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It's a real pleasure to be here in this world of virtual locations.

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I am delighted to welcome you to the borderland live present to the University of Oxford for the 20th anniversary

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event of the Oxford seminars and cartography on the fascinating and important topic of women and maps.

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It's particularly appropriate timing as the seminar falls into Women's History Month.

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Events like this one help us to see beyond the surface and to question our assumptions.

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Many of us, including I will confess we might think of or might have thought of Max as masculine territory.

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But reading a Library of Congress blog from 2016 by Karlyn Osborne.

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Thanks to my marketing colleagues for supplying this for me, I can see that that's not necessarily the case.

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That, as always, things underneath the surface are more complicated. I'll quote to you from that blog.

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There was a long tradition of women being intricately involved in the largest mass publishing houses in the low countries.

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Women were involved as every level of production, engraving, printing, colouring and publishing.

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And that puts a blog about the Dutch cartographer from the 17th century enervate.

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And incidentally, the borderland holds one of her maps.

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Other examples of women and maps and bodily and collections that I wanted to highlight to give you a taster.

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And my colleague Sarah is kindly going to share her screen with you.

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At this point, I hope so that I can talk it through with you.

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Yes. Great. Thank you. I can certainly see it, and I hope everyone else can, too.

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So this is a really fascinating example of a woman.

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Her name was Lillian Lancaster, and she created this book when she was only 15 to help her brother.

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I think she was probably educating with. I'm afraid I.

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I didn't know anything about her again until my kind maths colleagues showed shared this information with me.

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This is published in 1868. It's a geographical, fun, humorous outlines of various countries.

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And Sarah is going to scroll down so you can see some of those who thought England's nice shape of England.

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And then we've got Germany. And of course, in 1868, Prussia was a separate country and that's there.

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Thank you, Sarah. I think we could stop sharing now. And the second the.

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Oh, yes. And I wanted to say, what Sarah has just shared with you is the Bodleian Libraries Map blog.

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So you can see that for yourself if you want to have another look after this.

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And then my second example is that thanks to the legal deposit privilege that we enjoy in the BUTLIN and the

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Borderland has an almost complete collection of the published output of the for A to Z Map Company Ltd,

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which was founded by Phyllis Piersall, one of the most successful business people of the 20th century.

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I often quote the writer Virginia Woolf in this context, them in a beautiful line.

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She wrote it in an essay called Women in Fiction. Strange periods of silence seem to separate one period of activity from another.

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She was, as I said, talking about women in fiction. But it's also applicable to today's subject.

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The problem is that the thread of history is sometimes broken, all is lost, and so often every generation has to rediscover and we learn.

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And so there's no building on past experience. People have, you know,

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they waste time and energy having to say to to learn and start from scratch on things where actually they could be building on a historical tradition.

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And of course, that's where our memory institutions like the Bodleian come in because they can fill in the gaps.

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They can they can then bring the noise back into the silence that Virginia Woolf talks about.

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And a landmark event in this respect for us in the bottom man was the 2018 Sappho to Suffrage exhibition of Bogalay and collections related to women.

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It was curated by an Oxford historian, Saniya Sasha.

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And it was marking the anniversary of the vote for women in the UK and Ireland.

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It was accompanied by the creation of a suffrage rule of contemporary women representing a variety of occupations.

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And they were invited to become SCIF suffrage champions and digitised images of all the

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items from the exhibition and the suffrage bill are both also available on the web.

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If you would like to follow up afterwards. But, of course, coming back to today's events, conferences,

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conferences like this one enable researchers and students to find and study primary

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sources relating to women and to help us as the BUTLIN to make them better know.

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And that is one of our responsibilities as a large research library to make our collections better.

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No, particularly those that aren't so well-known because they represent groups that are less powerful or have been less powerful within our society.

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We also have a responsibility as large employers and large research libraries to ensure recognition,

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exposure and opportunities for all our staff, regardless of gender.

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And we owe that to one another as human beings. But it also makes sense to us as an institution because we don't want to miss out on the skills,

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experience and abilities of half the population, as hopefully you can see from what I've just been saying you.

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We are beginning to make progress on these on these goals. But like most institutions, we still have work to do.

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We still have a way to go. Finally,

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Nic has asked me to mention that the 25th anniversary papers from three years

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ago will be published in The Cartographic Journal in the next couple of months.

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So that's another little bit of information for you. I know those will have been hotly anticipated.

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And it only remains for me to thank Nic and to Liz for inviting me to participate to Debbie and Stuart's

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propagandising for providing background information that I shared with you and to wish you an enjoyable,

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interesting and productive afternoon. Thanks very much.