So you think you know about Special Collections?

A guest blog by Helen Clutton, a MA Medieval Studies student, recalling a placement with Special Collections earlier this year

If you ask most Bristol students to describe Special Collections they will probably say, ‘It’s a couple of rooms on the first floor of the Arts & Social Sciences Library, and if you ask them very nicely they’ll magically produce a book out of nowhere, which you can come in and look at as long as you put it on a cushion.’

Special Collections Seminar Room laid out in preparation for a seminar on the history of Hong Kong. Photograph by Jenny Fisken.

That’s how I thought of Special Collections, before I did a placement there as part of my masters. Every Tuesday for a semester I spent some time with a member of Special Collections staff (there are more than you think!) and learnt a little bit about everything that goes on in this branch of the library service. What we see on that first floor is the tip of a remarkable iceberg.

Downstairs, along corridors, and through various locked doors, there is a treasure trove of archived material, acquired over a century, covering not just books but artworks, banners, political leaflets, photographs – you name it, it’s down there (and if it’s not in the library building, it’s in the off-site warehouse in Brislington). And the collection grows every year – last year alone there were sixty new acquisitions. There are also specific projects going on, such as one for the Hong Kong History Centre, where wonderful photos and memories of old Hong Kong are being sent in by people from all over the world. Additionally, Special Collections is linked with Theatre Collections just down the road – another amazing accumulation of riches. So much history, so many stories, all there to be discovered.

King George V and Queen Mary passing the Vandyck Printworks (now the Theatre Collection) on their way to open the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital (BRI) on Park Row, 28 June 1912.

For instance, the stories which have been holding my attention for all these weeks centre around DM104, which is a collection of fifty manuscripts from Kingswood Abbey in Gloucestershire (now no longer in existence apart from its gatehouse, thanks to our old friend Henry VIII). These documents cover two centuries of monastic life, and include land deals, estate accounts, lists of workers’ jobs, and complaints about taxes! There are frustrating gaps and so many unanswerable questions (thanks again, Henry); however, the documents we do have reveal a dynamic and far-reaching monastic enterprise, with lands up to thirty miles away. Some of their lands were received as gifts, perhaps to secure the prayers of the monks (‘for the salvation of my soul’); other lands were part of complicated exchanges or leases where, in the days before birds-eye-view maps, plots were described in relation to people or landmarks around them. We can see in these descriptions a local and generational knowledge which, even when lessened by the Black Death, is still present at levels unimaginable now.

List of properties owned by Kingswood Abbey and the wages paid to workers at each property, 1255-1256. SC ref: DM104/24.

The documents relating to estate management give a tantalising snapshot of abbey life – the trips they took, the animals and their keepers, the food they ate (so much fish!). Being immersed in these documents over weeks transforms dry old documents into living stories.

And that’s the most interesting part of Special Collections – how do we discover all these stories? How do we know what we’ve got? That’s the job of the archivists. They take an acquisition, which could be an immaculate collection or simply a pile of ‘stuff’ from someone’s attic; they quarantine it in case of pests and mould; they do a simple box list of the contents; then when time, money, and manpower allow, they decide how best to arrange it, list it, and describe it, they digitise it if appropriate, and they make it accessible to us.

It’s quite an undertaking, and the people doing it are highly skilled and dedicated. They are also overstretched and underappreciated! Every time one of us students makes a request for an item from Special Collections, there’s a whole lot of form filling, shelf searching, and running up and down stairs that goes on in order to get that item onto its cushion – so remember to thank them.

Cataloguing the Personal Papers of John Addington Symonds

Introduction

Hello, my name is Alexander Taylor, and I have been cataloguing the archive of literary scholar, cultural historian and poet John Addington Symonds (1840-1893) since September 2024, with completion expected by July 2025. The archive records Symonds’ multifaceted and complex life through manuscript correspondence that comprises the single largest category of material in the collection. His correspondents included, among others, Janet Ann Ross (historian and biographer), Havelock Ellis (social reformer and physician), Thomas Hardy (novelist and poet), Andrew Lang (novelist and poet) and Vernon Lee (pseudonym for writer Violet Paget). The archive would appeal to a diverse range of audiences interested in late nineteenth-century sexuality and gender and Symonds’ literary career. Extensive correspondence tracks Symonds’ intellectual development and relationship with his family, from adolescence at Harrow School to his final years living and writing in Switzerland. He published prolifically throughout his lifetime, spanning various genres, including literary criticism, travel writing and cultural history, with a specific focus on Renaissance studies.

