Presentation to Grand Lodge on 9 June 2004 by Diane Clements, Director of the Library & Museum of Freemasonry

Good afternoon gentlemen, I would like to take the opportunity of reviewing what has been achieved in the Library and Museum over recent years and then setting out some of our plans for the future.

Freemasonry was largely a new subject to me when I joined five years ago. One of the reasons that I wanted to take on the challenge of running the Library and Museum was that I felt that Grand Lodge had an outstanding collection of objects, books and archives which deserved to be better known and their significance better appreciated. That view has been reinforced as my knowledge of the collections has increased. The size of the collection - 100,000 objects, 45,000 books and archives which occupy more than a mile of shelving - is one aspect of this but equally important is the extent of the collection. Although it is focussed on freemasonry under the English constitution it includes much unique material from other constitutions and countries. We have everything from a Masonic jelly mould to one of the most important pieces of presentation silver ever made, we have aprons worn by kings, prime ministers and paper aprons worn in conditions of great hardship. We have books in many languages, some inscribed by dukes, others handwritten in prisoner of war camps.

I personally believe that a knowledge of history helps illuminate the present so I thought I would just spend a couple of minutes giving you a very potted history of the Library and Museum because I think it does shed some light on where we are now. It all began in 1838 when Grand Lodge placed the sum of £100 at the disposal of the Board of General Purposes to establish a Library and Museum. The situation was reviewed after 10 years, at which point only £59 9s 6d had actually been spent, and the balance of the original £100 was allocated to printing a catalogue which was to be sold to interested parties at 6d a copy so our trading relationships with everyone go back a long way. Progress was sporadic over the next few years until 1887 when Henry Sadler was appointed the Sub-Librarian (the Grand Secretary was still nominally Librarian) and in 1900 when additional accommodation in Great Queen Street was purchased and the building was expanded there was for the first time dedicated space for the Library and Museum and the famous Henry Sadler was appointed to Librarian and Curator in 1910.

Throughout most of the twentieth century the Library and Museum continued as a department of Grand Lodge reporting to the Grand Secretary. In the mid 1990s it was decided that it should become a separate charitable trust which would enable it to obtain greater recognition as a library and museum, qualify for grants from external bodies (of which more later) and benefit from the tax status of being a registered charity. So the Library and Museum is one of the newest Masonic charities.

The bulk of the collection that is on display continues to be owned by Grand Lodge and is formally on long term loan to the Library and Museum. The collection is what it is today because of the consistent and continuing support of Grand Lodge from that first £100 grant nearly 170 years ago and especially because of the support of the many thousands of Brethren and other Masonic organisations who have made donations over the years. And of course the care and organisation and research which has been undertaken by all the previous Librarians and Curators has been absolutely vital and we have been able to build on their work.

We are very conscious that many, most, members based outside London and abroad (and even some in and around London) cannot easily visit or use the Library and Museum research facilities. One of the priorities over the last few years has been to increase the accessibility of the collections and in this we have been helped by the advances in computerisation. One of our major achievements has been to convert the existing card catalogue of library books and periodicals into electronic format and to make that catalogue available on a new web site, now nearly a year old, accessible to the public and free of charge. The website is available through a link from the Grand Lodge web site.

We wanted to encourage what I might call a holistic approach to the collections and set up an electronic catalogue which covered the library, museum and the archives as a totality. It soon becomes obvious to anyone who works in the Library and Museum and to those who research there extensively that there are many, many links between the objects, books and documents. As an obvious example we have a rather fine portrait of Dr Robert Crucefix in his regalia. Amongst the many other items we have related to him in the collections is a silver candelabrum presented to him by Bank of England Lodge which was a Lodge he was a member of, copies of the Masonic periodical he published and edited, books from his collection, complete with his annotations, not always very polite, and a play bill for a dramatic performance given in support of his scheme to establish a home for aged and decayed Freemasons. We thought it important that the catalogue should be able to provide information about all these items in a single search.

We also wanted the catalogue records to be in accordance with the best and highest international standards so that they would be compatible with catalogues in other libraries and museums.

The creation of what the museums world calls a "cross domain" catalogue to international standards turned out to be rather more ground breaking than we had anticipated and has, incidentally, resulted in many other museums and libraries visiting us to discuss our methodology and systems. The electronic catalogue now includes almost all the library collection (music and ritual being the two major areas still to be covered) as well as an increasing part of the jewel, object and document collection. We are busy cataloguing all our museum objects and archive documents but, as you will realise from the size of the collections, it will take some time to complete. All the museum objects will however be photographed as part of this process.

