Category Archives: 21st century

The catalogue of the archive of Averil Cameron –available soon!

20th century, 21st century, Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Humanities, Modern, Newly available (2023), Women

Averil Cameron is a historian of late antiquity, classics and Byzantine studies. She was professor of Late Antique and Byzantine History at King’s College London and Warden of Keble College, Oxford, from 1994 to 2010.

She has been associated with various academic societies including as founding director of the Centre for Hellenic Studies at King’s College London. Since 2018 she has been President of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies.

She has published several works, including; Agathias (1970), History as Text (1989) and The Byzantines (2006). The archive comprises papers and correspondence mainly relating to Cameron’s academic work. This includes books, published and unpublished lectures, and articles.

This collection will be available soon.

Catalogue of the archive of Averil Cameron

Three books of Averil Cameron

The catalogue of the archive of Dr Emilie Savage-Smith – available soon!

20th century, 21st century, Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Modern, Newly available (2023), Sciences, Women,

Dr Emilie Savage-Smith is a historian of science specialising in Islamic celestial globes. Islamic celestial globes are spherical maps of the sky that give the viewer a ‘God’s’ eye view of the stars and constellations, with Earth at the centre, originating from lands where Islam was the predominant religion.

Celestial globe

Savage-Smith graduated from DePauw University in 1962 and completed her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1969. She was professor of the History of Islamic Science in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford from 2006 to 2019, and a fellow and archivist of St Cross College, Oxford, 2004-2021.

She has authored several books, including Islamicate Celestial Globes: Their History, Construction and Use, 1985. She was named a fellow of the British Academy, 2010, and the Medieval Academy of America, 2020.

Celestial globe

This collection is the largest research archive of material on Islamic celestial globes in the world, with over two-hundred globes and instruments dating back to 1080 featured. It comprises her papers, photographs and drawings collected over the course of her career. Her collection of objects was donated to the History of Science Museum.

This collection will be available soon.

Catalogue of the archive of Dr Emilie Savage-Smith

Science in the Islamic World | History of Science Museum

 

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.

The International Internet Preservation Consortium Web Archiving Conference: Thoughts and Takeaways

21st century, Event, Humanities, Modern, Social Sciences, Web Archives

A couple months ago, thanks to the generous support of the IIPC student bursary, I had the pleasure of attending the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) web archiving conference in Hilversum, The Netherlands. The conference took place in The Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision, adding gravitas and rainbow colour to each of the talks and panels.

The Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision. Photo taken by Olga Holownia.

What I was struck by most throughout the conference was the extremely up-to-date ideas and topics of the panel. While typical archiving usually deals with history that happened decades or centuries ago, web archiving requires fast-paced decisions and actions to preserve contemporary material as it is being produced. The web is a dynamic, flexible, constantly changing entity. Content is often deleted or frequently buried under the constant barrage of new content creation. Therefore, web archivists must stay in the know and up to date in order keep up with the arms race between web technology and archiving resources.

For instance, right from the beginning, the opening keynote speech discussed the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine. Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat, the independent investigative collective focused on producing open source research, discussed the role of digital metadata and digital preservation techniques in the fight against disinformation. Using the example of Russian spread propaganda about the war in Ukraine, Higgins demonstrated that archived versions of sites and videos, and their associated metadata, can help to debunk intentionally spread misinformation depicting the Ukrainian army in a bad light. For instance, geolocation metadata has been used to prove that multiple videos supposedly showing the Ukrainian army threatening and killing innocent civilians, were actually staged and filmed behind the Russian frontlines. The notion that web archives are not just preserving modern culture and history, but also aiding in the fight against harmful disinformation, is quite heartening.

A similarly current topic of conversation was the potential use of artificial intelligence (AI) in web archives. Given the hot topic that AI is, it’s prevalence at the web archiving conference was well received. The quality assurance process for web archiving, which can be arduous and time consuming, was mentioned as a potential use-case for AI. Checking every subpage of an archived site against the live site is impossible given time and resource constraints. However, if AI could be used to compare screenshots of the live site to the captured version, even without actually going in and patching the issues, just knowing where the issues are would save considerable time. Additionally, AI could be used to fill gaps in collections. It is hard to know what you do not know. In particular, the Bodleian has a collection aimed at preserving the events and experiences of peopled affected by the war in Ukraine. Given our web archiving team’s lack of Ukrainian and Russian language skills, it can be hard to know what sites to include in the collection and what not to. Thus, having AI generate a list of sites deemed culturally relevant to the conflict could help fill the gaps in this collection that we were not even aware of.