The Symonds family and the City of Bristol 

Dr John Addington Symonds (John Addington Symonds’ father) moved to Bristol in 1831 and began practicing as a physician at Bristol General Hospital. In 1851 he purchased the Palladian villa Clifton Hill House, which his son inherited in 1871. In 1909 the house became the first university hall of residence for women in south-west England through successful lobbying by May Staveley, a lecturer in history. The house remains in the possession of the University of Bristol and accommodates approximately 226 students. The Symonds archive came to Bristol through a series of deposits dispersed throughout the twentieth century. An overwhelming majority of the extant material came to Special Collections from a donation by Dame Janet Vaughan, Symonds’ granddaughter through his daughter Margaret Vaughan. Other papers were given to Special Collections by Dame Katharine Furse (née Symonds) and her executor, Dame Rachel Crowdy, between 1946 and 1953, and further papers have been purchased by the University from various sources. In 2001 a substantial collection of literary manuscripts, including some of Symonds’ seminal histories of the Renaissance in Italy and the Memoirs of Carlo Gozzi, was transferred to Special Collections from Bristol Central Library, where they had been deposited by Symonds’ daughter, Margaret Vaughan, in 1915.

Students outside Clifton Hill House, the former home of John Addington Symonds and his family, 1921 ( DM2225/1).

Structuring and cataloguing the archive

Because of the numerous and drawn-out depositing, the collection has been scattered across multiple reference numbers and sometimes remained packaged in it its original envelopes, rather than specialist archive folders designed to ensure long-term preservation. The aim of re-cataloguing the archive has been to aggregate the many accession and reference numbers into one overarching reference number (DM3271) to aid in accessibility for researchers and library staff alike. The intellectual arrangement follows a series level chronology tracking Symonds’ life from his education at Harrow School (1854-1858) to life convalescing and writing in Switzerland (1878-1893). Additional series allow space for literary papers, printed material, photographs and family material, including the papers of Symonds’ wife Janet Catherine Symonds and their daughter Margaret Vaughan.

Favourites from the archive

My favourite item from the collection is a scrapbook compiled by Margaret Vaughan consisting of photographs, poems and an account of the life of the Symonds family dog, named Beppo. This intimate and emotive document is bound in a silk cover and includes several fine sketches depicting their adored pet alongside photographs of family members and Angelo Fusato, John Addington Symonds’ romantic partner and personal gondolier. A sketch of Beppo’s memorial reveals that he was born in Venice, September 1894, and died at Davos (Switzerland) in September 1903.

Illustrated page from the ‘Ave Beppo scrapbook’ [c1903] created by Margaret Vaughan [née Symonds], the daughter of John Addington Symonds (DM3271/9/1/3/1).

An album of photographs compiled by Margaret Symonds (later Vaughan), dated Silvester Abend (31 December in German), depicts daily life at the Symonds family home in Davos and includes studio and amateur photographs of John Addington Symonds from adolescence to later life. Several photographs depict Symonds writing in his study and enjoying recreation in the snow with labouring men. The contrast between his erudition and beguilement by athleticism and masculinity was a defining characteristic of Symonds during his life in Davos. Retained in the archive is an envelope dated 1904 containing dried ivy leaves from Rome. Photographs from the album show Symonds’ grave at the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome consumed by ivy and other shrubbery. It may be tentative to say that Margaret Vaughan took clippings from a visit to her father’s final resting place.

Portrait photograph of John Addington Symonds from an album of photographs, sketches and cuttings [c1894] created by Margaret Symonds (DM3271/10/1/4/1).

