It's a real pleasure to be here in this world of virtual locations.
I am delighted to welcome you to the borderland live present to the University of Oxford for the 20th anniversary
event of the Oxford seminars and cartography on the fascinating and important topic of women and maps.
It's particularly appropriate timing as the seminar falls into Women's History Month.
Events like this one help us to see beyond the surface and to question our assumptions.
Many of us, including I will confess we might think of or might have thought of Max as masculine territory.
But reading a Library of Congress blog from 2016 by Karlyn Osborne.
Thanks to my marketing colleagues for supplying this for me, I can see that that's not necessarily the case.
That, as always, things underneath the surface are more complicated. I'll quote to you from that blog.
There was a long tradition of women being intricately involved in the largest mass publishing houses in the low countries.
Women were involved as every level of production, engraving, printing, colouring and publishing.
And that puts a blog about the Dutch cartographer from the 17th century enervate.
And incidentally, the borderland holds one of her maps.
Other examples of women and maps and bodily and collections that I wanted to highlight to give you a taster.
And my colleague Sarah is kindly going to share her screen with you.
At this point, I hope so that I can talk it through with you.
Yes. Great. Thank you. I can certainly see it, and I hope everyone else can, too.
So this is a really fascinating example of a woman.
Her name was Lillian Lancaster, and she created this book when she was only 15 to help her brother.
I think she was probably educating with. I'm afraid I.
I didn't know anything about her again until my kind maths colleagues showed shared this information with me.
This is published in 1868. It's a geographical, fun, humorous outlines of various countries.
And Sarah is going to scroll down so you can see some of those who thought England's nice shape of England.
And then we've got Germany. And of course, in 1868, Prussia was a separate country and that's there.
Thank you, Sarah. I think we could stop sharing now. And the second the.
Oh, yes. And I wanted to say, what Sarah has just shared with you is the Bodleian Libraries Map blog.
So you can see that for yourself if you want to have another look after this.
And then my second example is that thanks to the legal deposit privilege that we enjoy in the BUTLIN and the
Borderland has an almost complete collection of the published output of the for A to Z Map Company Ltd,
which was founded by Phyllis Piersall, one of the most successful business people of the 20th century.
I often quote the writer Virginia Woolf in this context, them in a beautiful line.
She wrote it in an essay called Women in Fiction. Strange periods of silence seem to separate one period of activity from another.
She was, as I said, talking about women in fiction. But it's also applicable to today's subject.
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.
And so there's no building on past experience. People have, you know,
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.
And of course, that's where our memory institutions like the Bodleian come in because they can fill in the gaps.
They can they can then bring the noise back into the silence that Virginia Woolf talks about.
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.
It was curated by an Oxford historian, Saniya Sasha.
And it was marking the anniversary of the vote for women in the UK and Ireland.
It was accompanied by the creation of a suffrage rule of contemporary women representing a variety of occupations.
And they were invited to become SCIF suffrage champions and digitised images of all the
items from the exhibition and the suffrage bill are both also available on the web.
If you would like to follow up afterwards. But, of course, coming back to today's events, conferences,
conferences like this one enable researchers and students to find and study primary
sources relating to women and to help us as the BUTLIN to make them better know.
And that is one of our responsibilities as a large research library to make our collections better.
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.
We also have a responsibility as large employers and large research libraries to ensure recognition,
exposure and opportunities for all our staff, regardless of gender.
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,
experience and abilities of half the population, as hopefully you can see from what I've just been saying you.
We are beginning to make progress on these on these goals. But like most institutions, we still have work to do.
We still have a way to go. Finally,
Nic has asked me to mention that the 25th anniversary papers from three years
ago will be published in The Cartographic Journal in the next couple of months.
So that's another little bit of information for you. I know those will have been hotly anticipated.
And it only remains for me to thank Nic and to Liz for inviting me to participate to Debbie and Stuart's
propagandising for providing background information that I shared with you and to wish you an enjoyable,
interesting and productive afternoon. Thanks very much.