Conference: National Trust libraries, mobility and exchange in great house collections

As with my previous post, I've been taking full advantage of not working on Fridays to go to conferences that interest me, but aren't directly relevant to my job. Or so I thought. I was very pleasantly surprised by how many ideas I took away with me from this conference. Organised by the Centre for Material Texts, it was held in the beautiful surroundings of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

I'd initially signed up out of interest as I spent several years cataloguing rare books for the National Trust and wanted to find out more about how much had come out of this work. After many years work from a lot of cataloguers, detailed catalogue records are now available on COPAC. The aim of the conference was to bring together interested parties, librarians, curators, conservators and academics, to discuss potential areas for future research. Jason Scott-Warren has already blogged about the day, so I won't go into too much detail.

Papers ranged from the problem of accessing some books, as not all country houses are in public ownership, as well as research that has been done on how books were used in the houses, where people did their reading and who owned them. For example, the Earl of Carlisle, at Castle Howard, tended to store books in the more private parts of the house where it was more convenient for him to use them. Great pains have been taken in the cataloguing to record as much copy-specific detail as possible, as this is what makes these books unique and especially valuable for research.

It was clear that there is much research still to be done, in particular with nineteenth century libraries, which haven't attracted as much attention as earlier ones. There was also discussion of the practicalities of more research taking place, and the same practicalities that affect special collections librarians in other institutions.

• How to cope with rising demand for access to material.
• How to raise public awareness and get across to a non-academic audience why these collections are so important.
• How to balance the tension between sightseeing and exploring research in these libraries, especially as people with an academic interest in rare books are just one of many special interest groups who visit National Trust properties.

There was much discussion over lunch, and a round table discussion at the end, both of which I found very useful. It was also good to catch up with some former colleagues.  A highly enjoyable day and my thanks go to the organisers.

Provenance masterclass

Back in January I was fortunate enough to get a place on a provenance masterclass, Discovering provenance in book history at Cambridge University Library, taught by David Pearson, Director of Culture, Heritage & Libraries at the City of London Corporation.

CUL with the remains of a very large snowman outside.

This was a great overview of provenance evidence. Although I've been recording provenance in library catalogue records for over nine years now, it was good to be able to take a step back from the catalogue records and look at the whole provenance picture.

To me, it seems obvious that the history of what happened to a book is interesting and worth recording and studying, but this hasn't always been the case. Recording provenance evidence means we can see how books were used, read and circulated around society, who owned them and how they fitted in with other books they owned.

Provenance isn't about association copies - book owned by famous people. It is a lot lot more than that, as it's about all the marks of ownership that occur both in the books (bookplates, armorial bindings, inscriptions, annotations, marginalia) and externally (sale and library catalogues).

Pearson took us through different styles of inscriptions (names, mottoes), the development of bookplates from the late 15th century onwards as well as some definitions of bookplates, book labels and stamps. He then discussed provenance found on the outside of books, such as armorials stamped onto bindings. A brilliant new(ish) reference resource for this is the British Armorial Bindings Database, which has plenty of illustrations to help in identifying armorial bindings.

He also discussed the problems of provenance research, where no markings have been left, or they are incomplete, illegible or partly removed. Ways of dealing with provenance evidence included taking the time to practice, for instance inscriptions can become much easier to decipher with a knowledge of palaeography and lots of practice. The National Archives has an online palaeography tutorial. A bibliography of provenance related reading and suggested sources of help for different types of provenance was one of the workshop handouts. CERL is another good source of provenance information.

Finally, we were shown examples of different types of provenance and their associated difficulties, using incunabula from the Cambridge University Library collections. As we were a small group we were able to handle the books and examine the evidence for ourselves.

I really enjoyed having the chance to spend an afternoon taking a step back to think about provenance, as well as the opportunity to see such rich provenance evidence provided by the incunabula. It provided much food for thought for how to record this information in catalogue records and in a way that is useful to researchers. My thanks to David Pearson and all in the CUL Rare Books department for organising the masterclass.