An inconspicuous and rudimentary document provides a fascinating insight into the precarious situation John Addington Symonds and his family encountered as his health continued to deteriorate. The damp English climate exacerbated Symonds’ pulmonary disorder and specialists recommended convalescing abroad in either the high-altitude mountains of Switzerland or the arid environment of Egypt. The document lists Symonds’ pros and cons for each country.

Pros for Davos included rest, the presence of a doctor (particularly pulmonologist Dr Carl Rüedi) and being part of a community; Davos became a popular convalescence hub for wealthy expatriates in the second half of the nineteenth century. Cons included monotony and the lack of intellectual stimulation, fear of catching a bad cold, and general misery towards the weather.

Pros for Egypt included the relative warmth and dryness, while the cons (which patently outweighed the pros) stressed the absence of a doctor, fear of catching fevers, possible war and famine, and the presence of insects and flies.

Symonds visited Davos for the first time in 1877, a then isolated and underdeveloped rural community in the Swiss Alps. For several months a year he resided at various hotels including Hotel Belvédère and Hotel & Pension Buol before settling in Davos permanently in 1880. The family home, named Am Hof, was built in 1881 and became a cultural hub for visiting literary scholars and friends including Henry Sidgwick (philosopher), Benjamin Jowett (scholar) and Robert Louis Stevenson (writer).

The pros and cons of living in Davos and Egypt [c1876] (DM3271/7/2/2 ).

I hope you have enjoyed this short introduction to the John Addington Symonds archive. If you have any questions regarding the collection, please do not hesitate to contact me on hz24494@bristol.ac.uk.

Alexander Taylor
Project Archivist

This cataloguing project was made possible thanks to a generous bequest from the estate of Pricilla Makepeace.

My experience of attending the DPC Unconference 2024

Emma Hancox, Digital Archivist, working in Special Collections and Theatre Collection, shares what she learnt at the Digital Preservation Coalition’s Unconference event in May.

In May I attended the Digital Preservation Coalition’s annual Unconference and Networking Event. The Digital Preservation Coalition or DPC is a membership organisation for institutions involved in digital preservation activities. Its vision is to build ‘a welcoming and inclusive global community, working together to bring about a sustainable future for our digital assets.’ My role at the University of Bristol is Digital Archivist and I was excited to attend this event as it was the perfect opportunity for me to meet others in similar positions from a variety of institutions in Europe, the UK and the US. The venue this year was the beautiful Royal Irish Academy, an historic building in the centre of Dublin. Its meeting room was lined with books and it was a grand setting for the events of the unconference which were spread over two days.

Digital Preservation Coalition Unconference and Networking Event 2024, Royal Irish Academy, Dublin.

The unconference had a strong focus on opportunities to network, share information and have conversations with others. This is particularly important to practitioners in the digital field as they are often the only member of staff working on digital preservation in their institution and there may not be any other Digital Archivists working in their local area. I am fortunate that we have two Digital Archive Assistants at the University of Bristol but it is still invaluable for me to be able to meet other Digital Archivists. The programme for the event was driven by members hence the ‘unconference’ name. As well as proposing talks in the run up to the event, we were able to suggest and vote on topics for discussion on the day. The winning areas were cloud storage, procurement of digital preservation systems, advocacy for digital preservation and lastly artificial intelligence which was no surprise due to its popularity as a topical issue!

One of the highlights of the event for me was going to the DPC’s reading club for the first time. Whilst I have attended reading groups outside of work, a reading group based on professional literature was new to me. This was the first in-person reading club as it is normally held online. The topic of the session was an article called ‘Toward a Conceptual Framework for Technical Debt in Archives’. ‘Technical debt’ is a term borrowed from commercial software development. It is a metaphor for future costs and work which are necessary because of compromises that were made (either intentionally or unintentionally) when setting up a system or project. Technical debt applies to digital archives work where there is often a legacy of early collections-based projects and infrastructure which are time intensive and resource heavy to maintain in the future and compete with the many other tasks archivists are faced with in their day-to-day jobs. The article proposed a model to assess past digital projects through an understanding of technical debt to make better decisions in the future. I found the article a useful starting point for evaluating the status of legacy projects and it gave me a framework I will use when analysing past projects that are presented to me. I enjoyed the discussion around how the article could be expanded to include case studies relating to born-digital rather than just digitised material. I plan to attend more of the DPC’s reading groups in the future online as they are a useful driver for engaging with professional literature.

