This is the second of a four-part series of presentation summaries for the 2025 Trainee showcase. If you missed the previous post, you can find it directly below this one!

Gareth Smith – Uniomachia: a new Digital Edition in TEI XML

Written by Zac Draysey

Gareth’s presentation was an engaging deep-dive into Uniomachia, a forgotten gem of comic classical parody unearthed during his traineeship at the Oxford Union Library. Drawing on his strong background in Classics and Ancient History, Gareth recounted his excitement upon discovering this obscure 1833 satirical poem written in a mix of Ancient Greek, Latin, and English. The poem, penned by Oxford students Thomas Jackson and William Sinclair, parodies Homeric epic to dramatize a real political schism within the Oxford Union, transforming an internal dispute into a mock-epic battle between ‘heroes.’ Gareth walked us through how the text not only imitates Homeric style but also includes absurd scholarly commentary in Latin, designed to mock academic pretensions.

Gareth’s project focused on producing a digital edition which aimed to make this otherwise inaccessible work available to a modern audience. His work involved producing a facsimile, transcription, English translation, and detailed commentary, all encoded for Taylor Editions. He illustrated the complexity of the task through a textual analysis of a passage from the poem that showed how deeply layered the satire is, touching on everything from Classical allusions to real Oxford figures like A.C. Tait, a future Archbishop of Canterbury. The audience got a glimpse of the wit embedded in the text and the scholarly humour behind the pseudo-critical notes. Gareth’s blend of insight and humour made for a fascinating presentation, and he ended with a playful farewell, echoing the spirit of the original text.

Kate Hanson – Adventures in digitization

Notes by Gia Simmons, written by Yasmeen Khan

As the graduate trainee based at Christ Church College, it was almost inevitable that Kate would end up interacting with the legacy of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll). It was perhaps a little unexpected, however, when she was handed several hundred of his personal letters and asked to digitise them. 

Those who know a little about Carroll will likely know that alongside being an author, mathematician, and photographer, he was also a prolific letter-writer – so prolific, in fact, that his logs show him sending and receiving 98,721 letters in the last 35 years of his life. Christ Church was fortunate enough to get their hands on some of these letters through an incredibly generous donation by Jon A. Lindseth, and they quickly realised that they needed to increase global access to these items whilst reducing the number of people physically handling them. Thus, it was decided that the best course of action would be to digitise as many of them as possible. 

In an act that mirrored one of Carroll’s own 19th century photography set-ups, Kate was equipped with an ad-hoc digitisation studio and banished to the attics of Christ Church to photograph each and every item in crisp detail. Her patient and detail-oriented work bore fruit, and Kate ended the project having successfully digitised 232 out of the original 235 items; unfortunately, the wear and tear of time meant that the remaining three items were too fragile for digitisation. In total, Kate took over 600 images of the books, photographs, letters, envelopes, slips, and pictures that make up the Jon A. Lindseth Collection. The project rounded out with a 24 GB file size, allowing viewers to examine the items in minute detail – Kate pointed out, for example, that it is possible to make out the grain of the paper in some photographs.

But these impressive results naturally came with a few difficulties. Kate had to quickly get to grips with the subtle art of digitisation while grappling with the reality of the material as she found it. Not only were many of the items completely different sizes (forcing her to deal with the havoc of adjusting the lighting and focus), but many had been attached to or tucked inside other items and had to be recorded as such in the photographic record.

Overall, Kate’s trainee project was a fascinating meeting-point between the 19th century and modern day. Although her prior lack of Carroll knowledge meant that she had to quickly come to terms with both his triumphs and controversies, she found that reading his personal letters humanised him immensely. Kate’s brilliant project will not only allow people to encounter the legendary Lewis Carroll, but to interact with the sometimes-overlooked Charles Dodgson. Her work over the course of this year will not only have a lasting impact on Christ Church, but the greater field of Carroll Studies as a whole.

Millie Krantz – Some men in Oxford: queer life at All Souls

Written by Jake Banyard

Millie’s valuable project explored a history of queer experience at All Souls College and the wider university that has often lacked visibility and attention.

The project culminated in the curation of an exhibition of Millie’s findings, and her presentation began with an examination of the role of exhibitions in a college environment. Exhibitions can provide useful opportunities for college libraries to encourage reader engagement and promote their collections, as well as providing justification for Librarians to carry out interesting research and get to know their collections better. Millie raised the interesting question of who exhibitions should be aimed at: academics, students, readers, or the public? In the context of All Souls, Millie also considered the wide range of library users in the college, from fellows using the significant early printed book collection, to law undergraduates and naval history researchers. Who of these would be interested in the exhibition? For Millie this project also served as a way to begin to answer that question.

