Archives – More Than A Dodo

In February 2023, the Museum was lucky enough to acquire an important historical archive – a collection of notes, correspondence, artworks, photographs and family documents belonging to geologists William and Mary Buckland. But before the archive can be enjoyed by visitors and researchers, it must first be cared for, ensuring its preservation for generations to come. Thanks to generous funders, the Museum was able to hire a Project Paper Conservator, Anna Espanol Costa. Considering the Museum had not had a paper conservator since the mid-1990s, Anna was incredibly resourceful with her use of tools and materials, utilising everything from makeup sponges and soft brushes to tweezers and dental picks. In this blog post, we share insights from the eight months she spent assessing, cleaning and repairing some of the most at-risk and important material in the archive, as well as some unexpected surprises she found along the way…

Paper can be used to store information for decades, if not centuries, but it is still vulnerable to frequent handling and poor environmental storage conditions. When the Museum acquired the Buckland archive it was around two hundred years old and, unsurprisingly, many of its items needed care and restoration. Over the years, the papers had been housed in the standard file folders and boxes you would use for office documents, rather than an important historical archive. Many of the folders were overcrowded and had been tied together with string. Some manuscripts had been damaged due to too many items being stored in the same folder, and there were places where the string had cut into the larger pieces of paper causing tears. The most fragile and vulnerable items showed signs of chemical and physical damage, including iron-gall ink corrosion; chemicals in the ink had started to eat through the paper, causing cracks and loss of ink, and consequently text, in some areas.

Before treatment: Photographs mounted on an unsuitable bright blue backing

Past efforts had been made to restore the documents, but sometimes these had disfigured the original manuscripts: “in-fills” had been made with unsuitable paper, and backing sheets had been added in bright colours like blue or green. The archive was also being held together with unstable and rusty paper clips, and many of the original wax seals had cracks. It would have been a great shame to lose any of the seals, which feature beautiful examples of natural history icons, like ammonites and cephalopods.

PRESERVING HISTORY

The objective of my work was to stabilise the Buckland archive to ensure its long-term preservation and restore the appearance of the collection so it could be safely handled, digitised and exhibited in future.

One of the most important principles behind conservation is doing the ‘least amount to do the most good’. Conservation aims to slow down the ageing and deterioration process by using treatments that will not damage or disfigure the integrity of the original document. Conservation may be preventative — for instance, moving documents to a new box that creates the right ‘microclimate’ for their preservation. It may also be interventive — e.g. repairing with non-acidic and reversible materials that can be easily removed at any time, and that also can stand the test of time.

During my time at the Museum, I have been able to conserve a number of the most at-risk and important pieces of archival material. In some cases, this involved a light clean with a soft brush and re-housing of the most overcrowded items. In other cases, I performed more interventive and invasive conservation treatments including mechanical surface cleaning with smoke sponges, relaxing folds with paperweights or steam, stabilising iron-gall inks with gelatin to prevent further corrosion, mending tears with different grades of Japanese papers and tissues, and cleaning and consolidating cracks in the wax seals on the letters to prevent further loss. I also tackled some of the previous ‘repairs’ by eliminating old animal glue which had left the manuscripts shiny in places, carefully removing the unsuitable paper, and adding supports where necessary, thus leaving no traces of the bright blue backing paper.

Cleaning a letter to remove ingrained dirt

INTERESTING AND UNEXPECTED STOWAWAYS

As well as undertaking conservation repairs, I also documented the condition of the items; photographing the manuscripts before and after conservation treatments to ensure the Museum, or any other future conservators, have a record of my work. Whilst undertaking conservation treatments, I found some interesting and unexpected stowaways in the archive. What looked to be small holes in one of the pages of a letter ended up being recognised by one of the Museum’s entomologists as spider frass (poop). A moth had also decided to call the papers home at some point in the last two hundred years as I came across a small cocoon that was now long dead, desiccated (dry) and dusty. The most unusual find, however, was a small black dot that I initially thought was an insect. However, employing the help of a microscope and one of the Musuem’s entomologists, we realised that it was actually a seed! What kind of seed, and how or when that seed came to reside in the Buckland archive, we don’t know, but it shows the archive had a life and story of its own long before it came to rest here in the Museum.

