Category Archives: Archives and Modern Manuscripts

The man with many faces

19th century, Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Oxford University Archives, Spotlight, Uncategorized,

Is there anyone who doesn’t like to doodle? This is clearly not a modern trait. As ‘Doodle Day’ 2023 approaches in September, it seemed timely that we should come across some rather charming drawings by one of the examiners signing his name in two ‘Registers of Examinations’ held by the University Archives.

Frederick York Powell (1850-1904) was a law lecturer and examiner (he later became the Regius Professor of Modern History, 1894-1904) whose duties included lecturing and examining on political economy for the Pass School. The Pass School was introduced in the second half of the nineteenth century for those students who did not seek honours and offered the opportunity to study a different combination of subjects (see this previous blog for more details on the The Pass School)

Powell was an examiner for Pass School Group B (which included political economy) from 1877 until at least 1888, but he did not examine every term or every year. It is through his records of examinations that we meet his doodles.

Whenever Powell was the one to write the list of names of successful candidates, he bracketed together the names of the three (or sometimes four) examiners, who signed their names underneath, and drew a face as part of that bracket. Powell had extremely neat and legible handwriting, which was not always the case of examiners at this time.

Signatures of examiners for Pass School Group B, 1883 (from OUA/UR/3/1/27/1)

One of the fascinating things about Powell’s doodles is that whilst he consistently draws faces, they are all different. It’s tempting to wonder whether these drawings were actually caricatures of his fellow examiners or other academics in Oxford. The pictures are not always kind, sometimes showing exaggerated features:

Signatures of examiners for Pass School Group B, 1883 (from OUA/UR/3/1/27/1)

Signatures of examiners for Pass School Group B, 1883 (from OUA/UR/3/1/27/1)

It is important to remember that these registers were administrative records and were the official record kept by the University. As such, it’s all the more striking that Powell doodled so frequently – it wasn’t a momentary slip in an instance of absent-mindedness, but something he did consistently across several years. It is tempting to speculate as to whether his fellow examiners approved of such decorations or rather disapproved of his flamboyant style.

The second register featuring Powell’s doodles is the Register of Examinations for Modern History, 1872-1913, where he was an examiner from 1886 onwards. The examples in this volume are typical Powell style but the faces are different. The one below looks rather like Voldemort in Harry Potter!

Signatures of examiners for Modern History, 1887 (from OUA/UR/3/24/1)

Of all the faces drawn by Powell, of which these are only a selection, my favourite is shown below. The face looks rather elegant and distinguished with quite a head of hair:

Signatures of examiners for Modern History, 1888 (from OUA/UR/3/1/24/1)

Details of face drawn by Powell as examiner for Modern History, 1888 (from OUA/UR/3/1/24/1)

There are no other examples of examiners doodling or drawing like Powell in these two registers. If Powell was hoping to inject a little light heartedness or fun into a serious administrative record and perhaps encourage others to do the same, it does not look like this happened. It would be interesting to discover whether Powell continued to doodle once he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History in 1894. I could find no further examples of doodles by Powell from this date onwards within any records held by the University Archives.

According to his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (subscription required), Powell seems to have been a rather original yet disorganised character, not necessarily renowned for his scholarship but for his generosity of his time and sense of fun. I rather suspect that Powell may have continued to doodle no matter what position he held.

For other examples of drawings and doodles on records in the University Archives see Notes in the margin | Archives and Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library (ox.ac.uk)
For further information on Frederick York Powell, see his Wikipedia entry.

Uncovering Histories of Humanitarianism: the Aborigines’ Protection Society 1837-1866

19th century, Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Humanities, Modern, Spotlight, Uncategorized, , ,

By Zoë Laidlaw, University of Melbourne.

This is the fifth in a series of posts by researchers drawing on the archive of the Anti-Slavery Society, part of the Bodleian’s We Are Our History project.

The Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS) and the Anti-Slavery Society merged in 1909, formalising a history of engagement and occasional rivalry stretching back to the 1830s. The APS had long argued that concern for the welfare of Indigenous peoples in Britain’s empire was a logical extension of anti-slavery activism. But, while key personnel moved between the two societies, public support for the APS remained much more muted. Not least, this was because the APS struggled to explain its remit. In 1847, a decade after starting work, the APS acknowledged that many still asked ‘Who are the Aborigines, and who is their Friend?’ but struggled to address these basic questions:

“Government documents and other publications have given a currency and acceptation to the word Aborigines, which, however, is not so general as to render explanation unnecessary … When the overflowing or restless population of a civilized country quit their homes, and seek a country where a wider space is open before them, they often find the land imperfectly occupied by a race of men greatly differing from themselves. These are the so-called Aborigines of the country; and the interests of both races are involved in the character of the intercourse which ensues between them.”

As this comparative and pejorative definition of ‘Aborigines’ suggests, the APS was both Eurocentric and paternalistic. Its leaders recognised that British colonialism led to Indigenous peoples’ dispossession and exploitation, but they argued for the radical reform of colonialism rather than its eradication. In the utopian future they envisaged, colonisers and colonised alike would be more civilised, Indigenous rights recognised and protected and Britain’s empire more economically productive.

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Oxford University and Photography

19th century, 20th century, Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Modern, Oxford University Archives, Photography, Spotlight, Uncategorized,

In honour of World Photography Day, on 19 August, the University Archives blog looks at some of the photographs that we hold here and how the University used photography to record its people and its activities, and to present itself to the outside world.

Photographs are so commonplace today that it’s easy to forget that for many decades the taking of photographs was a much less frequent event. It often surprises users of the University Archives how few photographs we hold. But for many years, the University did not have its own photographic studio or photographers and so any photographs that were taken were done by outside firms at considerable expense. Photography was, as a result, used sparingly by the University, reserved for special occasions only, and did not form part of its day to day activities until the late 20th century.

The University took very few photographs of its students, for example. Where these were taken and where they have survived, they tend to be found in college archives rather than in the central University’s records. Colleges had a different, much closer, relationship with their students than the University, and their photographs span both formal teaching and informal social activities.

But despite the paucity of photographic material in the Archives, it is possible to identify trends and themes in the University’s relationship with photography. The examples below highlight just a few of these.

Photographs as gifts

Something of which we have a few examples of here is the commemorative album of photographs. From the late 1800s to the mid 20th century, there appears to have been a custom of presenting a very senior or long-standing member of staff on their retirement with an album of portrait photographs of their colleagues. It shows the precious and special nature of photographs in more distant decades.

One such case from a relatively early date is the gift given to Henry Stephens, University Marshal and Bellman, who retired in 1913, having been in post since 1888. In 1914, his colleagues (former and past) put together a beautifully-inscribed album comprising portrait photographs of every single one of the many University Proctors with whom he had worked over that period.

Title page from Henry Stephens' photo album

Title page of the commemorative album of photographs presented to Henry Stephens, Marshal and Bellman in 1914 (OUA/PR/1/25/1)

Stephens worked with fifty Proctors during his 25-year career. Each academic year saw the admission of two new Proctors (Senior and Junior) and each page of the album contains, in a variety of styles, their photographic portraits.

Page showing proctors for 1888-9

Photographs of the Proctors of 1888-89 from the album presented to Henry Stephens in 1914 (OUA/PR/1/25/1)

It must have been an expensive and time-consuming gift to create. At what point it was returned to the University by Henry Stephens or his family, we don’t know, but it made its way back to the Proctors’ Office and was transferred to the Archives along with their records over 50 years later.

Departmental posterity

Another developing use of photography, from the late nineteenth century onwards, was the custom adopted by certain University departments of taking photographs of their students: each year’s intake for example, or those attending summer schools or conferences.

One department which was very careful to record its activities in this way was the Department of Continuing Education, the adult education arm of the University. Its predecessor, the Delegacy for the Extension of Teaching beyond the limits of the University (or Extension Delegacy for short), was a pioneer in the field of adult education from its origins in 1878 and it appears there was already an awareness, in its early days, of how ground-breaking its work was. It wasn’t long before it was photographing its activities for posterity, one very early example of which was the biennial Summer Meeting.

