Sustainable teaching resources
The Special Collections and Archives Department supports the teaching and learning mission of UL by encouraging access to rich primary source materials, offering research assistance and course-specific instruction, and developing online research resources. In 2018, it developed and launched its new website, with a view to creating accessible research resources and opening up its collections to its researchers in new ways.
A key strategy of the department over the last number of years has been to create simple, reusable and scalable resources, working with that we have, within time and budgetary constraints. Online resources greatly increase the sustainability of the department’s overall teaching and learning programme, as it makes both core archival literacy skills training and digitised archival material freely available online.
Today’s image is taken from the ‘Opening a Window to the Past’ project, which focused on a sample of archival diaries held at UL Library, to teach students and researchers how best to undertake archival research.
click on the highlighted areas below to read more about common features to look out for while researching archival diaries
Click on each highlighted area to read more about this diary's unique formatting features, written by William Massey Blennerhassett (1861–1865), from the Glin collection.
Read Blennerhassett's diary in full on the UL Digital Library.
P1/22: Weather reports
Blennerhassett includes a weather report for each entry, perhaps necessitated by his living on a farm at Cloughanarold, Co Limerick.
For more on other types of incidental information contained in archival diaries, click here.
P1/22: Smudged ink
Written in wet ink, historical diaries often contain blots, smudges and sometimes even the fingerprints of their authors. Here, the smudged word is almost unreadable, but from a repeat of the word further on down the page, we know it says 'Arrival'.
P1/22: Headers and dates
This author helpfully includes the month and year at the beginning of each page, sometimes with a flourish or twirl of the pen to add emphasis.
P1/22: Drawings and doodles
Luckily for us, this author is quite the artist! He helpfully illustrates key pieces of text from his diary entries – in this case, this romantic doodle depicts the marriage of Miss Lloyd to Mr Edwards, on 23 November 1865, when the weather was 'fine'.
Blennerhassett includes a range of drawings in his diaries. For more on these, click here
P1/22: Personal notes and highlights
This author sometimes includes an 'X' to mark days or events of note.
P1/22: Formatting for emphasis
This author commonly underlines people's names and other events for emphasis, sometimes with a single line, and sometimes with a double line.
P1/22: Friends and relatives
This author often includes portraits of his friends and relatives in the margins of his diaries, sometimes accompanied by their full name or initials – in this case, 'CM' stands for Charles Massy.
Such drawings are both interesting caricatures of the people in Blennerhassett's life, as well as an important social record of fashion and modes of dress in 19th century Ireland.
For more on the social history contained in archival diaries, click here.
This project was developed in conjunction with Dr Rachel Murphy in the UL History Department, and funded by the National Forum for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education through the Centre for Transformative Learning at UL. Using archival diaries as a working example, this resource aims to build basic archival and information literacy, and explores useful historical research methods. It is designed to be used both in the classroom, as well as asynchronously and autonomously as required. For more, click here.
© All images held at Glucksman Library. Please contact us for copyright information and permission to reproduce.
