Tag: features

Archival Word of the Week: Common-place book

/ Jane Stevenson

'Twas fate,' they'll say, 'a wayward fate/Your web of discord wove;/And while your tyrants join'd in hate,/You never join'd in loveBit of a misnomer this one: common-place books are not printed books, they’re manuscript, and they are not commonplace – each one is unique.That’s why so many appear in archival collections described on the Archives Hub.

From the 16th century and on into the 19th, many people preserved snippets of conversation and interesting excerpts from books, by writing them down in a notebook, collected in a ‘common place’ for future reference.

Perhaps this blog sometimes resembles a digital common-place book, especially in the way the ‘labels’ organise our posts by theme, much as commonplace books were often organised.

Illustration: excerpt from "Weep On, Weep On" by Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779-1852).
See also: Collections of the Month: Love letters.

Archival Word of the Week: Ephemera

/ Jane Stevenson

Tonite onlyGeneric name for published documents which are designed to perform a specific task at a specific time, and expected to be forgotten or thrown away after use – although they might be retained for a striking design or as a souvenir of an event. Ephemera include posters, tickets, and leaflets. Does this blog count as ephemera? I don’t know.

These temporary documents tend to be littered with ‘linguistic shifters’ – relative terms such as ‘tonight’ or ‘here’ – which always require contextual information to make any sense at all.

Link: ephemera
Link: Carried away

Map of the human heart?

/ Jane Stevenson

portolano chart
February is LGBT History Month. This was the theme for February’s  feature last year. While sketching out an early draft, I thought of Foucault‘s observation that homosexuals didn’t exist until the 19th century, and it occurred to me that this was true in the same way that Italians didn’t exist until the 19th century either. So maybe a portolano chart on the homepage… That one didn’t get past the draft stage.

image copyright Edinburgh University Library Special Collections Division.

EAD and TEA

/ Amanda Hill

Yesterday I was in London helping to run an ‘Introduction to EAD’ training day on behalf of the Data Standards Group and the London Region of the Society of Archivists. The last exercise I did with the delegates was to look at a randomly-selected set of resources based around EAD finding aids (courtesy of the EAD Implementor Listing maintained by the EAD Roundtable of the Society of American Archivists). One of the issues that came up was to do with labelling: both of parts of archival descriptions and of search options. Some of the sites are moving away from using the standard ISAD(G)/EAD headings for the descriptions, so that ‘Scope and Content’ becomes ‘Content’, which we agreed might be more meaningful for users of the services (although possibly confusing when comparing records from different sources). The search options and consequences of following links are sometimes not obvious without going ahead and testing them out, and the results displays were sometimes similarly confusing, even to a room full of archivists.

One of the sites we were looking at was that of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. We became distracted by its excellent ‘Today in History’ feature, which is rather like the Archives Hub’s ‘Collection of the Month’, but with the whole year’s supply of featured documents prepared in advance. The text for the last week’s worth is available through the Instiute’s Today in History RSS feed. Today’s document is entitled ‘Painkillers for Spirit Wrestlers‘, but it was the entry for 28th February that really woke everyone up at the end of the day.

On the way home I found myself looking at another label, this time on an electricity socket on the train:

Socket for Laptops and Mobile Phones only
It made me wonder why the railway company had felt compelled to attach the label. Had commuters been bringing their hairdryers on to the train in the mornings and blow-drying their hair? Or perhaps some entrepreneur had brought an electric kettle on to the train and started selling cups of tea to the other passengers. With a large cup of tea now costing

Have another slice

/ Jane Stevenson

Cookery class Glasgow Caledonian University‘s Carole McCallum supplied us with a couple of splendid photos for Collections of the Month once again. This photo here unfortunately didn’t make it into the final version, due simply to pressure of time…

Illustration: Cookery class at The Glasgow and West of Scotland College of Domestic Science (Incorporated), 1931. From The Records of The Queen’s College, Glasgow,part of Glasgow Caledonian University Institutional Archive. Photograph copyright © Glasgow Caledonian University Archives.

Review of 2006

/ Amanda Hill

Archives Hub Christmas CardIt’s been an eventful year for the Archives Hub, so I thought I’d take this chance to select a few highlights.

Development work has been proceeding fast on the Spokes software. John Harrison (over in Liverpool), Jane and Steve have put a lot of energy into this and we’re also grateful to all the ‘early adopters’ who’ve given us so much useful feedback. I’m sure that 2007 will see widespread uptake of this software, which gives institutions a low-cost way of presenting their EAD files online. ELGAR is the Spoke installation at the John Rylands University Library here in Manchester, which has not been live for long, but which is already appearing in search engine results for searches on the names of John Rylands collections.

The Hub’s collections of the month have been brilliant this year: I think my favourite one was June’s look at Romanies and Gypsiologists, which is a great example of the way that services like the Archives Hub can bring together related collections from a range of archive-holding institutions. Thanks to Paddy for all the work that he does on this aspect of the service.

We’ve had a couple of interruptions to the Archives Hub’s service this year: a major power cut to Manchester Computing’s building in May and a hard disk failure in October. Steve ensured that the interruptions were as brief as possible!

We are a small team here, with five of us sharing an office, but all three of the men became fathers during 2006, so best wishes to all the new families for their first Christmas.

In the last week a complimentary review of the Archives Hub and other MIMAS services was published in the Guardian newspaper (scroll down the article to ‘The MIMAS Touch’), which was an excellent way to end the year.

We wish all our users, contributors and colleagues a happy Christmas and a fulfilling 2007.

The image is of the 2006 Archives Hub Christmas card, in case you didn’t get a hard copy version. Snowflakes were made using the Make a Flake site.

A selection of features

/ Jane Stevenson

This December’s feature, Somerville and Ross, is the fourth time now that we’ve highlighted the description for their Manuscript Collection held at Queen’s University Belfast. It’s an interesting collection!

The yellow jersey though goes to John Ruskin, whose manuscript collection at The University of Manchester, The John Rylands University Library has made a total of six appearances in our features. Several collection descriptions appear three times, including those for papers of Robert Donat and Nikolaas Tinbergen, and for the records of Penguin Books.

Yule be amazed

/ Jane Stevenson

The Insect Circus: Hoxton Hall, December 19th-30th Those of you who enjoyed the Insects and Entomologists feature in March will be thrilled to see that the Insect Circus is appearing at Hoxton Hall, London N1, for the Christmas season this year, December 19th-30th.

Once one has encountered the magical world of the Insect Circus, how could one come away and forget about the Knife Thrower and the Brave Butterfly, or the Heroic Capt. Courage and his Vicious Vespa Wasps? Mr. Maroc the Beast Tamer, The Balancing Scarab Dungo, The Antics, Tallulah the Worm Charmer, Ephemera, Hat-trick Hattie or Fleur de Paree?

"A Unique Theatrical Extravaganza."