The Summer Meeting first took place at Balliol College, Oxford, in August 1888. It was a summer school open to all extension students of Oxford, Cambridge and London Universities. Students stayed in lodgings in Oxford and attended a full programme of lectures and classes. A significant development in the availability of university-level education to adults, the Summer Meetings attracted students from all around the UK.

An album of photographs of the early Summer Meetings survives in the University Archives, including its earliest photograph which is identified as the very first Summer Meeting of 1888.

Photo of First Summer Meeting

The first Summer Meeting at Oxford, 1888 (from OUA/CE/5/1)

As the photograph shows, the majority of the students were women. The Extension Delegacy was one of the first University departments to offer a university-level education to women, long before they were allowed to matriculate as full students. The Summer Meeting was only one of a number of pioneering activities which the Delegacy undertook and it led to the formation of other important adult education movements such as the Workers Educational Association (WEA), launched at the Summer Meeting of 1903.

Letting the outside in

A key way in which the University began to use photography in the twentieth century was to present itself to the world outside Oxford. Most of the photographic prints which we have in the University Archives here were not taken by the University itself, but by the press. It appears that from the early 1950s onwards the University began to be asked more and more by the national and local press for its permission to photograph its activities and events.

Generally-speaking at this time, the University was reluctant to let the press in and many of the requests it received from photographers were refused. Although aware that the outside world was interested in what went on at Oxford, the University resisted the intrusion; self-promotion, in particular, was seen as anathema to many within it. On the rare occasions when it did agree to filming or photography by outside agencies, the University demanded a high level of editorial control over the images produced.

One significant example of this was a visit in the early 1950s from the Central Office of Information (COI). The COI was, from 1946 to 2011, the UK government’s marketing and communications agency. It produced public information materials (such as leaflets, posters and short films) on a range of public issues such as life in Britain, health and education, often for the promotion of Britain overseas. In April 1952, the COI’s Photographs Division wrote to the University asking to create a ‘picture set’ illustrating life at Oxford University intended for overseas distribution. The University agreed and the COI’s photographers visited in May that year.

The Archives contains a set of about 25 photographs taken by the COI with the working title ‘The University of Oxford – Life in Britain’s Oldest Seat of Learning’. They show a carefully-curated view of student life in Oxford including shots of the city, undergraduates in colleges, libraries and tutorials; a degree ceremony; the Proctors; punting and other sports; and a debate in the Union. These were sent to the University for its approval and each bears a descriptive text on the back written by the COI. Some of these have been heavily annotated and corrected by an unnamed University official.

Photo of the High Street by Central Office of Information

View of ‘The High’, taken by the Central Office of Information. Undated (1952) (from OUA/VC/3/5)

It appears that the project then led to an even more ‘intrusive’ request from the COI just four years later. The COI wrote again to the University in 1956 asking, this time, to create a short film about it. The Foreign Office and Commonwealth Relations Office had asked the COI to produce a film for the Overseas Information Services about life in a British university and Oxford was chosen. The University agreed to co-operate officially, despite opposition from some senior. The COI’s appointed production company, Greenpark Productions, visited in 1957 to take more photographs and to film.

From the surviving correspondence about this, it appears that the COI’s request was the only one of several received at the time with which the University was prepared to co-operate. And it continued to demand a high level of control over the finished product. The COI was obliged to send the University a copy of the proposed voiceover script for the film which it edited enormously. The finished film, entitled ‘Oxford’, which ran for 15 minutes, was released in 1958 and shown in a special screening in the city at the Ritz Cinema.

More requests to photograph and film at Oxford followed and the University appears to have been rather less dismissive of these in the years after the COI film. As photographs began to give way to the filming of University events, the University started taking over from ad hoc visits from the outside press, recording its own events and managing its public face itself. The University not only became more aware of the financial advantages of doing this, it was also part of a realisation in the late 1960s that it needed to exercise more control over its brand and manage its relations with the outside world on its own terms, rather than through the lens of the external press.