Other talks I attended included one on fixity file checking in the cloud by Gen Schmitt from the University of Illinois. File fixity checking allows archivists to verify that files in their care have not become damaged or corrupted over time. The talk discussed performing fixities at scale across a whole repository of content and it was interesting to hear how the cost and efficiency of the process had been balanced. There was also a useful discussion around appraisal of born-digital collections led by Nicola Caldwell from the National Library of New Zealand. Appraisal in the digital realm is a very challenging area due to the sheer volume of digital files produced. It was encouraging to hear about tools that could help to make this piece of work easier such as Brunnhilde and the full version of FTK Imager. We are also grappling with challenges around how to appraise born-digital files at Bristol and because of the information gained from this session we will certainly look at these two tools as part of our future research and testing.

Professional visits were another part of the unconference and I was lucky to get a place on a tour of the Irish Traditional Music Archive. Housed in the Georgian Merrion Square the archive collects everything to do with Irish traditional music and has a fascinating and wide-ranging collection. After a tour of their digitisation and recording studios we learnt about their collections and how they provide a service to the public. As expected, the ITMA staff spend a lot of time clearing rights in their collections to be able to make them accessible. If you are ever in Dublin a visit is highly recommended.

I’m very grateful to have had the opportunity to attend this year’s unconference. It was a fantastic opportunity to make new connections and I plan to integrate what I learnt about dealing with legacy projects, fixity checking in the cloud and digital appraisal in my own role at the University of Bristol.

General Election 4 July 2024 – an appeal for election leaflets

Ian Coates, Library Assistant, working in Special Collections on our political materials, calls for the your help to preserve General Election flyers: Donate, don’t dump!

We are appealing for donations of General Election material published by candidates in the forthcoming General Election. Please gather up any election-related leaflets you receive and post them to us at Special Collections, Arts & Social Sciences Library, University of Bristol, Tyndall Avenue, Bristol BS8 1TJ.

We collect election addresses, leaflets, manifestos, and related political materials
This includes items produced by all political parties, and independent candidates, as well as other groups seeking to influence the election, in all UK constituencies, to represent the whole political spectrum
We welcome donations of material from members of the public, political parties, parliamentary candidates, and their agents. We redact any personal names and addresses printed on material added to the archive
Please bundle up what comes through your door and send it to us after the General Election, with a note of the location or postcode where it was received

A collage of election flyers. Special Collections at the University of Bristol holds the largest and longest established collection of election addresses (over 30,000) and campaign literature, from all British parliamentary elections since 1892. We also hold leaflets from London County Council and European parliamentary elections, along with campaign literature from other important national plebiscites such as the 1975 and 2016 referendums on membership of the European Union. This material is available for consultation by students, researchers, journalists, and members of the public.

Please help us to keep our UK general election leaflet collection up to date!

A leaflet from the 1906 General Election. A description of our political collections, including our election address archive, can be found at: http://www.bris.ac.uk/library/special-collections/strengths/politics/.

Our online archive catalogue is at: https://archives.bristol.ac.uk/. For example, have a look at DM2952 for our holdings relating to the 2019 General Election (23 boxes).

How to get in touch:

Email: special-collections@bristol.ac.uk

Phone: 0117 928 8014

Web: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/library/special-collections

Twitter: @BrisUniSpColl

Address: Special Collections, Arts & Social Sciences Library, University of Bristol, Tyndall Avenue, Bristol BS8 1TJ

Two maps of London constituencies, dated 1900 and 1906.

Our collections go virtual!

Catherine Dack, Research Support Librarian, Library Services, writes about our contribution to the virtual museum.

