 Hello, everyone, and welcome to History Day at DCDC. I'm Argola Rubleck, the academic librarian for the History Collections at Setthouse Library, and I'm the co-organiser of History Day alongside my colleague Kate Wilcox, Reader Experience Manager at the Institute of Historical Research Library. Thank you for joining us for this afternoon of special events, which brings History Day to the Discovering Collections, Discovering Communities Conference for the very first time. For those of you who have not heard of us yet, History Day was founded in 2014 to bring together students, researchers, and anyone of interest in history with professionals from archives, libraries, and other organisations with history collections from across the UK. It is a free annual event created collaboratively between the Institute of Historical Research and Setthouse Library, and we would like to thank the organiser of the DCDC conference for kindly hosting us this afternoon and for all their work for making this event possible. Hello, everybody, and welcome to this afternoon's session. I really am delighted to be chairing it. I think I'm here more because of my job title than my knowledge of the subject, but I'm utterly delighted to be here, and it's great to be taking History Day into a new form. Absolutely. So, and History Day is all about putting, as I said, is all about putting researchers in touch with collection professionals. We have five speakers with two presentations this afternoon. Each set of speakers have been asked to restrict their remarks to just 10 minutes to allow plenty of time for questions and answers, the heart of History Day in many senses, so please don't hesitate to ask lots and lots of questions using the Q&A function in Zoom, which there's lots of instructions popping up in chat on how to do that, but even I can figure it out, so it is very simple as a Q&A symbol at the bottom of your screen. So, without any further introduction, I will hand over in a moment to three speakers linked to the Royal Society and the Lisa Jardine Grant scheme. So we have Ginny Mills from the Royal Society Library, Aaron Hanlon from Colby College in Maine, and Pamela McKenzie, who is currently at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and together they'll talk about the Lisa Jardine Grant scheme. Thank you very much. Hi everyone, and thanks to Richard for the introduction and for allowing me to be part of the History Day panel. It's a pleasure to be part of this virtual event. So yeah, as Richard said, I'm Virginia Mills and I'm the Early Collections Archivist at the Royal Society. So for those who don't know, the Royal Society is the UK's National Academy for Sciences established in 1660, so it's one of the oldest-learned societies in the world, and we have collections going right back to the foundation of the society and beyond. So my main responsibility as archivist is obviously the care of the society's pre-20th century records. But today I'm not here to speak about the content of the collections, which is what I'm normally doing, and they are great, so if you have an interest in History of Science you should definitely come visit us at some point when we reopen. But as the theme of the panel today and of the DC conference is collaboration and connecting researchers with collections, I wanted to tell you about one way that we tried to facilitate that at the Royal Society. And that is through the Lisa Jardine Grant scheme, which is administered by the Royal Society Library and Archive team. So the scheme was established in 2018 to fund travel for access to primary materials for early career interdisciplinary research. It's very generously funded by donations from Professor Lisa Jardine's family, friends and colleagues, and it's been set up in commemoration for her passion for history, collaboration and interdisciplinary studies after she sadly passed away in 2015. So many amongst you probably familiar with Professor Jardine and her work. She was a long time valued collaborator for the Royal Society collections, particularly in her work on one of our most important fellows, early fellows, Robert Hook. Not only did she write extensively on History of Science and make use of the Royal Society collections enriching our understanding of them and helping us bring them to a wider audience. She also spearheaded efforts to purchase a valuable 17th century manuscript for the Society collections, the Hook Folio, and went on to make a digital edition available through the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters. And she was given the very rare honor as a non-scientist of becoming an honorary fellow of the society. So the grant is set up in her name to kind of continue the spirit of collaboration and access to knowledge which she was a real champion of. Can't get my slides to change for some reason. There we go. So I'm going to give you a very quick overview of who and what the scheme will fund and then say something briefly about why the society thinks that a scheme like this is beneficial for the organization. And then I will hand over to past recipients of the ward, Aaron and Pamela to tell you about their perspective. So the scheme is for those pursuing interdisciplinary research combining the arts or humanities with natural sciences. It will fund travel and subsistence costs for UK based researchers to make international research trips up to one month. So that could be to use archive resources or to attend a conference or training events. And we'll also fund longer research trips for those coming to the Royal Society collections and that can be for a period of one to three months. And they can include kind of visiting other collections as well as part of that. And the grant is early career researchers, which we class as anyone who is a doctoral candidate at least one year into their