CILIP CDG visit to RCP - acronym soup, difficult questions and #speccolls resources

Yesterday afternoon it was my great pleasure to host a group visit by the CILIP Career Development Group London and South East Divisions.  It's a super, and very active group, but I do wonder if it couldn't do with a better name? CILIPCDGLSED is a bit too much for even the most seasoned acronym mangler to manage.

Royal College of Physicians by  tonyhall 

Anyway, they came to see the Royal College of Physicians, and to hear a little from me about what working in special collections is all about, and how to get ahead in the field.  I feel much less like a fraud given a talk like that this year when I have what feels much more like a proper rare books job, than I did last year when I was hopping from temporary post to temporary post.

I based what I said on various previous talks and presentations I've given, primarily those linked in my previous post.  The lovely guests also asked some really pertinent and difficult questions, and I promised I'd write up my thoughts about them here and add some useful links.

What are the first steps you should take in exposing, and trying to get support for working with, a hidden collection?

I've written about hidden collections before. Everyone has something that's hidden, and in some places the entirety of the special collections can be classed as 'hidden'.  There's some practical advice over on this write-up from earlier in the year. It's an issue that's being discussed more and more - there's an African Studies conference on the subject in a couple of weeks, for example.  I really think that the most important thing to do if you have a hidden collection is to start by getting a handle of just what it is.  You can't start by cataloguing in detail, but simply being able to say something like 'we have twenty shelves, mostly of printed books, with some pamphlets in 4 boxes.  It mostly looks 19th century and relates to cookery and gardening' starts to make the problem manageable, rather than being a great and mysterious unknown.

Edited to add: Emma Greenwood has just written a really super blog post about her work with the special collections at the Jerwood Library at Trinity Laban, which I would recommend you read for a case study of how to begin dealing with hidden collections.

How can you make special collections materials that have been long ignored seem relevant and worth supporting to an institution and library with a very different and tightly focussed audience and purpose (such as a hospital library)?

This can be a very difficult question.  I think that answering it successfully depends on being able to get a grip on just what it is that makes the people in the organisation with the power tick. Very often it's the simple finances that matter: maybe the special collections can help to garner funding, by impressing donors or demonstrating history and prestige.  But maybe adherence to a strategic plan is most important? Then you can try to find a way in which uncovering hidden collections could contribute explicitly to a strategic aim.  In other places, personal connections matter, so finding one supporter whose opinion is valued can turn things around. I fear these are none of them very satisfactory solutions.  Some of my thoughts after last year's Rare Books and Special Collections Group conference, which focussed on funding, may be of use.

If you would like to come and see the RCP building or gardens, we have free general tours once a month (first Friday for the building, first Wednesday for the medicinal gardens). And exhibitions and other events.

Lastly, here are a couple of links to ways to get more involved with the profession in general, and special collections in particular:

• The Historic Libraries Forum is free to join. It sends its members a twice-yearly bulletin, as well as updates about events and courses. It runs courses and an annual conference, which is consistently one of the friendliest and most useful I've been to. It also campaigns on behalf of historic libraries under threat, and gives advice to people in charge of historic libraries.
• The CILIP London branch maintains a London Library Events Calendar, listing not only what they do, but also all sorts of other events. (If you have something to add, I think you email cilipinlondon at gmail dot com.)

And last of all, Alison Cullingford's Special Collections Handbook is a very good place to start for all things #speccolls.

If you were at the visit and think I've forgotten to mention something I promised I'd link to, please say in the comments and I'll make amends.

And it would be great to hear other people's thoughts on the difficult questions. Any success stories of bringing hidden collections in small or uninterested institutions into the light?

Edited to add links to RCP tours and events.

Special Collections Careers

Tomorrow afternoon, the CILIP Career Development Group London and South East Divisions are coming to visit the Royal College of Physicians, and I'm giving a short talk on special collections careers.  In honour of this, I've updated by special collections careers slideshow. Ta-da:

A Special Collections Career Path / Katie birkwood from Katie Birkwood

For more information about the special collections world, my map of the field--written last May--is still worth a look:

• Prezi version
• pdf version

#cpd23 Thing 21: Job applications and interviews

Having recently been applying for jobs (once successfully, hurrah!) it would have been well to have tackled this Thing a few months ago.  But no matter: perhaps I can conjure up some useful advice from my recent experience?

Keep a list
Keeping a list, table, spreadsheet, notebook, or other record of everything notable you've done professionally both inside and outside work is absolutely invaluable when trying to write up a new CV or complete and application form.  I keep mine divided up by the type of thing I did - attending a talk, speaking at an event, visiting a library, writing an article, etc. - but you could equally well use another organising principle.  As long as the salient details are recorded (what, where, when) you can pick the things you need for each application.  I also keep all my old applications and CVs, so I can pick (with care!) phrases from them, and so I can use previous lists of "tasks undertaken" in any given job as a basis for the new write-up.

