termly report HT 2016
The Archivist’s work, November 2015 – January 2016. Several early November events were included in the Michaelmas report, but should have been in this one, so they are repeated.
St Cross reader & visitor numbers by month
Remote enquiries
| No. of enquiries | |
| November | 109 |
| December | 71 |
| January | 95 |
| Total | 275 |
Image management:
- Oxfile (OUCS)– used 12 times Nov-Jan to send from 1 to several hundred images, externally and within college, across archival collections.
Outreach
- Facebook: 852 total ‘Likes’ (+105).
- Twitter: total 1288 tweets (+74), 1173 followers.
- Blog: 15 new posts, average 750 views/month, 44 followers.
- ‘Document in Focus’ features continue on display in Broad St Library
- November
- staffed College Archives stall at Graduate History Thesis Fair (Exam schools)
- with Librarian, hosted MCR viewing of Swinburne exhibition and selections, some requested by students, from print and manuscript research collections
- staffed Arts & Heritage stall at OU Careers Fair (Arts, Media & Marketing day)
- started regular display of facsimiles from the archives in the antechapel. Nov – Jan topics: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Remembrance Day, illuminations from medieval manuscripts.
- taught Preservation on a Shoestring study day for ABTAPL librarians (small-institution lone/volunteer/part-time librarians with early and rare collections and archives) with Anna James (Pusey House Library & Regents Park), at St Cross
- hosted 3rd year of weekly Write In sessions for local novelists (NaNoWriMo)
- Daniel Tyler & Balliol English class examining draft states of poetry MSS (Clough & Browning)
- December
- supervised 5-day unpaid ‘micro-internship’ through OU Careers Service (medieval manuscripts photography)
- Unlocking Archives talk by Charlie Dawkins (Merton) re Harold Nicolson, James Joyce and censorship at the BBC in the 1930s, drawing on unpublished versions of Nicolson’s original diaries
- teaching session on planning archival research with Queen Mary students (MA Early Modern English, repeat invitation)
- January
- invited speaker, DIY Digitisation Day workshop, org Prof Daniel Wakelin & Prof Henrike Laehnemann (Weston Library)
- with Librarian, prepared JCR viewing of archives, manuscripts and rare books, and hosted with Asst Librarian (0 attendance)
- visit by Prof Patrick McCullagh (Eastman) and Prof Stephen Stigler (UChicago) to see medieval mss of texts on music and arithmetic by Boethius – lots of diagrams!
Cataloguing & collection care
The papers of CG Stone have been listed for the first time, and the list published online and a fonds level description sent to the Archives Hub.
The current box list of George Malcolm’s archive has been published online, and a fonds level description sent to the Archives Hub. Detailed listing of the George Malcolm archive is underway; a researcher has begun using these papers intensively with a view to mounting an exhibition on Malcolm in his centenary year (1917), and is providing useful background information for cataloguing.
Conservation: the boxing project is half complete. Measuring unboxed manuscripts paused in January for conservation work on items from a new acquisition of Belloc books but should resume before the end of HT, and most boxing, except for those needing major repairs before they can be measured for a long term box, should be completed in time for the Trinity Term report. Several manuscripts have been to OCC for small repairs in conjunction with boxing. Fasciculing of AL Smith’s letters has reached the letter F.
In conjunction with the early manuscripts boxing project, and coincidentally with staff manual handling training and lifting-load awareness, all the large/old/not archival quality boxes in the archives are being replaced with new acid-free and lignin free boxes from Conservation by Design/Bodleian boxing. These are standard size, and are unlikely to weigh more than 6 kg even when full of particularly heavy material. Reducing the weight of boxes is particularly important given that many are retrieved at height and carried up and down ladders in restricted spaces. More than 100 boxes have been replaced so far. Heavy boxes will be marked with their weight.
Acquisitions
- photo album and 1920 college photo from the family of RE Gundry (HT 1919)
- JCR & sport photos 2006-2012 from Denise Hurd (JCR office)
- dead members’ dossiers from College Office
Events scheduled so far:
HT (Feb onwards)
- Unlocking Archives talks by Anna Sander (AL Smith and WW1) and Eleanor Greer (Indexing Balliol’s manuscript illuminations)
- OU Bibliophiles Society visit to St Cross to see medieval mss
- session on planning archival research for dissertations with Balliol history students and tutors, at St Cross with display of archival material
- Dr Elena Lombardi and Balliol students – medieval manuscripts seminar
- Oxford Emmaus group – talk and display of medieval manuscripts and early archives, requested by Prof Martin Burton
- supporting Visiting Fellow Prof Elliott Horowitz in planning ‘Balliol Judaica’ & ‘Jews of Balliol’ linked exhibitions for September and MT 2016
- presentation on St Cross and Balliol’s archives & manuscripts to St Margaret’s Institution, with John Jones
TT: Unlocking Archives talks by Naomi Tiley (Shakespeare exhibition) and Prof Lesley Higgins (GM Hopkins)
CPD/Staff/Training
CPD completed (Anna):
- Balliol staff manual handling training
- 1-day course on Excel for Archival Listing, given by Gillian Sheldrick via OUCS, January.
- speaker at DIY Digitization workshop (Bodleian, January)
- visit to New College Archives
- attended IHR Winter Conference ‘The Production of the Archive’ – keynote Eric Ketelaar
OUIP micro-internship: Mary Maschio (Queen’s) did an excellent job in her 5-day placement, photographing two complete medieval manuscripts for research requests and completing a third; all are now online and images have been shared with the researchers. Mary’s blog post about her experience is here. Thanks to Library staff for providing her with a desk at Broad Street for her last day of image processing.
Consulting: site visit and advice on archival preservation, cataloguing and building planning to Blenheim Palace archivist and historian, November
Publications:
- chapter on handling special collections material in A Handbook of Editing Early Modern Texts, ed. H Phillips & C Williams, Ashgate, forthcoming 2017 (delayed by 2015 Ashgate takeover, will now appear under Routledge imprint)
- chapter in published proceedings of DIY Digitisation workshop , ed. D Wakelin & J Siefring, Bodleian, forthcoming 2016.
