ENGLISHNESS (iv): ROOKS

The Rook (Corvus frugilegus) is a type of bird. The adult is black/purple in color and they build their nests in tree-tops, which are called rookeries. They feed on worms, insects and grain. They are said to be a highly intelligent bird, and they are very sociable, joining together to make large colonies. They have a very unusual call, which is a “kaah” noise. The sound rooks make, I think it is particularly English.

Have a look at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehojFux0bNc&feature=related
“Rooks going to Roost”. Accessed 7/24/10

Consulted to write this blog: Holden, Peter. The RSPB Guide to British Birds. Pan Macmillan Ltd., London, 2002. Page 164.

Image: http://www.caringforgodsacre.org.uk/azchurchyardconservation.aspx

PS The collective noun for a group of rooks is a 'parliament'. Make of that what you will.

THE JOHN JOHNSON COLLECTION

AN ARCHIVE OF PRINTED EPHEMERA,
BODLEIAN LIBRARY, OXFORD

Dara, Gillian, Traci and I were very lucky to have a thorough and detailed tour of the John Johnson Archive of printed ephemera, which is housed at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Our guide was Amanda Flynn, who is an archivist at the Bodleian. The collection is housed in the new Bodleian Library, with workshops being on the ground floor, and materials being stored mostly in the stacks.

John de Monins Johnson (1882-1956) worked for the Oxford University Press (OUP), and the collection is named after him. Amanda explained that Johnson was a papyrologist, and his studies of fragile ancient Egyptian texts, lead him to realize that printed materials from his own era were just as fragile, and just as likely to be thrown in the trash. So he started a collection of printed ephemera, now containing approximately 1.5 million items, dating mostly from the 18th ,19th and 20th Centuries, with the cut-off date being WW2. Initially housed at the OUP offices, the collection was gifted to the university in 1968.

The collection includes a vast range of printed items. Playbills, programs, prints, newspapers, handbills and pamphlets sit alongside advertizing materials of all types. This collection is an invaluable resource for many different kinds of researchers, from those looking to see what an Edwardian theatre playbill looked like, to a hastily published newspaper, giving an account of a public hanging in the Victorian era. Because of the huge quantity of material, cataloging is critical for efficient access. Johnson himself cataloged his collection. Amanda conceded that the 700 subject headings that he created for his materials were so good that it is the one that is still broadly used today.

In 2006, a large scale joint-venture digitizing program was established between ProQuest and the Bodleian, under the auspices of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). JISC put up the funding with the aim of preserving and protecting fragile collections such as this one. ProQuest put up half of the £2m budget and JISC the other half. The agreement was that UK- based libraries and schools would have free access to the digitized collection, and those outside the UK would have to enter into a contract with ProQuest to be able to access the images.

It was seen as being unrealistic that the whole of the collection could be digitized, so the £2 m was spent scanning 62,421 items (167,356 images) and creating 60,300 new catalog entries. Amanda showed us multiple examples of the five categories of materials that were nominated for early inclusion;

* 19th Century Entertainment, including theater material and non-theatrical materials, such as circuses.
* Popular Prints. This category provides researchers with a huge range of visual information of both social and historical significance.
* Crime, Murders and Executions. Broadsides and pamphlets from court cases, and more lurid publications of grisly crimes are a treasure trove for researchers.
* The Book Trade. Examples of book publishing ephemera, including prospectuses and bookplates.
* Advertizing. This is popular culture in the raw, and is a rich vein for students of fashion, industrial processes, social/historical trends and habits, etc.

The workroom in the New Bodleian Library: A small selection of the collection.

The work commenced in 2007, took two years and involved 10 staff from the Bodleian. The academic input was provided by Bodleian staff and the digitization process was broken down into four discreet processes;

1. Sorting. The items were put into categories and given shelf marks.

2. Cataloging. New records were created, using the Allegro Bibliographic format. The catalog entries thus created are very complex, allowing multiple entry points for searching. Researchers may be researching theater history, or the history of an actor, or the typography used in early Victorian playbills. Amanda explained that a playbill might have included references to the theater, the name of the play, the theater manager, the players, a description of items contained in pictures included in the playbill and so on. Additional information would be included on dimensions, coloring, printing and paper processes used, etc. (i.e. copper engraving, wood block, Baxter-print etc). Only by including multiple search terms in the catalog entry, would this resource be of any future use to researchers. At this stage the paper conservation department did any necessary work needed to repair or conserve the item.

3. Tracking. Each item was assigned a barcode tracking number, allowing all the different departments to locate precisely where an item was at any given time.

4. Digitizing. The bulk of this work was done by an outside contractor, Capita, who are based in the nearby town of Bicester. Some of the more delicate time-consuming items were digitized in-house at the Bodleian.

