![William J. Lawrence](https://www.uc.edu/news/articles/legacy/enews/2012/05/e15817/jcr:content/image.img.cq5dam.thumbnail.500.500.jpg/1534516832662.jpg)
Ireland Trip Launches an International Research Network With Key Ties to UC
Irish theatre critic William John Lawrence (1862-1940) was considered a major figure in documenting the history of Irish theatre.
Yet, dozens of his notebooks on Irish theatre history from the 17th-to-20th centuries were never published. Efforts and outreach to make collections stored at the University of Cincinnati and at other institutions accessible worldwide will be presented at the 4th International Conference on Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries. The conference takes place May 22-25 in Limerick, Ireland, and brings together librarians from around the world as they explore best practices on making their resources available for research.
Kevin Grace, head of the UC
Archives and Rare Books Library,
will present at the conference. Grace says 99 of Lawrences unpublished notebooks are stored in UCs Archives & Rare Books Library. They were purchased from the estate of William Smith Clark II, a former UC English professor and theatre historian, who acquired the notebooks in the 1940s. The notebooks have been housed in the Archives & Rare Books Library since the late 1960s.
The notebooks are considered to be the sole source of Irelands theatrical history, since a 1922 fire at the Four Courts Building in Ireland destroyed virtually all of Irelands pre-20th century historical records.
Lawrence
His scores of notebooks on the topic preserved an important aspect of Irish and Anglo-Irish culture, not only in terms of theatres and plays and actors, but also in the culture of cities and towns, says Grace. They have not been published in any form, and contain Lawrences annotations, summaries of plays, anecdotes on the players, notes on the physical stage and on the staging of particular plays, reviews, images, announcements, biographies and production history.
Grace says that UC is now reaching out to other institutions to form a cooperative web presence of finding aids for Lawrence holdings. In addition to the collection at UC, 11 of Lawrences notebooks are stored at the University of Bristol in England. The National Library of Ireland in Dublin also contains unpublished manuscripts, and there are collections at the New York Public Library and the University of Delaware. Were interested in building partnerships with these libraries to create a unified guide to Lawrences writings, Grace says.
By the end of June, UCs Archives and Rare Books Library plans to launch a website with detailed finding aids to UCs collection and the other Lawrence collections around the world.
Grace says the web presence would open this history to scholars in a range of fields including urban studies, literature, sociology and theatre history.
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