, 271, 384
Day journal Friday 5 April 2013
Checked emails before leaving home – no readers today. A day to do all the things I can’t do while invigilating! Tidying and digitisation especially.
10.00 arrive. Answer emails.
10.50 leave for meeting elsewhere
12.30 finish. No point going back to St Cross – only a few minutes until lunch!
1.30 return to St Cross, answer emails.
2.15 Photography: I’ve been stalled (by the schedule) 60 folios from the end of this medieval manuscript all week. It needs finishing. (That’s one of the things I like best about digitising – clear visible results!) Bet I can do it in under 2 hours – time to put on iplayer radio and click away.
3.10 20 folios done (that’s 124 images) – hmm maybe 2 hours is overambitious… A modern books reader is on his way over & will want a chapter of a modern book scanned. [20 min or so interruption to scan and send required pages]
4.30 another 20 ff done and on their way into the ether.
17.50 478 photographs taken, processed and uploading. MS 210 is done!
18.30 all uploaded. Going home. Have a good weekend.
Day journal Thursday 4 April 2013
Checked emails before leaving home – 3 readers in today, all as per yesterday.
9.10 I arrive by the side gate and remember to open the front ones… Lights, computers, action. Yesterday’s boxes/volumes are ready for today’s readers just inside the repository, but I do not get them out until the readers arrive. Sometimes readers do not turn up, and sometimes after going over their notes the night before, they may change direction.
9.20 Answer new enquiries/requests for appointments. Today’s schedule is: Plan exhibitions/outreach (1h), work on the enquiries processing backlog (2hrs), and an unallocated hour at the end of the morning. Cataloguing all afternoon. I will start with some cataloguing (once today’s enquiries are answered) because I want to get this box of MS citations off my desk and out of the way.
9.40 Readers 1 & 2 arrive.
10.30 BRRR horrible freezing draft from somewhere. Close door curtain and put on 2nd jumper. Much second-guessing of Google Scholar going on. Citations seem to be worse quality for MSS later in the sequence. That cannot actually be true but it is certainly taking more checking than yesterday’s lot did…
10.45 Reader 3 arrives. I notice the door is having some of its Old Trouble again, after having been ‘fixed for good’ for the fortieth time.
11.15 Meter reader arrives.
11.30 Finished listing citations. Now to ensure that all medieval MSS have images of their entries in Mynors’ catalogue linked.
12.30 reader 1 departs
12.45 reader 2 is finished for the day and has come across very exciting useful things in Bod for me!!
1pm chuck out reader 3 and head over to lunch. Waiting for an Exciting Delivery.
1.30 I return to St Cross. The Exciting Delivery is on its way! I pretend to carry on calmly linking catalogue images.
2.10 readers 1 & 3 return.
2.15 Exciting Delivery arrives. Needs unpacking, documentation, number assigned, entry in database, putting away, delivery thanks to sender. More about it soon…
3.15 back to work. Might as well finish the MS catalogue links as there’s only a page to go, then that’s something done properly.
4pm Links are complete. Need better descriptions of MSS 451-473, but that’s for another day. Phone rings, publisher chasing an ENORMOUS photo request.
4.50 Done and sent. Unfortunately nobody had happened to ask for individual photos of those men before – the rare repeat request occupies only a matter of seconds. 10 minutes left – continue sorting March’s enquiries.
5.20 all readers gone.
Compare the day’s progress with the theoretical schedule: no resemblance really, and that list for an unallocated hour is disappearing into next week. Tomorrow is Tidy Friday – no readers in, so whatever the supposed schedule says, I will be in the repository for a large chunk of the day, putting away records produced over a very busy couple of weeks.
Day journal Wednesday 3 April 2013
Checked emails before leaving home – 4 readers in today, 3 of them for the same collection, Harold Nicolson’s diaries, always the most popular one but not usually quite this popular!
9.15 I arrive by the side gate and forget to open the front ones… Lights on, main computer on and nave desk VPN as I’m invigilating again. It seems a waste to have both computers on but apparently the VPN requires it.
9.30 Reader hours start – remember about gates and discover reader 1 outside whoops. Post some reminder sticky notes around the place – this coming in the side entrance is a new thing.
9.50 Today’s schedule is: first 3 hours researching & answering enquiries, then an unallocated hour, and cataloguing this afternoon. Sounds doable. However, I want to begin with the unallocated hour, to finish the stack of filing from yesterday. Less procrastination this time please! Putting away is going to have to wait until Friday as there are multiple readers in tomorrow as well as today…
10.10 Reader 2 arrives. Produce volume he was reading last time.
10.30 Answer door: someone is picking up a package. Answer phone: discuss Unlocking Archives arrangements with future speaker. Work on time management blog post. Nice irony.