Amanda then went on to show us how efficacious the search processes are. The work put into cataloging the collection, started by John Johnson, has paid off handsomely, because a part of this unique resource is now searchable and accessible in many different ways. For the first time, Johnson’s collection will open up its secrets in interesting and diverse ways to researchers working in many different fields.

I have used all of the web-sites listed below in researching this blog.

This web-site gives a brief history of the collection within the Bodleian: http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/johnson/johnson.htm

This site provides a lot of additional information:
http://johnjohnson.chadwyck.co.uk/marketing/about.jsp

More detail on the digitizing process can be found at:

http://www.capita-tds.co.uk/case-study-details.php?id=7

EDINBURGH CENTRAL LIBRARY

Visit Date: July 17, 2010

The Edinburgh Public Library was endowed with monies from the Carnegie Trust and was opened in 1890. The Carnegie inscription over the door reads “Let there be Light”. The Central library has 40 staff, and is the coordinating hub for 14 branch libraries in Edinburgh. The Central Library is literally and figuratively at the heart of access to learning in the city. We were shown some new and imaginative ways in which the staff is re-energizing the relationship between reader and library.

Our tour started with three lectures on different aspects of the running the library. After some introductory remarks, Alison Stoddart started by telling us how the library is working with web 2.0 to “reach” into the community in new ways. The main thrust is to renew (and in some cases build from scratch) connections with the community. “Your Edinburgh” is a web based initiative designed to link community and individuals together, giving “ownership” of events and handing projects back to communities. This web-site is designed to be a multi-layered bulletin board for the city, providing timely and accurate information, focusing particularly on health advice, learning, history, etc. It will be coordinated from the library.

Alison also discussed how the library is involved in a project called “Capital Collections”. This initiative will continue to digitize and make available many of the large number of antique photographs that the library has. This way, the portfolios of Victorian photographers such as Hill and Adamson, will be available to a wider audience. Web 2.0 is being used to reach further than existing schemes currently permit. For example, the “Word Up” scheme is a digital newsletter for library customers, currently reaching 2,000 subscribers. The library blog, “Tales of One City” informs of timely events, such as golf tournaments or the Edinburgh festival. The blog currently has 5,500 visits per month. Twitter is used as a good conduit for praise/criticism, and is seen by Alison as being vital in heading off crises before they happen.

Annie Bell and Colm Linnane headed up the next session, and they took us through the ways in which the library is working with special interest groups of library users, trying to improve library take-up and functionality. The library is placing reading at the heart of its outreach work. Events where fans can meet and interact with authors are good for both “sides”. In small groups, the library encourages “emerging” writers, in an attempt to encourage and enthuse. “Crime in the City” is a project to encourage and stimulate readers and writers of crime fiction to interact. The impressive range of “book group” activities includes;

* “Take a Break with a Scottish Book”; a project to stimulate summer reading
* Hearing and sight impaired book clubs
* Book clubs for soldiers’ barracks
* Book group books. The library offers packs of books of the same title for book club users to have the experience of all reading the same edition.
* Private book clubs. When asked to, the library liaises with private book clubs, providing help and support.
* Themed book clubs; for example clubs will read the winning titles of the Booker or Orange Book prizes.

The library is involved with a three year training program called “Front Line” (http://www.openingthebook.com/) which is taught on-line in seven modules. The impressive list of out-reach links also includes;

* Reading in care homes. Experience has shown that showing photos, accompanied by specific readings can help re-create and re-focus memories for Alzheimer’s patients.
* Oral story telling is a very useful tool in trying to get troubled teenagers in residential care involved in story-craft, without confronting the issue of illiteracy and the accompanying feelings of inadequacy. Many of these sessions involve a “meet the author” session.
* The Scottish Book Trust is a publishers group that is interested in promoting small publishers. Quarterly meetings actively encourage these businesses on a partnership basis.

Karen O’Brien then led us through the conservation issues and problems associated with a large metropolitan library. The library has many rare and unusual items in the collection and the boundary between preservation requirements and access often becomes unclear. By showing lots of different examples, Karen covered very effectively, the problems associated with acid-rich paper, binding and preservation issues.

We then went on a tour of the various areas of the library, starting with the local history section. The library has a unique and diverse collection of materials on Edinburgh, including extensive genealogical resources. We dodged the rain to go into a separate building which contained the children’s and music libraries. Back in the main building, the general lending library is very well used and is the busiest in Edinburgh. The fittings are the original Carnegie ones, with the exception of the central enquiry desk. Upstairs is an impressive art library. A large number of art and design colleges in the city, and surrounding hinterland, make good use of this collection. Downstairs is the original Carnegie reference library, no longer divided into men’s and ladies’ sections, but now providing reading desks for 150 readers. There is a very good selection of daily newspapers and periodicals in this department.

