Spotlight on Special Collections

UCL Special Collections has joined forces with three other groups in UCL Library Services:

• the Records Office,
• the IOE’s Archives and Special Collections,
• and the Retrospective Cataloguing Team.

Watch this space for reports from the new amalgamated group!

The amalgamated collections have been used to support students’ learning as actively as ever this term, with over 600 students due to have worked with original material before the term is up. This activity ranges from in-depth sessions teaching research skills, to 180 first-year undergraduate maths and physical-sciences students seeing Newton’s Principia in one of their introductory lectures. Training the conservators of the future continues, with training sessions on historic paper and bindings, and paper- and book-conservation students due to start placements very soon alongside our other volunteers from UCL and beyond.

New reading room

The new reading room for Special Collections and Records materials is now open near the South Junction on the lower ground floor of UCL’s Wilkins Building, and provides a specially equipped, secure space for accommodating both readers and small groups for academic support and outreach.

Professor Melissa Terras, Director of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities and Professor of Digital Humanities said about the space:-

“Having such a quiet, flexible space for consulting UCL Special Collections’ material in the heart of the Bloomsbury campus will mean improved access for researchers, as well as further opportunities to give students hands-on experience of object-based learning. In this digital age it is imperative that we encourage the next generation to understand the physical items that digitised collections are based on. The new reading room will allow us to further build our teaching around UCL collections, as well as providing a safe and congenial place for staff, students, and visitors to conduct research on this world-leading library resource“.

Research support continues apace and Special Collections are currently working with with UCL Digital Humanities to explore how humidifying printed material can enable multi-spectral imaging to reveal formerly hidden text, and UCL’s Centre For Editing Lives And Letters to produce digital editions of books owned by or annotated by John Dee. We’re also collaborating with Durham University on developing software for Optical Character Recognition of early print fonts, whose irregularities and page layout make current OCR techniques unsuccessful, and workshops were provided over the summer for an international conference on treatments of paper used for early printed books, particularly substances used to make sizing.

The Orwell Lecture 2016 was delivered at UCL on Tuesday 15 November by Ian Hislop, and the team that runs the Orwell Prize has now moved to UCL’s Institute of Advanced Studies. This unites it with the Orwell Archive held at Special Collections, which includes a Christmas card made by Richard Blair for his father in the month before the author died of tuberculosis at University College Hospital on 21st January 1950.

Archivist Gill Furlong was interviewed by BBC Radio 4 for an article on George Orwell, which aired on Sunday 20 November on Broadcasting House.

Exhibitions Featuring Material from Special Collections

• Main Library until December 2016: Fair Play And Foul: Connecting With Shakespeare at UCL as part of the Shakespeare400 anniversary celebrations,  including some of UCL’s well-known Shakespeare forgeries by William Henry Ireland. From 21 November 2016 posters and banners with images from the exhibition will be on display in the foyer of Stratford Library, The Grove, London E15 1EL as part of the joint public engagement/outreach programme of activities between UCL Libraries and the London Borough of Newham.
• UCL Senate House Hub  from mid-November 2016: What Is Paper? What Is A Book? How Do Physical and E-Books Differ? Displays put together by teams of UCL students working at Special Collections alongside Camberwell College Of The Arts conservation interns.
• Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona, Spain until 19 March 2017: 1,000 m2 Of Desire: Architecture And Sexuality including exhibits from UCL’s Bentham Archive.
• The Globe Theatre, until 4 September 2016: Shakespeare Rediscovered in Saint-Omer. An exhibition shining a light on the wider theatrical story of Bankside in 1616 and its significant legacy in South London and beyond. STOP-PRESS: this exhibition has now finished, and attracted a remarkable 64,010 visitors.
• Queen Square Library is delighted to announce its new exhibition: Sir Victor Horsley: commemorating the centenary of Horsley’s death. This exhibition, which will run in Queen Square Library until February 2017, features photographs, objects, and documents from Queen Square Archives and UCL Special Collections.  The exhibition was launched to coincide with the national Explore Your Archives campaign.

Events

• Staff from Special Collections and various UCL libraries were on hand with information on a wide range of relevant collections at this year’s History Day for researchers, held at Senate House on 15 November.
• Special Collections material was displayed at this year’s Graduate Open Day on 23 November.
• A public concert of music related to Shakespeare, combined with tours of the Shakespeare exhibition, was held this term in collaboration with UCL Chamber Music Club.

Dr. Tabitha Tuckett, Rare-Books Librarian, & The Team at Queen Square Library, with thanks to Melissa Terras