Private Books for Educational Use - the Formation of the Northern Congregational College Library

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Dissenting Academies Online: Virtual Library System forms part of a major research project on the history of the dissenting academies in the British Isles, 1660-1860, managed by the Dr Williams's Centre for Dissenting Studies. The earliest dissenting academies were established after the Restoration as a result of the 1662 Act of Uniformity, and were intended to provide Protestant students dissenting from the Church of England with a higher education similar to that at Oxford and Cambridge, from which they were largely excluded. Their main purpose was to prepare candidates for the ministry, but many educated lay students as well. The tutors and students at the academies contributed in fundamental ways to the development of ideas, notably in the fields of theology, philosophy, literature, and science. In the course of the nineteenth century the academies' original purpose was largely superseded by the founding of London University and the provincial universities, which were open to dissenters, and by the eventual reform of Oxford and Cambridge. The surviving academies were transformed into denominational training colleges for ministerial candidates. The Dissenting Academies Project will have two outcomes: A History of the Dissenting Academies in the British Isles, 1660-1860, a multi-authored book in preparation, and Dissenting Academies Online, two fully searchable databases already published on the Dr Williams's Centre website. The second database, the AHRC-funded Virtual Library System, uses modern library software to recreate virtual historic libraries from surviving library catalogues and loan records. The libraries included are those of Bristol Baptist College, Manchester College (largely Unitarian) in Manchester and York, and the Congregational Colleges of Mile End and Homerton in London. Users can search for particular titles or authors; browse the shelves of an academy library; compare the holdings of different libraries; and browse, search, and sort students' loan records. They can learn about the acquisition and use of books in dissenting education, and the impact that books had on the students' intellectual formation. The VLS has already been recognised as an important and innovative resource, the first of its kind, which will transform our understanding of the circulation of books and ideas in dissenting education and establish a model for future work with historic libraries. In the course of the Library project far more archival material was uncovered than could be entered into the database. The VLS includes more data on the Baptist and Unitarian academies than on the Congregational ones, and only Congregational academies in the London area are represented. The aims of the follow-on project on the Northern Congregational College, Manchester, are to enlarge the original database to include the libraries of Congregational colleges in Yorkshire and Lancashire, to extend the date up to the twentieth century, and to enter provenance details of individual books for the first time. The project will show how a twentieth-century denominational library developed through a process of acquisition, donation, inheritance, and transfer from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, and how books moved from private to educational use, thereby demonstrating the strength of Congregationalism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Yorkshire and Lancashire. The project has a number of applications and benefits: it will engage those currently training Congregational ministers in their own heritage and educational history; it will provide a model for librarians and book historians for recovering information about dispersed and lost book collections; it will show contemporary private libraries how they can make their own historic library collections searchable online through the model of the VLS; and it will introduce religious, educational, social, library, and book historians to a new way of researching the history of reading.