Photography and filming of University activities and events is now run by the University’s Educational Media team (formerly the Media Production Unit). Not only do they produce content but they also provide advice and expertise to others creating their own University-related content.

The print archive of the Central Office of Information is held by the British Library at Central Office of Information Archive – The British Library (bl.uk)

Its business records are held by the UK National Archives and the films they produced are preserved and made available by the British Film Institute at BFI National Archive | BFI

Further information about the history of the Department for Continuing Education and its predecessors, including the Summer Meetings, can be found at The history of continuing education at Oxford | Oxford University Department for Continuing Education

 

Notice to readers: Admissions office closure

21st century, Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Asian and Middle Eastern Collections, Event, Humanities, Medical, Modern, Sciences, Social Sciences

Exclamation mark graphicDue to staff illness, the  Bodleian Library’s Admissions Office, based in the Weston Library, will remain closed today, 15 August, but will reopen from Wednesday 16 August (with a brief closure from 12:00-13:00 on Friday 18 August).

We offer sincere apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.

New catalogue: the Archive of Joanna Trollope

20th century, 21st century, Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Cataloguing, Humanities, Modern, Newly available (2023), , ,
Photograph of Joanna Trollope.

Joanna Trollope. Reproduced with kind permission of www.barkerevans.com

The archive of the novelist and Oxford alumna Joanna Trollope, generously donated to the Bodleian by Joanna herself between 2014 and 2021, has now been catalogued and is available to view at the Weston Library.

A prolific author of numerous best-sellers, Joanna first started out writing historical fiction in the 1970s whilst working as an English teacher. By 1980 – the year her novel Parson Harding’s Daughter was awarded the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by the Romantic Novelists’ Association – she had become a full-time author. Her only non-fiction title, Britannia’s Daughters, was published in 1983.

During the 1980s, Joanna’s writing evolved to contemporary fiction and The Rector’s Wife (1991) was her first number one bestseller. Her works have been translated into over twenty different languages as well as being adapted for audiobook, television, radio, and theatre. In 2010, Joanna was awarded the Romantic Novelists’ Association Lifetime Achievement Award. She was made an OBE in 1996 for services to charity and a CBE in 2019 for services to literature.

Manuscript draft of Parson Harding’s Daughter (1979), Oxford, Bodleian Libraries,                 MS. 9515/29. Reproduced with kind permission of Joanna Trollope.

The undoubted highlights of the collection are the neatly-tied handwritten manuscript drafts of Joanna’s novels, ranging from her earliest work Eliza Stanhope (first published in 1978) right up to An Unsuitable Match (published in 2018). The collection also includes several notebooks demonstrating Joanna’s careful background research into the topics and places featured in her work, covering anything from football matches to inheritance tax. They bely the preconception that her characters are consigned to cosy, country lives but instead deal with some of the tougher elements of life – bereavement, adoption, sexuality, and self-harm. They also show how much Joanna’s work mirrors life in the 1990s and 2000s and in years to come the collection will be of much interest to any one researching (to paraphrase Joanna’s family’s famous Victorian author ) ‘the way we lived then’.

-Rachael Marsay

Reader notice: Library catalogue downtime

21st century, Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Asian and Middle Eastern Collections, Event, Humanities, Medical, Modern, Sciences, Social Sciences

Requesting items from closed stacks

Exclamation mark graphicBetween 16 – 23 August, you will not be able to use SOLO to request items from closed stacks or offsite storage. We strongly recommend that you place any requests through SOLO by 5pm on 11 August.

Libraries will extend item due dates, and items will not be returned to the stacks during the upgrade period.

We will be running a limited service to handle urgent stack requests placed between 16 – 23 August. To place a request, email book.fetch@bodleian.ox.ac.uk. You will only be able to pick up ordered items from the Bodleian Old Library or Weston Library. Please allow 48 hours for your item to be delivered.

 

Orders for manuscript and archival material will be unaffected. Rare Books held onsite can be ordered by emailing specialcollections.bookings@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

Please email specialcollections.enquiries@bodleian.ox.ac.uk for further assistance.

