Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T19:13:23.511Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“A Monument more Lasting than Bronze”: The Collections of the Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House, Oxford

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2022

John Pinfold
John Pinfold*
Affiliation:
Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies
Get access

Extract

“The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute its memoried glances and its murmers are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past. Even now we slip away like those pictures painted on the moving dials of antique clocks … and we, that were the new thing, gather magic as we go.“

(Mary Webb, in the preface to her novel Precious Bane, 1924)

This sense of the precariousness of both the past and the present is something that most, if not all, historians must have felt at some time as they search, sometimes in vain, for relevant sources for their research. And archivists and librarians, even as they save what they can from disappearing, maybe for ever, or from the ravages of decay, know that it is perhaps only a small fraction of what should or could be saved.

Type
Articles
Information
African Research and Documentation , Volume 99 , 2005 , pp. 13 - 25
Copyright
Copyright © African Research & Documentation 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bodleian, Library. South Africa in the twentieth century: from Boer War to Amandla!: an exhibition at the Bodleian Library, Spring 2000. (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2000).Google Scholar
Brown, C.E. Manuscript collections in Rhodes House Library, Oxford: accessions 1978-1994. (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1996)Google Scholar
Byrne, W.S. Manuscript collections (Africana and non-Africana) in Rhodes House Library, Oxford: supplementary accessions to the end of 1977. (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1978)Google Scholar
Frewer, L.B. Manuscript collections of Africana in Rhodes House Library, Oxford. (Oxford: the Library, 1968).Google Scholar
Frewer, L.B. Manuscript collections of Africana in Rhodes House Library, Oxford: supplement. (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1971).Google Scholar
Hill, Amanda. “Bringing archives online through the Archives Hub”, Journal of the Society of Archivists 23/2 (October 2002), pp. 239-248.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kirk-Greene, A.H.M. “African source materials from the Oxford Development Records Project”, African Research and Documentation, 33 (1983), pp. 1-11.Google Scholar
Pinfold, John. “Archives in Oxford relating to the South African War”, South African Historical Journal, 41 (1999), pp. 422-442.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pinfold, John. “Roads to Rhodes: acquiring Africana for a British academic library” in Schmidt, Nancy J. Africana Librarianship in the 21st century: treasuring the past and building the future (Bloomington, Ind.: African Studies Program, 1998), pp. 30-33.Google Scholar
Pugh, Patricia. “The Oxford Colonial Records Project and the Oxford Development Records project”, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 6/2 (October 1978), pp. 76-86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tawney, John J. “An exercise in partnership: the Oxford Colonial Records project and Rhodes House Library”, Bodleian Library Record, 9/2 (March 1974), pp. 113-125.Google Scholar
Tawney, John J. “Personal thoughts on a rescue operation: the Oxford Colonial Records Project”, African Affairs, 67 (1968), pp. 345-350.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tough, Alistair. African medical history: a guide to personal papers in Rhodes House Library, Oxford. (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1998).Google Scholar