Library and Information History Group Conference 2015: Libraries and the Development of Professional Knowledge

Pusey House Oxford on Saturday 19 September.

This conference will consider the various ways in which libraries have served as generators of professional knowledge, and examine how they succeeded in doing so. A student bursary is being offered to attend the conference which covers conference fees and refreshments and up to £100 towards travel expenses. The deadline for the bursary is 31st August 2015. Applications can be made by emailing a short paragraph explaining why you would like to attend the conference, together with a one page CV, to the Chair, Renae Satterley, r.satterley@middletemple.org.uk.

9.45 – Registration and Welcome

10.20 – Libraries and professional knowledge in the Early Modern age
Lucy Gwynn: Folios, hedgehogs, sketches and pickles: the traffic of books, specimens and drawings between physicians in Restoration England

Helen Kemp: The role of manuscripts in the acquisition of professional knowledge for the seventeenth century clergy

11.00 Questions and Refreshments

11.30 – Libraries and the growth of technical knowledge during the nineteenth century 

Jennifer Hillyard: The Library of the North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers

John Tiernan: A Pioneer Regional Professional Association for Librarians in the UK 

Martyn Walker: ‘For the last many years in England everybody has been educating the people, but they have forgotten to find them any books’. The Mechanics’ Institute in Britain

12.45 – Lunch

13.45 – Keynote Address by Anthony Watkinson, Honorary Lecturer (UCL) and Principal Consultant (CIBER Research)
The growth in numbers, cost and importance of journals in the later twentieth century and how this has impacted on the role of academic libraries

14.30 – Refreshments

15.00 – Founding professional libraries in the 20th century 

Kristine Chapman: Building a natural history library: the collection of Willoughby Gardner

Daniel Gooding: Mind, Body, and Spiritualism: a case study of the personal collections of Sir Henry Solomon Wellcome and Harry Houdini

Julie Mathias: The National Library of Wales’s Duplicates Section 

Full details on the conference, including the programme, are available at: http://www.cilip.org.uk/library-information-history-group/events/library-information-history-group-conference-2015


Middle Temple Library, Ashley Building, Middle Temple Lane, London EC4Y 9BT
T: 020 7427 4830 I F: 020 7427 4831
www.middletemple.org.uk/library

CALL FOR PAPERS: Early Modern Women and the Book: Ownership, Circulation, and Collecting

Proposals are sought for a panel — “Early Modern Women and the Book: Ownership, Circulation, and Collecting” — to be proposed for the annual meeting of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) in Montreal and Longueuil, Quebec, July 6-11, 2015.

We seek proposals for papers that examine early modern British women who owned books, circulated books, or created libraries or book collections between 1500-1700, a period that saw increased literacy and a revolution in book production and circulation. Scholars have reconstructed and assessed the collections and libraries of Renaissance men, including Harvey, Dee, Jonson, Hales, and Drake; women’s book ownership, as a subject of scholarly inquiry, “awaits its historian,” observes David McKitterick (2000) in a study of Elizabeth Puckering’s library. What resources (commonplace books, poetry miscellanies, inventories, etc.) shed light on women’s circulation of books within communities? What are the marks — figurative, material, cultural — of women’s book usage, ownership, and collecting? What can the creation of book collections or libraries tell us about social status, family ties, confessional affiliations, education, economic status, travels? What methodologies illuminate these interrelated topics?

By Oct. 1, 2014, please send a file containing a 350 word abstract and a 50-word biographical statement to Leah Knight (lknight@brocku.ca), Micheline White (micheline.white@carleton.ca), and Elizabeth Sauer (esauer@brocku.ca) for consideration.