Notes and Comments

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 11, Issue 2, 1 October 1978, Page 115

Notes and Comments

Former Chief Librarian honoured Mr A. G. Bagnall, doyen of the bibliographers of New Zealand and Chief Librarian of the Alexander Turnbull Library from 1966 to 1973, was honoured by the Queen on the occasion of the celebration of her birthday in June when he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (0.8. E.) for ‘services to New Zealand literature and the library profession’. Graham Bagnall is the editor and chief compiler of the New Zealand National Bibliography to the Year 1960 (volumes lI—IV, 1969-1975; volume lat press) and the author of numerous works in enumerative bibliography, history and biography including William Colenso (with G. C. Petersen, 1948), Okiwi (1972) and Wairarapa; an Historical Excursion (1976). He was the editor of the Turnbull Library Record from 1967 to 1976.

The Turnbull Research Fund The Alexander Turnbull Library Endowment Trust Board has resolved to set up a special fund, the Turnbull Research Fund, to provide financial assistance to encourage scholarly research based on the Library’s collections. The Trust Board’s assistance to the Library has in the past been concentrated on collection building and apart from several small grants for travelling and other expenses associated with collecting or copying and grants for the publication of material in the collections most of the Board’s expenditure has been on purchases of expensive materials, especially manuscripts and pictures. In order to use the Trust’s funds for grants to encourage the scholarly use of the collections the deed of trust will need to be altered. The Board at a meeting in 1977 resolved to make an approach to the Supreme Court for an amendment to the deed to incorporate the following additional purposes:

VI (d) To sponsor conferences, seminars, and other meetings on subjects relating to the Library’s collections and to pay the cost of such conferences, seminars and meetings, including the payment of fees for contributors. VI (e) To make grants to individuals, either resident in New Zealand or overseas, to support scholarly research based on the Library’s collections by way of fellowships and scholarships and assistance for travelling, living expenses, the copying of materials

from the collections, the preparation of manuscripts for publication, and assistance for publishing. The members of the Board have indicated that they wish to maintain the regular assistance given to the Library in building the collections at the present levels (some $20,000-$25,000 per annum) and that additional income will be sought to support the Research Fund. The Board has decided that the fund, to be administered under its guidance, will be used initially to make awards and grants to support scholarly research in the Library’s three main areas of excellence, New Zealand, the Pacific, and English literature and bibliography. The main forms of assistance proposed are the Turnbull Scholar awards for full-time research, the Turnbull grants-in-aid to provide extra assistance for research workers, and the Turnbull conference programme.

THE TURNBULL SCHOLAR This prestige award, at the level of a university fellowship, will be for established scholars to enable them to work full-time for a year towards a publication based on the Library’s collections. The Board envisages that the award will be of the order 0f57,000-$12,000 for a full year with the possibility of extension into a second year. Awards will be made in the broad subject areas of New Zealand studies; Pacific history, anthropology, languages and literature; and English literature, history and bibliography.

THE TURNBULL GRANTS-IN-AID These are intended to provide additional support for scholars at all levels who wish to conduct research towards a publication based on the Library’s collections. Grants will be available for travel and accommodation expenses, the copying of material from the Library’s collections, and to assist in publication. It is anticipated that for an initial period of three years this scheme will require some 54,000-$6,000 per annum; it will then be reviewed to determine its effectiveness and to consider whether expansion is justified.

THE TURNBULL CONFERENCE PROGRAMME This programme will provide financial assistance to enable the Library to bring scholars together for conferences, symposia, seminars and lectures on subjects represented in the collections. The Endowment Trust Board has considered various means of increasing its available income to finance the Research Fund and as a first step is appealing to a small group of New Zealand charitable trusts for assistance. The Todd Foundation, the first such trust approached, has made a grant of SSOO for 1978 and it is anticipated that the others will contribute similar amounts. The second step will be to approach a number of overseas charitable foundations

that have made grants for similar purposes. With this income the Board proposes to launch the Research Fund on a restricted programme of activities and in due course when the work of the Research Fund is more widely known to make a more general appeal to organisations, business firms, and individuals. Supporters of the Research Fund may make donations for the general purposes of the Fund or for one of the three programmes, and may become either a Sustaining Member by making a regular annual grant or a Donor Member through a non-recurring grant. The Turnbull Research Fund has been approved by the Minister in Charge of the Inland Revenue Department for the purposes of S. 146(1) (d) of the Income Tax Act 1976. In terms of this approval companies may claim as a deduction for tax purposes donations of $2 or more made in any one income year provided that the total of all donations does not exceed SI,OOO or 5 per cent of the company’s assessable income. Individuals making donations to the Research Fund may also claim as a deduction for tax purposes donations of $2 or more provided that the total of all donations does not exceed S2OO. The new emphasis of the Endowment Trust on assisting research workers to exploit the Library’s collections is in sympathy with moves which have taken place within the Library to define the objectives of the Turnbull as a national research collection, to stress the scholarly use of the Library’s resources and its obligations to the national research community.

New Manuscripts Librarian appointed In late July it was officially announced that Dr Michael E. Hoare, FLS, had been appointed head of the Library’s Manuscript Section following the resignation of Tom Wilsted to take up a position as director of the archives of the Salvation Army in the United States. Dr Hoare, the third James Cook Fellow (1975-78) of the Royal Society of New Zealand is the author of The Tactless Philosopher: Johann Reinhold Forster 1729-98 (1976), Beyond the Filial Piety (1977), Three Men in a Boat; the Forsters and New Zealand Science (1975) and Reform in New Zealand Science 1880-1926 (Hocken lecture, 1977) as well as numerous contributions to periodicals. He has edited Forster’s Journal for publication by the Hakluyt Society (4 volumes, at press). Dr Hoare has held research appointments at Monash University and the Australian National University, was Humboldt Foundation Research Fellow at Gottingen in 1970-71 and was for nine years the manuscripts librarian of the Basser Library of the Australian Academy of Science in Canberra. From January to April he was a Canadian Commonwealth Fellow and visiting professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia

and contributed a paper to the international conference ‘Captain James Cook and his Times’ at the University in April.