11.45 Reader 3 arrives. Reader 2 is reading the same years as reader 3 – gentlemanly compromise arrived at.
12.00 Filing attempt strategically postponed until Friday – no point stacking up any more until I can actually start putting some of it away. Finish and post time management blog post. An hour left: sorting enquiries it is. Wondering if I will ever see the bottom of my inbox again. Slow job as am replying to enquiries as I click past them.
1pm The Nicolson Diaries Reading Group, because that is what we are this morning, rises for an hour. Time to chuck out readers and lock up for lunch. Reader 1 is finished for the day.
1.40 I return to St Cross.
2pm Readers 2 and 3 return, reader 4 arrives. By some miracle Reader 4 is not looking at the Nicolson diaries.
This afternoon’s cataloguing consists of tackling 2 small but deep boxes of offprints of more or less relevance to Balliol’s medieval books; citations need adding to the online version of Mynors’ catalogue.
3pm going well thanks to Google Scholar vastly reducing the typing out of citations. Various interruptions for readers, one resulting in a book suggestion to the library.
4.30 1 box of ca. 50 MS citations done! Have needed the second jumper since lunchtime, finally getting up for it. Starting the second box.
5.00 Made it as far as MS 225 in the second box, another 10 or so citations. Google Scholar is great but unreliable – have to check details, and quite often the citation is half missing or just bizarre. Much extra chasing required. Kind of interesting though, and satisfying to finally put all the pieces together – a good number of the offprints don’t have all the necessary details either. Time to chuck out readers, but not to go home – medieval mystics reading group turning up in a few minutes.
Compare the day’s progress with the theoretical schedule: pretty nearly bang on actually! As for the ‘list for an unallocated hour’ from yesterday, I will carry it over. There were no such unallocated hours today.
List for an unallocated hour tomorrow:
- Now URGENT: Devise poster for Unlocking Archives or at least send text round – list places to advertise
- Passwords maintenance (beginning of a new quarter)
- Learn tweetdeck
- Make lists and organise twitter feed according to categories
- Make some themed FFs for scheduling - medieval music, art, history, image resources
- Write up Cambridge visit 1 March & post on blog
- Work on March monthly report for blog
Day journal Tuesday 2 April 2013
I checked emails before leaving home – I have two readers coming and I like to know before I have to plunge into the day what kind of email mountain is waiting, especially after a holiday weekend. But enquirers seem to have been out enjoying themselves ,and there are few queries. So far…
9.25 I arrive, unlock gates, switch on lights, main computer and nave desk VPN as I’m invigilating today. Visual checks: 3 repositories – no water on floors, dataloggers are displaying reasonable conditions, locks are working. Plant room and fire detection panels: all green lights.
9.35 reader 1 arrives – produce box he was working on last time
9.50 It’s Tuesday, but this is the first day of my working week so I‘ll follow at least part of Monday’s schedule. First though, I want to finish processing the box of accessions I was halfway through on Friday afternoon. I’ll see how much I can do by 10.30.
10.10 reader 2 arrives. Produce volume he was reading last time.
10.30 That didn’t go according to plan – I answered internal emails instead, as several needed prompt responses. Typical. They’re done now, so I’ll take the next half hour to finish this box. First I’ll get another jumper though…
11.00 ugh – it’s getting quite dense. Lots of disparate bits of filing to sort.
11.30 more done and JISC NRA list mail backlog cleared!
11.45 right, putting off dealing with horrible dregs of filing by discovering just how many email enquiries there were in March, for the monthly dose of statistics.
12.00 interrupted by web-ready version of a collection list arriving, needs posting online by lunchtime!
1pm List posted on website with contents, links etc, announced on facebook and twitter. Time to chuck out readers and lock up for lunch.
Over lunch in college (10 min walk away) update Fellows on what’s happening at St Cross and catch up with anything going in college, as I’m not on site most of the time. It’s quiet just now as we’re between teaching terms.
1.50 I return to St Cross.
2pm Both readers return.
2.15 Conservator arrives for final fitting of smart new archival board display case linings and covers, hurra. Just one needs a last trimming adjustment (not one case is a true rectangle…) and the covers need little lugs attached for ease of lifting now that trimming is complete. Nearly there!
2.45 check OUCS offerings re poster design & express interest in several modules for later – copyright, digital media, data storage…
3pm back to original task – whoops, must not forget to publicise Unlocking Archives talk, preferably today but I don’t have a poster design. At least get the text out. Put on facebook and twitter – already on blog. Where does Bod advertise all its talks? Hard to schedule things to avoid clashes right now as little is published before the start of term. Would be good to be able to advertise the whole term’s worth of talks together, April, May 7 June, but one at a time will do, just glad they’re happening.
