Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters

Exploring the hard copy index in the Selden End of Duke Humfreys Library in the Bodleian

We are delighted to announce that Dr Kim McLean-Fiander will be joining the Project as an Editorial Assistant. Kim will be working intensively with the digitized version of the Card Catalogue of MS Correspondence in the Bodleian Library (which will form an initial core of material for our union catalogue of seventeenth-century letters), proofing the keyed texts and bringing them into conformity with Project standards. Her academic research touches upon the intellectual networks of seventeenth-century women, while she has wide-ranging experience of cataloguing and editing at the Bodleian Libraries and at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC. For a full profile see here.

Testing the record-editing interface.

Comparing calendars.

Yesterday provided us with a valuable opportunity to bring individual CofK researchers together with OULS technical experts for a day of intensive training and consultation on various aspects of our nascent union catalogue of seventeenth-century intellectual correspondence. Scholars working on the Aubrey, Lister, Lhwyd, Hartlib, and Comenius collections explored the latest iteration of the pilot database; tested its online interface for the editing of letter records as well as our free-standing application for the collection of epistolary data; and compared individual calendars against each other as well as Project standards. The first version of the catalogue will be launched at the Universal Reformation conference, which will take place in Oxford on 21-23 September 2010.

We are currently seeking an Editorial Assistant (1.0FTE) to help us with the online publication of the Bodleian Library’s card catalogue of seventeenth-century manuscript correspondence. To be based in the History Faculty, the assistant, who will be employed for six months in the first instance, will be responsible for providing basic quality assurance on metadata from the cards which has been keyed and supplied by an outsourcing company. Working with online tools for the display and editing of data developed specifically for the Project, they will ensure that all records have been tagged in compliance with Project standards; that within each individual field dates, names, and places have been expressed correctly and without typographical errors; and implement necessary changes directly onto the records by means of a simple data entry interface. The closing date for applications is noon on Friday 5 February 2010; for full details and how to apply, please see here.

The Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at QMUL will be hosting a workshop on Thursday 17 September on ‘Digitizing Correspondence’. The event, which is sponsored by JISC, will allow archivists, editors, and researchers to converge on a range of issues relating to the digitization of letter collections in a context of presentations, round table discussions, and breakout groups. For a draft programme and booking information, please see the workshop webpage.