A JOB WELL DONE

Overall, I was pleased with the amount of work I was able to accomplish at the Museum. I managed to conserve a significant amount of the archive and was fortunate enough to work with, and learn from, a range of museum staff, including palaeontologists, geologists, zoologists, entomologists and the Life and Earth collections conservators. It has been a privilege to share and exchange knowledge with my colleagues and work collaboratively on the preservation of an important archive. I look forward to hearing about some of the research findings it produces, and to see it shared with the public in future exhibitions and displays.

Thank you to the National Manuscripts Conservation Trust and Helen Roll Charity for funding Anna’s work. Items from the Buckland archive will feature in the Museum’s upcoming exhibition ‘Breaking Ground’ opening 18th October 2024.

15 August 202420 August 2024

More than a Dodo1 Comment

Ubiquitous and Inconspicuous

THE INVISIBLE HISTORY OF THE MUSEUM’S GLASS DISPLAY CASES

Glass cases play an integral role in museums and galleries, but they are designed to be overlooked and ignored. In this blog post, Librarian and Archivist Danielle Czerkaszyn uses research collected by Helen Goulston (AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership PhD Candidate) to uncover the invisible history of OUMNH’s glass display cases and considers how they have evolved alongside the museum during its 160-year history.

Since 2018, the Museum has been working to refresh its Main Court by installing new permanent displays. This morning, we placed the final specimen in our brand new “Open Oceans” display, concluding the latest phase of the redisplay project. The “Open Oceans” display is housed in one of eight new conservation-grade glass cases installed last year. While some visitors have welcomed the new cases, others have mourned the loss of the wooden cases or questioned why they needed to be replaced. Others have wondered why the tops of the new glass cases have roofs with different heights. To answer these questions, we need to dive into the museum archive…

A CASE HISTORY

When visitors arrived at the newly-opened museum in 1860 they would have been greeted by an empty central court, devoid of displays. While the fabric of the building was more or less complete, and preparation for the installation of displays had already begun, the university’s scientific and natural history collections had not yet been transferred to the building.

A sketch in the archive dated 16 October 1858 by architect Benjamin Woodward shows an early plan for the display cases to be arranged between the iron columns in the Main Court, allowing visitors to circulate among the exhibits, with display cases echoing the Gothic revival architecture. The right of the document shows grand double-height displays with a central balustrade that were never realised, but cases similar to those on the left would be ordered in January 1862.

The empty Main Court of the Museum when it opened in 1860, London Illustrated News

The 1862 tender document written by William Bramwell, Clerk of Works at the Museum, shows two types of upright display cases ordered for installation between the iron columns — some with pitched roofs and others with flat tops, which were considerably cheaper. Though the design of the cases resembles Woodward’s original sketches, the tender included detailed specifications that addressed the practicalities of displaying specimens, such as cotton velvet door linings to stop dust from getting in.

In addition to the upright centre court cases, ten table cases were ordered from the high-end London cabinet makers, Jackson and Graham, at a cost of £344.10. The same firm was also commissioned to fit the tall wall cases in the outer corridors. Plans and photographs from the archive show that the installation of these cases was piecemeal and it wasn’t until 1866 that all the display cases were fully in place.

A tender document written for the Museum’s first display cases, written by William Bramwell in 1862

WHY REPLACE THE CASES?

The wooden display cases that we have been replacing may look old, but few of the original cases from 1866 survive. While some of the old display cases were moved behind the scenes for preservation, others found homes in different museums or were disposed of when they were beyond repair. The most recent timber-framed cases in the Main Court are 20th-century replicas that have been heavily modified, particularly in the late 1960s-early 1970s, and again in the early 2000s when the clear acrylic roofs were added. Some of these modifications affected the stability of the cases, particularly when the doors were opened, making them unsafe for staff to access. Other modifications meant the cases were no longer dust or pest-proof, which poses a risk to specimens.

Main Court in 1870s, by Henry Taunt, showing roofed display cases with alternating pitches

As these wooden display cases neared the end of their life, the museum and Oxford University Estates worked with Oxford City Council and Historic England to approve the replacement of the cases and ensure the redevelopment was historically sensitive to our Grade 1 listed Victorian building.

For this reason, the new cases retain the original 1866 arrangement and are built to the same dimensions. We have also returned to the original form, including outer aisle cases with alternating pitched and flat roofs. It was decided early on that the new cases would not be lined in wood because timber can be detrimental to the conservation of certain specimens. However, the design of the edges of the new cases sought to mirror the craftmanship of the 1866 cases by emulating the beading on the edges – albeit much more subtly, and in bronze rather than timber – complementing the colours of the ironwork in the museum roof.