3.05 Get next box out for reader 2. Both readers are actually reading and not just skimming through or photographing everything in sight. Photography is a great thing and I’ve had lovely cooperation from several scholars who’ve provided copies of all their images and permission to pass them on to future enquirers – after the photographer has published the article in hand! – but those who actually read things do make for much shorter lists of productions, which means I get quite a bit more done on those days. Seriously, back to this wretched box of filing.
3.30 more email enquiries correspondence. Hour and a half to go. I can do this – starting the (silent) online timer for a FlyLady style 15 min hustle, or to approximate rowing parlance, a push for 10…
3.40 Right, have set up tweetdeck so I can schedule tweets more regularly and not have to log in once a week to bombard the twittersphere with mad numbers of updates all at once. Yay. Really useful, and obviously not putting off the filing at all… Thank goodness for brightly coloured mini-sticky notes. I know they’re not archival, they are just for directing me through a big box of stuff that needs putting away. Fun stationery is the filer’s friend…
3.55 Box is empty! Now to actually sort and put the things away…
5.00 well, got them sorted but couldn’t put them away in the repository as I was invigilating, so started sorting another stack…
======
Compare the day’s progress with the theoretical schedule:
Hrs 1-3 research & answer enquiries – more or less!
Hr 4 accessioning – yes, part of sorting the filing.
Hr 5 urgent tasks for this week – giving an extra push to filing is a good urgent thing.
Hr 6-7 scans & photography – not possible as I was based in the nave today
List for an unallocated hour tomorrow:
- Devise poster for Unlocking Archives or at least send text round – list places to advertise
- Passwords maintenance (beginning of a new quarter)
- Learn tweetdeck
- Make lists and organise twitter feed according to categories
- Make some themed FFs for scheduling - medieval music, art, history, image resources
- Write up Cambridge visit 1 March & post on blog
- Work on March monthly report for blog
Time management
This week I will be making a time management experiment. Here is a structure for my ideal work week – or at least a first draft of the ideal week.
| Time/Day | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday |
| Hour 1 | Paperwork, catch up, log enquiries | Research & answer enquiries | Research & answer enquiries | Plan exhibitions/ talks | Plan exhibitions/ talks |
| Hour 2 | Produce/put away records | Research & answer enquiries | Research & answer enquiries | Enquiries processing backlog | - |
| Hour 3 | Write reports, compile stats | Research & answer enquiries | Research & answer enquiries | Enquiries processing backlog | - |
| Hour 4 | Write reports, compile stats | Accessioning | - | - | Produce/put away records |
| Lunch – St Cross closed | Lunch | Lunch | Lunch | Lunch | |
| Hour 5 | Urgent/emergent | Urgent/emergent | Cataloguing | Cataloguing | Environmental monitoring etc |
| Hour 6 | Web content, blog, social media | Scans & photography | Cataloguing | Cataloguing | Tidying, filing, putting away |
| Hour 7 | Web content, blog, social media | Scans & photography | Cataloguing | Cataloguing | Paperwork, catch up, log enquiries |
It doesn’t allot many hours to any particular task, but it does give some time to pretty well all the different sorts of things I need to do. This means that at least some of all those tasks will get done every week, which in turn means that quite a lot of them will get finished over the course of a month or a year. If something doesn’t fill its allotted slot in a given week, there is always plenty else to do in that time instead. This never happens! indeed, several hours are deliberately left unallocated ( – ). Meetings, talks, tours, visitors, assisting readers, invigilation, answering the phone and door, correspondence/visits re maintenance etc cannot be scheduled like this, but all take up time throughout the week in most weeks.
Backlogs of every kind, so often inherited, are the archivist’s bugbear, so some kind of structure is required to whittle away at those while also answering the constant barrage of enquiries, helping researchers, making sure it’s not raining in the repository (what I call ‘environmental monitoring’) and keeping at the cutting edge of everything else going on. When it feels as though there is constant catching up to do, it’s good to schedule some progress tasks – which make you feel as though you are improving something – as well as maintenance ones.
One day, I will have caught up all the enquiries and enquirers entries for the database, and that ‘enquiries processing backlog’ designation will disappear – probably to be replaced with more digital photography & scanning, which I’d like to spend more time on in order to shorten waiting times for those on the list.