I'm pretty ruthless and try to keep a note of everything I've done, even if it doesn't look particularly relevant to my current or future work.  You never know when it might come in handy, and if I haven't recorded it I tend to forget that it happened at all.  Seeing something on a list (e.g. a presentation about medical databases that I attended) will call to mind some of the things I thought and learnt at the time (e.g. that there's an awful lot of really good metatdata work going on in databases like pubmed), which might just be useful to bear in mind during the application process.

Make it relevant
Compared with, say, applying for a University place (and I went through the Cambridge application process, complete with moderately baffling interview questions such as "how would you explain the differences between the main two political parties to a Martian who'd just arrived on earth?"), applying for jobs always seems to me a bit like sitting an exam for which the answers are given in advance.  I'm not saying it's easy, but most applications (certainly in the library world) come with a list of requirements that the candidate should meet.  I find writing an application that meets each of these one-by-one--neatly supported with evidence from The List--pretty dull, really.  The constant self-aggrandisement grows wearing, and there's no intellectual or creative challenge beyond trying not to start each sentence with "I".  Still, I'm not complaining... I still have flashbacks to how I didn't mention attitudes to taxation in the Martian question (and how I wish I were joking).

Get some advice
As well as having a second pair of eyes look over your application for typos, style and tone, it can be invaluable to speak to colleagues, mentors or connections who know something about the place you're applying to.  Obviously this isn't always possible, as you don't always want to advertise that you're applying for jobs in general, or a particular post in particular. However librarianship, especially in certain sectors, is quite a small world, and it's likely you know someone who knows a bit more about the ethos and aims of the place you're applying than you can glean from their website and the application materials.

Enjoy yourself
This bit is hard, especially when you're applying for jobs because you're on a short-term contract or are currently out of work.  But there's no point working somewhere that you're not happy: you'll only make yourself ill.  So, at interview, make an effort to enjoy yourself and show your personality.  If this doesn't go down well then you probably don't want to be at that place anyway...

To anyone reading this who's currently applying: good luck!

#cpd23 Thing 20: Library Routes

I don't have a lot to write for this Thing.  I wrote about my library roots and route a couple of years ago, and while I've moved on a bit in job terms since then, my history in libraries hasn't!

I don't think my path into special collections work has been particularly unusual.  It's certainly been marked by a fair dose of good luck at various times.  My advice to other people would be to grab chances to gain experience whenever they come along.  You never know when they might come in useful in the future!

All change!

Big news here at Girl in the Moon towers: I've managed to land myself a new job.  From the start of December I'll be the Rare Books and Special Collections Librarian at the Royal College of Physicians in London.

  by  pixelhut 

Some readers may know that my contract in Cambridge is soon to expire, so this couldn't have come at a better moment for me.  And, in addition to that, the RCP has a really interesting collection of early printed books, and the job description includes lots of things that I enjoy: cataloguing, exhibitions, public engagement.

But there's no doubt that it's going to be a Big Change.  I've been a student at, or an employee in, the University of Cambridge (or one of its connected institutions) for ten years now.  It's definitely the right time to break free and experience work somewhere else, but by this point I'm pretty well enmeshed in the daily, termly and annual rhythms of this place.  Not to mention that I've had the same @cam.ac.uk email address, and a very generous mailbox limit, for all of those ten years: switching that is going to be a real wrench.

I'll not be moving away from Cambridge, not in the short-term at least.  The joy of not having to move house is counterbalanced by the added excitement of acclimatising to the commute.  I've been hugely lucky so far in life - the longest I've ever had to travel to work is a 25 minute bike ride.  So I'm not complaining now, just facing up to the fact that the alarm's going to be going off a lot earlier than it used to!

It's going to be a very interesting time, professionally.  It's just the motivation I need to get on and sort my chartership, and there'll be lots to learn about local systems, cataloguing practices and collections.  And about the history of medicine.  London librarian types: expect to see me at more evening events (LIKE - I have my eyes on you in particular).  Cambridge librarian types: expect to see me, blearily, in the vicinity of the station.  Other librarian types: watch this space for (hopefully) news of how I get on.

If anyone has any hints or tips for 1) commuting, 2) learning about the history of medicine and 3) places near Regent's Park/Portland Place to eat, drink and shop, I'd be happy to hear them!

Special Collections Careers: a workshop at the CILIP New Professionals Day #cilipnpd12

Today I'm facilitating a workshop on special collections librarianship at the CILIP New Professionals Day. I've produced a couple of resources to accompany the workshop, and to give those who couldn't make it some idea what I said.

First of all, an overview of the whole field, including what special collections are, what special collections librarians do, how to get into special collections work, and how to keep up to date.  This is available as a prezi (see below), or as a pdf to download and keep.

