Uncovering the lost library of John Dee: exhibition reflections

The biggest (though not the only) project on which I’ve been working over the last couple of years has been the creation of the exhibition Scholar, courtier, magician: the lost library of John Dee. It’s the first time the Royal College of Physicians museum has dedicated one of its temporary exhibitions primarily to rare books, and it has been the RCP’s most successful exhibition (in terms of media coverage and visitor numbers) to date.

I first suggested the idea of holding an exhibition of John Dee’s books (of which the RCP holds the largest known surviving collection) in January 2013, only a few weeks after I started working there. So this has been a project that has lived with me for a good long while. It’s been a long slog and one of the hardest things I’ve ever worked on. It’s also one of the most rewarding things I’ve done, and one of those about which I feel most proud. Credit is due in huge part to the museum team at the RCP who did all of hard work.

I wrote an article for the May 2016 issue of CILIP Update magazine about the process of putting the exhibition together. After a month’s embargo, I’m now able to share it directly online.

I’m continuing to reflect on the process, and will continue to do so for quite a long time, I suspect. I’ve written up a different version my thoughts here, in case it’s useful.

Things that are particular to John Dee

• John Dee had such a varied and complicated life that it’s hard to know where to start writing about him or describing what he did. He’s a well-known figure but doesn’t have any famous things named after him, or one book to his name that everyone’s heard of.
• The books are pretty difficult to interpret: they’re mostly written and annotated in Latin, many of the subjects are complicated to explain, most of the authors are not very well known. And taken as a whole, Dee’s age had a very different world view to ours. It’s hard to explain all of this satisfactorily in short captions.
• We were expecting a wide audience for the exhibition: from rare books and bibliographical experts, people who’ve read widely on Dee, those generally interested in Tudor history, to people who’d never heard of Dee or never looked at an old book before. That made it hard to know where to pitch the text: it takes a lot of crafting to create descriptions that explain technical details without being baffling to the non-expert or obvious or simplistic to those with specialist knowledge.
• A lot of the ‘facts’ about Dee’s life and books are, in fact, not 100% certain. Hedging around issues makes for less compelling reading and add lots of words to text. But you can’t portray as certain truth something for which you know there isn’t hard evidence. Cue further tinkering with the text, adding and removing lots of ‘may have been’s, ‘is believed to have’s, ‘has been suggested that’s and so on.

Worst bits

• I found Dee as a subject completely overwhelming. It took a really long time to get a sense of just what the exhibition would really be about.
• At some points it felt like progress slowed to barely a crawl: collaborating with other teams required a lot of sending ideas and files back and forth to get every concept and every detail correct.
• However carefully you plan, there’ll always end up being a time when it feels like everything’s happening at once. For me, this was definitely the final week of installation, where the work of actually making sure everything looked good in the cases seemed to take a back seat to media interest and promotional demands as we were installing

Best bits

• I really wasn’t looking forward to day when we tried out the actual layout of each of the display cases with the books themselves: I feared that it would show that all of my ideas were unworkable and that we’d have to go back to the drawing board. However, it was actually really good fun, and incredibly exciting to see the exhibition start to take shape in front of our eyes.
• I made a few gifs of some of the exhibits, which proved to be more wildly successful that I could have possibly imagined. I thought they were maybe a bit naff. Or at least a bit niche. But #earlymodern Twitter and beyond really took to them. Bonus: making them was really fun.
• We devised an audience engagement/participation activity by the name of #DoodleDee: here’s a blank postcard, why not leave us an exhibition-inspired doodle (for the chance of a monthly prize)? I had no idea people would take it up so keenly, and imaginatively. There have been some really charming (and bizarre) doodle submitted.
• Opening day was amazing. It’s very very rare that, after doing something, I genuinely feel pleased with it and can sit back and bask in the warm glow of pride and satisfaction. This was one of those occasions. There are, of course, things I would change if I could, or wish I had done differently, but nothing so much that I’m unable to appreciate that what was achieved is good.

Things I learnt about myself

• I really, really, don’t like uncertainty in the early stages of a project like this. For some people, the myriad possibilities and options are exciting and stimulating. For me, they threaten to be completely stymieing. I have to impose some order – for example, making arbitrary decisions about content and arrangement – in order to make progress.
• While I have an eye for (some) details, and a clear idea of what ‘right’ will look like, I don’t enjoy having to request corrections from other people, especially if it takes more than one attempt to get corrections implemented. I went through agonies when we were proof-reading the design work. I need to learn a way to say ‘[this bit] needs to look like [this thing]; it currently doesn’t have [something or other]’ without worrying that I’m being a malicious control freak.
• Even though I started out not knowing... my priorities – both large and small scale – did emerge. It was surprising to see what I did, and didn’t, consider vital: the orientation of an image on the wallpaper mattered a great deal, but I really didn’t mind changing the placement of the display cases on the gallery even at the last minute.
• I didn’t really know what the exhibition was about, or what the overall story was until I started given tours to journalists the week before we opened. I would have done well to start imagining the tours well before that.

