There’s all the difference in the world between receiving knowledge that’s second
hand that’s been summarised for you and passed on by others, and actually being able
to look at the real primary evidence for yourself.
And one of the great things about working at the University of Birmingham is that we
have so many specialist libraries.
For me, the most important is the one here in Stratford at the Shakespeare Institute,
but in total the university has three million manuscripts and an extraordinary collection
of books dating back to 1471.
We have a library here that has resources that are not only varied but if you’re interested
in Renaissance drama, it’s all here under one roof.
At the moment I’m doing an MPhil on the Jacobean [Masks - 0:09:37], specifically looking
at the distinctive qualities of the supernumeraries that performed in these [Masks] and this means
that I need not only 35 texts, some of them are very very rare and hard to find and it’s
amazing because I have found all 35 texts in the Shakespeare Institute Library alone.
Sometimes I need some very specific material such as I needed the white block papers from
Longleat and the Institute was able to get me some microfilms that I could see diagrams
of some of the choreography of musicians that were on and that’s been not only vital to
my Masters degree, it was vital to my MPhil and inspired me to go on for a PhD next year.
My area of research is Shakespearan graphic novels, so I’m looking at things like the
text, I’m looking at visual images of Shakespeare, I’m looking at performance.
The Shakespeare Institute library collection covers a vast range of contemporary culture.
It has a wonderful collection of newspaper and magazine articles that extends over 50
years and so you can see what was happening with Shakespeare in contemporary culture.
It also has materials on popular culture, youth culture and even includes some graphic
novels.
My role in the Shakespeare Institute library as Manager is to maintain and develop the
collections at this particular site and we do that in close collaboration with the academic
staff and with the students in order to ensure that they’ve got all the resources that
they need for their particular area of research.
A major aspect of our work concerns guiding and navigating the students round the vast
amount of resources we hold at the university, from the printed collections which we hold
here and at the main library on other sites, to the growing amount of electronic resources
that are becoming available.
So part of our job is just guiding the students through those resources.
S5 Here at the Shakespeare Institute we have MA distance learning students from all over
the globe, lots that are in the UK, but also lots that are in continental Europe, in parts
of Asia, the Middle East and the United States, so they need to be able to access the kinds
of research materials that you use when you’re a postgraduate student and they need to be
able to do it online.
We’re also thinking about ways in which we can take the unique resources, the archival
resources we have here, and make those available to students through new initiatives like the
virtual manuscript room which takes original documents that you won’t be able to find
at any other library in the world, things like Kenneth Brannagh’s shooting script
for his Henry V, or Zapharelli’s shooting script for his Hamlet, also theatre notebooks
How we can get some of those online so that students can use those to do original primary
source research.
We’re thinking very much about how to make sure that the things we want our students
to read and study are available easily to distance learners so we’re working with
the library to digitise select chapters of certain books so that students are able to
log into web-CT which is our virtual learning environment and there they can read pdfs of
certain articles online or certain book chapters and that can really be used as a jumping off
point to the research that they complete as they continue on with the course.
I’ve been here just over a year at the Barber and what we’ve got here in the reading room
is actually just a tiny proportion of the total collections that the Barber has got.
My own particular research interest is to do with the art criticism and the emergence
of art history as a discipline in the late 19th Century and the library really has quite
extraordinary collections in that regard.
It has really very unusual and important and quite rare historic monographs from the mid-19th
Century onwards which have been very useful for my research, and it also has really quite
rare collections of periodicals.
Outside of London and possibly Oxford and Cambridge I think it’s one of the most important
resources that we have in Britain.
The University of Birmingham has so many extraordinary collections in its libraries, not just the
collection here at the Institute but in the music department there’s the Barber Music
Library, there’s the Barber Fine Art Library, the Harding Law Library, the Barnes Collection
in Medicine and the Orchard Learning Resource Centre.
All these enable students and faculty at Birmingham to actually get among the evidence and make
their own knowledge for themselves.