The Why and How of Digital Archiving

21st century, Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Humanities, Medical, Modern, Sciences, Social Sciences, Web Archives

Guest post by Matthew Bell, Summer intern in the Modern Archives & Manuscripts Department

If you have ever wondered how future historians will reconstruct and analyse our present society, you may well have envisioned scholars wading through stacks of printed Tweets, Facebook messages and online quizzes, discussing the relevance of, for instance, GIFs sent on the comment section of a particular politician’s announcement of their candidacy, or what different E-Mail autoreplies reveal about communication in the 2010s. The source material for the researcher of this period must, after all, comprise overwhelmingly of internet material; the platform for our communication, the source of our news, the medium on which we work. To take but one example, Ofcom’s report on UK consumption of news from 2022 identifies that “The differences between platforms used across age groups are striking; younger age groups continue to be more likely to use the internet and social media for news, whereas their older counterparts favour print, radio and TV”. As this generation grows up to take the positions of power in our country, it is clear that in seeking to understand the cultural background from which they emerged, a reliance on storing solely physical newspapers will be insufficient. An accurate picture of Britain today would only be possible by careful digital archaeology, sifting through sediments of hyperlinks and screenshots.

This month, through the Oxford University Summer Internship Programme, I was incredibly fortunate to work as an intern in the Bodleian Libraries Web Archive (BLWA) for four weeks, at the cutting edge of digital archiving. One of the first things that became clear speaking to those working in the BLWA is that the world wide web as a source of research material as described above is by no means a foregone conclusion. The perception of the internet as a stable collection that will remain as it is without care and upkeep is a fallacy: websites are taken down, hyperlinks stop working or redirect somewhere else, social media accounts get removed, and companies go bankrupt and stop maintaining their online presence. Digital archiving can feel like a race against time, a push to capture the websites that people use today whilst we still can; without the constant work of web archivists, there is nothing to ensure that the online resources we use will still be available even decades down the line for researchers to consult.

Fortunately, the BLWA is far from alone in this endeavor. Perhaps the most ambitious contemporary web archive is the Internet Archive; from 1996 this archive has formed a collection of billions of websites, and states as its task the humble aim of providing “Universal Access to all Knowledge”, seeking to capture the entire internet. Other archives have a slightly more defined scope, such as the UK Web Archive, although even here the task is still an enormous one, of collecting “all UK websites at least once per year.” Because of the scale of online material that is published every day, whether or not a site has been archived by either the Internet Archive or the UK Web Archive has relevance for whether the Bodleian chooses to archive it; to this extent the world of digital archiving represents cooperation on an international scale.

One aspect of these web archives that struck me during my time here is the conscious effort made by many to place the power of web archiving in the hands of anyone with access to a computer. The Internet Archive, for instance, allows any users with a free account to add content to the archive. Furthermore, one of my responsibilities as intern was a research project into the viability of a programme named Webrecorder for capturing more complex sites such as social medias, and democratization of web archiving seems to be the key purpose of the programme. On their website, which offers free browser-based web archiving tools, the title of the company stands above the powerful rallying call “Web archiving for all!” Whilst the programme currently remains difficult to navigate without a certain level of coding knowledge, and never quite worked as expected during my research, its potential for expanding the responsibility of archiving is certainly exciting. As historians increasingly seek to understand the lives of those whose records have not generally made it into archive collections, one can see as particularly noble the desire to put secure archiving into the hands of people as well as institutions.

The “why” of Digital Archiving, then, seems clear, but what about the “how”? Before going into my main responsibilities this month, some clarification of terminology is necessary.

Capture – This refers to the Bodleian’s copy of a website, a snapshot of it at a particular moment in time which can be navigated exactly like the original.

Live Site – The website as it is available to users on the internet, as opposed to the capture.

Crawl – The process by which a website is captured, as the computer program “crawls” through the live site, clicking on all the links, copying all of the text and photographs, and gathering all of this together into a capture.

Crawl Frequency – The frequency with which a particular website is captured by the Bodleian, determined by a series of criteria including the regularity of the website’s updates.