Special Collections recently contributed digitised versions of some of our collections to The Uncertain Space, the new virtual museum for the University of Bristol which officially launches this week.

The Uncertain Space is a permanent museum space which will host a changing programme of exhibitions. It is just like a real-world museum, but is experienced online or in a virtual reality headset. The first exhibition, Secret Gardens, has been co-curated with a group of young Bristolians. It explores connections between the University’s public artworks and selected objects from across the University’s rich collections, underpinned by the interest of our ‘Secret Gardeners’ in activism and climate change.

Items from Special Collections that feature in the first exhibition include:

Kaleidoscope magic lantern slide (DM3192)

Kaleidoscope children’s magic lantern slide (DM3192). This kaleidoscope mechanical chromotrope magic lantern slide for children dates from around 1870-1880. The slide has two panels and was designed to be inserted into a lantern slide viewer. The handle of the viewer would be turned, so that one panel would move while the other remained stationary, giving a kaleidoscope effect. The slide comes from a collection donated to us by Paul Raphael in February 2023.

The Sea-Dragons as they lived by John Martin

'The Sea-Dragons as they lived' from 'The Book of the Great Sea-Dragons' by Thomas Hawkins (1840). John Martin (1789-1854) was an English Romantic artist, known for his dramatic, apocalyptic scenes. The engraving, The Sea-Dragons as they lived, depicts plesiosaurs attacking an ichthyosaur, while pterosaurs feed on the body of a second ichthyosaur. It forms the frontispiece to The Book of the Great Sea-Dragons by Thomas Hawkins, published in 1840. Thomas Hawkins (1810-1889) was a Somerset fossil collector, who collected fossils from Lyme Regis and the Dorset coast, which are now held in the Natural History Museum.

Danckerts’ Atlas (DM511)

The title page from an atlas of 1690, produced by Justus Danckerts (1635-1701) who was part of a Dutch family of mapmakers, based in Amsterdam. The illustration depicts the titan, Atlas, holding up the sky. Our copy of the atlas came to the University of Bristol Special Collections as part of the Bristol Moravian Church Archive.

The exhibition also includes digitised material from Archaeology, Anatomy, The Botanic Gardens, Earth Sciences and the Theatre Collection.

You can view the exhibition online or book an appointment with Special Collections to view it on one of our VR headsets.

You can read more about the making of The Uncertain Space and its first exhibition on the blogs of our colleagues from Library Research Support and Theatre Collection.

First impressions of Special Collections

Nicky Sugar, our new Head of Special Collections, looks back over a busy few weeks.

It’s now 4 weeks since I came up the hill from Bristol Archives to join the university as Head of Special Collections. I still have a huge amount to learn, but thought it was time to share some first impressions!

Some of the Special Collections team in our reading room.

Being local, I already knew that Special Collections holds a wide variety of unique and interesting material and is looked after by a fantastic team. It makes a huge difference to students and researchers to work with original sources, not just for scholarship but to find proof of past events which can impact the present. There is also enormous potential to work with people in the university and across the city to increase access to the collections, and that really excites me.

Colleagues exploring the Virtual Museum, which features treasures from Special Collections.

So these are a few of my highlights, in no particular order…

I attended the launch of “The Uncertain Space” – the university’s brand new Virtual Museum. This displays treasures from our collections alongside curated items from other university art, archive and audiovisual collections in a unique virtual space. We met some of the young people who had worked on the first exhibition and tried out the headsets for ourselves.
We hosted my first alumni event, for a group of ex-students who visited Special Collections. Several offered to send us items from their time in Bristol, and they were keen to hear how we can capture digital material to create the university archive of the future. As well as treasures from the university’s own archive, the alumni heard talks from colleagues about the Historical Photographs of China and the Wildfilm Archive.
The Wildfilm Archive is a unique resource for studying the history of wildlife filmmaking, an important part of Bristol’s cultural heritage. In my last job I was involved in a project to examine the role of wildlife collections in responding to the ecological crisis, and I see huge potential here to develop this area of our work. With this in mind, some of us met with Peter Bassett, the wildlife history ambassador who rescued much of the collection, to discuss next steps.
A team from the Brand Department at Penguin Random House visited us to look at iconic material from the Penguin Archive. This was a great example of the inspiration that historic collections can provide to innovation and business development.
On a gloriously sunny day I had a trip off campus to the SS Great Britain, where our collection of Brunel material is held by the team at the Brunel Institute. The material has huge relevance for STEM education, the history of migration and many other topics, and we discussed our shared commitment to making it available to diverse audiences.

