Brunel University London’s special collections

February 1, 2016 / Jane Ronson

Archives Hub feature for February 2016

Photograph of Isambard Kingdom Brunel — Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Image from The Big Ship, Brunel’s Great Eastern – a pictorial history by Patrick Beaver

In the early 1980s two substantial bequests, the Clinker and Garnett collections, were left to Brunel University Library. Charles Clinker and David Garnett were two railway historians, and their collections went on to form the basis of what is now known collectively as the Transport History Collection. Over the years their bequests were joined by others, so the collection now includes books, railway maps, Bradshaw guides, timetables, journals and photographs. The maps include early Airey and Railway Clearing House maps, as well as Ordnance Survey maps and railway junction diagrams. Archival material includes Charles Clinker’s extensive notes and correspondence concerning his Register of closed stations and papers relating to his revision of MacDermot’s History of the Great Western Railway. We still collect relevant railway material, and the collection is particularly strong on the history of the Great Western Railway.

Photograph of chalk sample — Chalk, Channel Tunnel Archive

To complement the Transport History collection, the papers of the Channel Tunnel Company and the Channel Tunnel Association were acquired in 2003. These offer a fascinating insight into the history and politics of tunneling under the English Channel from the early nineteenth century to the opening of the Channel Tunnel as we know it today. This resource includes a mixture of archival and printed material, including letters, photographs, objects (including a lump of chalk!), books, reports, advertisements, maps, conference proceedings and tunnel and bridge proposals.

Also in the 1980s here at Brunel University, John Burnett, David Vincent and David Mayall were compiling their annotated bibliography, The autobiography of the working class (Harvest Press, 1984-1989). The bibliography includes descriptions and locations of unpublished manuscripts produced by working class people who lived in England, Scotland or Wales between 1790 and 1945. Many of these autobiographies are now kept in Special Collections and are an extremely popular resource, amongst History, English and Creative Writing students.

Photograph of a letter from the Blount archive — Letter, Blount archive

Many people are surprised to learn that we have very few collections relating to Isambard Kingdom Brunel himself. Those we do have include a collection of photographs relating to the publication of The Big Ship: Brunel’s Great Eastern – a pictorial history by Patrick Beaver, and the small Gilbert Blount archive. Blount was an English Catholic architect born in 1819 who received his earliest training as a civil engineer under Isambard Kingdom Brunel, for whom he worked as a superintendent of the Thames Tunnel works. The collection here covers his early career, including correspondence with the Brunel family. It was given to the University Library by Michael May, Blount’s grandson, in 1976 and so is one of our earliest acquisitions.

Some of our other collections were later acquisitions, and we have been developing a theme around equality and advocacy issues. These collections include the Dennis Brutus Archive. Dennis Brutus was a South African poet and human rights activist who spearheaded a successful campaign to ban apartheid South Africa from international sport competitions, including the Olympic games. Related collections include Celia Brackenridge’s research archive. Celia is a recently retired Brunel academic who donated her collection to Special Collections in order to preserve original sources and information about the development of child abuse and child protection research, advocacy and policy in the UK and overseas from the 1980s to 2000s.

We also look after a couple of collections on behalf of external organisations. These are the South Asian Diaspora Arts Archive, a wide-ranging group of small collections of South Asian literature, art, theatre, dance and music by British based artists and organisations. The archive covers five main areas: literature, visual arts, theatre, dance and music, dating between approximately 1947 and the present day. The Operational Research Society houses their library at Brunel. Operational Research looks at organisations’ operations and uses mathematical or computer models, or other analytical approaches, to find better ways of doing these operations. Their library includes over 1500 books on topics including operational research, statistics, management science, market research, logistics, industrial engineering and management accounting.

Photograph of the new reading room — New reading room

In 2015 Special Collections saw a big change as we moved into new reading room and storage facilities. This has improved access to our collections, as we now have a dedicated reading room space which can also be used for workshops by both internal and external groups, as well as improving and increasing the amount of storage we have.

You can find out more about our collections on our webpages, on our blog and Twitter feed (@BrunelSpecColl).

Katie Flanagan
Special Collections Librarian

Related:

Browse the collections of Brunel University London on the Archives Hub.

All images copyright Brunel University London and reproduced with the kind permission of the copyright holder.

Exhibitions at the Shakespeare Institute: seeing beyond the book shelves

February 3, 2015 / Jane Ronson

Archives Hub feature for February 2015

Image of poster for 2014 exhibition: Birth in Shakespeare's time — Poster for 2014 exhibition: Birth in Shakespeare’s time (to mark the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth)

The Shakespeare Institute Library holds monthly exhibitions which bring out lesser known aspects of our collections and especially our archive holdings.