– Anna Sander, HT 2016
Unlocking Archives HT16 – 2
Lunchtime talk: Unlocking Archives
a seminar series about research in Balliol College’s special collections
Monday 7 March 2016, 1-2pm (HT8)
Balliol Historic Collections Centre
St Cross Church, Manor Road OX1 3UH
* all welcome *
Eleanor Greer (St Hilda’s) will be talking about her work indexing some of the decorative features of Balliol’s medieval manuscripts last year, and about her current post as graduate trainee in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Eleanor Greer holds an MSt in Medieval English from Oxford and is currently the graduate trainee in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Feel free to bring your lunch. The talk will last about half an hour, to allow time for questions and discussion afterwards, and a closer look at some of the manuscripts discussed.
Questions? archivist@balliol.ox.ac.uk
HT7 2016
7th week of Hilary Term! Lots of researchers in this week, looking at medieval manuscript codices and several C19-20 personal and family archives.
spring intern – week 2
Abby-Eléonore writes: Second week, plenty of things happened!
-I was quite excited to meet the conservators consortium working for some of the colleges of the university and to see their studio and equipment; they are very nice and work on some great items *.*
-Anna and I are preparing an exhibition for a Charity group that will visit. We explore a number of manuscripts and discuss the interest of getting some of them out for the display. Preparing the exhibition requires some physical exercise: we had to move the massive reader’s tables to make room for the visit, we went to the supermarket to buy a coat rack and had to deal with the foam supports to settle the manuscripts…
more next week…
spring intern – post 1
Abby-Eléonore writes: First week here and some things have already left a mark on me:
-I saw a giant stack of boxes (that was a bit of a struggle to take them through the door but we managed it); about 100 green acid-free boxes that will be used to keep papers have been delivered to St Cross Church. The pile is bigger than me, and Anna and I had to wrestle a bit with their gigantic wrapping;
-and then had to put them on the shelves. No need to mention that it implies climbing a giant ladder and trying to reach upper shelves. It is obviously a sort of archivist sport to move a huge ladder between narrow stacks!
-And the most amazing discovery truly is the rolling stacks. I have always been working in ancient prestigious monuments with no recent installations so those rolling stacks are some kind of advanced technology for me…
more next week…
monthly report January 2016
A few numbers about what was happening at St Cross during January:
- Number of enquiries (email etc): 95
- Number of researchers in person: 5
- Number of person-days in the reading room: 8
- Collections consulted: medieval & early modern mss, George Malcolm papers, college archives
- No of non-research visitors: 4 individuals
- Blog posts: 3
- interesting events: display from archives, manuscripts and early printed books for Balliol JCR
Unlocking Archives HT16
Lunchtime talk: Unlocking Archives
a seminar series about research in Balliol College’s special collections
‘AL Smith on the Home Front’
Anna Sander, Balliol College
Friday 19 February 2016, 1-2pm (HT5)
Balliol Historic Collections Centre
St Cross Church, Manor Road OX1 3UH
* all welcome *
Arthur Lionel Smith (1850-1924) was Balliol through and through: matriculated 1869, Tutor 1874, Lecturer 1879, Fellow 1882, Dean 1907, Master 1916. Though he was a particularly engaged and hardworking Fellow and Master of Balliol, a great part of his time and energy was devoted to work outside the college (even including a five-year Fellowship at Trinity) and outside Oxford. In this illustrated talk, Anna will open up some of his extensive personal, academic and administrative archive to show some of his activities at home and away during the First World War.
Anna Sander is archivist and curator of manuscripts at Balliol College.
Feel free to bring your lunch. The talk will last about half an hour, to allow time for questions and discussion afterwards, and a closer look at some of the Balliol special collections material discussed.
Questions? archivist@balliol.ox.ac.uk
DIY Digitization workshop – notes
notes for illustrated talk given 8 January 2016, Weston Library (Bodleian), Oxford, as part of a DIY Digitization Workshop Day on the informal uses of digital photography in special collections.
This talk has not been published elsewhere. An expanded and updated version will be published later in 2016 as part of a collection of workshop proceedings.
DIY digital photography by and for staff and readers in a small archive
The organisers have asked me to talk about my perspective on how keepers of special collections in smaller institutions are adapting to the use of digital photography and online platforms by and for themselves and their readers, including the role of cheap and readily accessible digital photography and platforms for sharing or manipulating such images. I’ll talk about one aspect of my work as Balliol’s archivist and curator of manuscripts (and some of it is not all that informal): creating digital images of Balliol’s archives and making them available. Most of my digitisation work relates to the medieval manuscript books so I’ll focus on that today.
This I what I do in these particular circumstances; my practice and thinking have evolved over time and they continue to change. It’s not the only way, but I hope it provides food for thought, discussion, practice and policy.
How?
Equipment & procedure
For some flat documents, I use an Epson GT-15000 scanner, A3 size, scanning at 200-600dpi. While I understand that tiff format is better, I scan and photograph in jpg unless I’m asked for tiff, because tiffs are huge and my current storage capacity, sharing platforms and PC power can’t deal with large numbers of tiffs. For photographs, I used a Nikon Coolpix 7600 camera 2005-2013, replaced in October 2013 by a Nikon Coolpix P770. Images produced by the new camera are 3000 x 4000 pixels and files are about 3.5-4.5 MB. For a couple of projects photographing physically large but straightforward ledgers, I’ve borrowed a mobile book cradle, with its own lights, from the Oxford Conservation Consortium.
I photograph as much as possible under natural light, and using cold/daylight fluorescent lights. To support the manuscripts I use the standard Clarkson foam wedges and cloth covered lead weight snakes, sometimes a bone folder to hold down a particularly springy page. That’s it for equipment. Rare requests for photos of watermarks, ie with illumination behind and through the page, or under UV light, I take to the Oxford Conservation Consortium studio down the road – I don’t have facilities for either. I want to acknowledge and thank the OCC conservators as well for their ongoing support with many aspects of this work, not only manuscript repairs and handling techniques but advice on camera equipment and photography tips as well.
Rather than just one shot per page I take numerous closeups wherever necessary. This attention to detail means that it can take four or more exposures to document a single side, but it’s quick and the intention is that not only the original enquirer but subsequent users will be able to answer as many questions as possible from the images, whether before or after, or even sometimes instead of, consulting the original. Ideally I or they shouldn’t have to come back to this same manuscript and take further more detailed photos later.
System
As a lone archivist I have to prioritise my time carefully. Rather than starting with MS 1, all photography is done in response to specific academic enquiries from individual researchers or research groups. I’d prefer to photograph whole manuscripts, but for practical reasons, if someone asks for only one text or one section of a book, I’ll only photograph that, at least for now.
