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Founder's jewel of Fairfax Lodge No. 3014 shows the 17th-century Fairfax House in Putney
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Vannevar Bush (1890-1974) is considered
by many to be the godfather of the internet.
He was never directly involved in its
development, but in a celebrated article
published in 1945, As We May Think, he
envisaged the creation of a system called
a ‘memex’ which linked information
in a way which anticipated modern
hypertextual links.
It is not generally known that Vannevar
Bush was a keen Freemason, serving as
Master of the Richard C. Maclaurin Lodge,
for members of the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, where Bush worked.
This Lodge sponsored one of the earliest
internet sites on Freemasonry, A Page About
Freemasonry, which has now had over a
million visitors and is still a useful gateway to
some of the Masonic sources on the internet
at (web.mit.edu/dryfoo/www/Masons/).
We can imagine that Bush, as a
visionary of information management
and a Freemason, would have been thrilled
with the range and quality of material on
the history of Freemasonry now available
on the internet. While there have been for
many years a number of very high quality
internet resources on Freemasonry, in the
past 18 months there has been a sea-change
in the quantity and character of internet
resources. This means that the internet is
now potentially a tool for serious and
original research into Freemasonry.
The internet does not change the basic
requirement of good historical research,
namely that it should be based on original,
first-hand and contemporary information:
minutes, letters, diaries, newspaper reports,
and so on. Increasingly, historians are also
starting to exploit pictorial sources and
artefacts, ranging from photographs to film.
Since its earliest days, the most valuable
feature of the internet has been its ability
to make available remotely, library and
archive catalogues, enabling researchers
more quickly to identify the whereabouts
of relevant source materials.
For researchers into Freemasonry, the
indispensable starting point is the on-line
catalogue of the Library and Museum of
Freemasonry, which gives access to the most
important Masonic collection in the world
at www.freemasonry.london.museum.
The catalogue of the Library and
Museum does not simply cover its wonderful
book collections. Its coverage of the archives
and manuscripts held at Great Queen Street
is already extensive and growing daily.
Particularly valuable are the catalogue
records for the historical correspondence
and the correspondence in the sequence
of annual returns, which contain short
summaries of the contents of the letters.
Another exciting and innovative feature
of the Library and Museum’s catalogue is that
it covers thousands of items in the Museum’s
jewel collections. Moreover, images are
provided of all these jewels, so that internet
users can effectively browse through the
Museum’s jewel collection at home.
A number of European and American
Masonic libraries have also made their
catalogues available on the internet.
The library of the Grand Orient of the
Netherlands contains the collections
of Georg Kloss, a 19th-century scholar,
who sought to acquire a copy of every
book published on Freemasonry. Go to
(www.vrijmetselarij.nl).
Another major Masonic museum whose
catalogue is available on-line is Van-Gorden
Williams Library at the National Heritage
Museum in Lexington, Massachusetts
(vgw.library.net).
However, in order to gain new insights
into the history of Freemasonry, it is
essential to make use of major research
libraries besides those run by Freemasons.
The COPAC web site gives consolidated
access to the catalogues of major research
and university libraries in Britain, including
the British Library and the National
Libraries of Wales and Scotland. A search
on ‘freemason’ in COPAC gives 6,383 hits!
The bread and butter of the historian are
archival documents, and there are now
many internet tools which help trace these
materials. The on-line catalogue of the
National Archives at Kew contains over
9.5 million records (www.nationalarchives.gov.uk).
The National Archives also runs some
very useful search tools for local and
specialist archival repositories in England,
including Access to Archives (www.a2a.org.uk) and the National Register of Archives
(www.nra.nationalarchives.gov.uk).
The British Library’s Manuscript
Collections contain many celebrated
Masonic items, such as the medieval Regius
and Cooke manuscripts. A search on
‘freemason’ in the British Library’s
Manuscript catalogue (molcat.bl.uk)
reveals that the collections include many
other equally fascinating, but less wellknown
items with Masonic associations.
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Copyright 2002-2007
MQ Magazine
Web site created by Mark Griffin
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