Research Notes

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 28, 1 January 1995, Page 93

Research Notes

From mid-June 1994 to March 1995, the Library hosted a Fulbright Scholar, Marilyn E. Lashley, Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, and a specialist in public policy within her major discipline of political science. She was granted a Fulbright Research Scholarship to do a comparative analysis of the parallel development of public policy for resolving ‘the minority problem’ in postwar New Zealand and the United States.

Originally here for the usual Fulbright term of six months, Professor Lashley was granted an extension from 30 December 1994 to 20 March 1995. During her time here, Professor Lashley made many useful contacts, with staff of other Government departments such as Te Puni Kokiri and the Department of Statistics, politicians, academics, and other individuals. She held seminars at five New Zealand universities, Library staff heard progress reports on her research on two occasions, and she addressed The Friends of the Turnbull Library on 14 February 1995. Professor Lashley then had a temporary research position at the Brookings Institute, Washington. At the end of June 1995, she returned to New Zealand for a month’s visit, having been invited to give the keynote address at the Population Association of New Zealand’s biennial conference in Christchurch, 29-30 June 1995. Library staff await with great interest the publication of her research.

The 1994 National Library Research Fellow (April 1994 to March 1995) was Wellington historian Susan Butterworth. Her Fellowship topic was ‘The Colonial Savant in Politics, a study of the intellectual interests and background of the first generation of New Zealand politicians up to 1875’. During her period as Fellow, she built up an automated database of the names, occupations, intellectual and/or social interests, and other related aspects of the politicians of this period. She addressed the Library staff on two occasions about her research, and more recently gave a talk at the Historical Branch, Department of Internal Affairs, on 5 September 1995.

The 1995 National Library Research Fellow (April 1995 to March 1996) is Dr Kerry Taylor, a specialist in labour history. Dr Taylor has conducted extensive research on socialism and trade unions in New Zealand, and on the 1951 waterfront lockout. His PhD thesis, completed in 1994, was on the history of the Communist Party in New Zealand. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the Trade Union History Project, and of the Professional Historians’Association of New Zealand/Aotearoa. From 1991 to 1994, he was a temporary lecturer in the History Department at Victoria University of Wellington, and prior to taking up the Fellowship, was a Resident at the Stout Research Centre. He contributed to Kevin Hince’s book Opening Hours: History of the Wellington Shop Employees Union (Wellington, 1990), and with John Martin, co-edited Culture and the Labour Movement: Essays in New Zealand Labour History (Palmerston North, 1991), based on papers presented at the 1990 Conference organised by the Trade Union History Project. A recent article is ‘ “Our Motto, No Compromise”: The Ideological Origins of the Communist Party of New Zealand’, New Zealand Journal ofHistory (October 1994), 160-77. Dr Taylor’s Fellowship topic is ‘Working Class Identity in New Zealand’.

The Library and Victoria University of Wellington jointly organised the Freedom and Modernity? Early Modern Studies in the Pacific conference, held at the National Library in August 1994. The main purpose of the conference was to further early modern studies (to ca. 1850) in the Pacific region, and it addressed many aspects of European intellectual culture before 1850. The conference coincided with the opening of "That Serpent Milton ": A Radical View of John Milton from the Collection of the Alexander Turnbull Library, a major exhibition of works by and concerning Milton, focusing on his political radicalism and the (often far from complimentary) reactions of his contemporaries. The Library is offering support to the New Zealand History of Print Culture Project. An initiative of Te Whainga Aronui/The New Zealand Academy for the Humanities, the Project is part of an international effort to document the History of the Book. The New Zealand project, which is presently being established, intends to look at all aspects of the printed word from catalogues to comics, brochures to books and at the various technologies for reproducing or representing it, from fine printing to the Internet. The Library's collections will be an important research resource for this project. A review of the Alexander Turnbull Library's and the National Library's acquisitions, cataloguing, and serials check-in functions resulted in the merging of the separate sections in 1994. These functions are now carried out centrally, and meet the bibliographic and conservation requirements of each particular collection of published material. In 1995, work began on updating and completing bibliographic records for the Alexander Turnbull Library's early Maori-language imprints from 1815 to 1900 (see Phil Parkinson's article in this issue for more information). The project to duplicate the retrospective collections of the Concert FM New Zealand Composer Tape Archive has been completed, with the Library now holding 296 digital audio tapes consisting of well over 2000 works by contemporary composers. The individual works are being input onto TAPUHI, the Library's database for unpublished heritage items.