Electronic Precinct - October 1998

Special Collection and Archives

In September, the Special Collections and Archives Division of the University Library, along with Liverpool City Libraries, hosted the Autumn Meeting of Designer Bookbinders, the principal society in Britain devoted to the craft of hand bookbinding. Some 38 members spent the morning in the Universi ty Library's Special Collections and Archives Reading Room examining examples of the art of the binder, both fine and curious, drawn from the University's rich and varied book collections. The range of bindings on display was wide chronologically, stylistically, and in the quality of work, giving t he visitors an opportunity to survey the historical binding tradition. A lecture by Paul Delrue, a member of Designers Bookbinders, completed the activities in the University Library.

This event followed a successful workshop given by Professor Ray Larson of the University of California, Berkeley, on the subject of emerging technologies in the field of information retrieval. Librarians from the universities of Durham, Oxford, Glasgow, as well as the Public Record Office, were ab le to examine new developments resulting from the collaborative project between the University of Liverpool and the University of California, Berkeley.

An equally successful event was the visit to Special Collections and Archives at the beginning of September by delegates attending the Fourth International Romani Linguistics Conference at the University of Manchester. On that occasion, material from the Gypsy Collections including vocabularies and the notebooks of Liverpool University's first librarian, John Sampson, were examined by visitors from Universities in the Czech Republic, Norway, Finland, Romania, Ireland, and America.