Software
I use Microsoft Picture Manager, part of the Microsoft Office suite, for basic tasks such as checking focus, filenaming, cropping and rotation, because my ordinary office PC has trouble with Adobe Bridge. But I need to use Bridge to insert the filename into the EXIF data title field for each image because that’s the information Flickr uses to create its filenames. A bit clunky, but it’s about using what’s available as efficiently as possible.
I have to spend some time checking the image quality and renaming the photos so that filenames reflect the manuscript number and foliation, and so the computer and Flickr will both arrange in the order I want, but I don’t edit or process the photographs much – they are not high enough quality in the first place to be perfectible, and I want them to be as ‘honest’ or WYSIWYG as possible. Researchers can then manipulate their digital copies for contrast or other parameters in whatever way is most useful to them.
Sharing
When I started, I chose to share images on Flickr because it was very inexpensive for unlimited image capacity, fairly friendly to use, and the biggest, most visible and most quickly growing share image resource on the web. I also like its potential for tagging, extensive text descriptions, and creating collections and galleries. though I’ve done little of that so far because I’m concentrating on creating the images requested, and because there isn’t (yet) a systematic way of copying and storing that added information outside of Flickr.
I chose not to host the college’s images on its own website because of the disproportionate demands this would put on the college’s IT department and the dangers of non-continuity using in-house software. As Will Noel said in his Mackenzie Lectures here at Oxford a couple of years ago, referring to the Parker Library’s Parker on the Web project with Stanford University, it’s more effective to let the manuscripts people do the manuscript stuff and let the image sharing platform specialists take care of that end. It was also important that the images be as widely visible and findable as possible, not just in a college web presence but in context with other similar material, particularly as the vast majority of special collections users are always and necessarily from other institutions. Flickr’s growing use by other special collections institutions meant that it would be on the map for researchers to check for relevant images. a belt and braces approach will help more people find what they’re looking for , so Balliol’s manuscripts are also catalogued online on the archives & manuscripts website, and images are linked from the catalogue text. I also use Oxfile for sharing large numbers of files with individuals, and the Flickandshare app for downloading whole sets from Flickr at once.
Other sharing platforms are available, and it’s worth having a good look at several to decide which suits your needs, or indeed to get ideas of how images might be presented or used. I’ll recommend the way I used to explore the options: the Bodleian’s 23Things for Research, a self-guided investigation of all kinds of digital tools, and the similarly structured Society of American Archivists’ 23Things for Archivists.
Why?
What’s good about allowing researchers to take their own photographs?
Good will: It’s just so much better than awkward encounters with researchers who want images and find the fees exorbitant, or those who try to take their own images clandestinely. I do believe strongly that academic institutions, professional staff and researchers should be free to cooperate!
Preservation: I’m not a dragon keeping people away from manuscripts or information. But I AM a dragon about preservation and good handling technique etc – so if all arrangements for access are clear and open, communication has already been established, and it’s easier for me to work WITH researchers, to make sure they are handling and supporting the material well and using lighting correctly.
Reader relations: people are usually surprised and grateful at this open attitude. That good feeling isn’t just pleasant; it leads to: helpful suggestions; sharing citations, sets of images, and contacts; the occasional speaker for our research seminar series; and researchers sending colleagues for more research.
Collaboration: it’s surprisingly rare that a researcher takes better photos than mine. But in those cases, I ask for a copy of the images and I also ask to post them online and/or share them with other researchers, with proper acknowledgement. This is highly unusual (apparently) but for the most part they are more than happy to collaborate in that way as well.
What’s good about doing ms photography myself?
I’ve been asked: Why not put a good thing on a larger scale, obtain external funding for digitization and outsource the photography to a professional?
Collection management
As well as low cost and good time management, because I can respond individually to requests and fit them in around my other tasks, the great advantage of doing the digitisation myself is that I get to know the manuscripts extremely well. While photographing, I’m also checking in detail for physical condition, learning to recognise individuals’ handwriting, discovering/replacing missing or misplaced items, prioritising items that need conservation or repackaging, noticing possible items for exhibitions and so on. If a photographer did this work, the only product would be the photos; all that direct encounter with each page would go to waste. And a reactive approach is more efficient – all images created are used at least once. So far, I’d rather invest time in direct collection management than filling in endless grant applications that only result in half a dozen mss getting photographed at a time. Having developed working practices and being in close touch with those who request and use the images, I’m now in a good position to involve others in image creation – the current work structure is a good base for new possibilities to develop.
Training
I’ve now worked out a procedure document that means it’s efficient to train a student, and recently I had an OU Careers Service microinternship placement student photographing mss and processing images for a week. In that time she completed two full manuscript orders and finished a third – that’s a big help, but is also sufficiently small-scale that I am still closely connected with the work. It’s great work experience too.
Are they good enough?
For images I create, I have to consider both quality and usability for current use and long term preservation, or at least for medium term re-use. They’re not intended to be publication quality – rare requests for extra high quality or resolution photos are individually outsourced.
In terms of service, I’m able to fulfil reprographics requests in reasonable time and to a standard that satisfies enquirers. I’ve yet to have an enquirer say the photos weren’t good enough for their study purposes. I have had people say the images were sufficiently good that they did not need to come and check the original. And some of my images have been published, so in some cases they are of adequate quality for that as well.
Regarding permanent preservation of digital images, all facsimiles are tools: they don’t replace the original and so far no format is permanent, in terms of either physical preservation or machine-readability, or indeed usable or acceptable quality. Microfilms in their day were supposed to be a permanent preservation format, but not only does it have issues of physical preservation and decreasing availability of reader/printer machines, readers find the black and white, scratchy, often poorly focussed films of unusably poor quality for their research purposes. I have to assume that these manuscripts will be photographed – using whatever format and equipment has evolved – again in their lifetimes. That’s inevitable – I just have to try to ensure they don’t need to be done again in my lifetime.
What is the cost?
Because reprographics are part of my regular work schedule, the cost is my time & the £50 or so fee every 2 years for our unlimited Flickr account.
Do you charge for access or images?
No (except outsourced images, for which cost is passed on to the requester). 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 also 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 err where we can on the side of the scholars! Most of the requests for images I receive which aren’t for medieval manuscripts are from private family history researchers, 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. It can also be expensive and time consuming to collect payment, plus VAT.