thesis or researchers holding a PhD awarded within the last 10 years. So I'm an archivist by training, not a grant scheme manager. So it's been a steep learning curve for me taking on kind of the management of a grant. But I'm, you know, of the belief through this learning experience that the greatest benefit of the resources that we've been trusted to distribute as part of this grant can be realized by making the grant what be mutually beneficial for the researchers it's supporting and for the collections that they're visiting. So one of the key aims of the grant is to support the history of science community by stimulating and facilitating use of archive material and providing an additional source of funds for those in early career positions to get access to those materials and to the connections that they need. And you know the Royal Society wants to be part of furthering exciting and novel research in this area. We also have very rich historical collections of our own at the society, and we want researchers to make use of them so I'm going to be honest in saying that part of the motivation for the society to put time and resources into the grant is that we recognize we're also getting some really valuable benefits back from researchers as well as supporting them in their work. You can see hopefully on this slide. Some of the diverse topics of research that have been funded by the grant, currently, and in the past. So they focus on a kind of broad range of subjects from specific fellows of the Royal Society and the role of the society and its networks. There's many different branches of science. We've got botany and meteorology topics in the past, as well as science policy, but also, you know, death studies, looking at the science of music, the intersection of science and the visual arts. And one of our upcoming researchers will be looking at a rural studies which I'm quite jealous of shall be going to Norway. So yet the diversity of the researchers that an interdisciplinary grant such as this brings to the Royal Society is one of the major benefits for us as an organization with records over 350 years of research in all disciplines of science and natural philosophy. There's a vast range of subjects covered in our collections. And the library and archive is managed by a small team of information professionals, and though we get to know our collections very well. We're not by and large subject specialists and certainly not over all the subjects covered in the collection. So the Lisa Jardine grant helps us to bring researchers into the collection with subject specialist knowledge that enriches the collection and our understanding of it. And I'm sure I'm preaching to the converted on this, but I think it's worth it. So the researchers that have been coming in are often doing in depth research into individual records and objects that the staff simply wouldn't have time for. Bringing new perspectives to our collection from different disciplines and applying different methodologies. So for example, the research that we had in looking at John Evelyn was from a legal background and was considering the importance of his early modern writings on current environmental law. We had research into hearing loss, which was carried out by a practicing sign language translator and teacher, and she brought that knowledge and insight to her study of the pedagogies of those working with the death in the early modern period which was really interesting. And of course, these diverse expertise, you know I shared with collection staff and very importantly to a wider audience through publication, and by feeding back into our finding aids. Yeah, and by supporting these researchers financially to travel to use the Royal Society collections, we're getting a wider range of researchers. More from more diverse organizations, more people coming in from outside of London and outside of the UK who may not otherwise have been able to access the collections. And often for whose research digital access is not best suited or not possible. And again, this increased kind of geographical reaches bringing in new perspectives to the collection and also build our network with academics and researchers in other cultural institutions, which is really important aim for us in the grant. So yeah, it might be less of we will also fund people to go to collections other than the Royal Society. So it might be sort of less obvious or immediate benefit to the society for doing that. But as I said, we're keen to be part of stimulating research in the wider history of science community and broadening our networks and the possibilities for future collaborations. So yeah. Finally, just sort of a note about the decision making process for the award. It's the applications are assessed by an independent panel of academics, chaired by a fellow of the Royal Society and they will approve by a library committee. So I feel like I've gone on a lot about what enormous benefits the researchers could bring to the Royal Society, but that is not the kind of main motivation in decision making funding is awarded first and foremost on the merits of the proposed research and the justification of the need to travel. So what we do ask people to kind of outline what the benefits will be to themselves as well as the organizations that they're intending to visit. We will take that into account. So hopefully there are some potential future applicants among you today who I might see at the Royal Society in the future, or help facilitate your travel elsewhere. If anyone is interested, the grant is currently open for applications until the 22nd of September. And that is for research to take place in 2022 and there will be further rounds of the grant, two rounds of the grant in 2022 if you want to apply for research later than that. And I'm now going to hand you over