Research Notes

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 21, Issue 2, 1 October 1988, Page 98

Research Notes

Dr Claudia Orange, the deputy editor of the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography , reports that the dictionary’s researchers continue to draw heavily on the resources of sections of the Turnbull Library, especially Reference and Manuscripts and Archives. Staff engaged in the editorial and research processes now number twelve full-time and eight part-time people. Apart from research relating to essays about to be written or in the process of being written, the major call on library time arises from checking on the written essays to prepare them for publication. In addition to this checking of six hundred essays in English, the translation of some two hundred of them into Maori is necessitating searches for information on personal, place and pa names as well as numerous other points. Work is also well under way for the next volume, scheduled for publication in 1992.

The Library’s sound collections became available to researchers at the beginning of May 1988, after a delay due to building problems. The collections consist of both commercially-produced and unpublished New Zealand sound recordings of music and spoken work, the latter including oral histories. Researchers are encouraged to first use recordings held in other institutions, unless they are unavailable or are unique to this Library. Prior notice of access is required so that listening copies can be made for use within the Library.

The Pictorial Collections have been made more publicly accessible in the past year through a number of exhibitions held in the National Library Gallery. The opening exhibition, ‘Points of View’, and a more recent one, ‘Wellington After All’, both presented a cross-section of material from a variety of collections. The first major exhibition from the Drawing and Prints Collection was ‘Drawn from Nature’ showing early European visual records of New Zealand. It displayed the original work of some well-known artists, such as Heaphy, Fox and Earle, as well as the little-known impressions of early amateurs. A significant collection of the watercolours and oils of Albin Martin is currently on loan to the Auckland City Art Gallery as part of an exhibition to be toured by the Art Gallery Directors’ Council.

The Cartographic Collection has acquired a reprint of the first edition of the one-inch to one-mile Ordnance Survey of England and Wales, originally published between 1805 and 1873. This series is complemented by a modern set of maps covering Scotland, England and Wales, the Ordnance Survey 1:50,000 scale Landranger series. A gazetteer containing some two hundred and fifty-six thousand names enhances access to this modern series. The Australia 1:100,000 topographic survey is part of the Australian National Mapping programme and covers more densely settled areas of the continent and other areas of social interest. At present, the Cartographic Collection has nearly four hundred sheets from this series. At a smaller scale of mapping, there are over three hundred sheets in the Australia 1:250,000 topographic survey.

An exhibition of World War I photographs from the Library’s collections was displayed at the Victoria University Library in July in conjunction with the Stout Research Centre conference. This year’s conference theme was ‘A War-like People? War and the New Zealand Experience.’ Fourteen panels of photographs were arranged to depict particular aspects of the experience of war —from the departure of troops in 1914, and the camps of Egypt and Gallipoli, to the battlefields with their dead and injured, and the monuments erected to their memory.

Family historians continue to be heavy users of the Library’s resources. In the first year of service in the new building, 52 % of week-day readers in the Reference Section cited their research interest as family history, and on Saturdays this proportion rose to 58%. The Newspaper Research Reading Room reflected similar patterns of use (44% and 54%). Many people see the manuscripts and archives, cartographic and pictorial collections as useful supplementary resources. Thirty-six per cent of readers in the Manuscripts and Archives Section were family historians, as were about 40% of those using maps. The correspondence received by the Library parallels these figures. Of the 1470 letters received by the Reference Section in the eighteen months from January 1987 to June 1988, 51% requested information about ancestors or other family members.

The Library has recently published Katherine Mansfield: Manuscripts in the Alexander Turnbull Library. It is a definitive listing of all manuscripts in all their forms: holograph, typescript, microfilm and photocopy. To celebrate her centenary, it was decided late in 1987 to reorganise the extensive Mansfield collections (MS Papers 119) according to the standard archival practice of provenance. The published guide is divided into three main sections: the collections, the letters and the papers. An index lists all people, prose and poetry. A number of appendices, such as a cross-reference table to MS Papers 119, have been included to aid readers.

During the year ended 31 March 1988 the Lilburn Trust granted SIO,OOO to the Turnbull’s Archive of New Zealand Music. The grant is being used to assist the publication of inventories of the collections of music archives. The Trust has also made a grant of $5,000 to the Archive for the commissioning of oral history recordings of musicians and for purchasing commercially-produced New Zealand sound recordings. Yellow Pencils: Contemporary Poetry by New Zealand Women, was published in late August by Oxford University Press. The selection was based on works available in the Turnbull and Victoria University Library. Lydia We vers, editor of the volume, is an English lecturer at Victoria University.