Pace institutions that do charge for access or images – I’ve been there and I acknowledge that there are other situations and reasons for charging. Balliol did not have a digitisation programme before I started. It did not produce photos in-house, or charge users to take their own photos, so I was able to begin with a clean slate.
Balliol College does reserve the right to charge for permission to publish its images, but may waive this for academic publications.
What about copyright?
Copyright in unpublished material and images of that material is legally complex and still pretty vague and inconsistent in the UK, and we’re all watching developments in that area, with the advent of the Orphan Works Register and so on. We are relieved that at least preservation copying is now permitted for unpublished works.
For older material that belongs to Balliol, I’m with the British Library’s image reuse policy on this one. Ideally, as much as possible should be as available online as possible, for reasons of both access and preservation. For now, however, I’ve retained ‘all rights reserved’ status on all the Flickr photos, as the College has not yet formally considered Creative Commons licenses.
I was asked by the college as soon as I proposed starting this way of sharing images about copyright and image security. As soon as a digital image is taken it has a life of its own, and its use and sharing can’t be practically controlled much at all – however, this hasn’t been a problem for Balliol thus far. The college has not suffered financially or intellectually, and indeed its reputation in this area has improved considerably!
Conclusion
Digital photography opens up so many opportunities to make familiar research methods quicker and easier, and to discover new questions to ask of old material. It’s to the college’s advantage to be forthcoming and as open as possible about its collections, and thus to become a hub of shared knowledge about Balliol’s manuscripts, rather than having researchers privately sharing information and pools of unauthorised photos, that perhaps aren’t well documented or well organised. It’s good for the college to have high staff knowledge of the collections, and of collection use in the wider world of research, including new publications about them. The best source for much of both is from researchers themselves. I don’t want any feeling of researchers having to work around or in spite of curatorial staff – we should be on the same side. Better to be open, so we can communicate effectively, and ask for researchers’ input and collaboration. I hope I haven’t only adapted to the use of digital photography by staff and readers, but embraced it.
– Anna Sander, January 2016.
‘DIY digital photography by and for staff and readers in a small archive’ by Anna Sander (Balliol College, Oxford) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
monthly report December 2015
A few numbers about what was happening at St Cross during December:
- Number of enquiries (email etc): 71
- Total remote enquiries in 2015: 1137!
- Number of researchers in person: 6
- Number of person-days in the reading room: 7
- Collections consulted: AL Smith, College records (2), Greene-Reid, MSS
- No of non-research visitors: 3 individuals
- Blog posts: 3
- Flickr uploads: images from MS 199 and 200
- interesting events: Unlocking Archives talk (Charlie Dawkins, Merton); OU micro-internship placement photographing medieval mss (Mary Maschio, Queen’s); Anna teaching a session on archives careers and planning graduate research in archives with former St Cross volunteer, now Dr, Claire Williams, QML.
Happy New Year! Anna will be back in the office on 7 Jan but speaking at the DIY Digitization colloquium at the Bodleian Library on Friday 8 January, so full service in the archives resumes Tuesday 12 January.
2015 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 9,900 times in 2015. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
guest post
Oxford, Balliol College, MS 200 p.1
A guest post to close the research year at St Cross:
Robert Cowton was an early fourteenth century theologian based in Oxford, and Balliol archives house three manuscripts containing some of his treatises. I spent my week on a “micro-internship”, organised through the careers service, digitising these manuscripts for a group of researchers based in Germany. Making the images available online will hopefully save them, and the planet, a flight over. The three manuscripts, Balliol MSS 199, 200 and 201, are all executed in the same hand with matching decorations in red and blue ink.
I started off by photographing each of the pages attempting to give a clear and legible picture of the text. Wrinkles, curling pages and minute annotations did not make this an easy task. Handling a manuscript carefully and making the pages sit flat often seem to be diametrically opposed aims. If some of the pages are a little hard to read, this is because I have erred on the side of caution. Despite these challenges it was a real pleasure to work with the manuscripts; getting to feel the parchment and see at first hand the way the skin has been stretched and tanned to make it fit to write on. The tiny marginalia left by successive readers; from the eighteenth century page numbering (often with corrections) to the little pointed fingers indicating important parts of the text show the continued life of a text in a way that a modern printed edition cannot.
Once I had finished photographing the manuscripts I then jumped to the other end of the temporal spectrum and attempted to upload the images to Flickr. In order to get both Windows Explorer and Flickr to read the right title field data, each file had to be named twice, in two different programs. Once I had got through the renaming and uploading process it was very satisfying to see the whole manuscript online, waiting to be read.
I am very grateful to Anna Sander, the college archivist, for giving me this opportunity and patiently dealing with my questions and problems, as well as to the staff at Balliol library for giving me a desk on Friday afternoon and covering my lunch in college during the week.
– Mary Maschio (Queen’s College)
Anna adds: Some of Mary’s images have already had dozens of views, and I am very grateful for her help furthering the progress of manuscripts digitisation and sharing. I also thank the Oxford University Careers Service for organising the microinternship scheme, and appreciate their consistently excellent pools of applicants for these placements!
day in the life
Thursday in brief:
- First thing: answer a few overnight emails. Get out next MS for student to photograph.
- student intern working on photographing medieval manuscripts project in the office all this week – brilliant to have her help, as she will have photographed two manuscripts and completed a third in response to a request from several overseas academics working together on an editing project.
- No readers to invigilate? Into the repository! lots of volumes and boxes to put away from a couple of box-measuring sessions and a busy reading room at the end of the year.
- For a change, head into the small repository and (finally) make a full shelf check and locations list, by hand, with pencil and paper. Faster than using our old laptop!
- process recent environmental monitoring data
- engineers arrive to look at the air conditioning plant
- after lunch, 36 new manuscript boxes arrive. Fetch out mss, attach labels to new boxes, start boxing.
- conservators ring: I will visit them later to discuss a question about some material on the bench at the moment and take them the used (ugh) insect traps for their regular census. We have never caught any really worrying beasties, so we’re moving to 6-monthly monitoring instead of quarterly.
- Collect bug traps from strategic places around the building. Mostly harmless but a peculiar grub-looking thing in one of them, never seen the like before. This may take some research… Off to conservation studio with bug traps, back with a couple of manuscripts that have had all the little repairs they need in preparation for boxing. Put them away – their new boxes won’t arrive until the new year.