Although built over a hundred years ago, the staff in this library is involved in a lively and bold debate with their customers. They are taking the book to their constituents, and also informing the city, by proactively using many of the tools that web 2.0 provides. I applaud them for their initiative and fortitude. I wish them luck in the straightened times in which we live.

ENGLISHNESS (iii): BELL RINGING

For me the sound of bells being rung from an English country bell tower is the essence of Englishness. Have a listen to the bells of Prestbury Church, Cheshire, being rung (“Prestbury – St.Peter’s Church 5”) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTudBZfGs_Y

The poet Sir John Betjaman was fascinated by church bells. Verse three from his poem Church of England Thoughts Occasioned by Hearing the Bells of Magdalen Tower from the Botanic Garden, Oxford on St. Margaret’s Day:

“A Multiplicity of bells
A Changing cadence, rich and deep
Swung from these pinnacles on high
To fill the trees and flood the sky
And rock the sailing clouds to sleep”. 1

Tuned bells, hung in a bell tower ("pinnacles on high") are rung in a pattern called a “change”, by pulling on ropes from a platform built below the bells. Large groups of bells hung in a tower, are called “rings of bells”. The bells swing freely to a determined pattern that does not produce a melody in a formal sense. Have a look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_ringing. This Wikipedia article explains the intricacies of bell ringing, and you will see from the article, which is entitled “Campanology”, just how involved the vocabulary is for this subject.

1 Betjaman, Sir John. The Collected Poems. Book Club Associates, London, 1975. Page 193.

ENGLISHNESS (ii): LITTER

In my search for things quintessentially English, I am writing about an unfortunate English problem. Litter. Boris Johnson is the Mayor of London. He frequently writes a column for The Daily Telegraph newspaper. In a recent article, he wrote of how unsightly discarded chewing gum despoils the sidewalks of London. “It is like a plague. It is a monstrous acne of sticky grey blotches. It is an awful self-inflicted impetigo on the face of modern London…”1 Johnson goes on to say that an on-the-spot fine of £80 should be levied on those dropping gum on the sidewalk.

I would take issue with Mr. Johnson. Instead of fines, London needs more public trash cans. Litter and discarded chewing gum rule in a land of no trash cans. All around the country, trash cans were removed after the IRA started putting bombs in them in the 1970’s. Trash cans made a return in the late 1990’s, only to be removed after the London 7/7 bombings of 2005. The result is that we now have litter everywhere, including the ubiquitous “acne” chewing gum blotches. I wish it were not so.

1 The Daily Telegraph. “Our Streets are Suffering From a Monstrous Plague of Blotches”. July 12, 2010. Page 16.

THE BODLEIAN LIBRARY

Oxford University claims the honor of being the oldest university in the English speaking world. The Bodleian Library is the library of Oxford University. We were most fortunate to have an excellent tour of the library from Mr. Ian Mitchell, who is a most knowledgeable (and lively) tour guide.

He started by giving us a historical overview of the history of the university, whilst sitting in the room that was formerly the Divinity School. The building was built in the beautiful late gothic English perpendicular style. Ian explained that the Divinity School acted as a school room and also as a venue for “examination by oral disputation”, which was the verbal examination system used to award degrees at Oxford. We then moved to the Convocation House, where King Charles I held three parliaments when his court was in exile during the English civil war.

The Divinity School

Adjacent to the Convocation House is the Consistory Court established in 1214 and is where university staff and students were tried by the university authorities. Through the windows one can see the Sheldonian Theater, the first commission for the architect, Sir Christopher Wren. The Sheldonian is the main ceremonial hall for the university.

The first library in Oxford dates from the 14th Century. Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (brother to King Henry V), donated a large collection of manuscripts to the university (1435-37) and constructed a library, built above the Divinity School. Completed in 1488, it is known as Duke Humphrey’s library. Thomas Bodley (1545-1613), an Oxford alumnus, later re-fitted the library and donated many of his own books. It was re-opened in 1602, now bearing the name of its’ latest benefactor. What is presently called Duke Humphrey’s library is largely the work of Bodley, including many of his 17th Century innovations. He built bookcases, in the form we know now, and until the 1780’s the books were chained. He also added galleries with access via stairs, the entrance and egress from which could be scrutinized by staff.

Humphrey’s library has a beautiful hammer beam roof, decorated in an elaborate arabesque style. The portraits of 34 heads of colleges look down from the walls. Below are cubicles with benches and chairs where “readers” sit and work. The Bodleian is a reference library and books are delivered to the readers in the reading room of their choice, by staff from closed stacks. There are some 55,000 registered readers, with 25,000 of those being university related.