to two past recipients of the Lisa Jardine grants, who have kindly agreed to tell you something about their experience in the research that they carried out. And so, firstly, I will hand over to Aaron Hanlon, and then we'll hear from Pamela. I'm just going to stop sharing my screen. Okay, Aaron. Okay. Thank you Jenny and thanks everyone for everyone who organized for for putting this together I hope everybody can hear me and see the screen okay. I just have two slides. And the first one just is about the the background of the research that brought me to the Royal Society library. I've been interested in the point at which the term data entered the English language in the 17th century, and what sorts of things are described. And what particularly what sorts of forms of evidence described when used that way. And so I started looking at scientific instruments in particular navigational instruments like the octant or the sextant as you can see in the photo there. That produced a lot of numerical data. So that's what brought me there. A little bit about my experience and some of the what I think are the benefits of the Lisa Jardine grand scheme. For one, I was in a kind of complicated situation because I'm based in the United States ordinarily and I work on early modern Britain so I find myself with reason to be here often for archival research but I was also on sabbatical that year as a visiting scholar in history and philosophy of science at Cambridge. And so the Rose Royal Society was very helpful and kind of working with me on the funding part of the proposal and the, you know, what, what sorts of expenses would fall within the scheme, given that I kind of needed to get to London but it would be have been very expensive to kind of actually stay there. So that was really helpful and I appreciate the eligibility for international scholars. As Jenny said they really do have fantastic manuscript collections. They're well organized in my experience, you know I could call up something like papers of the Board of Longitude and they would be organized in such a way that I would encounter things that I didn't already know about and could easily kind of navigate the related materials. I think that the privates and the staff are extraordinarily helpful. I had a lovely experience there, I think, at least at one point when my paleography skills failed me somebody was helped me to be able to help me figure out a squiggle or two. It does seem to encourage public facing work as well so I've listed here a couple of articles, one of which is is already out there data at the dawn of the Anthropocene that arose from my research at the Royal Society. The other one is more of a kind of peer reviewed piece that's forthcoming. But I think if I recall correctly the grant scheme was very kind of encouraging about doing public facing work as part of as part of the research, which I thought was fantastic. The only negative thing I could say about it is it's very cold, even for for a special collections reading room so if you go there if you're fortunate enough to go there just bring a sweater. And finally, I'll just say that my work at the Royal Society Library kind of inspired me to, well I recognize that because the staff are really great and the reading room intimate and the materials excellent that it would be a great place to bring my some of my undergraduate students in the future so if to do that I'm really looking forward to bringing a group of students over to to kind of introduce them to early modern history of science archives and so that's what I have planned next, and I'll hand it over to Pamela. Okay, hi, I'm Pamela McKenzie I'm an art history PhD student right now at the University of British Columbia still finishing my dissertation. I'm also based in the Max Planck group in Berlin but it's actually not the history of science group. It's this group called for a laboratory that's technically based out of the KHI, the Consistitutions Institute in Florence. But yeah I met a Max Planck group in Berlin working on history of science topics and so what you can see here on the screen right now is just a set of different images from Nehemiah Gruse anatomy of plants so this is a book made in the 17th century by a physician and early sculptist named Nehemiah Gruse. And I'm interested in the representations of nature that kind of emerged from the use of new technologies. And because Nehemiah Gruse was a fellow at the Royal Society. And this book is published through the Royal Society so are several other books and many of his original manuscripts are there. I spent my time at the Lisa Jardin, with the Lisa Jardin grant sort of going through all of his papers that are available there and then sort of looking also more broadly at other collections there are a lot of original drawings from. Shella Malpighi and Leivenhoek the Dutch Microscopist Leivenhoek and from this time at the at the Royal Society, I in addition to having done a lot of important work for my dissertation, which will be finished soon. I also have an article coming out soon in a special issue of the journal Nunsius that's about the relationship between Malpighi and Gruse and their use of visual language and the work I did at the Royal Society was super key for that actually. And in terms of sort of surprising things that happened I mean, in addition to the archive like this just being an excellent opportunity for me as a PhD student again like similarly based in North America with without great access to the primary documents I needed for my research this was the only way I would have been able to spend such an intense amount of time in the archive so. Yeah, I super grateful for that and also I wanted to reiterate for the staff who were really really helpful, really, really kind people who know the collections very well in my experience. Like