- continue boxing manuscripts
- ‘Type up locations list from this morning’ has been on the agenda all afternoon, but has been shunted to tomorrow (maybe) by the boxes arriving and the visit to Conservation. Sufficient unto the day…
- No extra time to catch up after 5 today, stop by the lodge to borrow a gown and off to sing evening service at the Cathedral. Lots of Britten tonight!
monthly report November 2015
A few numbers about what was happening at St Cross during November:
- Number of enquiries (email etc): 109 (broke record, from 2014, of 948 in late October and passed #1000 for 2015 on the 14th)
- Number of researchers in person: 10
- Number of person-days in the reading room: 12
- Collections consulted: Clough, Browning, AL Smith, College records (7)
- No of non-research visitors: ca 90 (10 MCR viewing, 12 NaNo, 50 Into University pupils, 12 ABTAPL, 7 individuals)
- Blog posts: 8
- Flickr uploads: 800 images from MS 32
- interesting events: staffing stalls re archives at OU graduate history thesis fair and Careers fair (Arts & Heritage); Balliol MCR ‘private view’ evening; 3rd year of weekly NaNoWriMo Come Write In sessions; Balliol undergraduate class using Clough and Browning MS material; visit to Blenheim Palace to advise new archivist and Palace historian; OAC visit to new archive at St Anthony’s/Middle East Studies Centre; librarians deliver ‘Maps and Monsters’ session to Into University groups; with Anna James (Pusey House Library), ‘Preservation on a shoestring’ study day for ABTAPL members; conservators measuring manuscripts for boxing.
spam spam spam not lovely spam
Q: I’ve emailed you at least once in the past month and haven’t had a reply.
A: (searches every email sent or received ever) This is the first time I’ve heard from you. Could you forward me a copy of your previous message?
Q: Here it is:
From: enquirer@email.com
Sent: date
To: archivist [at] balliol.ox.ac.uk
Subject: Hello
Hello,
…..
A: (twigs, checks junk mail) Aha, it disappeared into the spam box because of the vague subject line – lots of spam and e-swindles are titled ‘Hello my friend’ etc. Enquiries titled e.g. ‘I need your help’, ‘Looking for a relative’ or ‘Urgent response required’, though reasonable in e.g. a family history research query, will have the same problem. Subject lines left blank? Bin. Exclamation marks? Bin. All caps in the subject line? Bin. Using red/green/purple text? Bin. Sending to lots of different email addresses at once? Bin.
It’s increasingly important these days to make your archives enquiry email look genuinely addressed to a particular person about something particular. Institutional addresses are bombarded daily with zillions of spam messages, not to mention things with malware and viruses attached. Firewalls and spam-detection levels are raised accordingly, usually by the institution’s IT department rather than individual users who do not normally have that kind of control, so it’s easier for messages to be automatically junked without the intended recipient ever seeing them. Due to the increasing volume, hardly anybody ever checks their spam boxes for possible genuine messages.
Best to use something short, clear and specific, e.g. ‘[College name] archives enquiry’ or similar. Using the name of the person you’re writing to in the salutation will also help lower the spam score.
If you are repeating a previous email enquiry that may have gone astray, include a copy of the first attempt, with headers (From, To, Date, Subject), in your next one. Email delivery and search functions aren’t perfect and do break down, and it may help, if not to find your first email, at least to let the archivist know when it was sent and what the original query was about.
Unlocking Archives MT 2015
Lunchtime talk: Unlocking Archives
a seminar series about research in Balliol College’s special collections
‘Harold Nicolson, John Reith, and censorship at the BBC in 1931’
Charlie Dawkins, Merton College, Oxford
Friday 4 December 2015, 1-2pm
Balliol Historic Collections Centre
St Cross Church, Manor Road [directions]
* all welcome *
In 1931, diplomat, critic and journalist Harold Nicolson set out to broadcast twelve radio talks on modern literature at the BBC. Radio talks of this nature were very much part of Director-General John Reith’s attempt to educate the nation. But when Nicolson attempted to talk about James Joyce’s banned novel Ulysses, the BBC took issue and Nicolson’s talk was seemingly censored. Behind this very public controversy, Nicolson’s diaries and the BBC’s internal records document an intriguing debate: how did John Reith’s cultural programme develop at the microphone, and just what could one say on the radio in 1931?
Charlie Dawkins is writing his doctoral thesis on modernism in mainstream British literary magazines.
Feel free to bring your lunch. The talk will last about half an hour, to allow time for questions and discussion afterwards, and a closer look at some of the Balliol special collections material discussed.
Questions? archivist@balliol.ox.ac.uk
In addition to a key page from the diary for 29 June 1931, detailing Nicolson’s impressions of Reith, also on display supporting the talk were:
- Photographs (facsimile) from July 1906 – Nicolson’s visit to Francis Urquhart’s ‘Chalet des anglais’ near Chamonix
- Photographs (facsimile) from August 1908 – Nicolson’s visit to Chartres with Francis Urquhart
- Diary entry for 1910 – typical brief manuscript note form for the early diaries, already setting a recognisable pattern for the fuller and more detailed later volumes, noting e.g. whom he met for which meals and where they ate, travel arrangements and personal reading
- Diary entry (original) for June 1916 – noting the day his father was elevated to the peerage (Arthur Nicolson, 1st Baron Carnock)
- Diary entry for November 1963 – among the last of many BBC meetings
manuscripts boxing
The benefits of last year’s condition survey of manuscript books continue apace: during last year’s manuscripts condition survey, we listed 155 manuscripts either unboxed or inadequately boxed. Boxing is a quick and effective – and relatively inexpensive, depending on the type of box – way to protect all kinds of archival material from light, dust and handling damage, as well as providing a certain amount of buffering from the environment.
First batch of 25 to be measured – these manuscripts are in good condition and require only light cleaning. Once they are boxed they will not need further conservation attention for a good long time, we hope. This will mean we can cross two dozen off our list of 155 quickly. The next tranches of mss will be measured in batches as well, in order according to how much repair they need, starting with those needing least binding repair, and avoiding those needing major text block repairs until the end. This isn’t just about getting through the list quickly: any change to the binding – and even some major interventions to the text block – may alter the outer shape of the book and therefore the box. Those will need treatment before they can be accurately measured for a box. Some may need a folder or wrapper in the interim.
