Don’t forget that the British Library exhibition on Alice in Wonderland in the Front Hall Gallery is still open to explore until April 17th. Curated by Helen Melody, the exhibition celebrates 150 years since the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Find out more about the exhibition here and more about a range of events being put on by the BL to compliment the exhibition on their Events Calendar.
With the assistance of the ACE/V & A Purchase Grant Fund and the Friends of the National Libraries, The University of Nottingham recently purchased a Typescript of D H Lawrence’s Collection of Poems ‘Pansies’, with an accompanying letter to Charles Lahr, both dated 1929.
This typescript quite significantly shows that Lawrence typed the Poetry collection a fourth time in order to elude the censors. These items have not apparently been seen by any of the various scholars working on Lawrence’s life and works since his death in 1930 and so this is a very exciting purchase!
Further work needs to be undertaken to ascertain its full significance.
Nottingham have now catalogued the Pansies typescript and the description is available on their online catalogue. To find a description of this, and more information about the acquisition, please visit the Nottingham blog here.
Please also check out the press release issued to celebrate the event!
![See page for author [CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](http://glam-archives.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/A_young_couple_sit_on_a_sofa_holding_hands_while_she_coyly_Wellcome_V0039049-2.jpg "[See page for author [CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons")
[See page for author [CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
The DBSA podcast is hosted by Sarah Wendell, co-founder of the romance novel review site Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. Normally focusing on interviews with romance authors, editors, and readers, this episode featured an interview with Rutgers University (New Jersey) digital archivist Caryn Radick, and raised some fascinating questions about the intersection between the romance genre and the archives world.
It’s probably fair to say that the usual concerns of a literary archivist are on collecting, cataloguing and outreach – how do we acquire archives, and how best to describe and promote them? Interestingly, Caryn Radick has flipped this script and is working on a project investigating how romance writers use archives for research.
The interview ranges widely-topics covered include what an archivist does; the research resources that might be of interest to romance authors; how to find and access archives, and how they differ from (and can be more intimating than) libraries. The discussion also touches on digital archives and online access; the way that certain people’s voices are just not captured in the archival record; novels and TV shows that feature archives and manuscripts (namecheck: Dracula); and, importantly, whether the often-denigrated romance community is being adequately documented.*
On the original question of the kinds of archival research that romance authors do, Caryn’s research indicates that:
“A lot of them just really, said they really want to get those details of time and place correct, but they also like to get a voice that represents the time period or place that they’re looking at.?One of the things I really appreciated was there was a certain amount of reverence and enthusiasm for using archival materials which reflects what it was like for me when I was first getting into the profession. The aspect of, wow, this is a diary that somebody wrote in the nineteenth century, and I can’t believe you’re letting me touch this.”
Caryn is a terrifically eloquent advocate for archives (the podcast is worth a listen for that alone) and Sarah Wendell, for her part, is a very sympathetic interviewer. In fact, Sarah’s summary of what archivists do by way of accessibility and outreach is one of the best elevator pitches I’ve ever heard for the profession:
“So part of your job is, we have all this old stuff, and we need to make it available to people who are curious about all of this old stuff, and it’s not just for us at the university; everybody can have access to all of our old stuff.“
I found this multi-faceted approach to the ways that the romance genre interacts with archives very stimulating. Just some of the things I was left wondering…
->How are we doing when it comes to collecting genre fiction archives and documenting those communities?
->Would it be helpful to create a list of literary archives sorted by genre?
->It’s now common to use story-telling when interacting with kids, but could we do more to market our story-rich research collections to creative writers? (One outlet or inspiration for that kind of outreach might be Two Nerdy History Girls, a history/writing blog by Loretta Chase and Isabella Bradford, two well-known historical romance authors.)
->The eternal bugbear: what can we do to make archival research less scary?
And if you’ve been wondering yes, but what have romance writers ever done for us? well, it turns out that there are, indeed, archivist romance heroines. Take a listen to find out more…
(Lucky librarians: this list by Wendy the Super Librarian has librarian heroines covered.)
*If you’re interested in the reception of romance as a genre, Kelly Faircloth’s article How Romance Novelists Got Such a Silly, Sappy Rap is an excellent introduction and her article on How Harlequin Became The Most Famous Name In Romance is a must read for anybody interested in publishing history.
Charlotte Mash, Project Archivist, Bodleian Library
The Cadbury Research Library has just finished hosting a four-week internship focusing on the Noël Coward archive held there. The internship was funded by the Coward Foundation and the successful applicant was Lucy Mounfield.
The Coward archive at Birmingham is extensive but not fully catalogued. We do have a basic box listing available on our online archive catalogue as a PDF document. Lucy’s internship was divided into a number of small projects including:
Indexing the telegram log books in the collection. Listing the names of correspondents and adding keywords to aid research:
We are hoping this is the first stage in trying to obtain funding to fully catalogue the whole of this important, albeit under-used, collection.
The meeting held at the British Library 22nd May 2015 on the theme of acquisition was well attended, with a very informative and lively session from Andrew Motion and Peter Rankin. Thanks to members who shared their experiences on negotiations with donors and depositors. Chatham house rules applied to the day but we hope some members will share edited highlights in the next GLAM edition of ARC. More details of the ARC edition will be sent to members in the next few weeks. We do hope that members will have lots of literary archives stories to make it as successful as it has been in previous years.
Minutes from the 2014 Aberystwyth and British Library meetings can be found here.
We do hope that members can join us for our 10th year celebration at the John Rylands in Manchester on 1st October. At the meeting we will be looking back at a decade of GLAM, alongside the following two discussions:
– Literary societies & archives, with talks from Anne Price-Owen and Nia Daniel from the David Jones Society and Antoinette Fawcett and Fran Baker from the Norman Nicholson Society
– Recent developments in copyright in the UK and the EU
We will then proceed with our usual AGM meeting.
