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from Arthur Green, Conservation & Collection Care

The Abinger papers are a substantial part of three generations of the Godwin and Shelley family archive, and were the last third of the archive to remain in private hands. The papers were purchased by the University in 2004 with the support of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation, and other donors through a public campaign.

The collection consists of over 8000 letters and over 100 notebooks, and is the bulk of correspondence and journals of the novelist and political philosopher William Godwin, as well as items from other family members including Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Other significant items within the collection include letters from poets John Keats, William Wordsworth, and Lord Byron. The collection was catalogued in 2010 by Charlotte McKillop-Mash, and the conservation was made possible by a generous donation from Prof. Suzuna Jimbo.

The year-long conservation project has helped to stabilise fragile items and to improve safe access to a well used library resource. All of the 8646 letters are now safely housed in ‘fascicules’ and the notebooks all have custom made archival boxes. Fascicules are a purpose-made storage system devised at the Bodleian in the late 1970’s, whereby loose items of varying size are hinged into suitable sized single-section bindings.

Fasciculing has addressed many of the preservation needs associated with handling and storage. It eliminates the need for folding items, and reduces wear and tear by supporting each leaf when read, particularly the thin paper of the 189 ‘wet-transfer-copies’ within the collection. Wet-transfer-copying was developed by James Watt, and is a system of taking multiple copies of a letter from one original, by sandwiching a letter written with specially formulated ink, with a thin paper, and then pressing. William Godwin was an early adopter of James Watt’s invention and the Abinger wet-transfer-copies are a rare and important example of this technology.

Many items from the collection have been recently displayed in the exhibition “Shelley’s Ghost: Reshaping the image of a literary family” at the Bodleian Library and Wordsworth Museum in 2011, and currently at the New York Public Library.

Phase one of the conservation project was successfully completed in February 2012 by Arthur Green, with assistance from Joan Lee, and under the supervision of Robert Minte, in consultation with Bruce Barker-Benfield. Phase two of the project to conserve two of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s notebooks is scheduled to start soon and will be undertaken by Nicole Gilroy, Book Conservation supervisor.

— from Chrissie Webb

The Library’s one year project to catalogue the papers of Anthony Sampson (1926-2004), writer and journalist, is now complete.

Sampson read English at Christ Church, Oxford, graduating in 1950. Undecided on a career, he went to South Africa in 1951 as business manager for the black magazine, African Drum. Within weeks he was promoted to editor despite having no journalistic experience. He became immersed in black culture at an exciting time in Johannesburg, and made many friends including Trevor Huddleston, Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Nadine Gordimer. He returned to England after four years but maintained a lifelong interest in South Africa, and in the anti-apartheid struggle. On his return he worked for the Observer as a journalist, under David Astor’s editorship. He reported on Harold Macmillan’s tour of Africa in 1960 and heard the ‘Wind of Change’ speech which disassociated Britain from the policy of apartheid. He was in South Africa at the end of the trial of Nelson Mandela and others in 1964, and advised Mandela on his defence speech. Many years later, after Mandela’s release, he wrote the authorised biography, Mandela (London, 1999).

He wrote over 20 books, mainly investigative journalism, but his major best-seller was the Anatomy of Britain (London, 1962), ‘a book about the workings of Britain – who runs it and how, how they got there, and how they are changing’. It was hugely popular, and five updates were published between 1965 and 2004.

In 1979-80 Sampson was editorial adviser to the ‘Brandt Commission’ on international development issues, working closely with Ted Heath, who later became a neighbour in Wiltshire. A few years later he was closely involved in the founding of the Social Democratic Party with friend and former fellow journalist, Shirley Williams.

Sampson’s correspondence and working papers provide intelligent writing, vivid insights, and first-hand experience of some key events of the 20th century, reflecting his wide-ranging interests throughout a full and varied career, The archive will be of interest to anyone studying late 20th century British politics; the workings of power through public institutions, private business and government; the politics of South Africa under the apartheid regime and after; and contemporary journalism and the history of journalism.

The papers can be consulted in the Bodleian’s Special Collections Reading Room and the catalogue can be viewed online:
http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/online/modern/sampson/sampson.html

Supported by the John Fell Fund, the project “Engaging with early modern print culture online” has been developing innovative techniques for searching and comparing woodcut-printed images in early English broadside ballads. An experiment with image matching software was conducted as part of this project.

Link to the Project Page

The Bodleian Libraries hold over 25,000 ballad sheets which are accessible online through the Bodleian Broadside Ballads database. Over 1,600 of these are from the 16th and 17th centuries and typically feature a single song accompanied by several woodcut images. As with any hand-printed material, the letters of the type and the woodcut images are physical clues to the origins of this often undated, unattributed material. Some woodcut blocks were reused again and again until they wore out. Images were copied with varying degrees of exactness. Book historians use the presence of the same woodcut image across different printed texts to explore visual traditions and to identify the business relationships between printers who might inherit or share woodblocks.

Within this project, technology developed by the Visual Geometry Group at the University of Oxford’s Department of Engineering Science has been applied to a sample of almost 1000 early printed ballads. The image-matching tool works by comparing a subpart of an image with all others in a database; finding regions that are common to both; and returning a sequence of images in order of similarity with the selected image. It can find images printed from the same wooden printing-block with a high degree of accuracy, even when the block has undergone considerable wear and tear. It can also identify copies made by tracing or by freehand imitation, even when the copy is a mirror-image.