The focal point of the exhibition was the life and papers of John Sparrow. Made a fellow of All Souls in 1929, he remained so until his death in 1992 and served as the College’s Warden from 1952-1977. Sparrow lived through a time of great change in the lives of queer people in the UK and by using his papers (which were left to All Souls in his will) Millie’s exhibition presented an insight into Sparrow’s personal experience of the 20^th century, and the experiences of those he knew and corresponded with.   

Due to the nature of the materials exhibited, Millie’s project involved a certain amount of ‘crossing the floor’ from the realm of Library collections and delving into the College archive. Archival practice within Oxford colleges has historically often been haphazard and informal, which means that catalogues can be incomplete or that past sensitivity reviews (if they have been carried out at all) have led to overzealous access restrictions or a lack of any access restrictions whatsoever. These were problems Millie soon ran into: one box of the Sparrow material was restricted simply because, despite Sparrow’s sexuality being publicly known, it “concern[ed] homosexuality”. Fortunately, upon consultation with the College’s current archivists, the restrictions were altered, and Millie was able to access the material.  

Perhaps therein lies a concrete example of the value of Millie’s work. Instead of remaining uncatalogued or behind restricted access, queer experience and history has been made more visible, and awareness of the existence of these kinds of collections has been promoted. Millie’s ideas for the future of the exhibition involve potentially creating a permanent digital version, a longer-running physical exhibition, or using the material for outreach purposes in the library – so watch this space!   

Yasmeen Khan – The Rhodes less taken: approaches to ethical cataloguing in the former Rhodes House Library material

Written by Charlotte Edwards

Based in Resource Description, Yasmeen had the opportunity to navigate a unique and highly sensitive project. Years before her arrival, the department had received a collection of resources from the Rhodes House Library, mostly pertaining to 20th and 21st century African and Commonwealth Studies. As many of these items were completely uncatalogued, Yasmeen took on the task of getting as many of them onto the system through ethical cataloguing practice as she could.

Due to the nature, content, and physical location of the material, Yasmeen had many things to consider when starting her project, such as:

• A duty of care to readers – there are pictures, language, and references in these resources that can be distressing.
• Library ethics – the material is not held in an ideal location at Osney, is not accessible to researchers, and has lots of confusing metadata that makes it difficult to catalogue.

The first step of Yasmeen’s project was learning to catalogue – not an easy feat! She then started experimenting with serials and monographs (both would be needed for the vast array of material she would encounter in this collection) and began researching ethical cataloguing, eventually pulling together a ‘Bodleian Cataloguing Code of Ethics’ based on her research.

Yasmeen’s real-life approach to cataloguing was not priority-based, as she proceeded in the order of what item was next on the pile. The records were full-level, the descriptive fields were left intact, and she altered subject headings if it was both necessary and possible. In a few cases, she also restricted access to items with graphic images – due to their nature, it was felt that these items should only be viewed in private areas in the reading rooms. An attendee asked Yasmeen at the end of her presentation how she herself dealt with the material she was seeing. Indeed, we often consider how a reader would react to the material, but not the staff encountering it. Yasmeen’s approach was to take time to be mentally prepared for what she might see, especially after being taken by surprise at the beginning. It was also beneficial that she would only work on this collection for a couple of hours per week and so could restrict her overall exposure.

There are limitations when cataloguing, especially when cataloguing a collection like this, and Yasmeen touched on her ‘Dream Approaches’ regarding ethical cataloguing. Ideally, rather than relying solely on individual cataloguers, ethical cataloguing would occur on multiple levels, such as having institutional cataloguing policies that are regularly reviewed to ensure alignment with ethical principles.

Due to the collection’s vastness, the comparatively low priority of the collection, and the lack of departmental guidelines on ethical cataloguing, the collection could not be fully catalogued by the end of Yasmeen’s traineeship. To combat this open-endedness, Yasmeen is proceeding to write a report for any future cataloguers who want to continue this well-thought out and important work.

Yasmeen’s presentation was a fascinating insight into the decisions that are made when cataloguing sensitive material, and as an audience member I found her presentation highly enlightening and engaging.