The first lot of custom-made boxes has arrived from the Bodleian’s boxing and packaging department:
a surprisingly small package…
contains a certain number of boxes…
which are bigger on the inside than the outside! clever packing 🙂
one type of box – drop-spine, mostly used for larger, thicker or hardback volumes; several have string-and-washer closures on the fore edge for extra security and a little pressure to help keep the boards in shape
the other type, a robust four-flap folder, for thinner, smaller and soft-back volumes
all done – another two dozen manuscripts safer on the shelf and during production!
MCR viewing
Yesterday we put on a special viewing for members of Balliol’s MCR (grad students). In addition to a final opportunity to look round the Swinburne exhibition, on display were:
- Dervorguilla’s Statutes of 1282
- the oldest document in the college archive
- Gerard Manley Hopkins’ notebook of undergraduate essays, and a number of facsimiles from Balliol’s small Hopkins collection – requested by a student
- a letter of condolence from Robert Browning to the novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) on the death of GH Lewes – requested by a student
- illuminated medieval manuscripts 1 and 232B – requested by a student
- a letter from the novelist Graham Greene to Josephine Reid
- the Charter of Incorporation of 1588, with the great Seal of Elizabeth I
- facsimile images of items from the college, personal and family archives and the medieval manuscript books
- reference works and the Balliol Biographies section
- a display about the history and conversion of the building
- illustrated early printed books (C17) on Japanese and British geography
history graduate thesis fair
Yesterday I and several colleagues from other college archives staffed our usual stall at the thesis fair for Oxford University history grad students. We fielded queries about:
- records of the discussions leading up to the foundation of new colleges (C19-20)
- records of changing student attitudes & unrest/protests (C20, e.g. women in former men’s colleges, political protest)
- records of medieval hospitals (C12-14)
- Oxford connections, individual and institutional, with South Africa (C19-20)
- anything about the 30 Years’ War (C17)
- the ‘Merton Calculators’ – 14th century Oxford thinkers who approached philosophical and theological problems in a mathematical way (C14-15)
- the social effect of WW1 on women – particularly but not exclusively women students at the time (C20)
- political relations between England, France and the Low Countries in the later Middle Ages (C15-16)
- medieval charter diplomatic (the study of the formal structure of official and legal documents) (C11-12)
- medieval English representations of Saracens in text and image (C12-15)
- early modern records of disorder and scandal (!) (C16-18)
- women and archaeology in the Victorian era (C19)
- general enquiries about what sorts of things are in college collections
While each student had individual attention for several minutes, these questions obviously didn’t fill two hours. Meanwhile, the Bodleian’s manuscripts and archives specialists at the next stall had a queue waiting most of the time, so I think we need a sandwich board: ‘Waiting to talk to the Bod? Come and see if college collections might have something useful for you as well!’ Because most people assume they won’t, and quite often that assumption is wrong.
We always enjoy meeting students and discussing their research needs, whether general or specific. We always learn something from each other as well; we’re often in touch by email, but it’s great to have an opportunity to explore the many and sometimes unexpected ways our collections relate to each other. And how they differ!
monthly report October 2015
A few numbers about what was happening at St Cross during October:
- Number of enquiries (email etc): 65
- Number of researchers in person: 6
- Number of person-days in the reading room: 6
- Collections consulted: Jowett, TH Green, Balogh (2), college records, Nicolson diaries
- No of non-research visitors: 110+ (35 Brookes publishing students, 30 AGRA researchers, 6 Balliol English students, 10 exhibition visitors, 20 Unlocking Archives audience)
- blog posts: 2
- Flickr uploads: 1700 images from MSS 32, 79, 92, 96
- interesting events: group visit from publishing students at Oxford Brookes (Fiona); presentation for AGRA study day (Anna and John Jones); visit to Swinburne exhibition by Balliol English tutor and students; Unlocking Archives talk on Swinburne by Rikky Rooksby; group visit from archives & family history students at Dundee University; 2 weekday lunchtime exhibition open hours; after hours exhibition opening for members of College; individual visits from current and former students
archivist’s day
Following on from last month’s details of a typical month’s enquiries, I am also sometimes asked what I do all day. Here’s a sample, of a day mostly in the office, without researchers in person:
check emails before leaving home so the wheels can turn in my brain as I cycle
arrive – begin collating previous month’s enquiry & event numbers for the monthly report
phone rings – do I want any office furniture? I do not.
email arrives from library with blurb for forthcoming event poster that needs posting asap. Type up poster with illustration, print, take out to notice board with stepstool, key and some extra drawing pins. While there, passersby request entry to the church. This is not usually permitted but passerby identifies self as visiting lecturer.
Give visitors a tour and produce Ancient Document for them. They depart; log visit on calendar and DARS (alumni database).
Post forthcoming event poster as a blog post & point to it from Facebook and Twitter.
discuss forthcoming cleaning schedule with scout – needs planning as some tasks can’t be done and some areas can’t be cleaned while researchers are here
phone rings – family history enquiry. Enquirer does not use internet so take notes. Research, respond, log query.
Tot up the last week’s enquiries in monthly enq record document, answer half dozen out of 70+ for the month that haven’t been finished yet. Forward a couple of requests for permission to publish now that the requesters have sent in their paperwork.
Finish and post monthly report, and point to blog post from FB and Twitter.
Several of this month’s last outstanding enquiries require photography of short sections of 3 different medieval mss for overseas academics and grad students. Fetch mss, take photos, process half and post online.
Late for lunch! Lights off, alarm on, lock door, check other door, lock gate, cycle to college.
Answer two queries from SCR members while eating and promise answer to another after checking sources.
Stop by College Office to pick up set of records for deposit in the archives. Check post. Cycle back to St Cross. Avoid running into tourists standing in middle of road to take photographs; avoid cars backing out of open-ended Broad St parking & attempting to drive wrong way down 1 way street. Alarms off, lights on, etc.
Process remaining photos from the morning, post online, notify enquirers. Return medieval mss to repository.
Record lunchtime enquiries and answer the one that needed sources checking.
Register and list contents of new accession picked up at lunchtime, package in acid-free folders and box, put away in repository.
Scan & send images of a document requested for internal administrative enquiry.
Finish collection description started earlier in the week. Post online. Finish numbering, arranging and repackaging collection (fortunately small) and return to repository. Create fonds level description for Archives Hub, submit. Create brief description for NRA-Discovery, submit. Link to new collection description from FB and twitter.
