Ballads at KMC

December 1, 2017, by Kathryn Steenson

Ballads at KMC

This is a guest post by Clare Clarke, a former volunteer librarian.

As a volunteer I have had the privilege to work with a range of fascinating collections, including material from the French Revolution, Fred Westacott pamphlets and works on or by D. H. Lawrence donated by the family of Emile Delavenay, a French academic.

My most recent task has been to categorize two scrapbooks of ballads in preparation for cataloguing. These poems date mainly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although there are few dates, and have been extracted from other literary sources and glued on to sheets. The aim was to divide the contents into smaller units ( 7-8) with no more than 90 titles in each section. One of the sections needed to be East-Midlands related, and this was largely a clearly designated section. The remainder could be separated by topic or any other common feature.

The first task was to read the ballads to get an idea of the subject matter and, in parallel, I investigated the most common poetry themes. Once I had studied both volumes, I decided on some suitable thematic categories. In addition to the Local ballads, the final choices were:

I allocated specific letters for each category to write against each title on the Contents pages. I then added up the number of titles in each section to ensure they did not outnumber the required amount.

There were some challenges during the process: when there was more than one poem per sheet, often with different topics, it was necessary to choose one more dominant ballad for the theme or a category which might be appropriate for all or most of them. Many of the poems had a romantic theme, so having too many titles for a single unit, I created another category of Romantic Yarns, tales of often amusing romantic entanglements and their consequences, leaving the Love and Attachment subset for more general eulogies.

I have picked out a few favourites, very varied in style and content, which I can highly recommend:

I have thoroughly enjoyed the task of reading and categorizing this collection of ballads. Once the collection is catalogued, I hope this will then improve access to them and enable many more readers to enjoy them too.