MUNDUS

A Project to Facilitate and Improve Access to Missionary Collections in the United Kingdom

The aim of this cross-sectoral and cross-domain project is to improve access to holdings of missionary archives, artefacts, manuscript collections, books, pamphlets and visual images held in a wide variety of institutions in the UK. Researchers from a broad range of academic disciplines are increasingly turning to these abundantly rich resources. However, the materials, widely dispersed, frequently uncatalogued and, sometimes, badly preserved are difficult to locate and consult. During the course of this three-year programme access to collections at five major centres (Birmingham, Cambridge, Edinburgh, London and Oxford) will be greatly improved. Previously unlisted papers and photographs will be sorted and listed to ISAD (G) standard and catalogues to both printed and manuscript materials will be made available on-line. Measures will also be taken to improve the physical storage of the materials including conservation work. The culmination of the project will be the creation of a cross-sectoral web-based guide to missionary materials throughout the UK, giving collection-level details of holdings, location and access information and providing a search facility by name, place and subject. Links to RSLP and other related projects and resources will be created to maximise the usefulness of the web-resource to the academic community.

Partner Institutions are:

• School of Oriental and African Studies (Lead Institute)

• University of Birmingham in strategic alliance with Westhill College

• Cambridge University Library

• Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World, Edinburgh

• Edinburgh University Library

• Regent’s Park College, Oxford

• Rhodes House Library, Oxford

Progress to March 2002

1. Institutional Projects

Birmingham

Some 1718 on-line catalogue records are now available in the CALM database for manuscript collections at the Orchard Learning and Resources Centre and 14383 records in the project to retro-convert handlists of the Church Missionary Society at the University of Birmingham Library. 5400 bibliographic records have been created for published works in the Library relating to mission studies.

Cambridge

Work is now well in hand to create a web-based guide to the archive of the British and Foreign Bible Society and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Some 4,450 records have been created to date.

Edinburgh

The project to catalogue and create collection-level descriptions for missionary collections at Edinburgh has been completed. Thirty-three collections at Edinburgh University Library and forty-three collections at new College have been catalogued.

Oxford

Regent’s Park College

The project to catalogue photographs in the Baptist Missionary Society Archive is now complete. Records have been created for 32,600 images, dated from c. 1890 to 1950 and covering a wide range of countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, New Zealand and Brazil.

Rhodes House Library

The project to create a database for missionary personnel of the (United) Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and the Universities Mission to Central Africa is now well advanced. Records for over 10,000 missionaries have been created to date.

School of Oriental and African Studies, London

The project to create an on-line catalogue of books in the MMS Library is now virtually complete. More than 4,000 records have been created for monographs and serials relating to the work of the Methodist Missionary Society and its missionaries.

More than 17, 000 images in the archives of the Presbyterian Church of England, the Council for World Mission and the Methodist Missionary Society have now been catalogued as part of the Missionary Photographic Project

2. Consortium Activity

• A Project Planning Group to steer the project and decide its methodology was set up in 1999. Three meetings have so far been held

• To raise awareness of the importance of missionary archives among archivists and others a conference entitled A Mission for the future: the use and importance of missionary archives, organised jointly by the RSLP Project and the Religious Archives Group, was held in London on 16th October 2000. More than 50 participants attended. A panel presentation outlining the Project was given by RSLP project leaders. The Conference Proceedings have been sent to all participants and widely distributed.

• A schema for the subject-indexing of missionary archive collections has been drawn up, based on the UNESCO Thesaurus, and is being used as the basis of subject indexing for the web guide.

• An Academic Evaluation Group, consisting of eleven representative UK academics has been set up. A meeting with the Planning Group to discuss dissemination and promotion is planned for the summer of 2002.”

• An illustrated leaflet on the project has been produced and 1,000 copies distributed.

• Work to create a web-based guide to Missionary Collections is now well underway. By the end of the project we will have included collection-level descriptions for approximately 500 collections in the UK. More than one hundred and twenty collection level descriptions are already in the database. The database will be available from June/July 2002.

Project Director

Project website

http://www.mundus.ac.uk

Content: Gill Davenport
Last updated 3 July 2002