Jenny was being very humble, but they're super super helpful. And while I was at the Royal Society completing this research I was also able to connect with the making visible group there were some postdocs there that were digitizing all of the images from the collections that was really exciting. I've gotten to learn a lot from them so there are also other scholars that are around that you may have an opportunity to meet if you go to the Royal Society which is great. And then I have one more slide, which is that while at the Royal Society doing this other research I came across what will be my next project which is working on visualizations of bladder stones in the Royal Society collections. It's something that seemed to come up a lot of scholars coming through sort of knew that they were there there's this great scrapbook that's just got a lot of kind of images that hadn't previously been put in one specific place in the collection. And there's a series of really wonderful illustrations of bladder stones, and they get presented when people are giving tours at the Royal Society often Keith one of the archivists will be like look at these strange stones. And that's what I was all about right, and I was, I want to know what they're all about. Where can I read more about this and apparently not a lot of work has been done on them and so I've developed that into a paper now and will be turning into a postdoctoral project to start next year I'll be applying for funding for that and so that was kind of a fun and unexpected consequence of just spending time in the archive was finding not just stuff for my current project but being able to develop a new project so that was really great and I will. I'll finish up there for now but looking forward to questions during the question period. If you want to know more about my experiences with the Royal Society thanks. I did not expect this session this part of the session to end with bladder stones. Wonderful stuff. And so I can see there are questions coming in. We will, we'll have an extended Q&A session after both presentations. I can see the enthusiasm to get back in libraries and to get grants that I can, I can see evidence there. So, our second presentation is from Steven Spencer of the Salvation Army International Heritage Center, and Adam Miller, who is a PhD student at the University of Leicester, who are working together on an ESRC funded doctoral award, which is very exciting. So I will hand over to them. Okay. So I'm the director of the Salvation Army International Heritage Center. And we are the institutional repository for the records and publications and objects of the Salvation Army all over the world. I'm just going to get my first slide up. So here we go. So we hold around 90 cubic meters of records that's about 5000 boxes, which relates to the work of the Salvation Army from its origins in the 1860s to the work in present day. What is the Salvation Army? I'll do a quick run through, very quick, of what the Salvation Army is, and then Adam will come in to speak about his specific research topic and then we'll come back for a bit more about the nature of our collaboration. The Salvation Army is an independent Christian denomination, which evolved out of Methodism. It was founded by William Booth and his wife Catherine in 1865 in London. It has a network over the country and over the world of churches, which are called core. It's well known for its social work, which began in the 1880s in earnest and now sits alongside the evangelical work that Salvation Army does. As of March this year, the Salvation Army is established in 132 countries around the world. And its work in those countries, including the UK, is run out of an international headquarters, which is located in the city of London. And we hold records from that institution as well as the Salvation Army in the UK. And it's some other records from the national headquarters that Adam has been using for his research. So Adam, go on to say something about what you're doing. Thank you, Stephen, and thank you for inviting both Stephen and I. Just checking, can you hear me okay? Absolutely. Okay, great. Okay, so yeah, as Stephen says, I'm Adam Miller. I'm a PhD student working on the collaborative project with the Salvation Army's International Heritage Centre. So I'm based at the University of Leicester. And obviously I've spent plenty of time in London with Stephen and his colleagues who have been fantastic. So my thesis looks at the Salvation Army's Imperial Settlements and Colonies in Australia since the publication of In Dark Stingland and the Way Out in 1890. So some people may or may not know what this publication is, but essentially, so this publication was likely ghost written by William T. Stead, who was the editor for a short while of the Paul Mal Gazette. And this publication was an expression of General William Booth, who was the Army's founder and first general. So it's an expression of his philosophy on the regeneration of Britain's urban poor. He proposed a tripartite social scheme through which destitute Britain's destitute Britons or the submerged 10th, as he described them. So Britain's poorest 10% of the population and how they would move from metropolitan shelters known as the city colony to the farm colony in rural Britain. And the major one of these was in Hadley in Essex and you'll see that on the next slide soon. And eventually they would be moved to overseas colonies, which were regulated settlements across the British Empire. So my thesis predominantly looks at the creation or failure to create these colonies across the British Empire. So it looks, it looks like Australia, but I was supposed to also research in South Africa, but unfortunately due to the COVID pandemic, this research trip was cancelled in March 2020, about six days before I was due to fly