You’re invited to learn how easy it is to preserve and share your institution’s digital legacy.
As a religious institution, you are a steward of important materials that document the history of faith, music, local communities and events, genealogy and so much more. The digital age has made it possible to digitize and preserve these important materials to increase accessibility to new audiences and to ensure that these invaluable records are still available for religious historians and the community well into the future.
Creating a new digital collections program from scratch or reviving a dormant digital collections program requires the right technology. Tools should be simple and affordable, hosted in a secure environment, and flexible enough to grow as your program grows.
Participants will:
Hear from a representative at Temple Rodef Shalom about how they are using Preservica Starter to connect with their community
Learn how to easily create your first digital preservation collection with simple drag and drop
Quickly upload metadata and digital files in bulk
Request digital materials from the community
Showcase your archive with your own public access portal
Connect with learning resources and others using this technology on the Community Hub
Please join Preservica for a FREE training to learn how to use Preservica’s Starter platform to launch a digital collections program.
Wednesday, February 8, 2023 11:00AM-12:00PM ET Register here
St Edmund’s College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded as St Edmund’s House in 1896 as a lodging house for students, it became a graduate college in 1965, received its Royal Charter in 1998 and is the only Cambridge college with a Roman Catholic Chapel. The Von Hügel Institute, a research institute for critical Catholic enquiry, although separate, has strong links and is based on the same site.
St Edmund’s House was co-founded by Henry Fitzalan Howard, the 15th Duke of Norfolk and Baron Anatole von Hügel, an ethnographer and explorer who became the first Catholic to take a degree in Cambridge since 1688. Von Hugel was also instrumental in the revocation of the papal ban on Catholics attending Oxford and Cambridge. St Edmund’s College, Ware provided three of the first four students, all of whom were studying for the priesthood. Within a few years most of St Edmund’s House students had already been ordained to the priesthood before coming into residence as members of the University. They read a range of degrees to equip them for work in grammar schools and universities.
The decade of the 1960’s, especially during the Mastership of Canon Garrett Sweeney (1964-76), was a period of steady progress, and laid the foundation for the present College. The increased number of postgraduates in the University resulted in four graduate Colleges being established in 1965 (the other three were Darwin College, Wolfson College and Clare Hall). 1965 also saw the election of the first four Fellows and an increase in the number of lay people working at St Edmund’s.
1896 Matriculation (Ref: EDPH 2/1/2)
The college gradually increased in student numbers throughout the 20th century and this is reflected in the plethora of new college buildings (many of which we hold plans, accounts and committee minutes for). There were less than 50 students in 1970 and this had more than doubled by 1990, doubling again to 200 in 2000, 400 in 2010 and over 450 by 2014. Although originally only postgraduates were admitted, this was extended to mature undergraduates in the later 20th century.
The College achieved the status of an Approved Foundation on 8 March 1975. The old Association was dissolved on 30 June 1984 and replaced by a new governing body of Fellows and St Edmund’s became a fully autonomous and self-regulating society. It attained full collegiate status in 1996, exactly 100 years after its foundation. All of these changes were well documented, and the records are in the archive.
The college archive has been in its current room since 2006. Underneath the library, it has a separate strong room and office, although efficient records management means that the office is slowly becoming a second strong room! Like many Cambridge archives, there has been a Fellow in overall charge of the archives since at least 1994. In the early 2000’s, the Archivist Dr Philip Gardener employed a professional consultant archivist (Joan Bullock-Anderson) and adopted the title Fellow Archivist in 2007.
Above and Below: The archive room
The archive has had a professionally qualified archivist since 2012, originally for only half day a week, but latterly for one day a week. The post now includes both archives and records management, as a Records Management Schedule was created in 2018. This has had a massive impact on accrual rates, and also raised the profile of the archive hugely within college; most enquiries are now internal. It also means that we have very recent records which are a bit of a challenge to catalogue!
A letter from Mother Teresa (Ref:EDAR 1/10/1)
As you would expect, the archive stores, preserves, and provides access to the records that document the history of the College. It includes records from the first 13 Masters of the college, taking us up to 2014. The Archive also contains minutes of the governing bodies, records of clubs and societies, College publications, photographs, and some personal papers. There are also plans and minutes from the numerous building projects, records from May Balls and the Norfolk Feast, the college’s pre-eminent social event, which is still held annually. Some records acquired from external sources predate the date of the foundation of St Edmund’s, although the majority of the collection is from the 20th century.
