History of the Records

The University of St Andrews has been keeping records of its students and staff members since its foundation in 1413. The records provide rich insights into the University's history as well as the societal and political structures at the time. Our case study focuses on the records created between~1747 and~1897 which have undergone a variety of transformations as part of several projects that aimed to preserve and conserve this collection. Originally, each student wrote down their name, and toward the end of this period, also church affiliation and birth place into the Matriculation/Graduation Roll. From 1888 to 1905 the then Keeper of Manuscripts and Muniments, James Maitland-Anderson, transcribed these records which resulted in a printed book. Anderson's work was re-visited between 1960 and 2004 by another Keeper of Manuscripts and Muniments at St Andrews, Dr Robert Smart, who also modified the records' content, drawing from a large variety of additional sources. He transformed the collection into what is now known as the Biographical Register of the University of St Andrews (BRUSA), a physically bound alphabetical index of student and staff names that includes information about their demographics, courses taken in St Andrews, parentage, and subsequent careers.

Manual Transcription

The first transformation the records (handwritten, originally in Latin) underwent involved their manual transcription. This process is defined as ``the effort to report---insofar as typography allows---precisely what the textual inscription of a manuscript consists of.''. The records were transcribed by Maitland-Anderson and later by Smart, who verified and in some cases re-transcribed Maitland-Anderson's work. Our interviews with Hart and Smart highlight the effort and level of interpretation inherent in this process which involves extensive experience in paleography: ``[...] it takes time, it takes experience, and you have to learn how to read the old hands.''~[Hart]. A paleographer also often needs to transcribe Latin texts: ``Latin has a lot of abbreviations within it, so, immediately, you need to have somebody who can understand Latin and expand abbreviations correctly.''~[Hart]. Hart also stresses that a transcription of historical records can never be considered a reproduction of the originals; interpretation is necessary: ``You're dependent on the ability to read the language but also to read the hands in order to be able to interpret. And this is why it's never a 100\% certain that the person who's transcribing has got it absolutely right.''~[Hart]. Smart himself acknowledges this in relation to transcription: ``The further back in time you get, the more difficult it becomes, so that with the present one [student records from 1413 to 1579], I am not even sure if I got the names right.''~[Smart]. Interpretation is necessary in the transcription process and it will introduce uncertainties, but without the meticulous work of Anderson and Smart, the knowledge within the original Roll would only be available to paleographers: and by transcribing the Roll, they have protected the physicality of the original materials and its onward curation.

Content Modification

Maitland-Anderson aimed to preserve the content included in the original Matriculation/Graduation Roll. Smart however, deliberately excluded some student information such as their age. At the same time, he vastly expanded the demographic information about students and staff by researching the University archives (e.g., library records, class lists, or medical degree testimonials) as well as national and church records, academic publications, newspapers, individual/family/national biographies, and history books for additional information. He even corresponded with living relatives and traveled to graveyards to find information on monumental inscriptions. As part of his archival work, Smart had to interpret information from multiple record collections in order to extract usable and consistent snippets to include in the existing student and staff records. His curatorial expansion of the historical records is remarkable and provides a much richer picture of University students and staff than the original records. However, Smart himself also emphasizes the limitations of his work in terms of completeness: ``I simply used the sources that were available at the time. But since it [BRUSA] was published, of course, a lot of new resources have become available. The Internet has become available. I didn't have any of that.''[Smart]. Crawford's project further expanded the historical records by adding URLs to student and staff publications where available. While all these expansions of the records were done manually through extensive research, we expanded the records computationally using Google's geocoding API to link locations of birth and death with exact geographic coordinates---a requirement for the creation of geospatial visualizations that introduce uncertainties due to ambiguities in historical place names. These expansions of the original records have contributed to the records' overall value and research potential, but also, again, introduced additional interpretation layers as well as uncertainty.

Organizational & Structural Modifications

Another category of transformation processes includes organizational and structural changes which can have a strong influence on how people engage with and make sense of historical and cultural collections. Maitland-Anderson decidedly aimed to avoid modifications of the original records as much as possible: ``The reader of the printed Roll is, thus, as nearly as may be, in the same position as the consulter of the manuscript Roll.''. However, his transcribed version of the records moves away from the original records' tabular representation by excluding the explicit labeling of individual parts of the records . He also removed the numbering of individual records. Nevertheless, the order of listed records still mirrors the order in which students signed the Matriculation Roll. A more major structural modification is introduced by Smart who moved away from this originally temporal structure of the records and organized them alphabetically. This enables easy look-up of individual names, but the inherent chronological order of the records is lost. Smart also introduced an implicit internal structure to the additional information he gathered for each record. All records contain consistent sections (name, education, birth, floruit, and death), although these are only visible in each record's internal structure; no explicit labels are provided.