Image of poster for 2014 exhibition: Where are we now? — Poster for 2014 exhibition: Where are we now? (Showcasing alumni careers)

These exhibitions were designed as a way to inform our users, predominantly our student body, of the breadth and depth of our holdings. As they have developed they have also enabled us to connect with the students and our local community in other ways: highlighting the careers and output of alumni of the Institute, promoting other collections in the local area, tying in with events and conferences, etc.

All library staff get involved in the researching, formatting, publicising and mounting of exhibitions so, as well as informing our users our staff get an excellent chance for learning more about the contents of the library and to work on areas of professional development – which, of course, can only benefit out users. The enthusiasm of the staff for the exhibitions has helped developed an exciting programme themes which we programme for the year. Work on these is scheduled so that there is a clear picture of when other collections need to be approached. As one is launched the work on the next begins.

Photo of exhibition on Henry V — Exhibition on Henry V (1913) commemorating the boys of King Edward VI School killed in WW1

These exhibitions have also given us the opportunity to collaborate with neighbouring collections. In November 2014 we held an exhibition on the boys of a King Edward VI School (Stratford-upon-Avon) who died in the First World War and performed in a production of Henry V in 1913, directed by Frank Benson.

Image of poster for 2014 exhibition: Shakespeare's Composers — Poster for 2014 exhibition: Shakespeare’s Composers

We’ve also worked extensively with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the Library of Birmingham, most recently on an exhibition on Shakespeare’s Composers for which we displayed a manuscript of Vaughan Williams incidental music to the afore mentioned Henry V (1913) and a manuscript of Granville Bantock’s music for a production of Macbeth performed at the Prince’s Theatre, London, 1926.

We also utilise the knowledge of our academic staff in order to develop exhibition ideas, themes and to check over content. When tied in to our curriculum, conference and symposia themes the exhibitions have also proved an ideal way of encouraging students to look beyond the reading list. By highlighting areas of direct relevance they also encourage visiting academics and students into the Library when they are attending events at the Institute. Our library users have really appreciated the opportunity to see beyond the book shelves.

Blogging about the exhibitions has also helped to market our library beyond the University.

Image of poster for 2014 exhibition: Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2 (Old Vic, 1945) — Poster for 2014 exhibition: Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2 (Old Vic, 1945)

In January 2015 as student came from America to consult the collections at the Shakespeare Institute, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and King Edward’s School after reading about the KES Henry V exhibition online. Now he has had access to the archives for this production he’s started writing a play as well as his MA dissertation. SIL blog address: http://silibrary1.wordpress.com/

Our programme of exhibitions is going from strength-to-strength and their success has been acknowledged by our department in Library Services with the funding of high quality display boards and a glass cabinet in order to facilitate more ambitious projects. This year we look forward to showing off our resources on some fascinating themes, including: Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare, Elizabethan Printing, Comic Book Shakespeare and Shakespeare and the Actor. We hope that they’ll continue to be informative and inspiring to our users!

Karin Brown, Shakespeare Institute Librarian

Shakespeare Institute Library: http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/edacs/departments/shakespeare/research/shakespeare-institute-library.aspx

Shakespeare Institute: http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/edacs/departments/shakespeare/index.aspx

Related:

Browse the collections of The Shakespeare Institute (University of Birmingham) on the Archives Hub:

Image of poster for 2014 exhibition: Foakes and Hawkes — Poster for 2014 exhibition: Foakes and Hawkes

All images copyright Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, and reproduced with the kind permission of the copyright holder.

James Phillips Kay-Shuttleworth – pioneering educational reformer

November 6, 2014 / Jane Ronson

Archives Hub feature for November 2014

Funded by a grant from the John Rylands Research Institute, we have recently catalogued the papers of celebrated Victorian educationist Sir James Phillips Kay-Shuttleworth (1804-1877), opening up the rich content of this archive to researchers across the world.

Kay-Shuttleworth was born James Kay in Rochdale, Lancashire, into a textile manufacturing family. After qualifying as a doctor, he went on to have a distinguished career. He was a pioneer of public health, an influential civil servant, and played a key part in nineteenth-century educational reform, laying the groundwork for today’s system of national school education.

Kay-Shuttleworth’s career

After training at Edinburgh University, James Kay returned to practise as a doctor in Manchester in 1827. The following year, he co-founded the Ardwick and Ancoats Dispensary, a charity based in one of the poorest areas of the city. Through this work, he witnessed the appalling living conditions of the urban poor, and became increasingly involved in public health initiatives.

In 1832, the year of the cholera epidemic, he published his seminal pamphlet, The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester. This predated by some 13 years Friedrich Engels’ better-known The Condition of the Working Class in England.