Special Collections Librarianship: a Brief Map of the Field on Prezi

As well as that, a short slidedeck about my career so far.  (If you're interested in this, you might also like my Library Routes and Roots post.)

A Special Collections Career Path / Katie birkwood

View more presentations from Katie Birkwood

Watch this space for a post about some of the 'hot issues' in special collections librarianship, to include digital humanities, outreach, marketing and cataloguing.

#cpd23, Thing 10: Routes into librarianship

Well, I really enjoyed the elephants in the last post. 'Graduate traineeships, Masters Degrees, Chartership, Accreditation' is rather hard to illustrate with animals, though. But maybe there's something I can do with it. It's all about our 'journey' (cue slushy music) as librarians, isn't it? And when I think of journeys, I think of nothing so much as the majestic bison wending its way across the plains (cue David Attenborough)...

"Here, in the Hayden valley, Wyoming..."

Now, I've talked about my route into librarianship fairly recently, so if you want to know all the ins and outs I'll point you over here, and those that have already read the tale won't end up like this fellow:

What do bison dream about?

In this instalment of the story, I really ought to talk about Chartership, and my progress (or lack thereof) towards it. Having completed my part-time LIS MA in September 2008, by early 2010 I had pretty much got used to my not having essays to write in every spare moment, and thought I was ready for a new challenge. I also new that the job hunt would be looming in a year's time. These two factors combined to convince me to register for Chartership.  I'd been engaging in a fair amount of professional development since graduation (the nature of my job demanded it), so I felt that I had the material for a good portfolio.  I found a mentor, went to some Chartership course, and got involved in things to add to the portfolio evidence.  I set myself an ambitious deadline for completion. So far, so good.  But things have a habit of not turning out how you think they will.

Did you know that you can turn bison into knitting?

The trouble is, that I got so involved with so many great things, that Chartership has fallen by the wayside. I made six months' decent progress: drawing up necessary development plan, meeting my mentor, writing up some of my experiences, and creating a beautiful portfolio template that just requires me to fill in all the blanks. Around about Christmas and shortly afterwards the job situation resolved itself (at least temporarily), my extra-curricular involvement stepped itself up another notch or too and Chartership really hasn't had a look in since.  Dear mentor, if you are reading this, sorry.

It's time I faced facts: I need to sort myself and get on and finish this.

A face you can't ignore. (I should point out that my mentor looks nothing like this. This is mor a representation of my inner annoyance at letting Chartership drag on.)

Probably the first step should be to contact my mentor.  I've been putting that off and off and off not least because I feel I should have done some work first. So maybe I should do some work - draw up a plan, at least - and then get in touch.

Hopefully this public self-shaming will encourage me into doing something, anything. All encouragement gratefully received. Is anyone else in a similar position? Want to team up, and motivate each other together?

Yours, abjectly,

Katie.

News roundup, including savelibraries

Savelibraries

Campaigns to defend public libraries across the country against cuts are gathering strength, and this Saturday, 5th February, will see a day of action to show our support.  John Kirriemuir has written up a summary of what's what, including links to resources, so I won't repeat all of that here.  What you need to know is the following:

1. Check this list to see if a library near you is having an event. If is is, go to it.
2. If there's no event near you, go to your library anyway. If you're not already a member take some ID with your name and address on it so that you can join up. Borrow some books or CDs or DVDs, or read the newspapers and magazines, or use the PCs and/or wifi there.
3. If you can't get to your library, visit its webpages and use the online resources - you can look things up in the OED, for example.
4. If you're a Facebook user, show that you're taking part by RSVPing to this event. Then invite all your friends.
5. If you're on Twitter, tweet a reason why libraries are important, using the #savelibraries hashtag.
6. Pass this message on, using some of these posters to help you.

Echo-chamber breakout

Back last June, during Library Day in the Life 5, a post by Emma Cragg inspired me to think that the Library Day in the Life Project (which was started and is maintained by Bobbi L. Newman) could be used to advocate for libraries outside of the 'echo chamber'.  Emma and I teamed up, and wrote a pitch about 'what librarians really do' that we sent to The Guardian and to Radio 4.  Some time later, we heard back from The Guardian, who were interested in using the idea in their 'Behind the Job Title' series.  We wrote up an article about the various roles of, and skills needed by, a modern librarian, sent it off, and heard nothing for a while longer.  But lo, after Christmas we were asked for some revisions, which we supplied, and the article was published on Monday in GuardianCareers:

'Beyond books: what it takes to be a 21st-century librarian'

There was a little excitement in the comments and on Twitter in response to the decision to swap the picture of a brain for a picture of some stereotypically dressed female librarians carrying books on their heads and with their fingers on their lips in the international gesture for 'shh!'.  Comments from some upstanding librarians have now set that to rights, which is very pleasing indeed.

