By Jill Dye
Discover a cross-journal special feature from Library & Information History and Archives of Natural History.
A chance meeting of two journal editors at an Edinburgh University Press editor’s roundtable took place in 2023. What started as an initial acknowledgement of shared interests quickly transformed into an open call for papers to the societies which support both journals (CILIP Library & Information History Group and The Society for the History of Natural History). Following a successful conference hosted by the Linnean Society, authors were invited to submit papers to both journals, undergoing the same peer review, acceptance and publication process as usual for both journals. I’m pleased to share this cross-journal virtual issue: Libraries, Archives & Natural History.
Tracing library collections and scholarly networks
Two papers in this virtual issue demonstrate the value of tracing scholarly and social networks through the creation and dispersal of library and archive collections.
Katarzyna Pękacka-Falkowska explores the arrangement of the library of Johann Philipp Breyne (1680–1764), a naturalist and author from Gdańsk in Polish Prussia. Breyne cemented his place in elite scholarly networks through his library of lavish natural history works and through the giving and receiving of books for it.
William Noblett’s study of Philip Miller’s (1691–1771) posthumously-auctioned library uncovers a vibrant network of collectors and publishers and a strong market for botanical works, demonstrating the value of such auction catalogues in evidencing such networks even through a relatively modest sale.
Challenging narratives
Four papers in this virtual issue demonstrate how books, archives and specimens can evidence the lives of those which we might otherwise know very little and shed new light on lives we might think we know well.
Katherine Enright uses metadata from the digitised Singapore Herbarium alongside archival material to trace the presence of midwives and healers and uncovers the role of botanist Mohamed Haniff as a key intermediary.
Kimberly Glassman decodes William Hooker’s cryptic notations in Flora Boreali-Americana to reveala network of contributors from communities of people whose stories often remain untold.
Jill Whitelock examines how Francis Jenkinson’s (1853–1923) entomological pursuits were shaped by the rhythm of his work as Cambridge University Librarian and were reliant upon others in his household (his housekeeper, among others) setting his specimens before they became too brittle to pin.
Elizabeth Smith explores Lady Nora Barlow’s pivotal role in creating the Darwin Archive at Cambridge University Library. Spurred on by her own scientific interests, Barlow sought to make Charles Darwin’s private papers accessible to scholars, and to present him as a modern scientific pioneer, undoing earlier efforts by his family to obscure Darwin’s views on religion through careful curation of his papers.
Uncovering evidence in the afterlives of books
Andrew Brown traces the stories within the layers of an interleaved copy of Thomas Pennant’s British Zoology, tracing how notes by Marmaduke Tunstall and George Allan fed into Thomas Bewick’s preparation for his own History of British Birds, exemplifying the interconnectedness of the local natural history community in the North East of England at the end of the eighteenth century.
A more modern afterlife is the subject of Florence Pieters’ article, which recounts the dramatic recovery of stolen specimens from the collections of painter and poet Johannes le Francq van Berkhey (1729–1812), highlighting the importance of collection unification in elucidating taxonomic questions today.
Preserving knowledge in the past and in the present
Collaborative efforts to stabilise knowledge for future research form, in historical and present-day contexts. In their article, Christopher Preston and Nathan Smith demonstrate this by revisiting the communal effort to record Cambridgeshire’s flora and fungi (1919–1952). This project was organised without hierarchy, giving all researchers equal access to records and equal opportunity to create records, creating a standardised recording method.
Finally, Cheryl Tipp examines technological evolution, fragility and urgency of the British Library’s wildlife sound archive. Digitisation aimed to safeguard deteriorating recordings, including voices of extinct birds, but the impact that the 2023 cyberattack on the British Library had on access to these collections revealed a new fragility of archives today.
A collaborative effort
The creation of this special virtual issue has been possible through the work of so contributors, from conference organisers and authors to peer reviewers and copy editors, to all of whom I owe a great deal of thanks; most especially I would like to highlight the efforts of my collaborator, Anne Secord. Thanks are also due to Edinburgh University Press who have been supportive of this venture throughout and have facilitated free access to all these articles for twelve months from their publication.
I am so excited that we can now share these articles openly, celebrating our shared interests, while emerging from the process with a deeper appreciation of what makes each journal unique.
About the author
Jill Dye is co-editor of Library & Information History and Head of Access at the National Library of Scotland. She is a chartered librarian with a PhD in historic library borrowing records from the University of Stirling. Her research interests lie in public access to books and information in the past and in the present.