Archive-It – The website used by the Bodleian to run these crawls, and which stores the captured websites.

Brozzler – A particularly detailed crawl, taking more time but better for dynamic or complicated sites such as social medias. Brozzlers are used for Twitter accounts, for instance. Crawls which are not brozzlers are known as standard crawls and use Heritrix software.

Data Budget – The allocated quantity of data the Bodleian libraries purchase to use on captures, meaning a necessary selectivity as to what is and is not captured.

Quality Assurance (QA) – A huge part of the work of digital archiving, the process by which a capture is compared with the live site and scrutinized for any potential problems in the way it has copied the website, which are then “patched” (fixed). These generally include missing images, stylesheets, or subpages.

Seed – The term for a website which is being captured.

Permission E-Mails – Due to the copyright regulations around web archiving, the BLWA requires permission from the owners of websites before archiving; this can be a particularly complicated task due to the difficulty of finding contact information for many websites, as well as language barriers.

My responsibilities during my internship were diverse, and my day to day work was generally split between quality assurance, setting off crawls, and sending or drafting permission e-mails. Alongside this I was not only carrying out research into Webrecorder, but also contributing to a report re-assessing the crawl frequency of several of our seeds. The work I have done this month has been not only incredibly satisfying (when the computer programme works and you are able to patch a PDF during QA of a website it makes one disproportionately happy), but rewarding. One missing image or hyperlink at a time, digital archivists are driving the careful maintenance of a particularly fragile medium, but one which is vital for the analysis of everything we are living through today.

‘Probable Prospects’: Richard Hill and Black Activism in The Archive of the Anti-Slavery Society

19th century, Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Humanities, Modern, Spotlight, Uncategorized, , , ,

By Olivia Carpenter, Department of English and Related Literature, University of York.

This is the fourth in a series of posts by researchers drawing on the archive of the Anti-Slavery Society, part of the Bodleian’s We Are Our History project.

Afro-British writer, politician, and activist Richard Hill was born in 1796. Hill was born in Jamaica but spent much of his youth in England, where some of his earliest efforts on behalf of Abolitionism and the rights of free Black people in the British Empire took place when he agreed to act as an agent of the London Anti-Slavery Society in 1830. A series of several letters exchanged between Hill and the Society’s President and Secretary are among the Bodleian’s collection of the Society’s papers. These letters, exchanged over a period of just over two years, allow us to trace Hill’s experience of traveling to Haiti on behalf of the Society. The Society sent Hill to ascertain the condition of this first and only new Republic created by formerly enslaved people who had fought and won a war to become a free, independent nation. Reading Hill’s correspondence with Thomas Pringle can help us gain a greater understanding of Black British anti-slavery activism in the early nineteenth century and what Haiti’s unique sociopolitical history meant for Black organizers like Hill, who hoped to establish Black freedom in the British Empire. The letters also give us unique insight into the day-to-day successes and struggles of a nineteenth-century Afro-British activist as Hill worked to earn a living in precarious circumstances while remaining committed to developing his career.

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Photographer Helen Muspratt’s archive is now available

20th century, Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Humanities, Modern, Newly available (2023), Photography, Women, , , , ,
A bride in a flower-decorated Oxford punt, being steered by the groom or a groomsman, c. 1960s

The punting bride, a wedding photograph by Helen Muspratt, Ramsey & Muspratt, c. 1960s, ©Bodleian Libraries

The archive of the portrait and documentary photographer Helen Muspratt is now catalogued and available in the Weston Library.

Helen Muspratt (1907-2001) first made her name as a skilled, experimental portrait and documentary photographer in the 1930s.

Muspratt was introduced to Lettice Ramsey (1898-1985) by their mutual friend Fra Newbery, the retired head of the Glasgow School of Art. Lettice Ramsey was a Cambridge graduate and a widowed young mother of two who had excellent contacts in Cambridge and in the winter of 1932, Muspratt joined her in Cambridge to create the studio Ramsey & Muspratt. They soon expanded into Oxford. Some of those Ramsey & Muspratt photographed during this period were the intellectual and left-wing luminaries of the day, including Virginia Woolf, C.P. Snow, Dorothy Hodgkin, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt, as well as Julian Bell, who was Lettice Ramsey’s lover. Muspratt’s photographs in the 1930s are notable for her experimental approach, including the use of double negatives and solarisation, inspired by the photographer Man Ray.