At this point I have to say an enormous thank you to Emma. She did all the hard work with the article, including writing all the best bits, thinking up whom to use for case studies, and corresponding with the paper.  She's been a pleasure to work with, and is clearly pretty busy as she has another article out this week in the ORG (Open Rights Group) Zine also out this week!

Also a thank you to Ned Potter for being so loudly pleased about the article.  He's chuffed to be mentioned in a Guardian article, and I'm chuffed that he liked it. Smiles all round.

And finally...

This isn't about libraries, but it is about making the world a better place. A friend of my has written a truly brilliant blog post. I've tried to summarise it, but I can't manage it. Just read it and be inspired to be a better person. Or something.

Library Day in the Life: Round 6, Day 3

[The sixth round of Library Day in the Life is running from Monday 24 to Friday 28 January. You can find the other participants, and sign up yourself, on the project wiki, and watch the #libday6 hashtag on Twitter. This is the second time I've taken part. You can find my Round 5 posts tagged with libday5, including my introduction to what I do for a living.]

Today in bulleted lists...

Ego boosts

• The brilliant Cambridge photographer, Sir Cam (@camdiary) has posted a gorgeous photograph of me, taken at Open Cambridge 2009, to his Flickr account to mark the Library Day in the Life week.
• My post on Library/Info Pro job titles was included in the CILIP weekly news bulletin. 

Accounting

• Tomorrow is pay day, so our pay slips came round today and I added this months pay expenses to my spreadsheet of project expenses, and photocopied the slip as evidence for the funding body.
• While I had the spreadsheet open I also added other recent expenditure, including the cost of having publicity flyers printed and the price of an advertisement in an amateur astronomy magazine. Then I had a look over all the numbers, to work out how extravagant, or otherwise, I can be in preparing for the final events in the project.

Everyday Library Life

• Just the one reader, today, one of the manuscripts cataloguers working on the multi-volume catalogue of illuminated manuscripts at the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Cambridge Colleges.
• A man came in to check over our security alarms, and someone noticed that a small piece of wall in the Old Library might need some new plaster.
• Cataloguing continued, highlights including a talk given by Fred Hoyle to a European Summit in Davos on the subject of microbes in space.

Extra-curricular

• A lunchtime talk about social networking tools for academic libraries, and further work on a bursary application to attend, and present at, LILAC 2011.

Library Day in the Life: Round 6, Day 2...

[The sixth round of Library Day in the Life is running from Monday 24 to Friday 28 January. You can find the other participants, and sign up yourself, on the project wiki, and watch the #libday6 hashtag on Twitter. This is the second time I've taken part. You can find my Round 5 posts tagged with libday5, including my introduction to what I do for a living.]

No blow-by-blow rundown of the day's activities today (mainly cataloguing). Instead, some very brief thoughts on staffing a reading room.

...or, The clueless reader: what should we do?

I work in a rare books reading room.  Standard reader interaction goes something along the lines of 'Can I see MS K.31, please?' 'Yes, certainly, fill in this form, take a seat, and I'll fetch it for you'.  Or perhaps, 'Can you tell me where Glover's papers are catalogued?' 'Yes, they're available on Janus'.  Every now and again someone comes in and asks broad, open ended questions like 'Can I see what you have about slavery', or 'Can I see some medieval manuscripts', which we, frankly, find difficult to answer.

The difficulty arises not because the questions aren't 'valid': it's certainly reasonable to want to look for material on slavery in our library because we hold papers connected with the abolitionists Wilberforce and Clarkson, and we have 300+ medieval manuscripts, so that's also something you can easily find here.  The difficult in these reader interactions arises because we're used to our readers having done plenty of research in advance of their visit.  Being a special collections reader is quite a specialised business--in terms of handling material, reading room etiquette and 'resource discovery'--and most of our readers are already fairly well 'trained'.  Indeed, most readers are so 'good' that we, as library staff, are quite out of practice at helping the ones that aren't.

There's sometimes the feeling that it's 'not our job' to teach new/inexperienced/clueless readers how to read up on the topic first, research their particular interest, and search catalogues and listings for relevant items.  We might feel that this is the job of their supervisor or course tutor, and that our role is just to produce the material once they know more-or-less exactly what it is they want to see.  When readers come to us very early in their research, it's easy to feel like they're looking for us to do their research for them.

I don't generally find it very easy to turn these interactions round from something slightly antangonistic ('what are they doing here when they don't know what they're doing?') to something positive ('here's an opportunity to show somebody what we do and what we can offer them').  Partly this is because it's hard to tell someone that actually they need to put in more time and effort to what they're doing, and partly it's because this sort of work isn't really accounted for explicitly in procedures and policies.  Although we have information online about the special collections and the reading room, none of it is written from the 'new to special collections?' perspective.  We have no 'script' for how to induct the new reader.

