Cardiff Children’s Literature Festival

From the 19th to the 24th March the Cardiff Children’s Literature Festival will be taking place in the city, at a variety of locations, and featuring authors and illustrators.  A whole variety of events will be happening, for children, schools, and even adults! You can keep up with their activities by following @CDFKidsLitFest on Twitter.  Cardiff University is contributing to the festival, and hosting some of the events, and in SCOLAR we are putting on an exhibition celebrating the history of children’s literature, from the 17th century up to the 20th century.  We are looking at the chronological development of children’s literature by highlighting several themes.

Books for children were initially for educational purposes, which then developed into moral instructions too.  Children were taught how to behave, and were given frightening examples of what might happen to them if they didn’t.  The prevailing religiosity of the 18th and 19th centuries gradually waned until by the end of the 19th C. children were being regarded with a more sentimental outlook.  More illustrative works began to emerge, some portraying idealised images of children, whilst others were aiming to capture their attention.  Reading was no longer just for instruction, but for entertainment too, as fairy tales became popular.  With an increase in fiction, the gender divide became markably apparent, as works were specifically aimed at either boys or girls.

Children’s fiction became more adventurous, and elements of fantasy were increasingly included, much of it owing a debt to British myths and legends that were popular at the time.  In the twentieth century fantasy literature took on a life of its own, and is now one of the most popular genres in children’s fiction.

Charlotte Guest’s English translation of the Mabinogion in 1838 contributed to the fascination with Arthurian myths, as she brought the tales to a new readership.  Translations of works into Welsh or English also provide a interesting look at what we want children to be reading.

We have gathered items from SCOLAR’s collections, including the Children’s Literature Collection which can be seen in part in the glass cases at the entrance to SCOLAR, and from the modern children’s literature collection held in the main part of the library.  Items from the modern collection are also being utilised in a display on level 1 of the library (ASSL), where readers can vote for their favourite children’s novel.

The exhibition is available for viewing March-May 2013, and details of the items displayed are available on our webpages.

Unexpected opportunity for a cataloguer: exhibiting Arthur

Reblogged from dark-side-of-the-catalogue:

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This week sees the 'unveiling' of an exhibition in SCOLAR our special collections department on the subject of Arthur: King of the Britons.  I'm really excited about it because I have had an integral part in the curating of it.  This is one of those 'unexpected opportunities' that I didn't actually manage to talk about in my presentation at the CILIP CIG conference on 11th September because I over ran and had to skip it!

Read more… 1,016 more words

Karen Pierce has written about her experience of curating our new Special Collections and Archives exhibition on "King Arthur in Britain".

Postgraduate Curators 2012

Postgraduate Curators is a programme that offers curatorial skills training to PhD students, and gives them the opportunity to curate their own exhibitions. This programme is organised by the Graduate College and SCOLAR, and open to PhD students from all disciplines – this year we had attendees from ENCAP, WELSH, JOMEC and SHARE.

The format consists of a half day workshop, with Peter Keelan speaking on project management, Alison Harvey on research and selection, and a senior lecturer from SHARE, Jane Henderson, on conservation issues. At the end of the workshop, we ask the students if any of them would like to volunteer to spend the next week planning a small exhibit on their PhD topic. This year, five of the eight students agreed to take part, and of these five, three had never visited SCOLAR before.

For those who wish to take part, we ask that in the week following the workshop, they use Voyager and our Excel lists to collate a long-list of potential material. We retrieve the items and they visit SCOLAR to examine them and make selections to cut the long-list down to a short-list. We ask them to research and write captions for each item on the short-list, and we ask them to design a poster for the exhibition. Once they have their short-lists, captions and poster, we ask them to all come in on an agreed half-day to set up the exhibits. We then talk through each exhibit to review each other’s work, and generally reflect on the experience.

The students gain time management and project management experience, as well as research and information literacy skills in searching for relevant material. In the case of those who have not visited us before, they may discover untapped resources for their research. They gain employability skills, and two types of work experience which can be very difficult to obtain – specifically in special collections work, but more broadly in the creative and cultural industries. They learn to think visually, and to phrase their research in non-specialist terms.