Muspratt met her husband, Oxford University graduate and Communist Party organiser Jack Dunman (d. 1973) in Cambridge where he was working for the railway. In 1936 Muspratt went on a tour of the Soviet Union with a group organised by the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR, and her photographs from the trip were used in lecture tours to drum up support for the Soviet Union during World War II. With a commission from the Left Book Club in 1937, Muspratt did her last major documentary series, producing haunting photographs of out-of-work miners and labourers in South Wales and Liverpool, and she also joined the Communist Party. Ramsey and Muspratt’s business partnership was formally dissolved at the end of February 1945, but their respective Cambridge and Oxford studios retained the name Ramsey & Muspratt, and the pair remained friends.

From World War II onwards, while her husband worked as a full-time, rural Communist Party organiser and editor of The Country Standard, Helen Muspratt supported her family as a hardworking studio photographer. From her studio on Cornmarket Street in Oxford she staged lively portraits of everyone from babies to brides to new graduates. Muspratt also loved to photograph architecture, and she photographed Oxford and its environs for John Betjeman. She did a final documentary series when she was commissioned in 1946 by a group of campaigning doctors to photograph elderly patients in the Victorian workhouse-like conditions of the Poor House near Wantage.

Her archive, which mainly comprises prints and negatives, is a wonderful window into Oxford and its environs in the latter half of the twentieth century, as well as pioneering experimental photography of the 1930s. It also includes correspondence with her husband and her parents that are relevant to British Communist Party and left-wing political history. Muspratt’s work, including her 1930s experimental portraiture, is celebrated in the book Face: Shape and Angle by her daughter Jessica Sutcliffe (available from the Bodleian shop).

A web of meaningful links. Archived websites in and as special collections

20th century, 21st century, Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Humanities, Photography, , , ,

As some of you may know, since 2011 the Bodleian has been archiving websites, which are collected in the Bodleian Libraries Web Archive (BLWA) and made publicly accessible through the platform Archive-it. BLWA is thematically organised into seven collections: Arts and Humanities; Social Sciences; Science, Technology and Medicine; International; Oxford University Colleges; Oxford Student Societies and Oxford GLAM. As their names already suggest, much of the online content we collect relates to Oxford University and seeks to provide a snapshot of its intellectual, cultural and academic life as well as to document the University’s main administrative functions.

From the very beginning, the BLWA collection has also been regarded as a complement to and reflection of the Bodleian’s analogue special collections that users can consult in the reading rooms. For example, there are multiple meaningful links between our BLWA Arts & Humanities collection and the Bodleian’s Modern Archives & Manuscripts. By teasing out the connections between them, I hope to offer some concrete examples of how archived websites can be valuable to historical and cultural research and explore some of the reasons why the BLWA can be seen as integral to the Bodleian Special Collections.

Collecting author appreciation society websites…

In BLWA, you can find websites of societies dedicated to the study of famous authors whose papers are kept at the Bodleian (partly or in full), such as T.S. Eliot, J. R.R. Tolkien and Evelyn Waugh. An example from this category is The Philip Larkin Society website, which complements the holdings of correspondence to and from the poet and librarian Philip Larkin (1922-1985) held at the Bodleian.

The website provides helpful information to anyone with a general or academic interest in Larkin, as it lists talks and events about the poet as well as relevant publications and online resources promoted by the Society.

A 2018 capture in BLWA of a webpage from the Larkin Society website, describing a public art project celebrating Larkin’s famous poem ‘Toads’

The value of the archived version of The Philip Larkin Society website may not be immediately apparent now, when the live site is still active. However, in decades from now, this website may well become a primary source that offers a window onto how early 21st century society engaged with English poetry and disseminated research about the topic through media and formats distinctive of our time, such as online reviews, podcasts and blog posts.

