The Bishop Grimes Collection - An Introduction

The Bishop Grimes Collection was donated to the University of Canterbury in 1980. Collated together across almost 100 years, it is a diverse set of texts that covers a range of subjects. This blog, as hinted at by the title, is aimed at discussing items from that collection. My name is Jennifer Dorsey and I am completing the final year of my Arts Degree at the University of Canterbury and this year I have decided to undertake an internship in the Rare Books Department. As part of my 300-level internship programme, which introduces students to the workforce and encourages them to use the skills that they have learnt, I will blog any interesting discoveries that I come across in my project. I decided to focus my internship on the Macmillan Brown Library, and specifically on the Rare Books from the Bishop Grimes’ collection.

At first it may be difficult to understand why we scholars should examine a collection that is 35 years old and has already had some system of cataloguing applied to it. However, despite the 35 years that have passed since it was donated to the University, there is still a question about what texts we actually have and, more to the point, what we know about the collection itself. Even after three decades, there is still a lot to be discovered about this collection that has been sitting in storage.

My job is to catalogue the details of each book by examining a number of sources of information. These include card catalogues, a Reference Catalogue that was made by the Bishops of Christchurch, an electronic catalogue, and finally the book itself. The purpose of the cataloguing activity is to determine the correct publication details of a text and to uncover details about how it came to be in the Grimes Collection. Ultimately, I hope to produce a catalogue of compiled information that is accurate and can used by historians and librarians. It will hopefully uncover books that we did not know we had and will make the collection more accessible to others who wish to study the collection in depth.

My internship consists of practical and academic components. The practical component takes place in the Macmillan Brown Library, where the rare books from the Grimes Collection are housed. I will be advised by Damian Cairns, the Special Collections Librarian, and supervised by Dr Chris Jones, History Department, College of Arts at University of Canterbury. The academic part of my course will also be supervised by Dr Chris Jones. The Director of Interns, Dr Stephen Hardman will be an additional general supervisor as I complete both the academic and practical aspects of my internship.