Museums and the Web
An annual conference exploring the social, cultural, design, technological, economic, and organizational issues of culture, science and heritage on-line.
Dissenting Academies Online: The Opportunities and Challenges of Making the Collections of a Private Research Library Accessible to the Public
Authors
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Kyle Roberts is Assistant Professor of Public History and New Media in the History Department at Loyola University. He teaches courses on public history, digital humanities, religion, and North America and the Atlantic World in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. After... |
Abstract
Private research libraries face special challenges in making their collections available to the broader public. Small staffs, limited hours and reading room space, and pressing conservation concerns can limit the availability of important manuscript and print collections to all but the most intrepid researchers. Yet often such institutions have missions that state the institution’s role in not just making collections available but also fostering research on those collections.
Two recent major grants from the AHRC and the Leverhulme Trust have allowed Dr Williams’ Library, the premier library of English dissent, to make important collections related to dissenting education more broadly available through innovative digital platforms. Over the eighteenth and nineteenth century, hundreds of academies across Great Britain were founded to provide Protestants dissenting from the Church of England with an education on par with that offered by Oxford and Cambridge. Refusal to swear to certain oaths barred many dissenters from matriculating at the English universities after the Act of Uniformity in 1662. These academies flourished over the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, not only offering thousands of ministerial and lay students an advanced education, but also in offering important interventions in the way in which various topics were taught. The influence of dissenting education was felt far beyond the walls of the dissenting academy.
This paper will explore two components of Dissenting Academies Online (http://www.english.qmul.ac.uk/drwilliams/portal.html): a database and encyclopedia of every student, tutor, and academy and an innovative virtual library system that recreates the historical collections and borrowing of leading dissenting academies. The paper will highlight the challenges that arose in constructing these digital humanities resources, the choices that were made in working with open source software, and how scholars and the broader public are now making use of them.
Type:
Paper - in formal session