In 1835, he became an Assistant Poor Law Commissioner for Norfolk and Suffolk, a role which gave rise to his lifelong interest in education and his conviction that it held the key to society’s regeneration.

Image of pamphlet The Training of Pauper Children — The Training of Pauper Children (1839): Kay-Shuttleworth’s ideas about educational reform had their origins in his work with pauper children.

In 1839, he was appointed as Assistant Secretary to the Whig government’s Committee of the Privy Council on Education, which administered grants for public education, a post he held for nine years. He was a highly effective civil servant and much of what we take for granted today had its origins in his inspired reforms. In 1840, he established Battersea College, the first teacher training college in Britain. He created a school inspection system; he argued for state education; and he forced through regulations around how children were taught, the design of school buildings, the structure of the teaching profession and the ways in which schools were governed.

There are over 1,000 letters in Kay-Shuttleworth’s archive, reflecting his whole professional career. Correspondents include those involved in education and philanthropy like Matthew Arnold and Angela Burdett-Coutts, as well as many Liberal or Whig politicians, including Gladstone, W.E. Forster, Lord John Russell and John Bright. Most of his key publications are also represented.

Family ties

The archival material relating to Kay-Shuttleworth’s public life is complemented by extensive personal and family correspondence, providing a fascinating insight into family relationships, social and gender roles.

In 1842, he married Lady Janet Shuttleworth, the heiress of Gawthorpe Hall in Lancashire, and adopted her surname on marriage, becoming Kay-Shuttleworth. The couple had five children.

Photograph of Gawthorpe Hall — Gawthorpe Hall, Padiham, Lancashire. James Kay-Shuttleworth set his own stamp on his wife’s ancestral home, employing fashionable architect Charles Barry to undertake major renovations in the 1850s. Photograph courtesy of Lee Pilkington.

The letters between Kay-Shuttleworth and his son Ughtred James (1844-1939) show the closeness of their relationship. Ughtred inherited Gawthorpe Hall, and estate management is discussed in some detail, as is Ughtred’s early political career; he went on to become a successful Liberal MP.

Other relationships were less straightforward. Correspondence in the archive documents the young James Kay’s unsuccessful courtship of Helen Kennedy, daughter of a wealthy Manchester family. Later, he grew apart from his wife, Janet; in 1851 she moved permanently to the Continent, ultimately settling in Italy with her eldest child Janet, two youngest sons, and the family governess Rosa Poplawska.

Two of the Kay-Shuttleworth sons – Robert (known as Robin) and Stewart – caused ongoing anxiety to their father. Neither lived up to his expectations, either getting into debt or associating with people of whom their parents disapproved. Ultimately Kay-Shuttleworth arranged for Robin to travel to Australia and take up sheep-farming (although he proved a continued source of worry to his parents), and Stewart emigrated to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) to run a plantation.

Literary circles

Kay-Shuttleworth’s literary aspirations are less well-known than his public career. Always passionate about literature, after his retirement he published two historical novels set in his home county of Lancashire, Scarsdale (1860) and Ribblesdale (1870). Correspondence and reviews relating to these two novels are included in his archive, as is the manuscript of a third novel, Cromwell in the North, which remained unpublished at his death, and his unpublished autobiography.

Image of a page from Gaskell’s manuscript of The Life of Charlotte Brontë — A page from Gaskell’s manuscript of The Life of Charlotte Brontë, from the Library’s Elizabeth Gaskell Collection

His own literary endeavours failed to attract much critical acclaim, and his greatest contribution to literature was probably his role in bringing together Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell. The two writers first met in August 1850, during a visit to the summer home of the Kay-Shuttleworths in the Lake District. Gaskell was already fascinated by what she knew of Brontë and her isolated life in Haworth, which was so different from Gaskell’s own bustling home in Manchester. Despite their many differences, the women immediately struck up a friendship which lasted until Brontë’s premature death in 1855. Gaskell went on to write the celebrated biography of her friend.

Photograph of Elizabeth Gaskell — Elizabeth Gaskell, c. 1864. Photograph by Alexander McGlashon

Having been refused access to the manuscript of Brontë’s unpublished novel, The Professor, by her widower, the Rev. Arthur Nicholls, Gaskell recruited Kay Shuttleworth’s assistance. They visited the parsonage at Haworth together in July 1856. The forceful personality of Sir James overcame the misgivings of Nicholls. He and Gaskell came away not only with The Professor manuscript, but also the fragment of a novel called Emma which Brontë had been working on before her marriage, and the now-famous miniature ‘Gondal’ and ‘Angria’ manuscripts created by Brontë and her siblings.