If the students gain a new perspective on their work – so do we. They extract and draw significance from material in our collections, of which we are often unaware. We have the opportunity to promote our collections to new audiences, and demonstrate our support of postgraduates from a range of disciplines, in a very visible way.

This year, we are featuring the following exhibitions:

Victorian medievalism: the fallen women of Tennyson’s Camelot
Sarah Clausen, Centre for Late Antique Religion and Culture

The Victorian author: artist or businessman
Helen McKenzie, English Literature

Representing the workhouse
Laura Foster, English Literature

From Celtic languages to the Roman alphabet
John Caulfield, Welsh

Welsh architecture from the Salisbury Collection: a selection of original artworks
Mark Baker, Archaeology and Conservation

All the students produced excellent exhibits, but one in particular made a significant discovery. Mark Baker is working on a historical study of Welsh country houses, and found an image in the Salisbury prints collection, which is thought to be the earliest depiction of the Hafod estate, which has since been demolished. In the case of the earlier building to the right, it is the only image in existence. It’s a watercolour, not a print, so it’s entirely unique – it only exists here in Cardiff.

Mark has notified the Hafod Trust, who confirmed his hunch. As well as being a discovery which is very significant for his research, he has succeeded in interesting the local press. Both the Western Mail and the Cambrian News in Aberystwyth will be including a feature on his discovery, and by extension, the postgraduate curators programme. Mark may also be volunteering with us in future to research and prepare a full-scale exhibition on the prints contained in the Salisbury collection.

The exhibitions will be on display in SCOLAR until the end of February. Extracts from the exhibitions can be found on the SCOLAR website.

Darwin centenary books

This month we added two books to the Human Genetics Historical Library that commemorated the centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species. Both books were published in 1909 by Cambridge University Press.

The foundations of The Origin of Species, a sketch written in 1842 by Charles Darwin, was edited by Darwin’s son, Francis.  The manuscript was only discovered in 1896 after the death of his mother (Emma Wedgwood), and was found in a cupboard under the stairs at the family home.  It demonstrates that 17 years before the publication of the Origin that Charles Darwin had been able to write a very full outline of his future work.

Darwin and modern science is an edited volume by A. C. Seward that contains essays commissioned to celebrate the Darwin centenary.  The audience was intended to be the ‘educated layman’ rather than experts and it was hoped that it “would serve the double purpose of illustrating the far-reaching influence of Darwin’s work on the progress of knowledge and the present attitude of original investigators and thinkers towards the views embodied in Darwin’s works.”

Some of the contributors to this work include authors we already have represented in the HGH Library, such as William Bateson, a geneticist, whilst others such as Jane Ellen Harrison and James G. Frazer, added essays that showed the influence of Darwin on their own sphere of expertise.

In 2009 when the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species was reached SCOLAR produced an exhibition (Dec 2009-Jan 2010) on Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace; extracts can be viewed on SCOLAR’s website.

Student exhibitions launched

Following the success of the 1611 King James Bible anniversary exhibition, SCOLAR launches its first exhibition entirely curated by postgraduate students, as part of the University Graduate College’s Research Students’ Skills Development Programme. In February, Peter Keelan (SCOLAR), Alison Harvey (SCOLAR) and Jane Henderson (SHARE) held an RSSDP workshop on curatorial skills. Following this, three of the attendees volunteered to attend a second workshop, for which they planned, researched, and constructed their own exhibitions using SCOLAR’s facilities and equipment.

The curators used SCOLAR’s rare books and printed sources to visually reflect and explore their research topics. All three students produced meticulously researched exhibitions to a professional standard on their chosen topic. See extracts from Healthy Reading by Johann Gregory (ENCAP), Divine Dimension by Corbett Miteff (JOMEC), and Approaches to Roman Archaeology in Wales by Jennifer Jones (SHARE). The exhibitions will be on display in SCOLAR during July and August 2011. If you would like to take part in the next ‘Curating an Exhibition’ workshop, taking place in January 2012, please contact the University Graduate Office for details.