For researchers, this technology offers a promising means of grouping the woodcuts to explore their bibliographic history or compositional similarities. It can assist cataloguers in determining if images are derived from the same block, or if they are looser copies. More casual browsers will find the technology an engaging way of browsing collections without prior knowledge of their contents. For all users, it is potentially a new way of exploring the rich visual traditions of early-modern print culture.

This work has been carried out by Andrew Zisserman and Relja Arandjelovic of the the Visual Geometry Group,University of Oxford.

The project “Engaging with early modern popular print online,” funded by the John Fell OUP Research Fund is investigating new ways of making the content of the Bodleian’s broadside ballads collections available to users. At present the black and white scans of ballad sheets are linked to a searchable database at: http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ballads/

The first of two workshops scheduled in the project was held in June 25, 2011, at Merton College. The task of this workshop was to gather expertise in the crowdsourcing of transcriptions and user-generated content, and to comment on how the broadside ballads in the Bodleian’s online database might be enhanced by user-created transcriptions.

Organized by Dr. Giles Bergel, JPR Lyell Research Fellow in the History of the Book, the day was attended by 20 academics, librarians and IT and research staff.
The questions Dr. Bergel posed to the workshop were:

1) Whether, if one outsources a particular area of intellectual enquiry, one also outsources responsibility for the outcome of that enquiry.
2) The issue of how contributors behave in the context of a crowd-sourcing project.

Presentations to the workshop were made with reference to projects that currently solicit crowdsourced descriptions: the Galaxy Zoo and Old Weather projects (via a podcast by Dr Arfon Smith of Zooniverse) and the What’s the Score project to describe digitized musical scored at the Bodleian Library, with a presentation by the project manager, David Tomkins.

from Chrissie Webb, Project Archivist

Saving Oxford Medicine, a project to discover, survey and catalogue archives relating to medicine at Oxford, is under way.

As well as preserving and making archive material available via the Bodleian Library, we want to disseminate information about related archives of key importance held elsewhere. We have begun by looking at the papers of the Regius Professors of Medicine of the 20th century. Some of these are at the Wellcome Library in London, including those of Sir George Pickering, Regius Professor from 1956 to 1968, who, in the opinion of Dr Bent Juel-Jensen, Medical Officer to the University from 1976-90 and benefactor of the Bodleian Library (whose personal papers are also held here), did more than anyone else for the improvement of medical education at Oxford. Another distinction, by the way – was Pickering the only Regius Professor to have a University boat funded in his memory and named after him?

Find out more about the project on our project page..

and in our presentation at:

In March the Bodleian Library initiated a project to sort, arrange and boxlist the papers of the distinguished geneticists Sir Walter Bodmer (b 1936) and Julia, Lady Bodmer (1934-2001). The work is supported by the Wellcome Trust’s Research Resources in Medical History programme.

Walter Bodmer was born in 1936 in Germany, coming to Britain with his family at a young age. At Cambridge he studied mathematics, becoming particularly interested in genetics, taught by R.A. Fisher as part of the course. After postgraduate research with Fisher on population genetics, in 1961 Bodmer went to work with Joshua Lederberg at Stanford University. He returned to the UK in 1970 as Professor of Genetics at Oxford University (1970-1979). He was then successively Director of Research (1979-1991) and Director-General (1991-1996) of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (later part of Cancer Research UK). On retirement from the ICRF he returned to Oxford as Principal of Hertford College. He is now Head of the Cancer and Immunogenetics Laboratory in the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine in Oxford.

Julia Bodmer, his wife, was a distinguished researcher in her own right as well as an important research collaborator with her husband, contributing in particular to the discovery and definition of the HLA system of inherited differences between individuals.
Chris Fletcher, Head of Western Manuscripts, leads the project and the work is being undertaken by two archivists with considerable experience in contemporary scientific and biomedical records, Tim Powell and Adrian Nardone.

Physically the archive is huge, filling 60 filing cabinets, 10 metal cupboards and over 450 boxes and boxfiles, stored on the upper floor of a warehouse in Cowley.

All of Sir Walter’s career is represented in the papers, from his undergraduate days onwards. Well represented aspects include correspondence and papers relating to his periods as Director of Research and Director-General of the ICRF, a voluminous scientific correspondence; material relating to his publications, teaching and public lectures, documentation of the many societies and organisations with which he was associated and conference material. The archive includes, as a significant part of the whole, correspondence, papers and research notebooks of Julia Bodmer, and notebooks of other researchers at the ICRF’s Tissue Antigen Laboratory which Julia Bodmer headed.

The archive is of great importance for the history of genetics and the history of medicine more generally, but its interest will be enhanced by the many connections that can be made with other archives of human and medical geneticists recently processed, including Bodmer’s successor as Professor of Genetics at Oxford, John Hilton Edwards.

This project will thus contribute significantly towards the ongoing documentation of a crucial field of scientific endeavour that has emerged since the 1950s and to which British researchers have made great contributions.