out, which is always fun. And initially, my thesis was going to look predominantly at colonies created solely for British migrants. But this since researching the Heritage Centre in London, but also the Heritage Centre in Melbourne and other archives across Britain and Australia. It's grown to look further at the experiences poor juvenile Australian boys, so-called fallen women, Indigenous communities in Australia and former convicts and how they experienced these colonies. Over to you, Stephen. Oh, just to describe this slide, actually, the first image is Canaan Home at Riverview Farm. So that's in Ipswich in Queensland. It's about an hour's drive away from Brisbane for anyone who knows their Australian geography. Actually, Perga Colony, which was established for Indigenous communities, is about a half an hour drive away from Riverview. But as you can see, the land at the two sites are quite different. Over to you, Stephen. Brilliant. Thank you, Adam. So I thought it'd be interesting to say a bit about how we came to be doing this collaborative award with Adam. And the Heritage Centre has had connections with various academics and universities over the years. Probably the longest lasting one we've had is with Birkbeck at the University of London. And we've worked with academics before and we've occasionally talked about doing some sort of collaborative doctoral program, but it's never quite got off the ground for whatever reason. Then back in 2011, Adam's supervisor, Claire Anderson, at Leicester, was doing some research with us on penal colonies in the Andaman Islands, in the Indian Ocean. And the Salvation Army ran a settlement on the Andaman Islands. And as she was working in the archive, we were sort of discussing the other records that we had around the subject and kind of her research on the kind of international history of what she calls the castle archipelago. And we kind of realised that we had, like the Salvation Army archives, held enough records that hadn't really been approached in that way to at least do a PhD if not more research. Because there have been research done on specific Salvation Army settlements, like Hadley in Essex or in Australia, particularly in India. But no one had tried to pull together a sub-international history of these settlements and what they were doing and how they were led to empire and so on. It took us another five years to actually get the application into the ESRC for the collaborative award. Luckily, we were successful. And we recruited for a student to come aboard the project and Adam was obviously successful in that process. And you began your PhD and it was 2018 wasn't it, the first academic year that you started working with us. So Adam's due to finish at the end of this year. So it's worth noting that it's been a decade since I first began discussing this idea for a CDA with Claire. So I mean, I guess other institutions have a different experience of these kind of awards, but it's been a kind of long process in our experience. So there's a question as well around what do we as an archive get out of doing a collaborative doctoral program with the university. And a lot of this Virginia touched on in what you're saying about the recent Shardina Awards that I mean it's really good publicity. The best way that an archive can get publicity is if academics and students use the collection and they publish about it. There's data, conference papers, people at the archives there, and it kind of raises that awareness that a collection exists. And we have those kind of records that can support this kind of research. But also, it's a really good way of kind of directing academic research. Because as an archivist, I think we all know that we hold things in our collections that are really rich, really strong research tension. And academics might not have used them, students might not use them, they might not relate specifically to someone ongoing research. And the CDA is a really good way of collaborating with an academic institution to kind of tease out how you can use a collection that you know is very strong. But we don't understand like the research landscape it sits in. So that's what Claire could bring to our records. And that's kind of that's what's enriched this project. And it also brings a lot of specialism into the collection that we don't have, that people know things about British Empire, about penal colonies, about Australia, that we in the Heritage Centre don't have ourselves. And that's one of the real strengths of why we wanted to go into this collaboration. So now finally, it's back to Adam, who can say a bit about the experience of the club to PhD. Thank you, Steve. So yeah, I think it's worth saying that at the start of the collaboration, I think we were, it was quite an ambitious kind of project put forward about what we were going to do as part of the collaboration. Unfortunately, the COVID pandemic has kind of altered some of the aspects, but we have persevered. So some of the things we decided to do as part of the collaboration is we established a seminar series called the Institutions of Empire. So this began to run in May this year. And we had Dr. Mandy Banton from the School of Bant Study at the University of London. She gave the first paper on the National Archives and discussed whether we can conceive of the National Archives as an institution of empire. And we had a second event that was on Oral and Empire, and then one of the events was going to be on the Salvation Army. And unfortunately due to the UCU global boycott of the University of Leicester, we have a port of the seminar series on hold for probably until the autumn. So that's a plug just so you all know that's coming back in the autumn if anyone wants to attend any of the events. Another thing we did was we did some site visits. So me, Stephen and Claire Anderson, who