We have also been exploring the use of information technology in other areas. We are currently testing, in the Library and Museum, the use of digital copies of the membership records up to 1886 which provide access to records which would otherwise be inaccessible for conservation reasons. We have the proceedings of Grand Lodge and Grand Chapter since 1813 available digitally with a basic search facility.

The availability of these resources is helping to support the work of an increasing number of researchers inside and outside Freemasonry who are undertaking work in Masonic history. In particular we are very pleased to be able to support the work of the Centre for Research into Freemasonry at Sheffield University headed by Professor Andrew Prescott, the work of the Canonbury Masonic Research Centre and the activities of the provincial and individual Lodge collections and museums all over the country. We also have regular contact with scholars in the US and throughout Europe who are now starting to realise the vast potential of the material we hold.

We are seeing an increasing number of members of the public visiting the Library and Museum and doing the tour of Freemasons' Hall. To attract them We undertake a changing series of exhibitions in the Library and Museum itself and in each of the last two years we have mounted a large summer exhibition on the Ground Floor here which has been well reviewed by the daily press including the Times and the Independent. This year's exhibition opens in July and will be about John Pine and will highlight the potential for art historians to work with the collections here. John Pine is relatively well known in art history as the most important English engraver of the eighteenth century but his work for Freemasonry including the frontispiece of the first Book of Constitutions in 1723 and his Masonic and, if you like, secular friendship with Hogarth is largely unknown by these same art historians. This exhibition will bring together his Masonic and his other work for the first time.

Over the next few years we will be continuing to improve access to the collections by adding more material to the catalogue. and by mounting further exhibitions. Next year we are planning an exhibition based on our collection of friendly and fraternal society material which in itself is probably one of the most important such collections in the country. The exhibition will coincide with the publication of the first book to provide a comprehensive guide to the identification of fraternal and friendly society regalia and objects which, as you probably know quite often get confused with the Masonic things. Another idea in the pipeline is a display about Masonic holders of the Victoria Cross and, with the London Grand Rank Association, about what we can do to mark its centenary which happens in a couple of years time. We will be using the web site more extensively and looking at creating virtual exhibitions on line and providing more research material electronically. In parallel with this we will be continuing to improve the storage conditions of the collection, upgrading the way in which it is displayed so as to enable even more material to be on view and to undertake conservation of books and objects. From time to time we continue to purchase items for the collections and some of our most recent purchases including an impressive gilt presentation box dating from the 1890's and a rare Lodge meeting in a bottle are currently on display. If you can't quite imagine what a Lodge meeting in a bottle looks like now is your chance to find out!

Properly maintaining such a large and important collection involves considerable costs. The Library and Museum has been supported by annual grants from Grand Lodge and Grand Chapter over the years since that first £100 grant, but we are also encouraged to seek additional funding from elsewhere. In particular I mentioned the hope that the establishment of the charitable trust would assist with this. In October 2001 the Library and Museum obtained the status of registered museum which makes us eligible to apply for funding from external sources. We have just completed a £65,000 project funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund to catalogue and conserve some of the earliest archive documents dating from before 1813. We have recently been awarded a further grant of £50,000 from the same source to catalogue and conserve the documents relating to the building of the first Freemasons' Hall in 1768. These grants are important not only because they provide additional income and help us look after the collections but, probably more importantly, because the publicity associated with them raises the profile of the collections generally.

The support of individual members and Lodges is still very important. We continue to receive generous donations of objects and books for which we are very grateful. Joining the Friends group is a significant way of supporting the Library and Museum financially as an individual or a Lodge or Chapter and in a way that I hope also provides our Friends with a greater involvement in what we are doing. The Library and Museum is now responsible for the Shop here at Freemasons' Hall so obviously buying lots of things there, including your Craft tie, all helps benefit the Library and Museum and the range of stock is rather more extensive that a 6d catalogue. The Shop is now developing ecommerce and mail order facilities which will be available in the next few months.

We only have to look at our local bookshops, the television and radio schedules or queue to have the latest celebrity historian sign a copy of his book for us to realise that at the moment history is popular and not just because we have recently been commemorating the 60th anniversary of D-Day. Family history research is the most popular hobby in the world in the terms of the number of people actually pursuing it. The role of Freemasonry in social and cultural history, the material evidence for which is on display in the Library and Museum, remains largely unexplored. We have a great opportunity to provide the resources to encourage research and take advantage of this contemporary interest in the past. Once people understand the role that Freemasonry has played historically I believe they will be better enabled to understand the role that Freemasonry plays in contemporary life. It is the role of the Library and Museum to be at the forefront in promoting that understanding.

Thank you.