St John’s College Library Newsletter L
Easter 2023
VOLUME 6, ISSUE 3
A botanist’s photographs go online The Old Library is a repository not only of written words, but also of fascinating pictures. The donation of the papers of R.H. Yapp, Professor of Botany, has added over 700 early glass plate negatives and a new dimension to our photographic collections. Yapp entered St John’s in 1895 to study Natural Sciences and was appointed Botanist to the 1899-1900 University expedition to the Siamese Malay States. A keen amateur photographer, he took his camera with him, capturing not just plant life, but local scenes, people, and wildlife. He travelled to Switzerland and Italy in 1903, and to South Africa two years later. He also kept detailed photographic records of his ecological studies in the Fens and the North Wales salt marshes, with which he illustrated his scientific papers.
A generous donation from Yapp’s grandson, who gave us the collection, has enabled us to digitise all these fragile negatives. Glass plates deteriorate over time, even if kept in perfect conservation conditions. Digitising isn’t just for preservation; it enables us to make these images publicly available to a much wider audience via the Cambridge Digital Library (https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/). Such a project is no small undertaking. Metadata had to be created for each individual image. Yapp helpfully labelled most of his photos, but deciphering botanical names (some of which have changed in the last 100+ years) and obscure place names, all in tiny handwriting, was a challenge. Then the negatives travelled to Ely to the FSB Scanning Bureau at the Cambridgeshire Archives, where specialist staff with experience of digitising fragile historic materials scanned them all at high resolution. The digital images then went
SJC-IT-07 Locarno, Switzerland. Women washing clothes. (1903)
Above: SJC-C-12 Tennis on St John’s Paddock, May Term. (1899)