ABSTRACT
On 13 June 1894, J. W. Clark, historian of library classifi cation, delivered a paper at the University of Cambridge as that year’s prestigious Rede Lecturer. Through a meticulous piece of scholarly work, Clark placed the university libraries that surrounded him and his audience into the context of a sweeping story of civilisation. From Sir Christopher Wren to St Benedict, and from Sir Robert Cotton (who contributed one of the foundation collections of the British Library), to Bishop Alexander of Jerusalem, this was nineteenth-century narrative history at its most introspective and self-congratulatory. It was, however, his comments on the current state of archiving and librarianship that resonate for the history of museum collections and new technology. Clark concluded that ‘common sense urges that mechanical ingenuity, which has gone so much in other directions, should be employed in making the acquisition of knowledge less cumbrous and less tedious’. His recommendation, therefore, was a simple one: ‘that as we travel by steam, so we should also read by steam, and be helped in our studies by the varied resources of modern invention’. In short, writing at the twilight of the Victorian age of expansion and mechanisation, Clark saw his culture’s new technologies as having a role (a signifi cant role) in the organisation of cultural heritage. To him, it was ‘the varied resources of modern invention’ that had an active and unavoidable part to play in the future of memory institutions. I doubt he could have guessed how true his words would prove to be.