A beautiful day to find out more about our Brunel Collection.

My other main highlight has been meeting new colleagues in the library and wider university, who have all been incredibly generous with sharing their expertise and future plans. The amount of new information I’ve absorbed has been almost overwhelming at times but I can definitely see it all coming together in some innovative ways to share the collections more widely. I look forward to providing an update on it all soon!

Edward Tawney geology lecture notes, 1876-1878 (DM3215)

Ian Coates, Library Assistant in Special Collections, rediscovers Edward Tawney’s lecture notes in geology, dating from his time at University College Bristol.

One of the pleasures of working in Special Collections is the rediscovery of material that has been long forgotten. Following a refurbishment, we moved some book collections to a new set of shelves. Along with the books were fifteen manuscript volumes of lecture notes in geology with Tawney MSS. on the spine. It soon became apparent that the author was Edward Bernard Tawney (1840-1882) who, between 1876 and 1878, was the first lecturer in geology at University College, Bristol (before it became the University of Bristol). Since that time, although these volumes had been preserved, only now have they been given a catalogue listing. Tawney’s importance has been acknowledged by the School of Earth Sciences, who recently posted a blog giving details of his career, but they did not know that the University still held his original lecture notes.

Edward Tawney (1840-1882)

Tawney was educated in Bristol before gaining Diplomas in Geology and Mining from the Royal School of Mines (Imperial College, London) in 1863, where he proved himself to be an outstanding scholar. Pursuing his interest in geology he published several papers on his investigations before being appointed Curator at Bristol Museum and Library in 1872, where he was responsible for the geology collections. He continued with his fieldwork and contributed a chapter on physical geography and geology in Bristol and its environs, produced by the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1875.

‘Bristol and its environs: historical, descriptive and scientific’ (London: Houlston and Sons, 1875).

Tawney’s talents were widely recognised leading to his appointment in 1878 as Assistant to the Woodwardian Professor at the University of Cambridge which at the time had the best geological collection in Britain. He provided lecture courses on various aspects of geology, as well as being made a Fellow of Trinity College and awarded an honorary M.A. His health, which had never been robust, deteriorated and he died four years later. The main body of Tawney’s papers are held at the Sedgewick Museum of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge.

DM3215 Edward Tawney geology lecture notes, 1876-1878.

An early Christmas present

Catherine Dack, Research Support Librarian, writes about Thomas Hervey’s ‘The Book of Christmas’.

Special Collections received an early Christmas present this year when Friends of the National Libraries gave us a donation of rare books from the Blavatnik Honresfield Library (see an earlier blog). Among the titles we received was a first edition copy of Thomas Hervey’s The Book of Christmas, published in 1836.

Thomas Hervey (1799-1859) was known as a poet, critic, and editor of the Athenaeum. In The Book of Christmas he describes a variety of Christmas and New Year customs and traditions. First published just before the Victorian enthusiasm for the festive season took hold, the book became popular and went through many editions. Part of its popularity must have been due to the lively Illustrations by Robert Seymour (1798-1836), a caricaturist who also worked on Dickens’ Pickwick Papers.

‘The Mistletoe Bough’. An illustration by Robert Seymour from ‘The Book of Christmas’ by Thomas Hervey (1836).

Among the holiday customs depicted are traditions that are still very familiar today, such as carol singing, kissing under the mistletoe, and Christmas dinner, turkeys for which were transported by coach with

…hampers piled on the roof and swung from beneath the body, and its birds depending, by every possible contrivance, from every part from which a bird could be made to hang.