Put files got out for reference during the day back in the repository and reference books back on shelves.
Lights out, alarms on, stop by Broad Street with a book requested by a current student – collections remain as borrowable as ever and there are no borrowing facilities at St Cross.
monthly report September 2015
A few numbers about what was happening at St Cross during September:
- Number of enquiries (email etc): 74
- Number of researchers in person: 8
- Number of person-days in the reading room: 8
- Collections consulted: Greene-Reid (2), Chalet, Jowett (2), TH Green, Harris, Nicolson diaries, college records
- No of non-research visitors: ca 415 (6 individual visitors, 388 Open Doors, 20 evensong)
- blog posts: 7
- Flickr uploads: images from MSS 92, 96, 117 and 263
- interesting events: Balliol intern Robin completed 8 weeks cataloguing; all library staff and Robin involved in Oxford Open Doors days and the opening of Fiona’s Swinburne exhibition; Evening Prayer service in St Cross for patronal feast; display on Broad St site for Gerard Manley Hopkins Society conference; CILIP RBSCG conference in London on making ‘hidden’ collections more visible; English Literary Heritage conference in London on how academic researchers and professional staff can work together to increase access to (particularly) museums, houses and places with literary associations and collections; individual visits from Old Members, benefactors and visiting lecturers.
Unlocking Archives MT 2015
Lunchtime talk: Unlocking Archives
a seminar series about research in Balliol College’s special collections
‘Swinburne, Balliol and the pursuit of books’
Dr Rikky Rooksby
Monday 19 October 2015, 1-2pm
Balliol Historic Collections Centre
St Cross Church, Manor Road
* all welcome *
In this illustrated talk Rikky Rooksby discusses the life and legacy of the Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne and the poet’s connection with Balliol, and relates the story of his own Swinburne book collection which is now part of Balliol College Library. He also reflects on thirty years’ experience of book-collecting.
Feel free to bring your lunch. The talk will last about half an hour, to allow time for questions and discussion afterwards, and a closer look at some of the Balliol special collections material discussed.
Questions? library@balliol.ox.ac.uk
Soldiers of Oxfordshire
Yesterday I was delighted to attend the launch of a fascinating new exhibition at the Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum in Woodstock: ‘Above the Dreaming Spires – Oxfordshire’s Great War Aviation Story.’ The exhibition has been curated by Dr Peter Dye, Air Vice-Marshal (ret’d), OBE, former Director General of the Royal Air Force Museum at Hendon, and will be open until March 2016.
The exhibition combines original photographs and magnified facsimiles, family and institutional archive material, period and recent printed sources and three-dimensional objects from personal belongings to uniforms and equipment. Many items have been loaned especially for the exhibition by descendants and family members. The county-specific focus means that it’s not solely about those daring young men in their flying machines – we see more of what was going on in wartime aviation in Oxfordshire, such as photos of the airfield on Port Meadow, curriculum notes from the School of Aeronautical Engineering housed at Christ Church in the city of Oxford, and reminiscences of local country people and places by an American airman stationed here. A number of individuals are singled out for their key contributions and for personal stories that help to illustrate the bigger history.
Balliol members Hubert Latham (Balliol 1903) and Hardit Singh Malik (Balliol 1912) both feature prominently in the exhibition, and Balliol contributed digital copies of several photographs of Malik from Francis Urquhart’s photograph albums. Many Balliol men joined the Ox & Bucks Light Infantry – individuals’ wartime careers are sketched in their entries in the Balliol College Register.
For more information about what went on in the colleges and in the city of Oxford during WW1, see Malcolm Graham’s recent book Oxford in the Great War (Pen & Sword, 2014). The Oxfordshire Soldiers’ Museum makes available lots of archive sources, learning resources and publications about the military history of Oxfordshire regiments and military bases and activities in the county.
Dr Dye will be speaking about the exhibition on 2 December at the Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum.
conference notes
On Friday I was able to attend the final day of the CILIP RBSCG (Rare Books & Special Collections Group) annual conference at the British Library (4 Sept 2015). Here are my very brief notes of and thoughts prompted by six excellent papers that gave an excellent variety of subjects, issues and solutions, but were very much related under the conference theme of ‘Hidden Collections: Revealed’…
… and here is Joanna Baines’ blog post, from someone who was able to attend the whole conference and had more of an overview of the theme’s development over the three days.
Paper 1 Adrian Edwards on the BL’s collection of comics and the Comics Unmasked exhibition
- exhibitions can and should be used to stimulate cataloguing priorities and research investigation, awareness, public engagement. eg c19 poets recently for us
- helps leverage management support and resources for eg cataloguing, conservation, digitisation etc
- importance of online afterlife of exhibitions
- increased staff knowledge of collection, either by regular cataloguing staff or via shared knowledge from external/specialist cataloguer
- every exhibition’s potential and impact is individual and the same formulae can’t always be applied – apply everything and see what works!
- the BL’s Comics Unmasked exhibition (past)
- more from the collection
Paper 2 Lara Haggerty on Inverpeffray Library
- they have C18 borrowing registers! what a lovely record (see Matthew’s recent posts here about Balliol’s borrowing registers)
- the Library was described ca 1930 as ‘a quaint corner in Libraria’ – it’s much more than that of course, but I do like the phrase!
- I also like the work placement PhD model they are using – research student gets experience on both sides of the desk.
- it is both difficult and necessary to have the door at St Cross locked most of the time, without impromptu public access. We are doing more every year to improve general public tourist access (research access by appointment in advance is always available to anyone) and there are always more ideas to try.
- Inverpeffray Library – go visit!
- Alexander McCall Smith’s Love Letter to Inverpeffray Library and the whole Love Letters to Libraries series in the Guardian
Paper 3 Katie Sambrooke on the FCO collection, now at King’s College London
- The Foreign & Commonwealth Office’s library, consisting of 100,000 items, moved to KCL Library in 2007 and is now their largest and most used special collection!