Fran Baker (Archivist) and Jane Speller (Project Archivist), The University of Manchester Library

Find out more and explore the collection:

Papers of Sir James Phillips Kay-Shuttleworth – http://archiveshub.ac.uk/data/gb133-jks

Charles Darwin and the Beagle Collections in the University of Cambridge

July 6, 2009 / Lisa

Caricature of Darwin as a student riding on the back of a beetle, done by a Cambridge friend of his, Albert Way. CUL MS DAR 204:29. Provided by Cambridge University Library. copyright

Researchers’ Use of Academic Libraries

April 17, 2007 / Amanda Hill

A new report has been published by the Research Information Network (RIN) and the Consortium of Research Libraries (CURL): Researchers’ Use of Academic Libraries and their Services [pdf format]. This is based on information gathered from more than 2,000 UK researchers and 300 librarians. After being somewhat critical in an earlier post about the RIN’s Researchers and Discovery Services report, I feel honour-bound to record here that this report is much more comprehensive and well-written. Its authors are Sheridan Brown and Alma Swan of Key Perspectives Ltd. The report covers a number of areas, including the impact of digital services, problems of attracting enough funding, communication between library staff and researchers, and changing patterns of use.

Archive services within academic libraries get a number of mentions, with the interesting statistic that:

Archives are rated “very useful” by 50% of arts and humanities researchers and special collections by 46%. By comparison the figures for life science researchers are 10% and 8%.

Really? 10% of life scientists find archives “very useful”? Wow!

The report also noted that:

Most researchers use digital finding aids to locate both digital and print-based resources. Print finding aids are used by very few researchers, and these are mainly in the arts and humanities. This highlights the need for libraries to ensure that they provide online high-quality metadata for their holdings, and that they address cataloguing backlogs. Information resources that cannot be found electronically may well be overlooked, since few researchers will invest the time required to track down items that cannot be quickly be identified using digital finding aids.

And in the same vein:

Libraries have made significant efforts to optimise the visibility and usage of their archival or special collection material through digitisation programmes. Feedback from researchers is very positive, but many information resources that could be useful to researchers remain under-used currently, mainly because they exist only in hardcopy or are inadequately catalogued.

and:

…material that is digitised and for which there is easily-available and accurate metadata will be visible and usable by scholars. What remains in print may well be sought out, but probably only if it is digitally catalogued. Indeed, some researchers as well as librarians pointed out that more use would be made of library holdings overall

Undergraduate experience of university libraries

March 16, 2007 / Amanda Hill

A post by Brian Mathews (a librarian at the Georgia Institute of Technology) on his Ubiquitous Librarian blog compares undergraduate levels of library usage and satisfaction in UK and US universities. He looked at information from SCONUL and compared it with statistics from the US Association of Research Libraries (ARL). He notes that usage of libraries by undergraduates is much higher in the UK:

…86% indicate daily or weekly use, while the US is around 50%. When asked about using library web resources they were at 77% daily/weekly, while US was between 40-50%.

but that levels of satisfaction with space and resources are much lower and that our printed materials and journals are ‘barely adequate’. He expresses surprise at this, but it sounds like an issue of under-resourcing to me and probably won’t surprise staff working in UK universities. The difference in usage levels are interesting though – why are they so much higher here?

Irish blues

December 8, 2006 / Amanda Hill

The library of Trinity College Dublin was featured in Material World this week on BBC Radio 4. The programme discussed the use of Laser Raman spectroscopy, which is a non-destructive way of analysing the contents of the pigments in the illustrations of the 9th-century Book of Kells. It had originally been thought that the blues in the paintings were made from lapis lazuli, causing elaborate theories of very early trade links between Ireland and Afghanistan to be developed. The new technique showed that the blue was in fact created from woad, which is slightly less exotic and exciting, but much more easily explained. Keeper of manuscripts Bernard Meehan and keeper of conservation Susie Bioletti both featured in the programme, which is available online until next Thursday.

And we thought indexing for the Hub was hard…

September 15, 2006 / Amanda Hill

An accidental posting by Ellen Chapman (of the Archives & Manuscripts Department at the University of Hawaii at Manoa) to the US Archives and Archivists mailing list brightened my morning today. It was a link to an article by Philip O’Leary in the most recent edition of the Annals of Improbable Research about the complexities of indexing Celtic languages. The article is available in PDF format, and is definitely worth reading if you’ve been struggling with creating index terms in English.

Philip Pullman on libraries

March 29, 2006 / Amanda Hill

There was a good promotional article on libraries and librarians in The Times on Saturday. Though I don’t think Philip realises quite how much librarians are involved in bringing information online and improving the quality of online information (not to mention providing online access within libraries).

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