Cambridge University Library: projects undertaken in recent years

We were pleased to hear from 4 of our colleagues at the University Library who talked through some ongoing and recent projects that have taken place in the Library.

James Freeman began the afternoon with a presentation about a Wellcome funded project to make medieval medical recipes more accessible: ‘Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries’. 186 manuscripts from the University Library, Fitzwilliam Museum and 12 Cambridge Colleges will be conserved, catalogued and digitised during the 2 year project. It is also planned to transcribe many of the recipes.

The resulting output will give not only an understanding of historical cures, but also allow examination of patient-doctor interactions and provide information about the social situation. We all understand illness and the need to find a cure for ailments, so the material will be very relatable to a wide variety of people.

See curious cures blog post.

Sally Kent then talked about her work on records relating to Thomas Hobson undertaken during the period the University Library was closed during the Covid pandemic. Hobson is a familiar name to those in Cambridge: Hobson Street, Hobson’s Conduit; and to the wider world with the phrase ‘Hobson’s choice’.

unknown artist; Thomas Hobson (1545-1631), Celebrated Cambridge Carrier; Old Schools, University of Cambridge; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/thomas-hobson-15451631-celebrated-cambridge-carrier-195456

Hobson features in University records as businessman and benefactor in the period 1587-1631, and the project was designed to bring all the records relating to him together on the Cambridge University Digital Library. The focus of the project was on accessibility: many of the records he features are hard to read (the Registrary James Tabor, who was responsible for many of the University records of the period, had bad handwriting!) and the documents often used Latin legal phrases. Translations and transcriptions were created and catalogue descriptions enhanced, often adding indexes to catalogue records to facilitate searching.

The digitsation of the c. 300 images took only 3 days but the transcriptions and translations were very time consuming. The output provides a template that could be used for similar projects and helps give a way in to some of the less well used University records such as the Act Books and Depositions.

See Thomas Hobson pages on the Cambridge Digital Library.

This contrasted with a talk by John Wells on the Jardine Matheson Archive – a business archive held at the Library since 1935 when it was presented by the company, with subsequent transfers over the following years. Formed by William Jardine and James Matheson in 1832, the company was initially based at Canton, but transferred its main office to Hong Kong in 1844. In its early years the firm was heavily involved in the opium trade, but latterly handled a wide range of imports into China, such as coal, metals and machinery.

The initial deposit arrived just after the new Library had opened so there was space for this very large collection! It was not until after the Second World War that cataloguing began. Initially a manuscript index was created providing indexes of the correspondents and brief summaries of letters. The collection contains over 175,000 letters arranged by place of writing. This index is still used today and although such detail would most likely not be created in a modern catalogue the index provides a way into the collection that would not otherwise be possible.

After a gap, further work was done to create a classification scheme, list the bound volumes as well as carrying out repair work and microfilming in the 1980s.

Calendar box and index slip examples.

A further major deposit in the 1990s lead to more work, including the creation of a listing in cardbox software. This was then exported to MS access and then into Cantab before moving to ArchivesSpace. Work was also done on the Chinese documents, which include rare survivals of property deeds.

See Jardine Matheson Archive and catalogue on ArchiveSearch.

Lastly we heard from Susan Gordon who is working with the Stephen Hawking Archive that the University Library received in 2021 as part of the acceptance in lieu scheme.

Hawking was an iconic figure who spent most of his career in Cambridge. Papers from his office at Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) had begun to be transferred to the Betty and Gordon Moore Library (BGML) in 2001 with further deposits over the years. The BGML accepted all the material offered with no sorting. That material, along with what remained in Hawking’s office at DAMTP, was valued by Christie’s for the acceptance in lieu scheme and material was divided between the Science Museum (objects) and the University Library (‘paper archive’). It is a complicated provenance history!

The material covers the period 1948-2018, with varying amounts of material over time. There are some audio visual and digital materials, but the majority is paper: essays, correspondence, research notes, drafts, scripts, notebooks, photos, gifts and material given to him by his mother Isobel. Initial sorting has been completed and cataloguing is beginning!

See News Post for further details.

Featured image: one of Milton’s epitaphs, taken from Poems of Mr. John Milton: both English and Latin, compos’d at several times (1645) (University Library classmark: Y.11.45) 

“The Fear of Contagion: Plague, Race, and Face Masks in Modern China” by Dr Meng Zhang

The popularity of CAG Zoom meetings continued on Tuesday 25^th August 2020 when Dr Meng Zhang, a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the School of Health Humanities at Peking University, China gave a highly topical talk entitled “The Fear of Contagion: Plague, Race, and Face Masks in Modern China”. We were privileged that Dr Zhang shared his recent research in the history of medicine, which he has been undertaking at the Needham Research Institute as a visiting scholar.

Copper engraving of Doctor Schnabel [i.e Dr. Beak], a plague doctor in seventeenth-century Rome, with a satirical macaronic poem (‘Vos Creditis, als eine Fabel, / quod scribitur vom Doctor Schnabel’) in octosyllabic rhyming couplets.

Dr Zhang had adapted his extensive research to an audience with archival interests, illustrating his talk with many photographs, cartoons, advertisements and maps. He traced the history of masks back to the bird-like plague masks of the 16^th century, which held aromatic herbs in the beak to dispel vapours. In explaining that the use of masks depended on an understanding of how infection was transmitted, he showed us a ‘cholera-preventive costume’ dated 1832 which followed a belief that cholera was an air-borne disease. In the early 20^th century, modern bacteriologists introduced masks into plague prevention when they distinguished between Bubonic plague, which is spread from rats and fleas to humans, and Pneumonic plague, which is spread in moisture droplets from human to human. As early as 1900, a Japanese advertisement promoted masks (named ‘respirators’) as plague-prevention instruments. It was interesting to see a photograph of people wearing masks in Australia during an outbreak of Pneumonic plague in 1905. Dr Zhang explained that it was the severity of the Great Manchurian plague of 1910-11 in which 40,000 people died within three months that changed the public understanding of the effectiveness of wearing masks. This was the first time that masks were used by civilians as well as medical staff, and the International Plague Conference of 1911 emphasised the importance of masks as preventing transmission of the disease.

The politics and racial implications of wearing masks was extremely interesting. Arthur Stanley (an influential author on Chinese medicine and President of the Royal Asiatic Society China) promoted the wearing of masks in Shanghai in 1911, designing one which could be made at home, surprisingly similar to patterns distributed during the COVID-19 outbreak. It was sobering to learn that his interest was in protecting the Western residents of Shanghai from infected Chinese. Chinese scientists, including Yu Fengbin, used their influence to encourage the Chinese population to wear masks. As in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the scientific evidence for the effectiveness of masks was questioned in the 1920s, and they were not recommended by British and North American officials during the influenza epidemics.

Dr Zhang showed us that this emblem of modernity and hygiene has a complex history, intricately bound with an understanding of how disease is transmitted, part of the solution but not the only one, and fraught with issues of race, culture and class. It was a thought-provoking reminder that our past influences our present and what we think of as a new phenomenon has happened before. Questions raised in 2020 about the efficacy of masks, the proportion of the population wearing them, and the cultural or political messages conveyed in the colours chosen by the wearers all were aired in the early 20^th century.

When we put on our masks, our understanding of their historical importance will be enriched thanks to Dr Zhang.

Ros Grooms