A CASE FOR THE FUTURE

The new glass cases are built by museum showcase experts ClickNetherfield and provide a stable, pest-proof environment for our delicate and historically important specimens. Their design artfully captures the character of the museum building, while still focusing the visitor’s attention on their contents. It is hoped that the new displays will last for at least another two decades, and the cases even longer. During that time, millions of eyes will be cast over our displays, but the glass cases that protect them may barely even be noticed.

26 July 202225 July 2022

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Re-collections: William John Burchell

By Matt Barton, Digital Archivist

Over the last few months, I have been working on cataloguing and rehousing the archival collection of William John Burchell (1781-1863). Burchell was an important early naturalist, explorer, ethnographer, and linguist who worked in South Africa and Brazil, contributing greatly to our understanding of the flora and fauna of these areas. He was also a highly talented artist!

Burchell amassed huge natural history collections and described many new species, but his work was not widely recognised in his lifetime. Although he received an honorary degree from Oxford in 1834, he felt neglected by the government and scientific community in Britain. Later on in his life, Burchell became something of a disillusioned and reclusive figure, strictly guarding access to his collections and publishing few of his own findings.

A painting by William Burchell of his collecting wagon, full of natural history specimens (1820)

The first section of the Burchell collection that I tackled was his correspondence. I am happy to report that our wonderful volunteers – Lucian Ohanian, Mariateresa DeGiovanni, Naide Gedikli-Gorali and Robert Gue – have now finished digitising this material and we have made the scans available to all on Collections Online. Now that the digitisation of the Burchell correspondence is complete, we are able to more easily search his letters, and learn more about his motivations to conduct expeditions so far afield.

Burchell first left the British Isles in 1805 when he travelled to the island of Saint Helena. He moved to Cape Town in 1810 before beginning his expedition into the interior of South Africa in 1811. This epic journey covered 7000 kilometres, mainly through terrain unexplored by Europeans at the time. It lasted four years, with Burchell only returning to Britain in 1815.

What prompted him to undertake such an extraordinary expedition? In a letter home to his mother written on 29th May 1811, Burchell relates several potential motivations. Firstly, he describes his frustration with the East India Company (his employers in St Helena), and his desire for a new beginning: “I have been patient with the Company’s promises till it is become evident to everyone that I was only wasting my life living any longer in St Helena.” He goes on to stress his enthusiasm for scientific research, which may also have been a motivating factor behind his journey: “I have thought it best to give free indulgence to my inclination for research which I feel so natural to me, that I flatter myself it will be my best employment.” Finally, Burchell shows a more pecuniary motive when he notes, “I do not consider myself out of the way of making money, when I think of the value of what I shall be able to obtain in my journey.”

Burchell’s correspondence has been digitised and is available from Collections Online.

Burchell closes the letter very affectionately, suggesting he had a close relationship with his family. More than half of the letters in our collection written by Burchell are addressed to his parents or sisters. He ultimately left his specimens to his sister, Anna, who in 1865 donated his botanical specimens to Kew Gardens and his other specimens to Oxford University Museum of Natural History, with the archival collection following later.

No longer an underappreciated figure, Burchell is recognised as a pioneering and significant naturalist. Through preserving and reading our Burchell archive, we can continue to shed more light on his life and personality.

If you would like more information on this fascinating individual, we have a short article about Burchell on our website.

25 June 201927 June 2019

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The most insulting letter I ever had!

by Danielle Czerkaszyn, Senior Archives and Library Assistant, and Kiah Conroy, placement student from Oxford Brookes University

James Charles Dale (1791-1872) was a pioneering English naturalist who devoted most of his life to entomology. Dale’s specimen collection and archive represent a unique historical record of the insect fauna of Great Britain and everyday life in the 19^th century. Originally housed in more than 30 cabinets in the Museum’s entomology department, the Dale collection contains many notable specimens, including the world’s oldest pinned insect and several species now extinct in Britain.

