CLiC and the Cadbury Research Library: The start of a collaboration

This week marked the beginning of our collaboration with the University of Birmingham’s Cadbury Research Library. Together with the GLARE Project we were pleased to give a seminar for library staff, introducing the CLiC web app and the opportunities it can offer to students, staff and visitors.

This week staff @CadburyRL enjoyed a fascinating training session on corpus linguistics, courtesy of colleagues working on the @CLiC_Dickens project. We’re very much looking forward to collaborating more closely together to support researchers studying literary texts

— CadburyRL (@CadburyRL) September 27, 2018

The Cadbury Research Library is home to the University of Birmingham’s historic collection of rare books, manuscripts, archives and photographs. The collections consist of over 200,000 rare printed books, including significant incunabula, as well as over 4 million unique archive and manuscript collections. The Cadbury Research Library is responsible for directly supporting the University’s research, learning and teaching agenda, along with supporting the national and international research community. All interested researchers are welcome to explore and enjoy the unique collections held by the University of Birmingham.  

For further information see the Cadbury Research Library website. If you’re local to the Birmingham area, you might be interested in joining one of the tours of Cadbury Research Library (organised as part of Black History Month) on 8th & 10th October (To book a place, please email Jenny Childs).

This introductory video also provides a glimpse behind the scenes at the library. 

At our CLiC Dickens Day event in December 2017, the Head of Rare Books at the library, Martin Killeen, already gave us a taster of the rich collection, including local materials. In his guest post for this blog, Martin shared material from the library’s Dickens holdings, tracing how the novelist came to put on a performance in Birmingham (including an original draft ticket and playbill for the event).

Bringing together resources from the physical manuscripts in the library and the digital texts in CLiC opens up new opportunities for both

1. contextualising the study of the CLiC texts with information from 19th century sources such as original illustrations, letters etc.
2. expanding research in the library with a digital search across the 19th corpora available in CLiC

Following this kick-off event we are looking forward to expanding this collaboration by introducing CLiC to students, staff and visitors of the Cadbury Research Library as well as the wider Library Services department at the University of Birmingham. We are also planning collaborative events at the Cadbury Research Library that will be open to the public and combine examples from the physical collections and digital output from the CLiC web app. If you’re interested in doing a PhD in this area, please do get in touch via clic@contacts.bham.ac.uk.