The obvious answer to all this is that we, as specialist librarians, need to recognise, value and assert our expertise: instead of grudgingly acquiescing to the poorly-thought-out research requests of the new reader, we should step in and educate them.  And to do this well, we'll need to develop planned ways of doing this, rather than relying on adhoc introductions, the quality of which will vary tremendously from day to day.

Library Day in the Life: Round 6, Day 1

[The sixth round of Library Day in the Life is running from Monday 24 to Friday 28 January. You can find the other participants, and sign up yourself, on the project wiki, and watch the #libday6 hashtag on Twitter. This is the second time I've taken part. You can find my Round 5 posts tagged with libday5, including my introduction to what I do for a living.]

'Exclamation' by Ian Boyd on Flickr

Today has been quite exciting - I think the theme might be 'advertising' (Incidentally, there was a lovely exhibition of 19th and 20th advertisements in the University Library recently. Well done the Tower Project people who put it together.)

The major excitement was the launch of booking for the second Cambridge Librarian Teachment being held on 29 March 2011.This kept me busy throughout the day, doing such things as:

• Checking the drafts of the event page and blog post, updating all their links, and publishing them.
• Setting up POP access in Gmail to the camlibtm email address (info at camlibtm dot info if you want to get in touch).
• Emailing my designated email list to advertise the event and tweeting cheerfully about it.
• Watching the bookings roll in.  At the time of writing we're pretty much full, but we're working on getting the waiting list working properly, so do sign up to that.

I've also been working on the advertising for the grand finale of the Hoyle Project, which is happening on Saturday 19 March.

• Having been issued with the official Science Festival logo for this year I managed to track down the high-res versions of the College's quincentenary logo.
• With the logos in hand, I spent a very long time trying to incorporate them into the flyer design that I'd already drafted out.
• Once settled on a design I added a bleed area to the edge of the flyer, resized it down to A5 and printed it to pdf, ready to...
• ...place an order for professionally printed flyers.

I've also been writing draft notes on various aspects of the day, mainly advice notes for the volunteers who'll be running the 'Build Your Own Astrolabe' sessions, but for the exhibition and talk.  I'm going to be speaking about Hoyle's life, his collection of papers and artefacts, and my work in cataloguing them.  That's a bit of a tough ask to squeeze into 1 hour, so I've decided to structure it along the lines of 'A History of Fred Hoyle in 10 objects' (inspired by the obvious and also '100 Objects Bradford'.  Trying to choose only 10 objects to use as jumping-off points is really tricky because I need to choose a range that will cover most aspects of Hoyle's life, but I also want them to be visually interesting and not to have been exhibited much or published extensively (and that includes in my online exhibition) previously.

All sorts of other things happened throughout the day, too:

• A blown fuse in the Old Library. 
• A request for a short school visit on Thursday as part of a languages day organised by the people in College who work trying to widen access to the College and to university in general.  (I've written a bit before about access visits.)
• Lots and lots of email.

Now I'm heading off, to work on my Ignite talk and to start writing a bursary application to attend the LILAC conferece to talk about TeachMeet.

Library Roots and Route

I have been meaning to write my own contribution to the Library Routes Project ever since I heard about it (which was, admittedly, only a couple of months ago).  I'd been putting it off because I wanted to have a proper read of some other people's (not least Emma's and Niamh's) before I committed my story to the screen. I have, however, received a request to write about my route into special collections work, so I'm forging ahead now, feeling somewhat under-prepared.

'Library' by smastrong on Flickr

Beginnings

Yes, I was the child who spent a lot of her school days organising the books in the story area, and I'm the annoying adult who is forever jumping up from the dinner table to check dictionaries and encyclopedias for the answers to obscure queries.  But it took me a while to realise that librarianship was for me.

After a school career in which many subjects interested me, I took a BA in music with no fixed idea of what I would do with it afterwards (my only stipulations being that music teaching *wouldn't* be for me), and by the Christmas of my third year I was starting to feel really quite alarmed about the vagueness of my future.

Revelation

For my BA I chose to study a few papers about the transcription of medieval music, which included consideration of the material texts through which the corpus is transmitted to us.  In plain English that means we occasionally got to look at real medieval manuscripts, and spent a good deal of time peering at photocopies of facsimiles of them.  I was hooked - palaeography enchanted me, transcription absorbed me, codicology fascinated me...

But how to get more of it?  One answer would have been a career in academia, but that seemed like a lot of hard work and rather an insecure way to earn a crust.  I decided instead that a career *looking after* these wonderful old tomes was a better choice of activity.  And, I reasoned, I like organising information, and I like finding things out for people, so maybe librarianship was a good choice for me.*

First steps

Having hit upon libraries I tried to get as much work experience as I could fit in around sitting my finals.  I volunteered at my local home library in the Christmas and Easter vacations, and after the exams finished I spent a week helping with the Faculty's annual stock check.  I applied for some graduate trainee positions in Cambridge, and was interviewed for some, but not selected for any.  I suspect a lack of experience and awareness of current library issues may not have helped my applications.

