History

The volumes which now form the Lampeter Tract Collection were given to the institution by a number of benefactors in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Dr Thomas Bowdler and the Bowdler Collection

By far the largest component of the Collection was a single donation of over 9000 individual items (now bound in 552 volumes) received soon after 1825. Although no record of the donor's name survives in the University's archives, the provenance history of the volumes, reconstructed from ownership inscriptions and other documentary evidence, suggest that the donor was Dr Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825), who spent the last fourteen years of his life at the Rhyddings near Swansea, and that the pamphlets had been collected by his family during the years 1638 to 1787. The greater part of the collection assembled by Thomas Bowdler II (1661-1738) during the years 1709-18, mostly unbound but tied up in bundles, was methodically catalogued from 1717 by their owner, and this catalogue came to Lampeter with the pamphlet volumes which had been subsequently bound and numbered to correspond to the manuscript catalogue.

Later additions to the Bowdler collection were not included in the manuscript catalogue, and the first printed catalogue of the library at Lampeter (Llandovery, 1836) only listed the first item in a few of the pamphlets and covered the remainder of the donation with a collective entry in the form 'Tracts and Pamphlets…bound together in 491 vols…all numbered; with a manuscript catalogue of their contents'. The Foundation Collection

A leaf of the manuscript catalogue of the Bowdler pamphlet collection showing the contents of 'bundle' 163 now T264 & T517 Enlarge

At the time of the first printed catalogue, the Library at Lampeter consisted of not more than 5,000 very miscellaneous volumes. Most of these had been contributed by well-wishers - many of whose names were not recorded in the Donations Book which begins in 1827 when the first students were admitted - and these had been given in response to an appeal from Thomas Burgess, the Founder of St David's College, first issued in 1807. Dr Bowdler had evidently been one of these uncommemorated benefactors to the Foundation Collection, and there were other donations of pamphlets at this time, such as seventeen numbered volumes of 'miscellanies', once the property of Alexander and Thomas Scott.

The Burgess and Phillips additions to the Tract Collection

Some time during the second half of the nineteenth century, additions to the Lampeter Tract Collection were made from two other major donations which had come to the library since its opening in 1827. Fifty-one pamphlet volumes (containing about 440 individual items, mainly of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century) were added from the library of the Founder, Thomas Burgess (1756-1837), which had come to Lampeter by bequest soon after his death. Similarly, 169 volumes of pamphlets were added from the donation of Thomas Phillips (1760-1851) which over the years 1834-1851 had amounted to 22,500 volumes. The most interesting of these were sets of 'miscellanies' and 'political tracts' dating from the 1790s.

T. F. Tout and C. H. Firth

It seems that the historical importance of the Tract Collection was not fully recognized at Lampeter until the 1880s when T. F. Tout came to St David's College as Professor of History and librarian. With his friend, C. H. Firth, who was an external examiner for the College for a number of years, Tout rescued the collection from neglect, arranging for seventy-two volumes to be rebound, rearranging the contents of some, and bringing together, for example, all the Civil War and Commonwealth newspapers scattered throughout the collection, into four volumes arranged in chronological order. It is clear that by this time the condition of the collection had deterioriated. Some volumes were judged to be decayed beyond repair, and these were disposed of. Further losses were incurred when some items, believed to be 'duplicates' were sold to Firth. In the case of the Bowdler pamphlets, at least for the period 1638 to the 1780s, the surviving manuscript catalogue provides the most comprehensive listing of the original collection.

The first card catalogue

In the 1900s, the whole Tract Collection was renumbered in a single sequence (as far as T579), probably at the same time as a partial attempt was made, in 1902-1905, to create a card-index for the collection (and for the Library) as a whole. By this time, pamphlet volumes from other parts of the library had been added, and the original Bowdler numbering system had been lost.

The first printed catalogue

In 1972-74 the entire Tract Collection was catalogued for the first time. Many other pamphlet volumes were added from the Burgess, Phillips and 'foundation' collections, bringing the total number of volumes to 830, and the number of individual entries to 8,690. At the same time, reporting of Lampeter's pamphlet holdings was made to the editors of The Short-title Catalogue…1475-1640 with a view to their inclusion in the second edition of STC, and to Wing's Short-title catalogue…1641-1700 for inclusion in the second edition of Wing. The resulting Catalogue of the Tract Collection, compiled by Brian Ll. James and published by Mansell in 1975, was reproduced from the card-index of the collection arranged in chronological order by year. Reference was made in each catalogue entry to the first editions of STC and Wing where appropriate and, in the case of pamphlets printed on the continent, to H. M. Adams, Catalogue of books printed on the continent of Europe, 1501-1600, in Cambridge libraries. But, as the compiler indicated, the printed catalogue provided only 'a finding-list of the contents of the Collection' and did not attempt full bibliographical description.

For further information, see the Introduction to A Catalogue of the Tract Collection of Saint David's University College, Lampeter [compiled by B. Ll. James], Mansell, 1975, from which much of the above has been adapted.

From card-catalogue to on-line database

The advent of machine-readable and fully searchable on-line catalogue databases in the 1980s led to the funding of a project by the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (as part of its Non-Formula Funding programme for Special Collections) in 1994 to convert the card-catalogue of the Tract Collection (and that of the Founders' Library as a whole) to machine-readable form for inclusion on the Library's Libertas system on-line catalogue. This was undertaken by OCLC in 1994-96. The project highlighted the rarity of much of the Tract Collection as well as the limitations of an undertaking which was not funded to allow for the checking of the on-line records against the books themselves. Sample testing showed that the bibliographical description on the data-base was often at variance with the pamphlets themselves, that many Lampeter items could not at the time be matched with records available, and that in consequence a number of improperly matched and misleading records had been created. Copy-specific information often related, not to the Lampeter pamphlets, but to the copy already on the OCLC database, and 'duplicate' copies had generally been omitted. Consequently, much incorrect information would have to be stripped out, and the correct information substituted, before the on-line catalogue data-base would be an accurate search-tool for the user.

The RSLP Project

The present project, funded under the Research Support Libraries Programme, has necessitated the complete re-cataloguing of the Tract Collection to update existing on-line records, to add new records for duplicates which had been omitted from the OCLC retro-conversion project, and to add records for pamphlet fragments and other items which had escaped inclusion in the 1975 printed Catalogue of the Tract Collection.

The principal on-line databases used have been those provided by CURL and ESTC incorporating information not only from the 2nd editions of STC and Wing, but records for the period 1701 to 1800 not available when the first full catalogue was being prepared in the early 1970s.

In addition, provenance information has been included for each record where this is known, drawing on and in some cases amplifying what had been discovered in the course of cataloguing the collection in the 1970s. Furthermore, individual pamphlets within each volume (sometimes containing as many as 70 separate items) have now been numbered to facilitate identification and to avoid unnecessary and often time consuming searching which contributed in the past to further deterioration of already very fragile and vulnerable material. In the case of Bowdler pamphlets which are listed in the Bowdler manuscript catalogue, cross-references have been added to the corresponding item listed in the original 'bundles'. Where appropriate, the presence of manuscript annotations has been noted, especially in the case of former owners such as the nonjuror George Hickes.

Cataloguing Standards

The Pamphlet and Polemic Project has aimed to catalogue to the highest standard, adhering to and where possible exceeding the minimum standards for bibliographical records laid down by RSLP for its funded projects, i.e. AACR2/MARC 21 cataloguing, with Library of Congress subject headings. The project is using the Voyager library system, and new and updated records are added directly on to the catalogue database and are therefore immediately available to researchers.