is the first supervisor on the project all went to Hadley Farm, which you can see just in the background there. And obviously you can see the Thames Estuary just kind of in the foreground. Yeah, so this used to be part of the Hadley site. I think now it's kind of free land. Stephen might want to correct me there. But the Rare Breeds Farm, which is still owned by the Salvation Army, is slightly to our left, which is out of the screen unfortunately. Yeah, we did a site visit, which was really interesting, but also just really important to get a feel and an understanding of just how big the initial Hadley colony was, which was the initial farm colony, which is the second kind of stage of William Dove's tripartite social scheme. One of the things we're also going to do is write a co-authored article. This is going to be, we think, on Salvation Army's contribution to the international temperance movement. And so some of my work on Salvation Army's colony that was set up called Perga in the previous slide with Indigenous communities. Some of the work I've done on that is going to go into that article because they do a lot of work in trying to stop Indigenous communities engaging with so-called urban vices, such as alcohol. One of the things that is almost complete is a subject guide on the Salvation Army's colonies. And this isn't going to be restricted to Australia. This is going to kind of give potential researchers information about Salvation Army's colonies across the British Empire, but also in Britain as well. And we did have an internship planned where I was going to spend, I think, a month in the Heritage Centre learning the trade, basically, of being an archivist per se, but working within an archive. And one of the great things about being part of this collaboration is that every time I have visited the Heritage Centre, I've basically been treated as a staff member. So I've been able to go and sit in the offices, have access to all the files that I required, which is an experience that I've never had before. Just going and getting your own files and being able to explore the collections without any restriction whatsoever. So that's been kind of quite an incredible experience. And I think the last thing I'll say is one of the great things about these collaborations is that there is a kind of mutual benefit to it. So for obvious reasons, it's been a huge benefit to me with the access to the archives, kind of unfettered access. But also for Stephen and his colleagues in the sense that I've had people kind of approach me about offering documentation to the Heritage Centre since. So there was, when I first started my PhD, somebody overheard me talking about my research and they offered their grandfathers, great grandfathers diary to me, who was a migration officer in Australia, which is incredibly fortunate. And yeah, I've had access to his diary for a while. And also someone has some files on the Salvation Army in Kenya, which I believe they're going to pass to us too. So it's been, they're kind of definitely fortuitous moments of the collaboration and things you kind of don't really expect to come out of it, but they have and I guess that's one of the beautiful things about doing this collaboration. But also, you know, the relationship with Stephen and these colleagues has been excellent as well. And I've really enjoyed that element of the project and back to Richard, I don't think. Thank you. Thank you very much. And could I invite all of the panellists to reactivate their cameras and come back so that our attendees can see you all. I think there is so much collaboration to be celebrated in what's been said in the last half hour. It's extraordinary and we do have, there are some, there are some sort of very specific questions coming in about particularly arrangements around Lisa Jardine Grants and the reopening of the Royal Society Library, which perhaps for January might be best if you answer directly. I think, I mean, I think one thing I would highlight before I start reading out something, well, I'll read out one of the questions here and that is, it's a really interesting question about how the Royal Society uses the outcomes, how you incorporate the research produced by early career academics on the grant scheme into your finding aids and does this go somewhere into the catalogue. I think that's actually, that's a question that could usefully be put to all of us and on which every librarian and archivist should be reflecting. And I know, Adam, you touched on a subject guide, but I mean, I've certainly had the experience of seeing in our reading room at Centre House a reader sitting with a box that we've catalogued as unidentified objects. And only after they'd been looking at them for two weeks did any of us actually think to say, I'm sorry, do you know what they are? Because we've had them for 60 years and we don't know what they are. And they did and could write it down very quickly. But I just wondered if anybody, any of you wanted to talk about that, that the way these kind of collaborations can have that very direct improvement on the library service or the archive service for our readers? I can, yeah, I can say something. Yeah, absolutely, we try and make sure we're having these conversations with people whilst they're in the reading room, that's a really important part of the process. And yeah, add information to our descriptive information in catalogs and on our picture library, we can often, as you said, we can give information about things that may have been unidentified before. So yeah, people bringing in their kind of somatic knowledge and knowledge from other material that's in other collections and they can say this looks really similar to this. So we like to highlight in our catalogue where there's related material elsewhere as well. And if there have been