Following our tour of the Bodleian Library, we were at liberty to explore the town of Oxford at our leisure. Dara set up a 14:00 appointment for a few of us to view the John Johnson Collection of Ephemera at that time. We met at the new Bodleian for our appointment with Amanda Flinn, Assistant Curator for the collection.
John Johnson (1882-1956) was a graduate of Magdalen College in Oxford. He was intent on the civil service in Egypt until war and health issues altered his plans. Johnson became a papyrologist and is credited with the discovery of a work by Theocritus which pre-dated his previously known works. Johnson took a position at the Oxford University Press and ultimately became its Printer in 1925. In 1928 Johnson was awarded an Hon D.Litt for his work on the Oxford English Dictionary. It was in this year that he began collecting printed ephemera. his goal was to create "...a museum of what is commonly thrown away.."
Mr. Johnson obtained items over the course of the rest of his life, often using his own funds to further his collection. It appears that he tried to limit his collection through to the year 1939, but was occasionally tempted beyond this year. The majority of the collections, mainly British material, ranges over the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries; the earliest dated item in the collection is 1508. There are over a million individual items encompassed in the collection. He arranged the ephemera by subject, often in color coded boxes, encompassing over 700 areas; for example: advertisements, soap, company name, chronological order. Sadly, there is no real provenance on the items known at this time. He was collecting those things that people thought of a rubbish. There may be some clues regarding items he procured or items given to him by family and friends over the course of his collecting; however, those clues may be hidden away in his private correspondence which has not to date been thoroughly researched. The Bodleian received the collection in 1968 and a catalog of the collection was produced in 1971 to correspond with its exhibition. The collection has been used by students, undergraduates, post-graduates, independent researchers, film companies and the BBC.
The first attempts to digitize this collection took places in the early 1990's. In 1996 the Bodleian was afforded an opportunity through a grant from JISK to digitize the collection for access and preservation. Working in partnership with ProQuest, almost all of the images for five categories of the Johnson Collection were digitized and made available in a searchable database. ProQuest tool on the cost of storage, development, intellectual properties, design and publication, market research, user testing and tech support. The Bodleian provided the collection and research. The database is available to academic institutions throughout the UK, subscriptions to those outside the UK are available and have reportedly been a popular item.
The Bodleian employed ten people to sort, shelf-mark, catalog via Allegro (using MARC 21 and AACR2), compile thesaurii for multiple access points, describe physical and printing process characteristics of items and index subjects for the over 65,000 items. The items posted including ephemera from five of the subject areas including: crime, entertainment (encompassing theatrical and the weird, wonderful and bizarre), advertisements, publishing and book trade, and popular prints. Popular prints would include those items that companies provided with their products and may contain a standard landscape or holiday theme. Some of these items contained hidden pictures or were multidemensional. If additional funding becomes available in the future, the subject areas of politics/religion and social commentary will be added. The digitization project began in 2007 and ended in 2009. The database was launched in June 2010.
Ms. Flinn demonstrated the database's function for us. The database can be searched by subject, image type, images included and time frame. Searches can be saved, images saved and e-mailed. Metadata can be stored in a section referred to as an archive. Browsing is also an option.
Our visit was one of the highlights of my trip. I am extremely grateful to Dara for making the arrangements and to Ms. Flinn who was a fountain of information and a gracious hostess. We were able to spend around two hours with the collection and the time was well spent and flew past. No photographs were allowed of the collection. Due to the renovation of the New Bodleian building, the collection is in process of being moved for storage off site and images will only be available by request for viewing (outside of the database) until the building reopens in 2015.
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