Printing, Selection and the Cataloguing of Oxford Archives, c.1850–1950

In the late nineteenth century Oxford colleges opened up their ancient muniments to be catalogued by external scholars. Their cataloguing was heavily influenced by the culture of records printing that relied on a linear way of thinking about documents and on the selection of records, so that only the most significant documents utilized the limited space. This essay will examine this culture at work in the early publications of the Oxford Historical Society and show how it influenced the college archivists to concentrate on the content of records in their cataloguing, and ignore their context and provenance.