In common with other college archives in Cambridge, there are relatively few papers of prominent fellows, many of which are kept in the main University Library. The majority of the collection has been catalogued and is on the Cambridge University Archives Search at https://archivesearch.lib.cam.ac.uk/
As the archivist is only one day a week, it can take a little while for us to answer enquiries, and our search-room capabilities are limited. We do, however, offer an excellent remote service (with no research charges) and would be delighted to show any archivists or interested parties around if you are ever in Cambridge. Our email address is archives@st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk
Whilst the charity is non-denominational, its founder and his wife and fellow charity worker Lady Sue Ryder CMG OBE were well known Roman Catholics in their lifetime, and the archive contains much evidence of their faith.
In 2019, we were awarded grants by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Foyle Foundation to save our historic sound collection, which was at grave risk due to technical and physical obsolescence. This project, called ‘Resonate’ saw 256 reel to reel and cassette tapes digitised and then transcribed by a team of digital volunteers. As well as this vital conservation and access work, we produced a podcast and a series of blogs, and made some sound recordings available on our website.
The digitisation was done by an external company, Sirensound who we selected after a tender process. Once this was complete, we did a lot of work to improve the accessibility of the digitised sound files for disabled people. This started with transcription – a transcript is available for each recording and podcast. It also affected the way we chose to present the information online. For the digitised sound tapes, each tape is presented on our website as a fully captioned film, hosted on YouTube, so that people with sensory disabilities can access the recordings. The films were created for us by the company Nutmeg, again selected through a tendering process. For the podcast, we hosted the podcast in the Anchor app, which distributes the podcast to other apps such as iTunes and Spotify and provided a YouTube version as a fully captioned film too. We plan to continue this podcast now the project has ended.
Because of our location in South Derbyshire, and the limits on the size of our premises, the volunteering part of this project was always going to be ‘virtual’. However, our call for volunteers coincided with the first pandemic lockdown, so we were quite overwhelmed with expressions of interest. This soon settled down, and we had 27 volunteers, who contributed over 1,177 hours to the project.
There are a selection of the digitised sound tapes now available online. They include interviews with Group Captain Cheshire and Lady Ryder, and soundtracks of films on both of their charity work by Ryder-Cheshire films. Also included are oral history interviews with past members of staff, volunteers and residents as well as a selection of Group Captain Cheshire’s sermons. They can be viewed online, along with the accompanying blogs and podcast episodes at https://rewind.leonardcheshire.org/?type=tag&s=resonate.
Victoria Stevens Library and Archive Preservation and Conservation Ltd.
victoriastevensconservation@gmail.com
When it comes to the repair of bound items, there is a long tradition of the reuse and repurposing of materials. The recycling of waste is predominant in the history of book construction and repair methods throughout the medieval and early modern period, with manuscript fragments and printers’ waste being reused from the earliest point of codex production. Manuscripts, discarded in favour of printed editions or rendered redundant by the Reformation, quickly found their way into new bindings in the form of covers and constructional elements such as spine linings, pastedowns or endpaper reinforcements.
Highly visible manuscript waste, repurposed to create new bindings: Campion Hall collections (top) and New College; both colleges of the University of Oxford
Rarely hidden, the aesthetic for visibly reused components did not diminish until the beginning of the C17th when the fashion for all new materials, as a signifier of wealth and the ability to afford expensive tastes, became more prevalent and the use of highly visible waste slowly dropped away.
Waste materials continued to be used, however, but usually secretly: most Victorian cloth cases use printers’ waste for spine stiffeners or linings, and in some instances, these add to the provenance and story of the bindings by providing social or geographical markers.
Hidden printers’ waste:From Round the World from London Bridge to Charing Cross, via Yokohama and Chicago: An album of pictures from photographs of the chief places of interest in all parts of the world, published by George Newnes in 1895; from the collection of Magdalen College School; adverts for brandy creating the spine lining of a book in the Wordsworth Trust collections.
A good example is the spine lining in the Examiner’s Copy of TE Lawrence’s undergraduate thesis, held in the collections of Jesus College, Oxford. Here we see that the spine lining is a clear geographical signifier, indicating its origin and confirming the likelihood of it being a local creation. On the spine lining are adverts for a robe maker in St Aldates (opposite ‘Christ Church’) and businesses on Banbury Road, one of the main thoroughfares to the north of the city centre.
The spine lining of the Examiner’s copy of TE Lawrence’s undergraduate thesis; Jesus College Oxford
It was not only binding waste that was repurposed in library and archive collections: recycled clothing and textiles often feature in binding construction, with linen and printed cotton waste being used for seal protection, spine linings, endbands and in some cases early textile book covers. I have subsequently – and excitingly – discovered that ecclesiastical robes were used for repairs to the St Catherine’s Monastery collections in Sinai (1).
