Chawton Conference
|
A conference on private collections and their role in libraries, will be held at Chawton House Library, Chawton, Hampshire, England on July 19-20 2007. The event is jointly organised by Chawton House Library, the University of Southampton English Department, and Goucher College, Baltimore. There are many examples of collections put together by individuals that are now valuable assets of the libraries to which they have been donated and to the wider cultural heritage. Such collections include the Henry and Alberta Hirshheimer Burke collection of rare editions of Jane Austen’s novels and related materials at Goucher College, and the John Charles Hardy collection of eighteenth-century novels, a substantial part of which now forms a part of Chawton House Library.
For up-to-the minute conference information, see:
http://www.chawtonhouse.org/education/conferences_b.html
The conference will focus on individual collectors of books and manuscripts and their collections. Topics include:
- the role of such collections within the context of the libraries where they may now be accommodated
- the way in which libraries manage an individual’s collection
- the act and process of private collecting
- the motivation of the individual collector
- the book or manuscript as artifact in the context of private collections
Plenary speakers are Reg Carr (Director of University Library Services and Bodley's Librarian at the University of Oxford), Robert H. Jackson (Collector, author, and lecturer on literature, rare books, and collecting; founding member of the Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies), James Raven (Professor of History, University of Essex) and Bruce Whiteman (Head Librarian, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies, University of California - Los Angeles).