Social media archiving was also a significant subject discussed at the conference. Despite the large part that social media plays in our lives and culture, it can be very challenging to capture. For example, the Heritrix crawler, the most commonly used web crawler in web archiving, is blocked by Facebook and Instagram. Additionally, while Twitter technically remains capturable, much of the dynamic content contained in posts (i.e. videos, gifs, links to outside content) can’t be replayed in archived versions. Discussions of collaborations between social media companies and archivists were heralded as a necessity and something that needs to happen soon. In the meantime, talk of web archiving tools that may be best suited for dealing with social media captures included Webrecorder and other tools that mimic how a user would navigate a website in order to create a high-fidelity capture that includes dynamic content.

Between discussions of the role of web archives in halting the spread of disinformation, the use of barely understood tools like generative AI, and potential techniques to get around stumbling blocks within the field of social media archiving, the conference discussions got all attendees excited to begin further exploration of web preservation. The internet is the main resource through which we communicate, disseminate knowledge, and create modern history. Therefore, the pursuit of preserving such history is necessary and integral to the field of archiving.

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!

Additional material of Daniel Meadows – focus on photographic prints of Welfare State International

20th century, 21st century, Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Cataloguing, Digital archives, Humanities, Modern, Newly available (2023), Photography, , ,

Welfare State International [WSI] often incorporated lanterns into their projects. Their headquarters, no longer in use, was itself a converted old warehouse called ‘Lantern House’. I think a fundamental reason for the frequency of lantern creation and usage in WSI’s history is, unsurprisingly, the “lighting of dark times and places”. The work of Welfare State helped to regenerate the communities and economic infrastructure of towns across the UK, such as Barrow-in-Furness and Ulverston. They illuminated communities trapped inside industrial shadows. Michael White wrote that these lanterns were “an extraordinary animated artwork that would be impossible to exhibit in a gallery or to ‘price’ as a commodity. They exist only for a few hours through a great deal of collective involvement and imagination”. This amalgam of ephemerality and memory is one that resonates with me at the present, as I reflect on my time as an archives intern. My experience here has vastly opened my mind to the variety of histories that are accessible thanks to the dedication of the Bodleian Archives.

For three weeks this Spring, I was fortunate enough to undertake the cataloguing of the Bodleian 500 Print Project: the newest addition to the Archive of Daniel Meadows. This series highlights some of Meadows’ most powerful, beautiful, and memorable work from across the span of his career. Meadows is a social documentarist noted for his photographic records of working class individuals, communities, and livelihoods across Great Britain. These records serve as a source of nostalgia and progress for many, and of post-industrialist woe for many others. Such affective features are shared with the work of Welfare State International. This organisation combined the nostalgia of folk traditions with socio-political ambition to reject the machinations of our industrial, capitalist milieu. The items in MSS. Meadows which intrigued me most were the photographs that documented the artistic spectacles of Welfare State International.

Brookhouse Summer Festival, Blackburn, Lancashire, August 1977, from the Welfare State International series. © Daniel Meadows. [MS. Meadows 227, item 5] Reproduced with the kind permission of Daniel Meadows.

Welfare State International co-founder John Fox, in Eyes on Stalks, reflects on the ambitions of Welfare State International right from the start. They “took [their] art into the street in order to reach an audience who wouldn’t normally cross the thresholds of elitist theatres and galleries”. This reality permeates lower class engagements with elitist cultural spheres to this day. I recall a conversation early on in my first year that made the reality of Britain’s cultural class divide feel much more real. I had visited my first gallery at 18, while my peers had crossed that threshold very early on in their lives. Theatre, galleries, and literature were a family event for them: something still difficult for me to imagine. When you grow up in poverty, art is hardly at the top of your priority-list. What WSI did for communities across the country gave people the space and opportunity to access the arts at their doorstep. Community was essential to making it happen. Their work encompassed not only carnivals and processions, but education for youths and collaborative projects that can transform a life weighed down by the constant anxieties of one’s socio-economic situation.