…and social media accounts

Alongside websites, BLWA has been actively collecting Twitter accounts pertaining to authors and artists, such as The Barbara Pym Society Twitter presence.

A 2019 capture in BLWA of the Barbara Pym Society Twitter account

The Twitter feed preserves the memory of ephemeral, but meaningful encounters and forms of engagement with the works of English novelist Barbara Pym (1913-1980). The experience of consulting the Archive of English Novelist Barbara Pym in the Weston Reading rooms is enriched by the possibility of reading through the posts on the Pym Twitter account. From talks about Pym’s work to quotes in newspaper articles mentioning the author, the Twitter feed is not only a collection of news and information about Barbara Pym’s work, but also a representation of the lively network of individuals engaging with her writings, both in academic and broader circles.

Online presence of contemporary artists

Building an online presence through social media and a personal website is a promotional strategy that many contemporary artists and authors have adopted. A good example of this is the website of the British photographer and documentarist Daniel Meadows (b. 1952). In 2019, BLWA started taking regular captures of Meadows’ website, Photobus, following the acquisition of Meadows’ Archive a year earlier. This hybrid archive (which includes both analogue and born-digital items) has since been catalogued and its finding aid is available here.

The captures taken of Meadows’ Photobus site provide us with contextual information on the photographic series described in the finding aid of Meadows’ Archive at the Bodleian. Through the website, we get an account of Meadows’ life in his own words, we learn about the exhibitions where Meadows’ photographs were displayed and find out about the books in which his work has been published.

If you were to search for Daniel Meadows’ website on the live web right now, you would find that the website is still active, but looks rather different in content and layout from the captures archived in the BLWA between 2019 and March 2023.

Comparison of the ‘About’ page on Daniel Meadows’ website: the BLWA capture from January 2023 (top), and the capture from May 2023 (bottom)

Furthermore, the URL has changed from Photobus to the name of the photographer himself. Were it not for the version of the website archived in BLWA, the old content and structure of the site would not be as easily accessible. The website has also changed in scope, as it now provides us with a comprehensive digital repository of Meadows’ photographic series.

Comparing Meadows’ website in BLWA with his archive at the Bodleian, we can see an interesting series of correspondences between digital and analogue realm, and between digital and physical archives. For example, the archived version of Meadows’ website Photobus is included as a link in the section of the finding aid for the Meadows archive devoted to ‘related materials’. In turn, the updated, 2023 version of Meadows’ site reflects in some respects the organisation and structure of an archive: his oeuvre is tidily arranged into series, each accompanied by a description and digital images of the photographs to match their arrangement in the physical archive at the Bodleian. Daniel Meadows’ new website exemplifies how, through the combination of metadata and high-resolution images, websites can become a powerful interface through which an archive is discovered and its contents accessed in ways that complement and enhance the experience of working through an archival box in a reading room.

Archived websites as a link to tomorrow’s archives

Web archives are a relatively recent phenomenon, so the uses of a collection of archived websites like the BLWA are only gradually beginning to emerge. The historical, cultural and evidential value of web archives is still overlooked, or perhaps just not yet fully exploited. It is only a matter of time before social media and websites like those kept in BLWA will be seen as an increasingly important resource on the cultural significance of 20th and 21st century authors and artists and the reception of their work. After all, for today’s authors and artists, social media and websites are an important vehicle for the dissemination of news about their work, of their opinions and creativity. As such, their online presence may be different in form, but similar in purpose and significance to the letters, pamphlets, alba amicorum and diaries that one would consult to research the social interactions, ideas, and activities of a humanist scholar.

One of the exciting aspects of working with digital archives is the proactive nature of our collecting practice. Curators of digital collections need to identify, select and collect relevant content before it disappears or decay – threats to which websites and social media are vulnerable. Through the choices we make today of content to archive, we are ultimately shaping the digital archives that will be accessible decades from now.

We are happy to consider suggestions from our users about websites that could be suitable additions to the collection. If you are curious to explore the BLWA collection further, you can find it here.  The online nomination form can be found at this link. So don’t just follow the links – help us save them!