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.
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’.
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)
Cambridge Archivists Group 