- Balliol note, mention of Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps
- in later years, an important question was: who in the FCO used the collection? due to increasing security, it was very difficult for any external readers to gain access at all
- cataloguing the collection: used project staff, internal and external funding, high level of detail, DCRMB standard, lots of subject headings to add search/discovery via online catalogue
- cataloguers became experts in the collection, ideal for enquiries answering, outreach, exhibitions, talks, internal education of other staff
- I noted contrast with archival cataloguing, which is NOT ‘necessary but mundane’, it’s essential and substantively different
- a lesson for all of us who try to advertise via so many channels for exhibitions and talks etc etc: KCL’s exhibition footfall is 90% passing trade, that is, just happened to see the poster on the door
- personal contacts are a key source of exhibition ideas and curators, particularly tutors with an imaginative approach to collections. KCL English staff get special mention!
- for all the outreach targets, the primary audience for HE institutions is ACADEMIC – using special collections for the institution’s own research and teaching
- KCL survey shows that their own current students prefer email contact and NOT social media on library matters!
- KCL’s practice will be one to watch for improving visibility of special collections in the main library on a separate site although they are stored & consulted on a separate site – good example for us here. Examples: include special collections in fresher & new staff inductions, make a video, private view, advertise from freshers week
- users and uses of collections are always different from what might be expected, using different things in different ways. And the expected users will challenge all the expectations!
- interesting KCL MA module ‘exploring the Victorian archive’
- from question about social media: use all media to reach different audiences – just have to do them all and keep trying. There is nothing that doesn’t work! though some may be better value or better use of time than others.
- KCL Special Collections
- FCO collection
Paper 4 Katharine Hogg on the Gerald Coke Handel Collection at the Foundling Museum
- close collection connection with Handel House Museum
- Coke collection requires ‘extreme cataloguing’ ie highly detailed
- Balliol reference: Charles Jennens letters (Jennens was a key librettist for Handel – Messiah and many others)
- most users of this collection connect remotely rather than consulting the collection in person, digital images supplied and created on demand
- demand-led digitisation for budget and server space reasons.
- more active partnering with academic teaching!
Paper 5 Hannah Manktelow on Provincial Shakespeare performances in the BL’s Playbills collection
- BL playbill collection .25 mil! 70% London based but still 75000 for provincial study
- good introduction – setting out preconceptions, initial questions, expectations, what hoped to find
- portable theatres were literally ephemeral – ‘no one treasured their playbill from the portable theatre’. but Shakespeare certainly was performed in small towns and for working class audiences by travelling/seasonal theatres with visiting London stars!
- Sarah Siddons played Hamlet! only in provincial theatres 1780s. Provincial theatres had children playing Shakespeare central roles eg 6yo Macbeth (‘the Infant Kean’). ‘Women and children play damaged men, not heroes’. And not in London.
- So many stories waiting to be told in the playbill collection. Look for BBC stories on this within the year.
Paper 6 Mark Byford on opening a private collection to others
- ‘tiptoeing into a hidden collection’
- ‘rare books exercise a grip on the imagination’
- can collect by period, subject, author, publisher, illustrations, bindings, annotations…
- ‘a menagerie of books’ – open up to subject specialists
- why might you collect books you don’t understand? partly from necessity as they are scarce and expensive and finds are necessarily serendipitous rather than systematic, but approach also sympathetic to C17 breadth of tastes/interests in publishing and personal collecting
- lots of opportunity to engage different scholars, but how to share the understanding and meaning with others?
- Tiffany Stern article on David Garrick’s personal lending library – he didn’t read much! personal binding, book plate
- the statement ‘There is no catalogue’ of this collection brought a collective intake of breath from the assembled librarians…
- visits from and loans to specific scholars, uses own books for seminars with students
- the assertion that ‘collectors probably know their books better than many librarians’ was also much noticed in the room and on Twitter! need to exploit this knowledge effectively for research connections
- favourite quote: ‘You’re taught not to write in books, yet I’m thrilled that people did. As long as it was about 300 years ago!’
Other things to look up
- Follow tweets from #rbscg15 @CILIPRareBooks and storify from website
- next CILIP RBSCG conference: 7-9 Sept 2016 Univ of Liverpool – Diversity in access and collections (and staff)
- IFLA Rare Books & Special Collections
- ABA runs behind scenes tours for librarians at book fairs!
- new reference book for researchers, 3rd ed of the Directory of Rare Book & Special Collections in the UK & the Republic of Ireland
We then had a detailed tour by Alison Bailey of the Animal Tales exhibition in the Entrance Hall Gallery (formerly Folio Society Gallery). Lovely design! Highlights that made me want to turn the pages:
- Robert Southey’s copy of Gilbert White’s Selborne (Balliol reference)
- David Garnett A Man in the Zoo and Lady into Fox – if you’ve been watching Life in Squares, this is Bunny
- beautiful big embossed hardback edition of Laline Paull’s The Bees
- Varjak Paw, written by SF Said, illustrated by Dave McKean
- Anansi Company, poetry by Roy Fisher, extraordinary puppet-artwork by Ronald King
We were then taken beyond several layers of security into the stacks. I was very excited (I know…) to see the fabled BL red tray delivery track at last – if I worked there I would be sorely tempted to put a train on it.
We saw David Garrick’s drama collection with its fancy matching bindings and personalised bookplates – he lent books and was very keen they should come back to him.
Much of the repository is of course electronic rolling stack, and I was reminded of York Minster Archives’ simple method of preventing one member of staff from unwittingly squashing another down the very long runs of shelving (only three, but very long): a cardboard box neatly covered in a red plastic bag had to be placed on the floor at the mouth of the open run is anyone was down there, and removed when the run was vacated. It worked!
The sight of cut up marked sale catalogues from auction houses, printed catalogue pages pasted into a larger ledger, with manuscript accounts & notes throughout surrounding the printed material, showed, I thought, a fine example of far-from-unique printed material becoming something rather different, an archival record.
Biggest Ever Scandinavian linguistics collection made me very happy: ‘The Hannås Collection of Scandinavian Linguistic Literature was donated to the Library in 1984 by Torgrim Hannås, a Norwegian-born antiquarian bookseller living in Britain. The collection includes some 710 items, in all the Scandinavian languages, of which about three quarters date from before 1851. Just over half of the collection consists of dictionaries, the rest being divided between textbooks, readers, phrase books etc and linguistic monographs.’ ( description from the BL website)
Another Balliol note to end: we saw John Evelyn’s personal library next to editions of Lawrence Durrell. Ah, shelfmarks!
Thanks so much to RBSCG organisers and committee and British Library hosts for a brilliant day!
Balliol College Archives & Manuscripts 