‘Norfolk Coach at Christmas’. An illustration by Robert Seymour from ‘The Book of Christmas’ by Thomas Hervey (1836).

The Christmas pudding is shown being boiled in a cloth (steaming being a more recent method for cooking the puddings) and is described as “a truly national dish” which “refuses to flourish out of England”.

‘Christmas Pudding’. An illustration by Robert Seymour from ‘The Book of Christmas’ by Thomas Hervey (1836).

Father Christmas appears in an early guise as “Old Christmas”, wearing a traditional holly crown and riding a goat. Later in the 19^th century, he merged with the figure of the gift-giving St Nicholas or Santa Claus.

‘Old Christmas’. An illustration by Robert Seymour from ‘The Book of Christmas’ by Thomas Hervey (1836).

Christmas trees had not yet become popular at the time the book was first published, but the “ancient and still familiar practice of adorning our houses and churches with evergreens” is recommended.

‘Bringing home Christmas’. An illustration by Robert Seymour from ‘The Book of Christmas’ by Thomas Hervey (1836).

Other traditions described in the book are less well-known now, such as the wassail-bowl, which should be composed, according to Hervey, of wine or ale, highly spiced and sweetened with roasted apples floating on its surface.

‘Wassail Bowl’. An illustration by Robert Seymour from ‘The Book of Christmas’ by Thomas Hervey (1836).

The origins and traditions of mummers’ entertainments are explored at length. Hervey describes the performance of ancient plays, travelling from house to house in disguise to make merry, dancing hobby-horses and sword-dances.

‘Mummers’. An illustration by Robert Seymour from ‘The Book of Christmas’ by Thomas Hervey (1836).

The Book of Christmas helped to fuel the Victorian revival of the Christmas season and was soon followed by the publication of numerous books about Christmas. Our copy will be catalogued in the New Year and will then be available for consultation by readers in Special Collections.

Historical books from the Blavatnik Honresfield Library find a new home

Catherine Dack, Research Support Librarian, writes about recent additions to our holdings – distributed from the Blavatnik Honresfield Library.

We were delighted recently to receive a generous donation of books from the Honresfield Library, which has been acquired for the nation by Friends of the National Libraries. The charity, who work to save the UK’s written and printed heritage, succeeded last year in raising £15m to purchase this significant collection of manuscripts and books, formed towards the end of the 19^th century by mill owner brothers William and Alfred Law, who lived at Honresfield House near Rochdale. The manuscripts and books are being distributed to libraries across the UK to ensure they will remain accessible to the public.

Honresfield books donated to the Arts and Social Sciences Library, University of Bristol.

Among the historical works in the collection is a copy of The Baronage of England by William Dugdale, an English antiquary. Printed in 1675-1676, in three volumes, bound in two parts, it is an account of the lives of the English nobility from the Anglo-Saxon period. Our copy was originally in the library at Stourhead, and was sold at Sotheby’s in 1883, presumably to the Law brothers.

Dugdale’s ‘Baronage of England’, Vol. 1, 1675.

A very different historical work is The Comic History of England, 1847-8, by Gilbert Abbott A’Beckett. This popular work was illustrated with many humorous engravings by John Leech who, like the author, was a contributor to Punch, in which the episodes in the book first appeared.

‘Georgy Porgy the First going out for a ride in his State Coachy Poachy’ from ‘The Comic History of England’.

One item with an interesting publication history is a pirated edition of Tennyson’s early poems, printed in Toronto in 1862. Tennyson successfully obtained an injunction to prevent its sale in Britain, receiving an apology and £100. A manuscript copy of the Bill of Complaint in Chancery is loosely inserted into this copy.

Manuscript copy of the Bill of Complaint between Alfred Tennyson and John Camden Hotten.

The gift includes eight volumes of Charles Knight’s Standard Edition of the Pictorial Shakspeare 1842-1843, which was originally issued in monthly parts and later published in a number of editions. Knight took a new approach to the illustration of Shakespeare’s works, using images that aimed for historical accuracy, rather than representations of Shakespeare as performed in the Victorian theatre in contemporary costume, which previously had been the standard practice.