My first proper library job was as a book fetcher at the University Library.  Book fetchers collect readers' requests for closed-access materials and scurry around the behind-the-scenes maze to find it and bring it to the reading rooms.  It's not a glamorous job, it's not very well regarded by the other library staff, and it can be real hard physical work on the busy days fetching bound newspapers from the 1930s.  But working in a large library you do get to see, out of your peripheral vision at least, lots of different types of library work, and to learn how they all fit together.  I was lucky enough to be stationed in the manuscripts department for some of my term, which gave invaluable experience of handling rare material and of customer service helping readers interpret myraid catalogues and listings.

I applied to, and got a place on the MA course in Library and Information Studies at UCL, because it had historical bibliography and manuscripts modules, and because there was the option to study part-time, which I intended to do while continuing to work in Cambridge.

'library on route 66' by fabi_k on Flickr

Onwards and Upwards

In August 2006, after a year at the UL, and just about to start the MA course, I was appointed to a library assistant post for a collection of theological colleges in Cambridge. This role gave me experience of many different areas of library work including circulation, cataloguing and classification, user training, project work. There was also the opportunity to work on listing a small collection of early 19th-century letters held by one of the colleges.  Although relatively few institutions have dedicated special collections staff, very many do seem to have some special collections hidden away somewhere or other.

Today

I hadn't intended to change jobs again until after I'd completed my MA, but in late 2007 I saw a job advertised that really appealed to me.  I nearly didn't apply: I thought it wanted skills and experience that I didn't yet have.  A friend scoffed when I suggested letting it pass, and so I crafted my CV and application to make the most of the special collections and project experience that I already had, and made by bid to become Hoyle Project Associate.  Wonder of wonders, my application was successful, and I was appointed as the person responsible for bring the Hoyle Project into being.  (The moral of this tale is to always have a go, even if you think you won't get it.)

The Hoyle Project is a Heritage-Lottery-funded, three-year project to catalogue and make accessible the papers of the astrophysicist and science-fiction author Fred Hoyle (1915-2001), which were given to the College in 2002.  The post requires archival cataloguing skills (using a locally-developed database), and a whole gamut of outreach, public engagement, communication, curatorial, imaginative, and project-management skills.  As part of the role, I have organised a number of public events, hands-on activities for families and schools, online exhibitions, and special interest group visits, all more and less explicitly linked to Fred Hoyle.  I've also helped with the day-today running of a historic library and reading room.  One of the joys has been uncovering items from elsewhere in the special collections that can be drawn together to illustrate particular topics (generally the history of astronomy), and also, hopefully, inspiring colleagues to continue with the library's programme of outreach work, including the subject areas I've been working in, after the end of the project.

It's a great job to have (I only wish it weren't fixed-term), and still, 30 months in, I'm so pleased to have it.  The only downside is that far more could be done than I'll ever have time for.

Future

The Project is due to end at the end of March 2011, so I will soon be looking for a new post.  I'd definitely like, if possible, to stay in a special collections and/or outreach role, although I fear that there's no space for being fussy in the current climate.  In an effort to evaluate my skills, and to develop them further, I'm currently working towards Chartership.  As well as obtaining a further professional qualification, I hope that this will help the job hunt by improving my ability to analyse and match my skills to the requirements of advertised post, and just to have more experience to make me suitable for roles.

Conclusion

Five years ago I had very little idea where a career might take me.  I hoped that it would involve special collections in some way, but I was, frankly, scared of what the modern world might be bringing with it.  I would never have thought that I'd been working in outreach (sometime with school children, no less!), nevermind that I'd be enjoying it and looking to continue in the same area.  Now I can't imagine working in a special collections role that doesn't involve some element of outreach work.  What, after all, is the point of having lovely things if no-one ever gets to know of or see them?

*I'm also fond of sensible shoes, tweed, have short hair, look grumpy, wear glasses and like cardigans, but I'm trying to shy away from stereotypes here.

ETA 11 May 2012: You might also be interested in this slideshow, A Special Collections Career Path, and this prezi (or pdf), Special Collections Librarianship: A Brief Map of the Field.

A pleasure having you

On Wednesday afternoon, a group of seven-or-so members of staff from Cambridge University Medical Library came on a visit, led by yours truly, to see St John's College Library. This all came about after I met Isla, Reader Services Librarian at the Medical Library, at the CILIP future conversation held in Cambridge in June. She mentioned that she'd never been to St John's, I said I'd never been to the Medical Library, and a library visit swap was born. 