Daniel Meadows’ work relies on collaboration and community, too. This is visible across his oeuvre: photographic projects such as ‘The Shop on Greame Street’ and ‘The Free Photographic Omnibus’ are highly regarded now as a visual record of the changing landscape faced by the lower classes across the country. They emphasise the necessity of their voice and presence in all circles of artistic expression. What Meadows’ work also highlights is what is most relevant to my internship: all people deserve to be remembered. Archives should be filled with a more diverse array of lives and achievements. The world as we know it — its flairs and its flaws — has been transformed by individuals, organisations, communities across the socioeconomic spectrum. His photographic records of Welfare State International capture the collaboration of all these things, and all sorts of people, in action. Meadows’ WSI series keeps the spirit of their work alive today. Their manifesto acknowledges the “need for ceremony” in the lives of the masses, and these photographs capture and celebrate the ceremonies of the everyday.

Parliament in Flames, Burnley, Lancashire, November 1976, from the Welfare State International series. © Daniel Meadows. [MS. Meadows 227, item 4] Reproduced with kind permission from Daniel Meadows.

My favourite material to look at while completing this internship was definitely the the physical and digitised print of the image above. Its combination of people working together amid dilapidating Parliament imagery, construction equipment, and a cluster of typical council estate new builds encapsulates everything that WSI and Daniel Meadows seek to highlight in their work. The anti-capitalist power of WSI’s creative spectacles complements Meadows’ showcasing of a socially diverse Britain. Now that they have a presence in the Bodleian, the institution will be able to paint a much more complete and culturally rich picture of Britain in the archives. The work of Daniel Meadows helps to foster a positive, productive sense of national identity and progress. What it also does is break down the barriers of Oxford’s exclusivity. The archive of Daniel Meadows recognises his contributions to the cultural landscape of Britain over the past, and grants anybody interested the access to his creative projects and processes. The university can feel, at times, detached and alienating through its class divide. This is a common sentiment that pervades academia and beyond. The Archive of Daniel Meadows has been an honour to work with, and has empowered me with a greater sense of belonging in this institution.

The Archive of Daniel Meadows illuminates the working class experience across the latter half of the 20th century. The changing landscape of post-Industrial Britain left people – workers, families, communities – behind in its wake. What hasn’t changed is the socio-economic disparity faced by millions of people across the UK. An institution like Oxford must champion equal opportunity. The Crankstart Scholarship has been invaluable in providing me with access to this internship. I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to contribute to a more socially, culturally diverse Bodleian through the work of their archives.

For more information on Daniel Meadows, visit his website or view the the catalogue of his archive online.

Guest post by Olivia Hersey, Crankstart Intern, 13-31 Mar 2023.

New oral histories now online: Oxford’s pandemic perspectives

21st century, Digital archives, Medical, Modern, Newly available (2023), Sciences, , ,

https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/collecting-covid-oral-histories

The Collecting COVID project (a collaboration of collecting between the History of Science Museum and the Bodleian Libraries) is currently well into its second year of uncovering Oxford University’s innovative and celebrated pandemic research.

The project has acquired a fascinating selection of oral history interviews from across the University, which explore the rapid research response to the crisis in early 2020. Fifty of these interviews are now publicly available in full on the University Podcasts website. An additional fifty will conclude this part of the collection, with new interviews added routinely.

Oxford academics, principal investigators, professional services and medical students all provide insights into their experiences of this time, providing testimonials that will inform research for generations. Topics are varied with contributors from all academic divisions and include vaccine manufacture and clinical trials, drug design and discovery, COVID misinformation, clinical care of patients, and economic recovery.

Collecting COVID (funded by the E. P. A. Cephalosporin Fund) is ongoing and still actively collecting pandemic research related objects and archival material from the University community. Enquiries and submissions to the collection can be sent to collectingcovid@glam.ox.ac.uk