Elizabethan clergy anxiously reporting to the bishop on the state of their parishioners' souls can hardly have imagined they were creating a goldmine for future scholars in a digital age. "Ecclesiastical records may seem rather dry, but they contain an enormous amount about crime and marriage and gender relations," comments Allen Warren, head of York University's history department.
Fears of witchcraft and political upheaval, traces of poverty and disease, the views of ordinary people who did not write but who reveal all sorts of views and assumptions of the time in their wills - the sort of archive built up over centuries by the archdiocese of York is now a magnet for university researchers.
But it is not in a university library. Housed in a picturesque building in the medieval city centre, the Borthwick Institute archive is outgrowing its home and York University is keen to take it under its wing, rehouse it and make it more accessible to scholars as part of an ambitious £7.5m development.
Far from superseding traditional archives, new digital technology has the potential to bring more of them to light and make them more accessible.
The York project is taking place against the background of a revolution in British research libraries. It's a quiet revolution - but the vision that archives and books scattered in different libraries should be seen as a parts of a whole has been gaining ground over the past five years. For researchers it does not matter if the document or book they want to consult is in York, London or Edinburgh, just as long as they can locate it. So a lot of effort is going into cataloguing collections - and inventing bizarre names for them - to create what librarians call a Distributed National Resource.
Logically, this would produce a single integrated "library" covering the country - but that was "overambitious", according to Ronald Milne, director of the Research Support Libraries Programme, which is spending £30m over three years to link university libraries with each other and with public libraries and collections. However, building a distributed national resource in particular disciplines like archaeology or Chinese is, he believes, achievable.
In one sense York is a good example of the new spirit of collaboration. The project is linking the university not only with the Borthwick collection but the National Railway Museum archive in the city and privately held collections in the region. But the York scheme also reveals a tension between national plans and local ambition. The planned £3m humanities research library for the university campus will, it is hoped, put York more firmly on the research map. York is young in university library terms and does not have the breadth of the older collections, as librarian Elizabeth Heaps admits. A library covering history, English, history of art, music, archaeology, languages and philosophy would lure researchers, building on existing cross-disciplinary activity in medieval, women's and 18th-century studies.
"There is a well-developed interdisciplinary culture here," said John Barrell, head of English at York. "But it takes a lot of library resources to do it successfully. We have no problem getting high-quality staff, but in persuading postgraduate students that it is sensible to research here given the quality of library resources in London or America."
The humanities research library will be a hybrid - archives, books and printed material, with microfilm, CD-roms and network computers. "This is our laboratory for the humanities and related disciplines, but it is not all centred on the building and the books we put in it," said Heap.
York is already talking to owners of private collections - in stately homes, for instance. But a recent furore over Keele University's sale of Isaac Newton books donated by a benefactor has made owners nervous about giving collections to universities. Heaps is adamant that York would not sell off books.
Universities are of course eager to promote their own collections, but Milne has found that the promise from his programme set up after the 1996 Anderson Report of funding is inducing them to collaborate , even if with gritted teeth to start with. As no one library can buy all the books and journals or maintain the archives all its users need, closer cooperation and partnership has become a necessity, strongly promoted by Milne: "Some consortia are willing partnerships, some are shotgun marriages where people went in kicking and screaming. Money is a great attraction."
More difficult has been the lack of joined up interdepartmental thought and funding. Universities get money from the higher education funding councils, public libraries from several different departments. It makes collaboration complicated and bureaucratic, though it is happening. The British Library and the School of Oriental and African Studies, for instance, have agreed which Chinese resources each should collect.
Perhaps it is a sign that librarians are taking cooperation to heart that these partnerships have sprouted acronyms by the dozen, from Scone (Scottish Collections Network Extension) project to Casbah, a scheme to identify and map national research resources for Caribbean studies and the history of Black and Asian people in Britain. The Queen's University of Belfast has scooped a couple of particularly neat acronyms. Its Planning Architecture Design Database Ireland has been dubbed Paddi; its Research and Special Collections Available Locally is simply called Rascal.
Research Support Libraries Programme www.rslp.ac.uk