If you're interested in what we've got St John's, and what the visitors thought of it, then I highly recommend that you read Emma's, Anna's and Sheila's posts.  It's certainly been very intersting for me to read their impressions of the visit.  A library tour of this kind, in contrast to the tours I help to deliver to undergraduates in October, has no set goals.  I'm not trying impress anything in particular upon the audience - whether that's borrowing limits, fine rates, the friendliness of library staff, the usefulness of Newton, or the range of online resources available (although some of these might still interest the librarian visitor!) - but rather just to show what's here, and, hopefully to invite comments and reactions that can inform the way I introduce people to the library in the future, and also inform what we actually do as a library service.  It's something of an education to see which elements of the tour i must have been emphasising, and which stick with people enough to be repeated later.  It's not something one usually gets to find out, and is one of the features of Web 2.0 that is often commented upon: beware, reviews are instant and everywhere!

Anna's comment that I said little about e-resources was definitely fair.  I'm not sure that I mentioned them at all, in fact!  This stemmed from two things: 1) I  little to do with user education or enquiries answering in my current role, and 2) I suppose that I didn't want to show up my own ignorance in front of a group which I imagine makes much greater use of e-resources than we do here.  I shall definitely use the return visit to find out what the Medical Library is doing with e-stuff, and shall try in future not to let a fear of showing myself up stand in the way of a good learning opportunity.

Victorian staircase in St John's College Old Library by Wumpus on Flickr

It's hard to argue with the general agreement that St John's is a beautiful library, although it isn't without its little idiosyncracies. It's lovely to hear other people say that, and although I haven't been working here for very long, I do feel proud when people are impressed.  And it's good to be reminded, now and again, of what a remarkable building it is, and what a range of services we provide: on cold February (or even chilly July) afternoons it's all too easy just to curse the deficiencies in the heating and wish I was somewhere else.

So, medical librarians, thanks for coming. It was a pleasure having you!

Day in the Life: broad-brush approach

My 'Day in the Life' posts so far have been all about specifics.  Today I'll take the broader view and tell you a little about what a Hoyle Project Associate is, and why she does what she does.

Fred Hoyle's telescope

Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) was an astrophysicist, science fiction writer, Munro-bagger, frequent correspondent with The Times, Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy, radio star, and controversialist.  He invented the phrase 'Big Bang' although he didn't believe in the theory, wrote the soon-to-be-republished novel The Black Cloud (and much more including co-writing the BBC TV sci-fi series A for Andromeda), and suggested that life on earth might have been seeded from space.

He was a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, and after his death, his family donated his collection of personal papers, books, and some artefacts to the existing special collections of the College Library, which include medieval manuscripts, early printed books, collections of personal papers and a range of artefacts.  The Hoyle Collection is immense, the largest in the library, and covers all aspects of Hoyle's life and work.

Any collection (be it books, papers, objects, images, webpages or anything else) is no good to anyone unless 1) someone knows what's in it, and 2) people can access it.  These, to my mind, are the fundamental principals of librarianship: catalogue (i.e. work out what you've got) and make available (i.e. let people at it!).

So the basic aim of the Hoyle Project is to catalogue the Hoyle Collection.  Eventually the catalogue will be made publically available on Janus (the Cambridge University archives catalogue), and through nationwide tools such as the Archives Hub and the National Register of Archives.  In the mean time, there's a summary listing on the Library website.

But cataloguing is just the start.  The Hoyle Project aims to make the Hoyle Collection, and the Library collections more widely, known to as many people as possible, and to increase knowledge of Hoyle, astronomy, the history of science, and the Library.

Cambridge Science Festival visitors in St John's College Library (photo by wumpus on Flickr)

This means opening the Library door as often as we can manage:

• to school groups (both primary and secondary);
• special interest groups (Cambridge tour guides, the University of the Third Age, the British Astronomical Association);
• media companies (the Library and items from the Hoyle Collection were featured in the fifth episode of the recent Channel 4 series Genius of Britain);
• the general public (via the University festivals of Science and Humanities, and National Heritage Open Days);
• and virtually and digitally via an online exhibition and hands-on build-your-own-astrolabe kit.

My daily work is therefore a mixture of cataloguing, events planning, resource building, photography, web editing, exhibition curating, caption writing and enquiry answering.  Thrown in is some everyday special collections work staffing the reading room where researchers consult books and papers, which involves fetching items from the shelves and storage areas, supervising researchers to make sure they treat everything with respect, answering queries about the collections, and providing information about reproduction rights.

The work is definitely challenging, but also immensely rewarding.  There's nothing like the thrill of bringing to science or history to life by using some of the wonderful documents and books that I'm lucky enough to work with.

The Hoyle Project is funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, St John's College, and the Friends of the Center for the History of Physics, American Institute of Physics.

"I read the news today, oh boy"

Lots of library-related news in the UK in the last 24 hours, as the Department for Culture Media and Sport announced a 'Review of arm's length bodies' including proposals to abolish the Museums Libraries and Archive Council, the UK Film Council, the Advisory Council on Libraries and the Legal Deposit Advisory Panel. I would have liked to have made more time today to read all abaht it, but alas it was not so.  I look forward to seeing more from CILIP on the matter in the coming weeks.

