We are delighted to announce the programme for this year’s Paper Trails conference which has been jointly organised with Dr Andrew W M Smith (University of Chichester). The conference focuses on the lives of our research material which often go unmarked, lost between the gaps in disciplinary boundaries and narrow definitions and the full programme is below. You can register for the conference here.

PROGRAMME

09:30-10:00 Registration & Welcome

10:00-11:30

PANEL 1. (Beyond) The Margins:

Cath Bannister (Sheffield): Annotating the Opies: Teachers’ Notes and Marginalia in Children’s Responses to Iona and Peter Opie’s Survey of Folklore of Schoolchildren.

Michael Durrant (Bangor): Lost, Found, and Lost Again: The Messy Histories of Bangor’s ‘Cranmer’ Bible (c.1540)

Chloe Ward (Sheffield) Counting cards — Exploring the Contexts of Historical Archaeological Archives

11:30-11:45 BREAK

11:45-13:15

PANEL 2. Lives Overleaf:

Elizabeth DeWolfe (New England): Agnes Parker, Miss Johnson, Jane Tucker, and Me: Archival Layering, Received Narratives, and the Spy Who Hid in Plain Sight

Katrina Goldstone (Independent): A Photograph. A Scrapbook. Three Large Cardboard Boxes: The Lost World of Irish Radical Writers in the Thirties

Hannah Parker (Sheffield): The Emotional Lives of Letters: Encountering Soviet Letter-Writing in the Archive

13:15-14:00 LUNCH

14:00-15:15

PANEL 3. Responding to the Archive:

Kim Martin (Guelph): Stories of Serendipity: Reflections on Studying the Research Habits of Historians

Sarah Grange (Brighton): Improvising with the Archives

15:15-15:30 BREAK

15:30-17:00

PANEL 4.Archival Sleuths:

Will Pooley (Bristol)

Quest for the Absent Narrator: A Criminal Paper Trail in Alsace, 1925

Alexandra Steinlight (IHR): From ‘Paper Monster’ to Relic: The Jewish Card File in Post-Holocaust France

Lotte Fikkers (Leiden) & David Mills (QMUL): The Archive in the Fish Cellar

17:00 – Thanks and Close

The prestigious international Laidlaw scholarship scheme has this year selected a UCL Library Services project to be among 33 research opportunities on offer to exceptional undergraduates across UCL.

The project is a collaboration between Rare-Books Librarian Tabitha Tuckett from Special Collections, and Professor Adam Gibson from UCL Medical Physics And Biomedical Engineering. It offers a current first-year undergraduate the opportunity to research the cutting-edge use of imaging techniques and analysis to answer historical questions about rare books, archives and records.

Using Optical Coherence Tomography to explore the 1st printed edition of Euclid’s Elements (1482).

The work will make use of UCL Digital Humanities’ new digitisation suite, and will build on collaborative research with Special Collections that has already used medical imaging techniques in innovative ways to explore damaged text, hidden manuscripts, early printing techniques, the materials of rare books, and more. Read about some of this research here.

Interested students can find out more about the opportunity with Special Collections here, and should apply by 20 January, indicating project 13. Under the scheme, selected students are paid to undertake supervised research for six weeks during two summers, as well as receiving leadership training during their undergraduate career.

Twelve copies of The Drummer from the Alternative Press Collection. Founded in the 1967 and originally called Distant Drummer, the newspaper reported on Philadelphia’s radical/hippie community and served as a forum for commentary on local and national politics as well as the city’s music and arts scene. From 1971 until its demise in 1979, it was known simply as The Drummer.

ALTERNATIVE PRESS DRU

Eleven pipers piping: a scene from Ovid’s Metamorphoses depicts Mercury lulling Argus to sleep with his enchanted reed pipe.

STRONG ROOM OGDEN 177

Nine ladies dancing: Let’s dance! A party in the margin livening up this 1534 edition of Polydore Vergil’s History of England.

STRONG ROOM OGDEN A QUARTO 496

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