The new Bodleian Library was built in 1933. Designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott, with generous gifts from the Rockefeller Foundation, it has 11 storeys of stacks, eight above ground and three below. We toured the tunnels that connect the libraries below ground and saw the book conveyor system and pneumatic tubes that were formerly used to deliver the book request slips. Currently, book retrieval times can be up to three hours. The basement stacks had a variety of functions in WW2; bomb shelter, repository for other libraries’ holdings (including many from the Royal Collections), depository for the seeds collection from Kew Gardens and the WW2 Red Cross records.

The New Bodleian Library

Exiting the basement levels, Ian took us back to the main entrance and showed us the exteriors of the libraries we just toured, including the Schools Quadrangle. Doors off this quad lead to separate faculties for the teaching of logic, astronomy, morals, law, medicine, etc. He pointed out the tower and the five styles of classical columns built in pairs flanking the gate; Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Composite.

As with the British Library, the Bodleian does not use Dewey numbers, but rather arranges books by size to save space. The library has many items of huge antiquity, including an Egyptian papyrus marriage contract from 567BC. The library holds collections in many languages, having for example, the second largest collection in the world of Hebrew texts.

Some 5,500 new books are added per week to the collections and therefore the new library, built in 1933 is full. A new off-site facility in nearby Swindon is starting to house the overflow. The library will shortly undergo a re-fit costing £98 million to upgrade the library. This tour was most interesting, and Ian a most fascinating guide.

Greek inscription written over the door to the Divinity School

http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/bodley

THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF SCOTLAND

Opened in 1689, The National Library of Scotland started life as the Advocate’s Library, a private library. The library was granted the right to claim a copy of every book published in Great Britain under the 1710 Copyright Act. Under this new entitlement, the collection grew rapidly and the whole was donated to the nation when it was formed into the National Library of Scotland (NLS) in 1925.

After delays occasioned by WW2, the building the NLS presently occupies was opened in 1956, after generous bequests from Sir Alexander Grant of Forres. The building ranges over 15 floors, and because of the ever-expanding collection, has subsequently required two additional further buildings to be built. The Legal Deposit Libraries Act of 2003 means that the library now has the additional right to collect digitally published work, including e-journals and websites.

As you enter the museum, there is an exhibition display. A header above one of the exhibits states; “Today the National Library of Scotland is the home of our nation’s collected knowledge and history, and occupies a central place in Scottish cultural life”. It goes on to list that the library is home to 14 million books and manuscripts, 2 million maps and atlases, 300,000 musical scores, 32,000 films and videos (The Scottish Screen Archive), 25,000 newspaper issues and 7,500 sound recordings. Six thousand new items are added per week to the collection.

The exhibition starts with a display of Timothy Pont’s maps of Scotland. His remarkable maps of the 14th and 15th Centuries are some of the earliest maps drawn of Scotland. They show churches, towns, castles and topographical features. This small “taster” of what is in the NLS is far too small. Unfortunately, the rest of the exhibit is poor, and does not reflect adequately the treasures that the NLS holds. A rather trite golf exhibition neither informs nor educates. The third section of the exhibition is supposed to be an introduction to the John Murray Archive. This display is so sketchy and poor that I had to go to the bookshop to find a book in order to find out what this section of the exhibit was all about!

The John Murray Archive (JMA) was donated to the museum in 2006, and contains a vast collection of materials from the London publishing house that was founded in 1768 by John Murray. Born in Edinburgh, Murray was to found a publishing dynasty, with a further three generations succeeding in the business after him. The JMA, covering holdings dating from 1768 to 1920, covers a veritable “who’s who” of British publishing. A publishing list to die for included Jane Austen, Lord Byron, Charles Darwin, Humphrey Davy and Benjamin Disraeli, to name but a few. The archive offers us a peek into the partnership between publisher and author. The collection is full of nuggets such as a letter from Byron worrying that one of his books may be too small to sell. Letters from Jane Austen complain that the printer is too slow. Copies of the correspondence between Charles Darwin and his critics fill many boxes.

The Murray family was a publishing dynasty which lasted for four generations. But the archive also contains other papers, for example from the London publisher Smith, Elder and Co., who were the publishers for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mrs. Gaskell and the Brontë sisters. During the Victorian era, the Murray catalog also included works from many scientific disciplines, including geology, astronomy, botany and chemistry. The most famous scientific text published, though, has to be Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. John Murray II and III expanded the catalog to include exploration and travel, subjects that were very popular with the Victorians. This period saw the publication of the works of Sir Walter Scott, a publishing phenomenon that made the house a huge amount of money.

I am indebted to the book entitled Ideas that Shaped the World; An Introduction to the John Murray Archive. Editor, David McClay. NLS Publications, 2007. A good museum should challenge, guide, entertain and above all, inform. Sadly, this museum does none of these things. Floreat libra!

http://www.nls.uk/