The Robert Graves Archive web site grew out of both my prior interest in Robert Graves, and my involvement in 1994-5 with the Robert Graves' Trust, based at St. John's College Oxford, where I was Research Assistant and Archivist. The wish of the executor of Robert Graves' estate (his eldest son, William Graves) was that his works should continue to be read, and that scholarship should be facilitated by the new medium of computer networks (the statement was first made in 1988, before the existence of the web). This coincided fairly closely with my own interests: I regard Robert Graves as one of the most important English language writers of the twentieth century. Not necessarily a writer of the first rank, in purely literary terms (whatever that might mean), but in other terms, more worthy of attention than most. And the state of his papers is such that, without the creation of a distributed database, it might be two hundred years before it is possible to collate the disparate portions of drafts written on the obverse of other drafts. Graves sold papers to gain funds to continue working and to support his family; he did not work or sell with an eye to the burden on Graves scholarship he was creating.
I had worked as a cataloguer twice before joining the Robert Graves Trust in 1994, and had been involved in other library computerization projects. I was well aware of the advantages of computer-based databases for digging out and collating implicit information. I was also aware that the extreme case of the Graves papers - distributed widely around the world - provided one of the best possible test beds for the kind of virtual collation that the technology could generate.
The Trust had obtained a one year grant from the Leverhulme Trust in late 1993, in order to conduct a feasibility study for a proposed distributed database of Graves papers. I was interviewed in January 1994, and moved myself lock, stock, and barrel, to Oxford to begin work on the 14th of March. In fact I worked at St John's until the end of September 1995: St John's having arranged to pay my salary until after the Centenary Conference held in August. I gave a paper at that conference, summarizing the position of the database project, and afterwards demonstrated manuscript digitization. The demonstration was apparently impressive: a mere fifteen minutes before I finally quitted my office on the 28th of September, I was telephoned by a well-known Oxford scholar who wanted techical advice on the practicality of digitizing the slides he used for teaching purposes.
There had been a fairly traumatic application for a second Leverhulme grant, made in the fall of 1994. However, no-one in the works was aware at the time that it was not at all common for the Leverhulme Trust to make second grants to projects. The application was rejected. The Trust might have been successful in securing an initial grant for three years, but that was an understanding based upon hindsight.
I moved on. I worked as a multimedia programmer in Edinburgh in early 1996. From January of that year I began to put together the first version of The Robert Graves Archive, and it was mounted on my existing account with Oxford Computing Services. Afterwards it was moved to a commercial service provider in Edinburgh. Shortly afterwards (June 1996) I moved to Teddington, London, to join an encyclopedia project. The site remained on the Edinburgh (NetPresence) server until late September 1998, when I upgraded the pages and moved the site to UKOLN, where I have been working as Information Officer since October 1997.
The Robert Graves Archive is a virtual archive, and contains no actual papers (possession is beside the point of a virtual archive): those institutions that do are listed under "Special Collections" (I discovered recently in correspondence that the absence of papers was not immediately apparent from my pages). What this site does is to publicise the available resources for Robert Graves, and to map and archive these resources. The archive holds a number of databases relating to Graves; electronic files relating to the Graves Database Project of '94-5; electronic text; electronic transcriptions and photocopies of Graves correspondence; some digitized manuscripts; some digitized photographs; numerous archived web sites, pages, and screenshots of the same. Plus an old fashioned library. This collection of information and materials is constantly growing. Some details of this collection can be found on the Archived Files page.
I can be contacted at the:
UK Office for Library and Information Networking (UKOLN)
Level 4
The Library
University of Bath
Bath
BA2 7AY
Telephone: +44 (0)1225 826 354
E-mail: perlesvaus@easynet.co.uk or: p.j.hunter@ukoln.ac.uk
Philip Hunter
16 March 1999.
Page updated 16 Mar 1999
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