Historians conference in Library A small group of some twenty people with a research or teaching interest in early modern European history met by invitation at the Turnbull over the weekend of 17-18 June for a pioneer national conference ‘Early Modern Historians in New Zealand’ organised by Colin Davis of Victoria University. The conference was opened with a paper by Professor Geoffrey Elton of Cambridge University, in New Zealand on an extended visit sponsored by the British Council, entitled ‘Parliamentary History after the Certainties of Neale and Notestein’. Other papers were delivered by Dr M. A. R. Graves of the University of Auckland (‘The Decline of the House of Lords: A Marian Phenomenon’), Dr Alison Hanham of Massey University (‘Fact and Fancy: Sir Thomas More as Historian’) and Professor J. H. Jensen of Waikato University (‘Nationalism in Early Modern Europe: Has Elliot got it right?’) The Turnbull’s collections of sixteenth and seventeenth century printed books and its holdings of British books from Caxton to 1700 on microfilm make it a major research resource in New Zealand for British early modern history.

Oxford University Press quincentennial exhibition. This year the quincentenary of the Oxford University Press is being celebrated throughout the world and in New Zealand an exhibition showing the development of publishing and printing at Oxford was open to the public from May tojuly in the Library’s exhibition area. Mary Paul’s text, based on The Oxford University Press and the Spread of Learning (an illustrated history prepared for an exhibition at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York) traced the history of the Press from the first book printed at Oxford in 1478 through the organization of publishing in the seventeenth century and the commercial expansion of the nineteenth to the international publishing of the present day. Accompanying illustrations, mostly from the same book, included engravings and photographs of buildings occupied by the Press (the Sheldonian Theatre, the Clarendon Building, the Walton Street premises), portraits and photographs of dominant figures (Dr John Fell, Archbishop Laud, William Blackstone, Bartholomew Price), and sample pages from a number of major publications. Books from the early printed books collection gave a more immediate sense of the changes in publishing

and in book production in the Press’s history. The earliest of these was Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1628), and one of the most important The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars of England (1702) by the Earl of Clarendon—it was partly on the profits of this book that the Clarendon Press was founded. Volumes from the various Oxford series published this century were displayed, along with a group of publications on New Zealand and the Pacific. A small section was devoted to typography and printing, and the exhibition closed, on a note perhaps fitting for a publishing house that has produced bibles and prayer books for several hundred years, with two beautiful folio bibles owned by the Turnbull, the ‘Vinegar Bible’ of 1717 and the Lectern Bible of 1935. The exhibition was mounted by Mary Paul and Lindsay Missen on behalf of the Oxford University Press, Wellington.

Captain Cook conference in Vancouver A decade of Cook bicentenary commemorative celebrations is drawing to a close. It has been studded with exhibitions around the world, with greatest emphasis in the United Kingdom, the South Pacific and latterly Hawaii and North America. The primary event was undoubtedly the international conference, ‘Captain James Cook and His Times’ held at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Vancouver 26-29 April 1978. An important inter-disciplinary conference, it was attended by upwards ofsoo historians, scientists and authors from more than a dozen countries, including almost every Cook scholar of note. Some 25 papers were presented over the four days and these are being published in two separate volumes. Participants also had the opportunity of attending a large number of related activities, including no less than six Cook exhibitions in Vancouver and the neighbouring city of Victoria. Despite some ill-informed press reports that indicated that the conference was largely concerned with attacking Professor J. C. Beaglehole, OM, the pre-eminent Cook scholar, this was in fact far from the case. The keystone of the conference was his life-work in Cook research, for it was primarily from this that further research stemmed, probing further into related and peripheral fields in greater depth. Professor Beaglehole himself would have been the first to admit that he was concerned chiefly with Cook and that much more remained to be done, and he would have welcomed the new evidence discovered in subsequent research stimulated by what he had achieved. The Vancouver conference, in its turn, will prove a seminal influence for a new generation of researchers into the vast world of Cook’s achievements. The Library was represented by Mr Anthonv Murray-Oliver

who attended at the invitation of the Conference with additional financial assistance from the Trustees of the National Library. As an art historian Mr Murray-Oliver has specialised in the work of the artists on Cook’s three voyages. He took advantage of the opportunity to inspect all the Canadian Cook exhibitions and also a seventh at the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu on his return journey. At the Conference Mr Murray-Oliver was able to establish further useful liaison with representatives of a number of institutions that share the Alexander Turnbull Library’s Pacific interests.

Transfer of manuscripts and papers from The General Assembly Library to the Alexander Turnbull Library The transfer of manuscripts, correspondence and other personal and political papers from the General Assembly Library to the Manuscripts Section of the Alexander Turnbull Library is still proceeding (s ee N.Z. Journal of History, 12, April 1978, p. 94). The Manuscripts staff have already devoted considerable time to the integration, sorting and preparation of inventories for these important materials but much work remains still to be done. Constraints of time and staff make it necessary to request researchers who wish to use these materials to give adequate and due notice of their desire to have access to former General Assembly papers by writing to the Manuscripts Librarian well in advance of their proposed visit. Materials will be listed in the Turnbull Library Record commencing with this issue when they have been processed and will only then be available to researchers.