SUNCAT is very pleased to announce that Lambeth Palace Library has become our newest Contributing Library. The library is situated on the south side of the River Thames, in Lambeth, London. Just over 3000 of its serial records have been loaded into the service. This takes the total number of libraries in SUNCAT to 108, plus the CONSER database, ISSN register and Directory of Open Access Journals.
We invited Hugh Cahill, Senior Librarian at Lambeth Palace Library, to write a few words about the library and its collections.
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Lambeth Palace Library is the historic library and record office of the Archbishops of Canterbury and the principal repository of the documentary history of the Church of England. Its collections have been freely available for research since 1610.
The Great Hall, Lambeth Palace Library. (© Jonty Sexton , 2016)
The manuscripts and books held here date from the 9th century to the present day, and their broad scope reflects the office of Archbishop as head of the Province of Canterbury, his national and international roles in leading the Church of England and the Anglican Communion worldwide. James I described the Library as ‘a monument of fame’ in his kingdom.
The Library collects around 100 current journals. These relate mainly to the history of the Church of England rather than to theology but the Library also collects current journals of institutions of which it holds the archive, such as the Mothers’ Union and the Ecclesiastical Architects’ and Surveyors’ Association. Our historical journals date from the 17th c. onwards with titles such as The Gentleman’s Journal, Journal de Hambourg, and Histoire des Ouvrages des Sçavans.
The Library also holds large numbers of diocesan and parish magazines /newsletters from the 19th c. onward. With around 16,000 parishes in England no such collection can be truly comprehensive but we have an extensive sample that is representative both geographically and chronologically. The Library also holds periodicals on social issues of interest to the Church such as temperance, with runs of titles like Temperance Action Songs, The Church of England Temperance Magazine, and The Band of Hope Chronicle. Missionary magazines and reports of missionary societies are also well represented in the collection with title such as Mission Life and The Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal. Another subject area covered by the collections is relations of the Church of England with other Christian denominations worldwide, meaning that we have journals/periodicals in Greek, Russian, Romanian, Ukrainian, Spanish, Swedish and Italian.
By joining SUNCAT it is hoped that that the diverse periodical collections at Lambeth Palace Library will become better known and better used.
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SUNCAT would like to thank Hugh for writing this post. If you would like to write a post on your SUNCAT Contributing Library and its serials collections or would like to join SUNCAT please contact the EDINA Helpdesk at edina@ed.ac.uk.