things published about it, we will quite often try and put in a reference to publish material where people can find out more about specific objects. Yeah, I mean, I completely agree with all of that in terms of how reliant the archivist is on the subject specialist. Because as an archivist, you know your collection, you understand things about the materials that produced on and the institutional background to things that are created. But particularly for us where we hold an in-house collection, that's the way it was created organically itself. We have very little about the wider world around that, the non-publicity version of what was going on. So that's really useful, I mean having Adam bring in a lot of knowledge and having a patient who has the scope to do the research that we don't have the scope to do, to kind of inform questions that we know we don't have the answers to. And what I like about being an archivist, which I don't envy academics for, is that you don't need to have a thesis as an archivist, you just do catalogue of the material and the catalogue never finished. It's always just this is what we know straight away about the collection. I mean guess the point where you don't quite know what things are, you just stop and say, you know, put unknown objects or miscellaneous items. You don't need to have that kind of academic rigor to actually get to bottom of stuff. That's what you hand over to the academic for. Yeah. I didn't also just come in quickly and just say, yeah, I mean, I think one of the things being Steven experienced when doing the project is I was doing kind of a lot of survey work when I first started because we had I hadn't chosen my case of this. And so that allowed me to kind of get into the archive and get into the nitty gritty of what what the colonies and settlements the Salvation Army actually created. And I think being Steven, we're both quite surprised that the just just the mass number of settlements the Salvation Army had created across the British Empire that I guess we probably would never have uncovered had we not really done this project. So that's been kind of quite interesting for us. And I do, I do actually, there's a very direct question here about the experience of collaborative doctor rewards in particular but I think it probably applies to all these kind of funded research experiences of someone due to start a collaborative doctor award with English heritage in October, looking at the mahogany in their care. Does anyone have any advice for how to make a success of these collaborations, especially in the face of setbacks coven related or otherwise well I think we could all talk of the rest of the afternoon about research setbacks. Does anybody have a bit. Those of you who've received these wards and been doing the research. Do you have, do you have tips on on how to make a success of that relationship with the archive. Maybe we're just really easy to get along with us as collections people. That's okay. I think the one thing I would say is be as flexible as possible and try and cultivate a good relationship with your collaborative partner and hope that they will also be as flexible as possible because things change within. Well, I mean, especially in the UK recently things change within the week of a mind, you know, the year so you've kind of got to be open to the idea that, you know, whatever you are doing is going to change within the blink of an eye. Credit to Steven he's been absolutely brilliant at being as flexible as possible, despite everything going on. And yeah, it's been it's been a pleasure working with him during this time because you know I know from other people's experiences that hasn't been quite as easy and they've really struggled with the collaborative element during during the pandemic because they don't have never really created a good relationship with their collaborative partners. That's very kind. Thanks, Adam. I think it helps that Adam had been with us for what, two years, 18 months before the pandemic so we kind of, we knew each other by that point but it'd be a lot harder to start to CDA now where you're kind of doing it on zoom or whatever kind of initially. So, I mean, Aaron and Pamela did you just feel like sort of slightly slightly enriched researchers amongst a body of researchers in a reading room, albeit a chilly one. Or did you feel that you, you know you had a very different status there and you had personal relationships with the staff and so forth. I mean, so I'm trying to think when I was, when I was there, there were quite a few people coming in and out. I didn't, I don't, and partly is the way people work. And partly, you know my general kind of shyness but so I didn't really strike up kind of a relationship with other researchers there but I found I, you know I did with the archivists and and the and the staff. And so I think the only thing I would say on this question is kind of the other side of what Stephen and Jenny have have articulated that the archivists know the collections in a way that as researchers, we don't necessarily. So I had, I went in with a lot of kind of background knowledge on what I was looking at. But I didn't know just that about the existence of many of many things in the collection, and for that I relied on basically also picking up on what Adam said that flexibility to kind of say okay I went in with this plan but actually this thing is really cool and I didn't know about it and I only found out about it because the archivists kind of pushed me in that direction a little bit, and then it became, you know, something, you know, something that was really beneficial to the project. And maybe I can say something very briefly as well from that. We do host collaborative doctoral awards at the Royal Society as well and so the least charting grants are kind of obviously much shorter