Act I of ‘The Two Gentlemen of Verona’ from Charles Knight’s Standard Edition of the Pictorial Shakspeare, Vol. I.

We also received some fiction titles, including an 1877 edition of Bracebridge Hall by Washington Irving: a series of tales of life in an English manor, written when Irving was living in England. The illustrations are by Randolph Caldecott, after whom the Caldecott medal, awarded by the American Library Association for children’s picture book illustration, is named. Caldecott’s illustrations for Bracebridge Hall were among those which first established him as an illustrator.

‘Bracebridge Hall’ by Washington Irving, illustrated by Randolph Caldecott.

We are now looking forward to cataloguing these, together with the other books we received, to make them discoverable to the public.

You can read more about the saving of the Library, which has now been renamed the Blavatnik Honresfield Library, in honour of the principal benefactor, on the Friends of the National Libraries’ blog.

Also note the British Library event on Tuesday 6th December 2022 at 7pm, celebrating the acquisition for the nation of the Blavatnik Honresfield Library and its extraordinary collection of manuscripts by the Brontës, Jane Austen, Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott.

Archiving the Web: collecting web crawls for the University Archive

Sam Brenton, Bridging the Digital Gap Trainee, writes about his work in Special Collections and the Theatre Collection.

Hello, my name’s Sam and I’m the Digital Archives trainee on the Bridging the Digital Gap programme from The National Archives. This scheme aims to place people with technical skills within archives around the country to help preserve the increasing number of digital items they collect. Over the past fifteen months I’ve been at the University of Bristol, working on a number of digital archiving projects with Special Collections and the Theatre Collection. One of the things I’ve been working on is expanding the quantity of web pages in the University’s web archive.

Illustration by Jørgen Stamp digitalbevaring.dk CC BY 2.5 Denmark.

So what is a web archive? And how is it different from the website itself? A web archive is a collection of web pages preserved offline and is totally independent from the source website. This means that should the original web pages become unavailable, or are altered in any way, there is still a perfect copy of the original. The pages are stored as WARC files, a format specifically designed for the preservation of web pages as it acts as a container for all the elements that make up the web page, such as text and images.

When we’re concerned with long term preservation we can’t guarantee that the pages will still be hosted by their original source. Sometimes this is simply because an organisation likes to regularly refresh its content, for example a manufacturer listing their current products. But even something that appears to be more permanent, such as online encyclopedias and other information resources, may be altered, or older content might be removed without warning. It’s important that an archive is aware of any websites that come under the scope of its collection policy, particularly any that might be at risk.

I’ve been archiving parts of the University’s own website, such as the various news and announcements and the catalogues of courses offered, by crawling them in Preservica (our digital preservation system). The websites were identified by the University Archivist as being similar to traditional paper elements of the archive. So in order to mirror those collections, I’ve been doing small individual web-crawls based on dates (either year or month). These smaller crawls deliver more consistent results and will allow for better cataloguing in the future. Sometimes this is challenging, as it takes a lot of time to process each crawl. When web crawling, it is common to run in to issues when rendering the pages, this if usually because complex JavaScript elements of modern web pages, such as interactivity and animations, are difficult for the crawlers to capture, so it was important that I checked each crawl before adding it to the archive. Fortunately for me, the sites I’ve been crawling are relatively simple, so the only issues I had were with the .WARC viewers themselves. Each one behaves slightly differently, so it’s useful to try rendering the crawl in a different viewer (such as Conifer) if there are issues with it, before re-doing the crawl.

WARC files of crawled University web pages in Preservica.

In the future I’d like to look into adding relevant external web pages to the collections. In due course, we also hope to be able to catalogue and make web crawls accessible. In the longer term I would like to look into archiving social media profiles. These are far more challenging to preserve due to log-in requirements and the large number of interactive elements, but they are arguably just as important as standalone web pages. The posts are far more ephemeral than web pages and we are reliant on the platform to maintain them. They are also a key way that the University communicates with the public.

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