Work in Progress 6
Since our last post in April, there has been plenty of activity in the archives. Alongside our ongoing work responding to remote enquiries, supervising visitors and progressing with cataloguing, we have also been involved in a number of other activities.
As well as taking some well-deserved time off to enjoy the summer holidays, the team hosted two work experience placements during July and August. September, as always, was dedicated to our annual thorough cleaning and checking of the shelves. This also provided an opportunity to assess storage conditions, with a particular focus this year on replacing older, non-archival boxes that posed a risk of damaging the records they contained.
More recently, at the start of October, we hosted a joint open day with Heythrop Library. Bringing together the efforts of the whole team, the event featured a wonderfully rich exhibition celebrating the collections.
Below, the team shares more about their individual activities and projects over the past six months.
Rebecca Somerset, Province Archivist:
I have spent much of the past six months focusing on importing historic digitised material into our digital preservation system. I am now working on formalising the processes involved, as well as developing the portal I mentioned in previous work-in-progress blog posts.
In June, I conducted an oral history interview with Paul Chitnis, former director of Jesuit Missions. In August, I spent two days with the Preston community, appraising boxes of records stored in the basement and conducting oral history interviews with two community members.
In October, I welcomed the overseas Jesuits in Formation (JiFs) to the archives. I introduced them to the collections and used the material held here to offer an overview of the history of the Jesuits in Britain.
Mary Allen, Deputy Archivist:
Over the past six months, we have completed the transition of our catalogue from Calm to Atom. We managed to do this much quicker than anticipated, thanks to Jamie’s wizardry with Power Query (and a little help from ChatGPT!), which helped us get all the data from Calm into a format compatible with Atom. There was some tweaking required once all the data was in Atom, but we now have a tidy and well-functioning catalogue that we can be proud of. We have written a blog post about the whole process, including a list of things we wish we’d known before starting, which we hope to be able to share soon. We also hope to share the finished product soon, although we are waiting for the other partners in our network of Catholic Archives and Libraries to be up and running first. Since completing the transfer, Jamie and I have delivered training on using Atom to the rest of the team, so that we are all now confident in accessioning material, creating authority files, and cataloguing using the system. We have also created guides that can be consulted to help keep everything consistent. We are still learning new things as we use it, such as how to get the most out of searches and how to make a change to one field across every description in a particular collection.
Oral histories seem to be a bit of a theme at the moment! I carried out my first oral history interview with a Jesuit who was celebrating 60 years in the Society this year. I was a little daunted, having not done anything like this before, but I really enjoyed the process. I thought I had been mindful to keep my ‘mm-hm’s and ‘yeses’ to a minimum so as not to interrupt the flow too much, but on listening back, there were more than I realised! I will try to bear that in mind for next time.
Alongside this, I catalogued a number of smaller collections of personal papers, including those of a Jesuit who died last year. His brother had also been in the Society, and there was a fair amount of crossover in the material, so I am now working on cataloguing his papers as well. I also catalogued the personal papers of James Walsh SJ, one of the promoters of the Martyrs’ Cause, who died in 1986 and whose papers were opened this year.
Unfortunately, the Martyrs Cause papers have been left untouched for much of the year while we focused on the transfer to Atom, but I hope to get back to them soon once I have finished cataloguing these personal papers.
Lucy Vinten, Assistant Archivist and Rare Book Cataloguer:
As usual the last six months in the Archive have been varied and interesting! I continue to find my core work of cataloguing the antiquarian books fascinating and enjoy making the books findable and adding to our knowledge about them. I keep updating the Jesuit Books website with new images and details. Our book boxing project is also continuing – in the last month 100 large sixteenth and seventeenth-century books have been repackaged into bespoke boxes ordered from the Bodleian Library’s packing and design service. The boxes will help prolong the life of these very fragile books.
An interesting side project I started while working remotely for a period this summer was transcribing lists of books in Jesuit Libraries in the English Province in the 1820s and 1830s. These recently discovered lists may prove a useful fixed point in a larger investigation of the book provision within the Province in the nineteenth century. But as ever with any project like this, they raise more questions than they answer!
I am still the Archives’ designated driver and recently undertook a complicated trip lasting a few days. This involved taking archives which needed conserving to the National Conservation Service in Oxfordshire, then driving to Preston to collect personal papers and other archival matter to bring back to the Province Archive, on to Stonyhurst to deliver items for their upcoming Northern Connections exhibition and collect more archives destined for the Province Archives, and finally to Edge Hill University where together with PhD student Ted Simonds I gave a lecture to 2nd year undergraduates as part of their ‘Making History’ module. All the deliveries and collections ended up in the right place, with no mix ups, and I enjoyed the opportunity to have a look at the book collections at Stonyurst College and at St Wilfrid’s Presbytery in Preston.
Jamie Hennessy Jackson, Cataloguing Archivist:
It feels like since the start of the year, my role has become increasingly varied, so that cataloguing is now one (still very significant!) element of many. Over the past six months, I continued to work on our AtoM project alongside Mary, guided work experience students through cataloguing, and travelled both North and South.
In May, I was once again selected as the Archive’s ambassador to attend the Catholic Archives Society conference, this time held in Stone, Staffordshire. There were some excellent talks celebrating the value of Catholic Archives, and an interesting visit to Boscobel House, where Charles II famously climbed an oak tree and hid from Parliamentary forces overnight following the English Civil War.
The house was a hotbed of Jesuit activity in the 17th century and contains priest holes designed by Br Nicholas Owen SJ. As usual, the best part of the conference was meeting other archivists from across the UK and Ireland and forging professional links with them.
In June, I headed down to the South coast at Boscombe, Bournemouth, to interview Fr Kevin Fox SJ and Fr Michael Bossy SJ at the Corpus Christi Jesuit Community. I was asking them about their time at Heythrop College, Oxon in the 1950s and 1960s, the archives of which I had finished cataloguing a few months prior. This was an expansion of the living history project (originally focusing on the lives of individuals rather than institutions), which I instigated as a result of a number of question marks arising during the cataloguing phase which documents simply could not answer. Kevin had already been an invaluable resource to me, answering any and all questions I had via email about life at Heythrop and its administrative structure in great detail, and the interviews provided similarly fruitful (and quite contrasting) pictures of the Jesuit training college. Subsequent work transcribing and preserving these recordings meant I also got to grips with Preservica, our digital preservation software.
Following on from this, I was finally ready to begin cataloguing the archives of the London years of Heythrop College, 1970-2018. In terms of volume of material this has been my most ambitious undertaking yet, although the amount of duplicated records means we have been able to get rid of box upon box, requiring the site team to come and take away bags of recycling on almost a daily basis at points. This has been satisfying, particularly when we are finding that shelf space is at a premium. I’ve been working on this project on and off for 4 months now and there’s still a way to go, but the end is in sight. Next on the horizon for me is the Religious Archives Group conference in November, and future cataloguing projects TBC!
Archive Volunteers:
We are grateful for the invaluable contributions our incredible volunteers bring to our work. Over the past six months, Boqi, Cyril, Eleanor and Patrick have assisted us in listing 19th century books and pamphlets, listing and repackaging photographs as well as digitisation projects. Their dedication has contributed to our efforts, and we extend our thanks for their hard work and commitment. We also welcomed Anna and Kit for week-long work experience placements over the summer. Cyril and Kit have contributed blog posts on their experience.
***
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.
Comments