Work in Progress 3
- Rebecca Somerset
- Mar 31
- 6 min read
A year after our first work-in-progress update, it's time once again to share what we've been working on over the past six months alongside our regular duties, which include supervising visitors and managing remote inquiries.
Rebecca Somerset, Province Archivist:
Over the past six months, I’ve focused on a variety of tasks, including creating an induction schedule for Jamie, our newest staff member as well as welcoming potential volunteers, and setting up projects for them. I’ve also attended several meetings, including a key gathering of the Network of Archives and Libraries of the Catholic Church partners, and participated in the Province’s annual data protection training. Additionally, with Mary and Jamie’s help, I organised an exhibition for the Jesuit European Fundraising Conference visit. It is always enjoyable having an opportunity to select and showcase items from our collection.
A major focus for me has been setting up our digital preservation system. As we increasingly receive digital content, it has become clear that we need an automated preservation solution to ensure ongoing access, despite challenges such as file obsolescence. While there is still work to do in finalising the system, we will also need to develop policies and procedures.
In early March, I had the opportunity to present to the HISTORIA DOMUS network, a platform dedicated to Jesuit research and Christianity in South Asia. I provided an overview of our collections and shared how we make content accessible through various channels. Preparing for this presentation was a rewarding experience, as it highlighted the many approaches we’ve explored for enhancing accessibility.
Looking ahead, my priorities include completing several ongoing cataloguing projects and finalising the digital preservation system, enabling us to begin providing access to parts of our digital collections. Perhaps in six months’ time, we will be ready to share an online portal for accessing digital content.
Mary Allen, Deputy Archivist:
Since our last catch-up, I have carried on the momentum with cataloguing, and this has largely been my focus for the last few months. Despite cataloguing being the backbone of what archivists do, it is so easy for it to fall into the background as other, more time-sensitive projects arise. Happily, I have managed to complete a couple of small cataloguing projects, including a collection of personal papers of a Jesuit brother who died in 2023. He had a lot of images and documents saved to CDs and on a laptop, many of the files being back ups and duplicates, which took a long time to go through. I have also managed to re-package about a quarter of the first series of the Martyrs’ Cause papers, which has also involved addressing any queries I’d highlighted on my draft listing. It is slower progress than I anticipated, but my new deadline to get this series uploaded is Easter – watch this space!
In November last year we held our annual Explore Your Archive (EYA) exhibition for members of staff at the Jesuit Curia and London Jesuit Centre, and for the Jesuits living and working here. This year we held it over three consecutive days, rather than one. We have learnt from previous EYA exhibition that with hybrid working now being the norm, many missed out when it was held only on one day. Items on display included our recently repackage relics, photographs of life at Heythrop College, Oxfordshire, our oldest book and oldest document, records from the missions, Beaumont College photographs, and plans of the Holy Name Church in Manchester. We all felt that this was one of our best and most visually appealing EYA exhibitions yet.
On the topic of the Holy Name, I have also been asked to give a 30-minute talk at the Manchester Universities’ Catholic Chaplaincy on its history and archives. This is to take place in May. I’m not a natural public speaker so I’m a little nervous, but it has been fascinating going through the sources we have for the Church.
Lucy Vinten, Assistant Archivist and Rare Book Cataloguer:
The big news from the last few months is that the PhD funding bid submitted last autumn was successful. This was made jointly with the Institute of English Studies at the University of London to the London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP) to fund a PhD student for 4 years to investigate the rare books collection in the Jesuit Archive through the lens of two nineteenth-century catalogues. We have advertised the post, had some fabulous applications and will be interviewing next month. I am really excited about this project, and looking forward to the successful candidate starting his or her research in September.
Keeping with the academic theme, I have put on two displays of rare books for students doing Masters Degrees in Book History, one from Kings’ College London, the other from the Institute of English studies, part of the School of Advanced Studies at the Senate House, London. Both groups appeared to really enjoy the talk and the books I selected to display, and since then two students from Kings have come in weekly as volunteers to help list the eighteenth-century books. I am really pleased to have these deepening links with academic institutions, and to get our rare book collection more widely known.
Over the years our exhibitions and displays have become more professional and varied, and we have branched into thematic exhibitions. These two displays were the first time that we had concentrated solely on the rare books, and they raised some interesting questions about presenting such focussed exhibitions, from how to make them visually interesting, to whether we had enough book supports (the answer to this last was no, we didn’t. I had to quickly create more book cradles)
The Jesuit Rare Books Group had its latest meeting before Christmas. I set this group up a few years ago to create an opportunity for those involved in the care of Jesuit or Jesuit aligned historic book collections to meet and talk. It includes those who look after the collections at Stonyhurst and Campion Hall, Oxford, the Bar Convent in York, the Venerable English College (VEC) at Rome, and is expanding as we make new connections. This time we were joined for the first time by the rare books cataloguer at the Jesuit library of St Alban, Valladolid, who introduced her collections to us – an amalgamation of three Jesuit libraries from Valladolid and Madrid.
Following this, in January I went to visit the VEC in Rome. It houses a rare book collection with strong Jesuit links, and the Director of Heritage Collections, Professor Maurice Whitehead and the rare book cataloguer, Dr Renaud Milazzo, were extremely generous with their time and expertise. We spent a fascinating couple of days discussing our two collections, their similarities and differences, and I came away full of insights and ideas about avenues of further research. I was lucky enough to stay at the VEC, the guest wing of which was built as a palace by Cardinal Philip Howard OP in the late seventeenth century. My bedroom was as opulently appointed as that suggests!
Jamie Hennessy Jackson, Cataloguing Archivist:
Since joining the team in December, I have been tackling successively larger cataloguing projects. This began with the personal papers of four Jesuit priests, which you can read about here. Then over the previous two months, I have catalogued the extensive archives of Beaumont College, a Jesuit school in Old Windsor, Berkshire. The school has a rich history spanning more than a century, from its foundation in 1861 through to its closure in 1967, which was the subject of considerable controversy. The Society closed the school due to a climate of declining membership and tightening purse strings, but this caused outrage among parents and alumni who had only recently raised £100,000 for the school as part of a centenary fundraiser. Reading through folders of correspondence from this time sent to the Rector categorised into “sympathetic”, “neutral”, and “mostly hostile” was eye-opening to say the least. The collection also reveals the wartime spirit typical of Britons at the time, with Beaumont College accommodating the evacuating Vaughan School during the Blitz despite this nearly doubling their numbers.
Aside from Beaumont, I have also been expanding my repertoire of archival skills including putting together exhibitions. A recent “highlights of the archive” exhibition, displayed for one afternoon only, involved drawing on a range of fascinating material in our collections. This included our display cases with the theme “unexpected items”, showcasing our North Korean World Cup memorabilia and Frederick Copleston’s top hat. You can read the story of how a football signed by the 1966 North Korean World Cup team ended up in our collections here. Looking forward, my next big cataloguing project will be the archives of St Beuno’s Spirituality Centre, coinciding nicely with my upcoming weekend retreat there in May!
Archive Volunteers:
We are grateful for the invaluable contributions our incredible volunteers bring to our work. Over the past six months, Victoria, Henry, Grace, Iris, Lisi, Catherine and Lauren have assisted us in cataloguing newly opened personal papers, listing new accessions, cataloguing 18th century books and digitisation projects. Their dedication has contributed to our efforts, and we extend our thanks for their hard work and commitment.
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We hope you enjoyed discovering a bit about the work we are currently engaged with. Please contact us if you would like to know more about any of these areas of work.
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