Visitors
Today a girls' choir from Greenwich, Connecticut, were visiting the College as part of a day in Cambridge on their tour of England, and I took them up to our Old Library.  Visitors rarely fail to be impressed by the building and its 400-year old oak bookcases, and our largest book, a late fifteenth-century Spanish antiphoner (chant book) was of particular relevance to this group.  Groups of visitors can be shown the Old Library by prior arrangement with the Special Collections Librarian, and we have on average a few every month, both youngsters and adults.

In addition to pre-arranged group visits, members of College ('members' includes both current students and alumni) may bring guests to the Old Library at any time during our working hours, and two separate such parties arrived today within 10 minutes of each other.
other visitors


Cataloguing
I catalogued some more of the papers from yesterday's box.

CPD
I created some icons for use on blogs and websites to link to LISNPN, the L(ibrary and) I(formation) (Science) New Professionals Network, and added one to my sidebar to link to my LISNPN profile.
This evening I'm going to a meeting to discuss the possibility of organising TeachMeet for Cambridge librarians, and I intend to blog about that separately.

Outreach
I chased up contacts regarding a possible book republication event.  Do hope they get back to me - it's a great opportunity for publicity (and book sales) for all involved.
Received confirmation that some mp3s of Hoyle giving lectures in Montreal can be used by the Fred Hoyle website maintained by his family.

Extra curricular
At morning coffee, my colleagues and I enjoyed tucking into some Fitzbillies Chelsea buns kindly given to the Library by a reader.

Tomorrow's to-do list
Prepare for a visit of medical librarians tomorrow afternoon - I'm really looking forward to hearing what they think of our library, and to my return visit to the Medical Library at some point over the summer.
Email a school librarian I met last month about arranging the visit to the Medical Library
Cataloguing
Think about what I need to do next with the paperwork for Chartership.  Just writing 'sort out chartership notes' yesterday wasn't specific enough to get me to do anything useful today.

A day in the life

This my first post as part of the fifth round of Library Day in the Life a project started by Bobbi L. Newman, Librarian by Day. I only heard about Library Day in the Life on Sunday, so I've not followed any of the previous rounds and this is something of a leap in the dark.

I ought really to start with a post explaining my rather cryptic job title ('Hoyle Project Associate') and my place of work (St John's College Library, Cambridge, UK), but I'm going to leap right in with Monday, and will try and fill in the gaps later and/or as I go along.

Readers
I work in the Library's Rare Books Reading Room, a place for readers to consult, under supervision, items from the Library's special collections.  Today saw two phone calls and one email arranging three separate reader visits to see one medieval and two post-medieval manuscripts.  We also had two readers in the room, one looking at a post-med manuscript, and one using the photocopier.  Most photocopier users outside of other Library staff require some assistance with the machine, and interpreting its repertoire of cryptic error beeps, at some point or other.

Correspondence
Emails sent and answered today included:

• receiving the thanks of another College department for supervising the Old Library during a reception on Friday evening;
• Contacting a member of the public who donated sound recordings to the Hoyle Collection to ask about permission to use them on a Hoyle-related website;
• Confirming the details of a medical librarians' visit to the Library on Wednesday;
• Reminding attendees of an informal meeting tomorrow evening to discuss organising TeachMeet in Cambridge.

CPD
I'm currently undertaking the CILIP Chartership process, and am also participating in the 23 Things Cambridge programme. Today I read through the Thing 18 post about Zotero. Noticing that Zotero is a browser-based tool, and looking for something web-based that I can use from home, work, the UL, and all points north, I had a quick look round the Mendeley site, noted the Mendeley Web feature, and that it supports MHRA-style citation.

Cataloguing
The bulk of my workload is cataloguing Fred Hoyle's personal papers.  Today I started a new box (the papers have all been transferred from the filing cabinets they arrived in into archival-quality boxes) which demonstrates the flexibility of the term 'papers' in this context.

These pictures show not only a folder of papers removed from the books in Hoyles' library (also held at St John's and catalogued on Newton as the Hoyle Collection), but also a film reel of Stonehenge, volumes 2 to 5 of a children's encyclopaedia of science (articles within which include 'Phosphorescence' and 'The earthworm'), and a number of issues of the Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Outreach
The other main strand of my work is outreach to schools, special interest groups and the general public.  Forthcoming events include participation in Open Cambridge and the University of Cambridge Festival of Ideas.  Much of this morning was spent designing a flyer to advertise our Festival of Ideas event (an exhibition of literary manuscripts and free expert talk from College fellows).

Tomorrow's to-do list

• Continued cataloguing;
• Chasing up contacts regarding a possible Autumn event to mark the re-publication of a Hoyle science fiction novel;
• Bringing some of my Chartership notes into order;
• Genning up on TeachMeet.