2012 Annual Report - Jesus College - University of Cambridge

74 COLLEGE NEWS I Jesus College Annual Report 2012
The Old Library and Archives
Peter Glazebrook, Acting Keeper of the Old Library
and Fellow Librarian 2011-2012 and Frances Willmoth, Archivist
The Old Library
Two important projects have been completed, and a third begun, this year. The
Malthus Library has been re-catalogued in digital form and added to the UL’s
Newton Catalogue, which is accessible worldwide. Liam Sims (who worked half the
week for us) brought to light a number of interesting provenances among the older
books and also cleverly identified others (including three once belonging to Rousseau)
that had come (or come back) from Jane Dalton, a cousin of T. R. Malthus’s father and
something of a “blue-stocking”. (She deserves further study.) Our small collection of
oriental MSS and books has also been re-catalogued by an expert (Ignacio Sanchez)
– a very long-standing desideratum: hitherto we have relied on a list made a century ago
by the then fledgling “Year Among the Persians” E. G. Browne. And, while waiting to
take up a full-time appointment in the Rare Books Room of the UL, Sims started on the
digital re-cataloguing of the main Old Library Collection, tackling the 37 incunabula
(books printed before 1500) we still have. Exploiting the most recent work in this
bibliographical field, he confirmed the extreme rarity of several of them. Re-cataloguing
the entire collection (c.9000 volumes) would be a major undertaking, probably requiring
the equivalent of 3 years’ full-time work by an expert cataloguer, and so costing about
£100k (though it could be done in stages). It would undoubtedly be of benefit to the
wider world of scholarship.
The Jesuan Collection (of books by and about members of the College) continues to
grow – happily evidencing much scholarly and literary activity, less happily overflowing
the shelving in the Old Library Annex.
The steady flow of both researchers into our medieval manuscripts and early printed
books and other interested visitors has continued unabated. They have come from an
even wider than usual range of places, including Leiden, Paris, Florence, Jerusalem, and
the Universities of Umeå (Sweden), Tasmania, and Toronto, as well as others in Britain
and the U.S. The Friends of the National Libraries came in May.
Archives
The Archives’ office transferred from a small room at the end of the ground floor
corridor in East House to a much larger one off the hallway (opposite the choir
practice room) in the autumn of 2011. This is a huge improvement over the previously
cramped conditions. It provides working-space for three people, so readers can easily be
accommodated. We have also been able to take on two archives volunteers – Pat Holder
and Kathleen Cann – who lend their assistance one day a week and have already made a
major difference by undertaking the sorting and cataloguing of ephemera and other
documents.
Topics addressed by readers during the year have ranged from the charters of
Countess Constance (twelfth century) to early-twentieth-century friendship networks
between students. An architecture student examined the building of New Square; an
author preparing a biography of the mountaineer Jack Longland came in search of clues
to his activities and friends in his student days (1923-26). Another researcher consulted
papers left by Arthur Gray (Master, 1912-40) and looked at the early career of Frederick