Dale was also a prolific writer and the Museum archive holds his notebooks, manuscripts and around 5,000 letters from over 250 correspondents. They form one of the most important historical legacies left by any British entomologist. The individual letters were numbered by Dale and tied into bundles relating to the correspondents. While the bundles were great from an organisational point of view; in terms of long term preservation and accessibility this wasn’t exactly ideal. We were lucky enough to have a placement student from Oxford Brookes University who helped facilitate the first stage of reorganising the letters and rehousing them to ensure their longevity. Kiah shares her experience of working in the archives:

During my placement at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History I was working in the Library and Archives department. The work I did whilst I was there consisted of helping sort through the letters of entomologist James Charles Dale. This was a huge opportunity for me because I had never worked with archival materials before and it was something I was hugely interested in. Some might say archiving letters can be boring, but sometimes you stumble across really interesting finds. For example, when I was working on the letters I found one that Dale had addressed as ‘the most insulting letter I have ever received.’ This is fascinating because his letters gave an insight into the relationships he had with fellow entomologists.

The letter Kiah describes was from Reverend Henry Burney, an amateur entomologist who corresponded with Dale between 1837 and 1847. Although the correspondence is one-sided since we only have Burney’s letters to Dale, it is clear the two had a falling out over money which Burney owed to Dale. As Kiah was rehousing the letters she noticed that the correspondence between Dale and Burney became increasingly tense.

Dale had a habit of annotating many of the letters he received and his annotations on Burney’s letters are curt and cold- he was clearly unimpressed that Burney took so long to pay him back- culminating in his final comment that this was ‘the most insulting letter I have ever received.’ Oh, the drama of the 19^th century!

Along with archiving the letters, I also learnt how to catalogue archive material to a high standard as well as learning how to put the James Charles Dale Letters into the museum’s collection management database Emu. This was the most challenging aspect for me, because I had no idea how intricate museum databases could be. Luckily, the whole Library and Archive team were very supportive and showed me the steps. Overall, I really enjoyed my time at the Natural History Museum and I am very grateful I was given the chance to work there.

12 July 201824 July 2018

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Digging in the archives

by Danielle Czerkaszyn, Senior Archive and Library Assistant

Working day in, day out in the Museum of Natural History’s archive, we like to think we know a lot about our collections. The truth is, with the sheer number of items in our archive and the many nooks and crannies which exist in a historical building, we sometimes need some help rediscovering items in our collections. One such item is the engraved trowel used to set the Museum’s foundation stone.

The Earl of Derby lays the foundation stone at the 1855 ceremony. Engraving from *Illustrated London News.*

The story began when we received an enquiry from a museum enthusiast in America. He had read an article from an 1855 edition of the Illustrated London News, about the foundation stone ceremony. This was the moment that construction began on the Oxford University Museum, as it was then known. It seems that a small trowel was used as part of this ceremony. The article describes the trowel as follows:

The trowel, which is of silver and bronze, is highly finished, and novel in form. It is enriched by an engraved Gothic pattern on the upper, or silver, side. It was made by Skidmore, of Coventry, who has contracted for the foliated wrought-iron work which will decorate the quadrangle of the building. The trowel bears the following inscription-

Oxford University Museum. Chief Stone laid 20^th June, 1855, by the Right Hon. Edward Geoffrey Earl of Derby, Chancellor; Thomas Deane, Knt; Thomas N. Deane, and Benjamin Woodward, Architects.

Look carefully at the engraving from Ilustrated London News and you’ll see that children were also involved in the ceremony. They were likely to be Sarah and William Acland, the two eldest children of Dr. Henry Acland, who was instrumental in the founding of the Museum:

The trowel, borne on a cushion by two interesting children (the son and daughter of Dr. Acland), was then handed to the Earl.

The article does not say what happened to the trowel so our enquirer wanted to know; did the trowel end up in our archival collection or does it sit in the void under the stone?

Details from the Museum’s wrought iron roof decoration. Both the metalwork and the trowel were designed by Francis Skidmore.

As far as any of the Museum staff were aware, there was no trowel in our collections. With little to go on, we momentarily put the enquiry to one side and hoped for some good luck. The rediscovery came by accident just one week later, as we were rearranging boxes in the archive to make additional room for art storage. The trowel was spotted at the top of a box of items that had yet to be sorted and catalogued. With the recent enquiry on our minds, we recognised the trowel from its description and instantly knew what a special find this was.

Danielle Czerkaszyn holds the newly-discovered trowel. Her next challenge is to track down the missing silver handle.

Our enquirer was pleased to hear of the trowel’s rediscovery and thrilled to know the part that his enquiry played. Without his curious question, we might not have recognised the trowel for what it was. The trowel is now undergoing conservation treatment and cataloguing, and as an important part in the history of the Museum, it will hopefully be on display in the near future.