I considered using Twitter for a blow by blow account of how the day goes, plus the blog to note the actual work accomplished in each hour and demonstrate how it reflects, or doesn’t, the allotted task for that hour – but decided that would be too much to inflict on readers. Nobody wants torrents of tweets from one account in a day. Instead I’ll post at the end of each day and the week. I meant to use some web use tracking software to monitor how much time documentation of the day takes up, so I could weigh whether the greater accountability and conscious productivity make the use of the rest of my time more effective enough to be worthwhile, but on a very quick browse through the most obvious possibilities it seemed that they all required downloading of some piece of software, which I am not able to do at work. A completely browser-based one is what I’d need. So I’ll keep a diary and use online timers to keep myself on track.
This is part of an initiative (on my part) to write up guidelines for the smooth running of the archives, or rather, the closely interrelated non-print special collections: medieval books, institutional archives and modern personal papers. In practice they are mostly relevant to my work, but there have been several pre-course work experience placement students and there will be more, and I hope eventually there will be at least a part time trainee here. Library staff are at St Cross more often now that the early printed books stored here are consulted here , so we will be cooperating on invigilation. With a tiny staff of skilled professionals, it’s efficient to have clearly delineated responsibilities but a good enough understanding of at least the basics of each other’s work that services can be maintained during absences or emergencies. This is a good way of thinking through and writing down the system for getting things done and doing them well.
Too much is usually left to the individual memory/conscience/capability/experience, and we all know where that gets us – not as far along as we want to be, usually. Too often these things only get written down as handover notes – if then. This means that the postholder has no time to consider the system as it is written out, look at it from the outside, and improve it. So if the basic necessities, and a few refinements, are written into a system, it should be possible for anyone with the right background to be able to understand how things work and what needs doing, and to tweak and add value and information according to their own strengths, interests and experience. Otherwise we end up with too much reinvention of wheels, and some of them turn out to be square.
I’ll be pondering further along these lines, in a somewhat tangential but certainly related way, with the Cardigan Continuum’s latest readings for April.
Lunchtime talk: Unlocking the Archives 2
Announcing the second talk in our new series about research in Balliol’s special collections:
John Bray, Limner-Binder, and Three Sequences of Manuscripts Made in Oxford (1450-84)
Holly James-Maddocks, University of York
This paper identifies the hand of one Oxford-based illuminator (John Bray, d.1493) in three sequences of manuscripts housed today in Balliol, Merton, and Exeter Colleges. His collaboration with four London illuminators for their production prompts an assessment of the evidence for peripatetic book artisans and for the reliance of the Oxford trade on the supply of London labour.
Holly James-Maddocks is a PhD student at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York, completing the thesis ‘Collaborative Book Production: Scribes and Illuminators in Fifteenth-Century London’. She will continue her studies of the London book trade as the Katharine F. Pantzer Jr. Fellow in Descriptive Bibliography at Harvard University’s Houghton Library in 2013-14.
* * *
When: Friday 26 April, 1-2 pm
Where: Balliol Historic Collections Centre, St Cross Church, Manor Road (next to Holywell Manor).
Who: all welcome
Feel free to bring your lunch. The talk will last no more than half an hour, to allow time for questions and discussion afterwards, and a closer look at some of the Balliol MSS discussed.
Unlocking the Archives is a new series of talks opening up the college’s archives and manuscripts to a wider audience and future researchers, given by scholars from Oxford and around the world about their work on material from Balliol’s special collections.
More Unlocking Archives dates for your calendars:
- 24 May: Dr Stephen Golding (Univ, Radiology) on researching the first history of the ‘Chalet des Anglais’
- 20 June: Dr Robin Darwall-Smith (archivist, Magdalen & Univ) on cataloguing the papers of Benjamin Jowett at Balliol
= = = = = = = =
2 April update: Many thanks to Holly for a fascinating paper! It will be presented to another audience at a later date, and, we hope, the new research (and perhaps photographs) will be published as well, so no summary here. Stay tuned!
World Book Day
Much of what happens on World Book Day is associated with children’s reading, reading in schools, improving national literacy levels and so on, which is great. But I’m going to take the opportunity to make a list of a few of my favourite places to browse, mostly about medieval books and mostly with lots of splendid images. They all have lists of links and further reading and so on, so any one is a way to start the virtual equivalent of the humanities grad student’s favourite activity, the footnote trail, where looking up one book leads on to another, and then another… I can think of worse ways to spend World Book Day than doing the real-open-stack equivalent in Cambridge’s University Library, shelf-surfing from South Front 1 to North Wing 6…
- Online exhibitions at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge - my favourites are the Utamaro books and the Macclesfield Psalter, and off the books topic, they have a lovely exhibition of netsuke too.