The remnants of a textile seal protector; Worcester Cathedral library and archivesDress fabric used to cover a binding: Murray, Lindley. 1829. Sequel to the English Reader. Philadelphia: McCarty & Davis; featured on the https://www.conservation-wiki.com/wiki/File:Zigzag_sewing.jpg#filelinks
A recent discovery that covers – literally- the space between the recycling of traditional binding materials and items of clothing are the glove repairs in two collections with Jesuit links, recently assessed during separate conservation audits. My interest was first drawn to several items in the special collections held at the Bar Convent, York. These remarkable repairs using soft ladies’ kid gloves are beautifully executed, with a precision and neatness that shows some significant technical and three-dimensional craft skill. The glove seams are clearly visible, and carefully positioned to hug the book; there is purpose here in how they have been cut, stitched and adhered to the original covers to repair what was likely to be gaping spines and detached boards. This was clearly a case of make do and mend, and thrift in conservation and collections care, C19th style.
Imagine my surprise when assessing the Heythrop material (2) at Campion Hall a few months later to discover examples of similar repairs, again in a Jesuit collection. Here there was less evidence, with only one item being found to have a glove repair. This had a somewhat less decorous and less charming thin textile spine covering it; that too had become damaged, and, peeping out, was the tell-tale seam of a glove. The cloth was ridged at the tail of the spine: clearly there were further glove seams lurking there too, giving rise to the fact that they were possibly spine linings rather than the full reback-style repairs to the books at the Bar Convent.
These discoveries have led to a bit of an obsession, and to the potential for their inclusion in a conference paper on binding repairs. The effective ‘upcycling’ of materials is both so archaic in a throw-away world, but also so current with the drive to reduce, reuse and recycle. It would be great to know if this is a common feature in Catholic collections, possibly specifically Jesuit collections, and whether this is something that was taught to the communities that cared for these collections, perhaps by an itinerant binding teacher or through word of mouth.
I would really welcome any information from CAS members on comparable items they may have discovered. Please do get in touch using the email below; I look forward to making links and connections between the collections you now care for.
(1) Email correspondence with Dr Nikolas Sarris
(2) The Heythorp material is a recent addition to the Campion Hall collection and is currently unavailable for research use.
A Catholic Family History Society Lecture; presented by Carmen Mangion PhD Senior Lecturer in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London.
Date: 20 November 2021
Time: 14:00 GMT
Place: Online
The great Abbey at Syon was the only Bridgettine house in England. The foundation stone was laid by Henry V in 1415, and in a little more than a century of existence it reached a position of unique influence and importance, with especially close links to the Tudor dynasty.
The story of the Bridgettines of Syon Abbey has been remembered as one of triumph over adversity. They were one of two religious orders that were not dispersed after the Reformation, and the only one of the two to have survived thus retaining an unbroken line of succession from the original community founded in south-west London in 1415. After much ‘wanderings’ on the Continent and a short return to England in 1557 during the reign of Mary I, the community settled in Lisbon in 1599. Their permanent return to England in 1861 was celebrated in the Catholic press. This paper is about a lesser-known facet of their history, and examines Syon’s first return in 1809, when, threatened by the approach of Napoleon’s revolutionary forces, ten members of the Syon community in Lisbon returned to England. The paper begins by outlining the story of the 1809 departure from Lisbon. It then moves to what we know of the events that unfolded in England, identifying the individual Bridgettines, t he places they resided and their benefactors. It examines in depth the individual stories of two sisters who are dispersed, examining the fidelity to their identity as Bridgettines. Then it considers the memory of the 1809 return interrogating how the history of the first return has been remembered and documented arguing the preconceptions of the twentieth century have shaped how the story of Syon’s first return has been told.
Please register your interest in attendance by emailing cfhsrecords@gmail.com
I am delighted to announce the appointment of two new patrons to the Catholic Archives Society:
Our new episcopal patron is Bishop Robert Byrne CO, current bishop of Hexham and Newcastle. Bishop Robert has an impressive track record in promoting Catholic heritage, both during his time as Auxiliary Bishop in Birmingham as a trustee in charge of both the Oscott Heritage Subcommittee and the Diocesan Patrimony and Archive Committee, as well as more recently with the interest he has taken in both the long-term future of the Hexham and Newcastle Diocesan Archive and movements towards the formation of a Hexham and Newcastle Diocesan Patrimony Committee.
Our new lay patron is Dr Carmen Mangion, currently senior lecturer in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck University. Dr Mangion has a respected reputation within Catholic history research networks, is a regular user of Catholic archives, and has developed an excellent working relationship with a number of religious communities.
Both are appointed with immediate effect and, in line with our constitution, will serve a maximum term of ten years. We are very grateful to both Bishop Robert and Dr Mangion for agreeing to take on these roles and their willingness to advocate for the importance of Catholic archives in their respective spheres.
catholicarchivesociety.org 