The Museum archive and library is open by appointment to anyone who would like to visit, and we welcome enquiries at library@oum.ox.ac.uk.

17 February 201727 February 2017

More than a Dodo2 Comments

A moving story

For the past nine months there has been a lot of moving going on around here. Imagine moving house endlessly for weeks on end, but where your house is full of bones, insects, fossils, rocks, and weird and wonderful taxidermy. And the location of everything has to be precisely recorded. The museum move project was a bit like that.

Project assistant Hannah Allum explains…

The museums are migrating, we declared in May 2016. And so they have. The first major stage of the stores project has been completed. After we had created inventories for the largely unknown collections held in two offsite stores, the next stage was to pack them safely and transport them to a new home nearer the museum, a job which demanded almost 70 individual van trips! We now have over 15,000 specimens sitting in vastly improved storage conditions in a new facility.

A miscellany of boxes for a collection of shells

Let’s revel in some numbers. All in all there were over 1,000 boxes of archive material, mostly reprints of earth sciences and entomological research papers; over 1,300 specimens of mammal osteology (bones); and more than 1,000 boxes and 650 drawers of petrological and palaeontological material (rocks and fossils).

Some of the more memorable specimens include old tobacco tins and chocolate boxes filled with fossils and shells; a beautifully illustrated copy of the ‘Report on the Deep-Sea Keratosa’ from the HMS Challenger by German naturalist Ernst Haeckel; and the skull of a Brazilian Three-banded Armadillo (Tolypeutes tricinctus), complete with armour-plated scute carapace.

The skull and carapace of a Brazilian Three-banded Armadillo (*Tolypeutes tricinctus*)

There were also a few objects that have moved on to more unusual homes. A 4.5 m long cast of Attenborosaurus conybeari (yep, named after Sir David) was too large to fit in our new store and so made its way to another facility along with a cornucopia of old museum furniture. A set of dinosaur footprint casts, identical to those on the Museum’s lawn, have been gifted to the Botanical Gardens for use at the Harcourt Arboretum in Oxford.

And last but not least, a model of a Utahraptor received a whopping 200 applications from prospective owners in our bid to find it a suitable home. After a difficult shortlisting process it was offered to the John Radcliffe Children’s Hospital and following a quarantine period should soon be on display in their West Wing.

Footprint casts, attributed to Megalosaurus, queuing for a lift to Harcourt Arboretum. Credit: Hannah Allum — Casts of footprints by made *Megalosaurus,* queuing for a lift to Harcourt Arboretum. Image: Hannah Allum

Fittingly, the final specimen I placed on the shelf in the new store was the very same one that had been part of my interview for this job: The skeleton of a female leopard with a sad story. It apparently belonged to William Batty’s circus and died of birthing complications whilst in labour to a litter of lion-leopard hybrids before ending up in the Museum’s collections in 1860.

Though the moving part of this project is now complete there is still plenty of work to do. We are now updating and improving a lot of the documentation held in our databases, and conservation work is ongoing. The new store will also become a shared space – the first joint collections store for the University Museums, complete by April 2018.

To see more, follow the hashtag #storiesfromthestores on Twitter @morethanadodo and see what the team at Pitt Rivers Museum are up to by following @Pitt_Stores.

The Utahraptor model in the old store awaiting collection by its new owners.

Illustrated plate from the Report on the Deep-Sea Keratosa from the HMS Challenger by Ernst Haeckel

The title page of the Report on the Deep-Sea Keratosa from the HMS Challenger by Ernst Haeckel

On the van, off the van; on the van…

Boxes of Earth collections material stored safely and in sequence in the new store

Boxes, glorious boxes…

Rack ‘n’ Roll: Hannah deftly working the racking

Lily Wilks, an intern assisting with the inventory of bound reprints. Image: Hannah Allum

Hannah Allum working in the old store. Image: Edward Adcock

Life Collections Manager Mark Carnall and Project Assistant Hannah Allum carrying one of the final specimens, a Mirounga leonina (Southern elephant seal) skeleton, into the new store. Image: Edward Adcock

The Attenborosaurus fossil cast, in its unusually shaped case, en route to a new custom built support frame. Image: Hannah Allum

Tag: Archives

A Seed of Doubt

Ubiquitous and Inconspicuous

Re-collections: William John Burchell

The most insulting letter I ever had!

Digging in the archives

A moving story