- Tours of the British Library’s Digital Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts, which is expanding its coverage and increasing in detail and images all the time. I especially recommend the ‘Treasures Known and Unknown’ tour.
- Medieval manuscripts online at the National Library of Wales – have a look at the Llanbeblig Hours and the Laws of Hywel Dda
- Oxford has access (by subscription) to the Medieval Travel Writing site, so if you’re on the Oxford network, do have a look. This is also available at the British Library and many university and other reference libraries.
- For more about travel books and much else, have a browse through the ABE Books staff features archive – don’t miss the lists at the bottom of the page.
- Need inspiration for your own reading list? Explore some book blogs – I can recommend starting your trail with Stuck in a Book, written by Simon. He writes for work at Oxford Words, which is also highly worth a peruse!
Let the dog see the rabbit – MS Balliol 208, f.109r
International Book and Copyright Day is coming up on April 23rd…
monthly report: February 2013
A report on the month’s activities in the archives and manuscripts ancient and modern at the Historic Collections Centre in St Cross Church…
Researcher services
- Number of days open: 20
- Number of remote enquiries: 76
- Number of researchers in person: 6, + 2 tutors and 17 students using medieval mss for seminars (Balliol English & Year Abroad History)
- Collections consulted & popular topics: medieval mss, Pyper Papers, Falk Papers, AL Smith Papers, Nicolson Diaries
Collection care
- monitoring: humidity and temperature data in all three repositories are more consistent than they have been of late, but not yet as stable as we want them. Pest monitoring turned up lots of woodlice and spiders (thanks to the gaps under the external and repository doors) but fortunately nothing more threatening. We have finished our three months of collecting light exposure data with a monitor in various positions on the shelves in the nave; the conservators will be making recommendations to minimise the impact of natural and artificial light on the books.
- conservation item returns: several more items for the 750th exhibition in September, which won’t be enumerated here!
- cataloguing: a number of lists of smaller personal papers collections have been prepared for publication and will be popping up online in March, as will detailed lists of the Leonardo Society papers in the archives and the letters in the Browning collection. We have finally received high-resolution images of the PCF’s photography of Balliol’s oil paintings, so their entries in the online catalogue of college portraits will be updated.
- digitisation: 2749 images posted on Flickr: MSS 24, 95, 222, 282, 367, items from the Jowett Papers, minutes of the Hanover Society, items from the David Urquhart Papers
Balliol English students looking at medieval MSS, St Cross, Feb 2013
Outreach
- No of non-research visitors (details): medieval mystics seminar (8), Unlocking the Archives talk 1 (16)
- no of blog hits related to archival paper clips: 18
- loans & exhibitions incl online: items from the Morier Family, David Urquhart and Mallet Family papers for Unlocking the Archives, 8 medieval MSS for a seminar group of Year Abroad students, a different 8 medieval MSS for a Balliol-led seminar group
- academics recording for a history of the English carol, to be broadcast on BBC R4 in December
- blog posts: 4
- talks & tours: introduction to medieval MSS for both student seminars, tour for Old Member, Unlocking the Archives talk re Morier, D Urquhart & Mallet papers, in depth discussion of MS 354 for recording
CPD
- meeting about digitisation planning & practicalities with 2 colleagues (I was on the teaching end this time)
- Learning Institute module
Conservation
- in addition to above – conservation studio hosted a demonstration of a multispectral scanner. Unfortunately the technology let us down when it came to actually trying it out…
- borrowed digital projector, screen and foam blocks for Unlocking the Archives and MSS seminars (foam)
AOB
- Welcome to Naomi Tiley, Balliol’s new Assistant Librarian! we are already planning Special Collections outreach events for next term…
discussing the medieval carol – MS 354, Feb 2013
Lunchtime talk: Unlocking the Archives
Balliol’s new Historic Collections Centre at St Cross Church opened in October 2011; since then, more than 150 academic researchers and more than 2000 visitors have toured the building and consulted the collections. But what’s in there? How can you get a look at it? How did these archives end up at Balliol? and what value do they have for researchers?
A new series of talks by scholars from Oxford and around the world, about their work on material from Balliol’s special collections, is opening up the college’s archives and manuscripts to a wider audience. For this first presentation in the series, the college archivist and curator of manuscripts, Anna Sander, will be introducing three of Balliol’s large 18th and 19th century diplomatic and political collections, the Urquhart, Mallet and Morier Papers, with illustrations and original documents.
Feel free to bring your lunch. The talk will last no more than half an hour, to allow time for questions and discussion afterwards, and a closer look at some items from the collections.