term kind of placents than that. But they are sort of one of the hopes is that they do allow researchers to spend a bit longer with us and they might otherwise have been able to so it's sort of supporting their living costs if they're going to be staying in London for a while. So hopefully it does give us a little bit more time to develop a relationship with someone and maybe help them develop their research in those unexpected directions. Sorry Pamela, were you about to speak? Yeah, I found that the experience at the Royal Society was both really like, there was like a lot of this sort of like professional and research based activities that happened there but on the other hand, to your question, I did feel like I was a part of a community of scholars that were there like, both when there were people visiting on a day that I would be there, I would be told about it a week or two in advance and often invited out for lunch and things like this. I don't want to like rub in pre-COVID sort of, I don't know, archive etiquette but like it was before COVID and so there were a lot of opportunities actually to meet people and people I've since worked with actually so I found that to be one of the most enriching parts of being there was kind of entering into a very eager and willing community of scholars and the fact that the librarians, the archivists, thought about me, you know, and let me know when there might be someone coming that would be of interest. So I thought that was really lovely. So I have said there are a couple of specific questions so Adam, about your research project, have you consulted or used any post-colonial literature to contextualize your findings and if so or not you have a key recommended reference that has helped your understanding. Yeah, yeah sure, absolutely. In fact as part of the ESRC award I had to do a second master's degree so I did an MSc and part of that we looked at the philosophy of social science and within that we looked at post-colonial, decolonial literature so I mean Omibaba, Paul Gilroy, Depeche, Chakrabarti, Gayatri, Spivak, Candice of Almsby. Literature like that I've used quite a lot, I mean it's not necessarily gone in the thesis as much as maybe it should do yet but it has been used to contextualize my work for short. I use a lot of new imperial history which is kind of grown out of post-colonial literature and some of that work including my own supervisor Clare Anderson's work but also stuff like Antoinette Burson. Yeah so there's a lot of that literature that I've used but also I mean if you want specific recommendations I can always send, I can put my email address in the chat and we can speak more about that. That's very generous, you should also be able to see the question so you can type an answer directly to it if you, or yeah I'm sure anybody would be very grateful. So I think there's one more question which I think is a challenge to all of us which we probably don't have time to discuss or answer but I'm going to read it because it's a good point. Is there going to be more outreach programs to raise awareness of these types of schemes say at undergraduate level and perhaps also an attempt to appeal to and reach marginalized history students so that when they come to undertaking doctoral research they're already aware of what is out there. We all do our level best to communicate these opportunities but there is perhaps a challenge there for us to be better at collaborating. On a national professional level I know that there are lists and there are central bodies but yeah perhaps we could all be better about communicating what opportunities. Particularly I mean my own library has a research, a library research fellowship program that I think we could be better at communicating. And there's one very big question which I think we're going to have to leave can anyone recommend an online resource for those of us just starting out on archival research methods and on archival archival research sorry to understand how to use archives. I just jump in so Richard and really things like discovery at National Archives and the archives have absolutely made things I think what we need to do is get students to know to understand archive collections before they choose a research topics. Yeah, things like that you don't need to go to the archive just log on to discovery at TMA and it aggregates a lot of archive collections from across the UK. I think that's really important to get young students kind of aware of what they can do with archives sorry. No please don't apologize and the only other thing I would say is I've contributed to and listened to a lot of sessions on how to use archives. And I promise you the first thing every archivist says is you don't need to understand how to use the archive before you come to the archive. Please just come to the archive and talk to us and it isn't a mystery. We're not the wizard of us behind a curtain with we're honestly doing our best to be approachable. But yeah, any any any any any any guidance you genuinely require you should be able to get in any reading room with a smile if maybe not an invitation to lunch but you know, sometimes. So I'm sorry I've allowed that to sneak over time. I need to need to hand back to our killer just to round out the session but I'm sorry that the zoom means that we can't applaud you. I would like to encourage everyone to give you a round of applause. Thank you very much indeed it's been a very stimulating afternoon. Thank you. Thank you for coming from us again for all your really interesting and fantastic contributions and to Richard for chairing the session so expertly as well. We're just really here to give you a very quick end slide. So this is just to let you know if you would like to know more about history today, you're very welcome to choose. Or you can visit our website.