For all those wishing to attend, please contact Joanne Fitton (J.C.Fitton@leeds.co.uk) by 18th September.
A message from David Sutton, Chair of GLAM:
Authors and their Papers has reached this, its latest form, in a pleasingly collaborative way. The absence of such a document, especially for literary authors, became a theme for discussion during the workshops run by the Diasporic Literary Archives Network, and a first draft was assembled by DLAN members. That draft was then edited and expanded from the perspective of literary archivists, by members of GLAM, and from the perspective of authors themselves, by staff of the Society of Authors. Following positive discussions at the GLAM meeting in Aberystwyth in September 2014 and the DLAN meeting at Yale University in October 2014, the new expanded version was given an extensive editorial revision by members of staff of the National Archives. We feel that it is now nearing its final version, but there is still time for GLAM members to offer further comments and suggestions. Please send your views and ideas to me directly (at d.c.sutton@reading.ac.uk). Many thanks.
The Authors & their Papers publication is available here.
Here at GLAM we are delighted to announce that the University of East Anglia has launched a new British Archive for Contemporary Writing (BACW) .
The initiative builds on the University’s international reputation for creative writing, the status of Norwich as a UNESCO City of Literature, and UEA’s strong links with writers of world renown through its international literary festivals and its British Centre for Literary Translation and the emerging National Centre for Writing which is based in Norwich.
UEA established the country’s first MA in creative writing and remains the best, and best-known, having facilitated the emergence of new writers for more than forty years including: Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Anne Enright, Tracy Chevalier, Adam Foulds, Andrew Miller, John Boyne and David Almond to name just a few. https://www.uea.ac.uk/literature/creative-writing/alumni Its teachers have included Angus Wilson, Malcolm Bradbury, Angela Carter, Lorna Sage, Michelle Roberts, Patricia Duncker, Andrew Motion, Giles Foden, Lavinia Greenlaw, Trezza Azzopardi and Andrew Cowan.
UEA intends to grow its existing literary collections significantly, most notable of which is the extensive personal archive of the Nobel Laureate, Doris Lessing (www.uea.ac.uk/bacw/lessing), and literary material from other prize winning authors such as Naomi Alderman, Tash Aw, Malcolm Bradbury, Amit Chaudhuri, J.D. Salinger, Roger Deakin, Lorna Sage, WG Sebald and the acclaimed playwright Snoo Wilson.
The Archive includes more than 300 interviews with prominent authors across 23 years of its literary festivals including: Margaret Atwood, Martin Amis, Anne Enright, John Fowles, William Golding, Seamus Heaney, Alan Hollinghurst, Kazuo Ishiguro, P.D. James, Ian McEwan, Toni Morrison, Iris Murdoch, Harold Pinter, Salman Rushdie, Ali Smith to name just a few. These recordings are available for consultation in our archives reading room www.uea.ac.uk/bacw/litfest and a small selection can be viewed on our Website.
The Archive also provides an insight into the changing landscape of publishing throughout the twentieth century, through the papers of the oldest literary agency in the world, AP Watt, and the publisher Charles Pick including correspondence with Michael Holroyd, Nadine Gordimer, Anita Desai, Monica Dickens, Paul Gallico, Richard Gordon and Graham Greene. www.uea.ac.uk/bacw/publishing
Nature writing is a key theme within the BACW which already includes the archive of Roger Deakin, pioneer of the wild swimming movement and author of the acclaimed and highly popular, Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey through Britain. www.uea.ac.uk/bacw/nature-writing
To further enhance the archive, UEA is also establishing a storehouse initiative, an opportunity for authors to loan manuscripts and related literary material at a much earlier stage in their careers. The aim is to raise author profiles, to build up a truly contemporary archive, and for the wider research community to gain access to materials that would not otherwise be available until much later in an author’s career. The Storehouse will add value by organising and cataloguing the collections and making them more accessible even if authors need the flexibility to remove materials at a later stage. Several writers have already committed to depositing material under the model.
Although the archive will look to build some of its collections from UEA’s own community of emerging writers it is also keen to attract material from other acclaimed authors produced in, or translated into, the English language.
For more details please see their website: www.uea.ac.uk/bacw
Whether or not you’re a member of GLAM, it’s not too late to book a place for our two day visit to Aberystwyth, 17-18 September.
The theme of this special meeting is Collaborative Approaches in Literary Archives. There will be sessions on digital archives, literary societies and friends’ groups, publishers and cross-sectoral collaboration, not to mention a talk from Nia Daniel on the Dylan Thomas centenary. There will also be an opportunity to visit the Dylan Thomas 100 Exhibition. See below for the full programme.
The schedule has been designed with travel and train times in mind, so we hope to see as many of you as possible there. Please contact GLAM Secretary Judy Burg to book your place, j.burg@hull.ac.uk.
Aberystwyth, 17-18 September 2014
Day One: Wednesday 17 September
14.15 David Sutton: Welcome and introductory remarks:
GLAM involvement in collaborative projects:
14.45 Digital archives: how do they work?
15.45 Working with literary societies and friends’ groups
17.15 Close. Visit to the Dylan Thomas 100 exhibition
Day Two: Thursday 18 September
09.15 Nia Daniel: The role of the National Library of Wales in Welsh literary archives: the example of the Dylan Thomas centenary
09.45 Publishers’ archives: working with the publishers, working with the users
10.45 Break for coffee
11.15 Cross-sectoral collaboration: case studies
12.30 Lunch
13.15 GLAM AGM, to include any matters arising from the last general meeting and the last committee meeting, and latest news from member organisations.
14.45 Close
