A Week in My Library Life #libday7

I'm a 'Rare Books Specialist' at Cambridge University Library.  As part of Round 7 of the Library Day in the Life Project, here's a summary of the sort of things I've been up to this week.

Looking after the readers

Reader service isn't my primary function, but the whole point of having a library is so that readers can use it, so that's where I'll start this overview.  Our library has a Rare Books Reading Room that could, technically, seat up to 60 people, although they'd be frightfully squashed.  And average day would generally see up to 20 readers in at one time.  The 'Rare Books' net is cast fairly wide: it covers all printed material produced pre-1900, and selected printed material produced post-1900. Manuscripts are produced in a separate room.  The department has a team of book fetchers (who fetch around 1,000 items a week) and room supervisors who manage the day-to-day production of material and supervision of the room.  I do occasional stints on the reading room desk to cover lunchtimes, break times, evenings, Saturdays and absences for sickness or holiday.  I'm also one of the people asked to help out with non-standard enquiries. This week a couple of people were on holiday, so my share of desk duty was higher than normal.  Summer is also a busy time for the room, as lots of scholars make trips to research libraries at this time of year, making the most of a break from teaching responsibilities to get on with their own research.  Visiting researchers often want to see a lot of books in a fairly short time, they're less familiar with our policies, practices and services than our regulars, and as they're likely to be off to the next library very soon, they'll want their photocopying done as quickly as possible!

To be fair, our till doesn't look like this at all.

On the whole, I really enjoy working on the reading room desk.  Although much of the work is very routine--checking requests, checking fetched material out to readers and back in again when they're done, keeping an eye on how the material is treated, checking requests for photocopying and digital imaging, and authorising requests for self-service photography--it's a good way to get to know what sort of books people are interested in, and how they use our catalogues and other resources.  And I get to use the till when people buy pencils or pay for their photocopies. Bing! It is sometimes frustrating working on a front-line desk when the things I want to get done demand periods of focussed attention, but that just means I have to balance what I do when, so that the intensive stuff is left for when I can sit in the office (relatively) undisturbed.

Looking after the books

We're very fortunate to have a certain budget in the department for new acquisitions of rare material.   We generally purchase in order to supplement existing collection strengths, rather than to try and be 'completist' about our holdings.  As I've only been in post for a few months, I'm still getting to know the collections (have a look at our collection summaries here and you'll start to understand why!), so I don't have much of a role in choosing new purchases.  But I do do some of the background checking before we buy: double checking catalogues (both electronic and paper) to see if we, or other Cambridge libraries, already hold a copy, for example.

Once we've decided to get a book, it has to be checked on arrival to make sure we've got what we were expecting - all pages and plates are counted and checked, the condition is examined, etc. etc.  And then it goes onto the cataloguing shelf.

I love cataloguing rare books, but it's fair to say that there's a knack to doing it efficiently that I haven't yet grasped.  One can go to almost infinite lengths checking previous owners (we record as a matter of course any kinds of provenance marks in or on the books), deciding on binding materials and dates, and looking up references to the book in question.

Here are a couple of recent examples: a bibliography of the works of a geologist, acquired with a collection of his papers (this book was transferred to us from the manuscripts department) and a book of seventeenth-century German concrete poetry, lavishly embellished with extra plates relating to the city of Nuremberg by an early owner.

Exhibitions

I'm very fortunate that I'm responsible for the Library's internal exhibition cases, located on our main corridor on the way to the Tea Room.  The exhibition programme sees a new display every two to three months.  These are curated generally by members of Library staff, and cover a range of topics which enable us to showcase holdings or themes that wouldn't necessarily be included in the main public exhibition area.  Recent topics have been Ernest Hemingway, and twentieth-century Dutch book bindings. The next exhibition will be set out this week; I've been advising the curators throughout about suitability of material for display, case sizes, caption conventions, and so on.

Project work

Our department currently has a major cataloguing project in train. The Incunabula Project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will see the Library's holdings of pre-1501 books (known as 'incunabula'), which number over 4,500, catalogued to the fullest current standards.  The cataloguing work falls mainly to the project's Research Associate and others of my colleagues, but I am working to support the project by producing on online guide to the history of the incunable collection.  With the permission of the publishers, CUP, we are producing a web version of the introduction to the collection written by J.C.T. Oates, the author of the 1950s short-title catalogue of the collection (the only catalogue currently available).  Oates' introduction is a masterful example of academic librarianly writing of its period, but to modern eyes it's somewhat wordy.  I'm doing what I can to make it useful to the modern reader by dividing it into meaningful sections, and illustrating as many of these as possible with images of our books.

These images will focus particularly, where possible, on marks of provenance and other copy-specific details, so I am taking a lot of images myself specifically for this project.  This past week I've done a lot of work taking images to slot into the webpages that I have already pretty much finished writing.  Soon I hope to be able to hand the whole lot over to colleagues for proofreading.

Misc.

From time-to-time I'm obviously also involved in other things, such as supervising TV film crews who wish to use our materials, or helping with Library open days for prospective students or University Alumni.  The nature of the holdings in our department means, however that even a 'standard' day usually holds lots of interest.

On the back of similar posts in the past I've had a few emails from new professionals interested in special collections work. I'm always happy to answer any questions you might have, either in the comments here, or in email, but I'm fairly new to this myself and certainly don't proclaim myself any sort of expert!

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.

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.