An Update on the Hardyman Madagascar Collection

By Barbara Turfan

Despite the unhappy news of Mr Hardymans passing away, I am pleased to be able to report progress on James Hardyman's legacy - the Hardyman Madagascar Collection.

Cataloguing
Cataloguing has been achieved partially from the Library's own funds and partially with the help of funding from the British Library's Grants for Cataloguing and Preservation. I can now announce that a further grant has been awarded by the same body to complete the cataloguing of the published material. Thus a total of £11,000 has been received from the British Library towards making the Hardyman Madagascar Collection available for use. Our part-time temporary cataloguer has been re-appointed to continue the work over a nine- month period.

Binding
This year SOAS Library has also been awarded funding by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) for five projects in an application submitted during the recent Libraries Review: Non-Formula Funding of Specialised Research Collections in the Humanities: 1994-95 Non-Recurring Allocations. The funding includes £22,500 for the binding and conservation of a large proportion of the Hardyman Madagascar Collection - much of which is currently in a rather inadequate state of home-made binding and unlikely to resist the heavy use already being made of the Collection. Binding work has already begun and will continue for about a year.
Access
About two-thirds of the Collection (some 1,800 works) has to date been catalogued on the Library's on-line computer system and is accessible through the Internet (WWW and Telnet):

World Wide Web:
http://www.soas.ac.uk/Library/

Telnet:
- lib.soas.ac.uk or 193.63.73.246

The Collection so far includes the Reference, Periodical, History, Church and Mission History, and Fiction About Madagascar sections, all of which, with the exception of a few rare or early publications, are held on the open shelves. A class-mark search under WYM or Pam WYM will identify all of the open material. The closed material must be found through subject or author/title searching.
Future plans
What remains is to raise funds for the cataloguing of a relatively small amount of archival material belonging to the Collection and for the preparation of a printed catalogue.

Meanwhile, Inter Documentation Company (IDC) in Leiden, Netherlands, is considering the potential of the Hardyman Madagascar Collection as a full-text microfiche set, an exciting prospect which would enable even fuller access, worldwide, to the Collection.

Mrs Barbara Turfan is the Librarian of the Africa Division, SOAS Library