Advice

• Start early. No, earlier than that. Synthesising information takes time; the sooner you’re on top of the facts and figures, the sooner (and more easily) you can get down to the creative side.
• Take notes. Take more notes. Tiny details will suddenly take on huge important as deadlines approach. Future-you will love past-you if you’ve written down as much as possible. Don’t trust your memory!
• Know your strengths and weaknesses. What are your usual failure points? Let your team know, and what they can do to mitigate!
• Guess. Sometimes there just isn’t a right answer, or, at the very least, not one you can work out right now. So guess: pick an option and try it out. If it’s not working you’ll know soon enough and can change. If it is working then you’re sorted.
• Know your priorities. If some things need to change and you’re not too concerned, then let them go gracefully. There will be some things you’ll really want to stand and fight for, and you’ll know it when it happens; save you energy for those.
• Build in flexibility from the start. If you pick one option from two-or-more equally as good (or more-or-less as good) options, keep a note of those you didn’t choose, in case the first idea doesn’t pan out.
• Don't forget your passion. It can be easy to overlook the things, objects or ideas that made you go ‘wow’ right at the start. Keep them in mind: they’re the best selling point.
• Trust your exhibits. Let them tell their story. Work out what the key feature of each item is, and make sure that’s what you communicate to your visitors. Know exactly why each item has been included.
• Promote early, promote often (and use the professionals). The huge coverage for ‘Scholar, courtier, magician’ was the product of three things: Dee’s cult status, giving plenty of notice (a year plus) about the exhibition, and hiring a professional publicist.

Lots of people have asked me what come next after Dee. For the museum, it's a new show about the Great Fire of London. At the moment for me it’s ‘More Dee’: we’re reworking the exhibition text into a printed catalogue of the exhibition.  After that? I’ve no idea. I’m sure something will come along...

Digitisation: practicalities, pleasures and pitfalls. #HistLib15

On 12 November last year I went to the Historic Libraries Forum annual conference, titled ‘Practicalities, pleasures and pitfalls: uncovering digitisation projects’. As ever, it was a really informative and useful day, and a great chance to catch up with people.

The theme of the day was digitisation: how to plan, run and maintain a successful project. As someone who'd been involved for the last 18 months as one of the partners in the UK Medical Heritage Library project, I could only wish that the conference had come round two years earlier: it would have been a great help! But no matter, the case studies and advice generously shared by the six speakers will certainly be of use as I plan projects in the future.


1. Calum Dow, Towsweb Archiving. ‘The importance of planning for digitisation’

Townsweb is a company that undertakes digitisation for individuals and institutions. Calum provided a very clear overview of what you need to consider when considering and planning a project.

Key points

• Start with formal goals: use SMART objectives. Consider your desired outcomes, and the purposes of the digitisation: is it for for preservation, for display, for searchability, for access, for revenue? Who are the core users of the digital collection? What are your ideal timescales and milestones?
• Communicate with your supplier! Make sure everyone understands your project goals, including the end purpose of the digitisation. Ensure your supplier is happy to keep you updated.
• What to digitise? You might choose the items in greatest use, or at greatest risk. Ideal concerns have to be balanced with the items’ suitability in terms of condition and format.
• Image outputs and resolutions: capture your master images in an open-source, non-proprietary format.
• Access: metadata is vital to both your internal archive or document management system and your external website.
• Practicalities: you’ll need to consider how and where digitisation will take place. Different formats and materials have different requirements. The better quality digitisation will usually be achieved offsite. Very rare or fragile items may have to be digitised on-site, but you need a room with controllable lighting, good power supplies, space, etc.

Resources

• Callum's slides
• Planning Digitisation Projects – Best Practice Tips
• Guide: Sources of Funding for heritage Digitisation projects

2. Damian Nicolaou, Wellcome Library. ‘Hand in hand: The ups and downs of partnerships in digitisation’

Damian presented several case studies of collaborative digitisation projects. There can often be encouragement or inducement to work collaboratively these days, either with commercial or non-commercial partners. The Wellcome Library works with lots of partners. There are commercial (eg ProQuest) and non-commercial (eg the Internet Archive) organisations doing the digitisation. And then there are the organisations that use the output (eg Zooniverse), funders (eg JISC), publishers, academic partners, software developers, licensing societies, and internal partners. Some of the projects are London’s Pulse, ProQuest Early European Books, and the UK Medical Heritage Library.

Various themes recurred throughout the case studies that Damian presented:

• The difficulties of balancing your priorities against your partner’s (or partners’) priorities.
• Are the people at the coal-face of the digitisation working directly for you or for someone else?
• How to communicate well in order to manage relationships and expectations. Be clear who has responsibility for what.
• When collaborating, you need to agree tight standards for images and metadata. Sometimes the standards are baggy and imprecise, and even though everyone is adhering to them, local practice variations still make interoperability difficult.
• That doesn’t only apply to metadata: agree everything to do with the project in writing and even then interpretation may differ
• Things will change over time, including the people and staff you’re working with in partner organisations, and the goals of those organisations can change, too.
• Can you live with the conditions imposed by (commercial) partners? Are you prepared to do things their way?
• Could you do it on your own?
• Even ‘free’ things have costs.

Aside from the points directly relevant to collaborative working, there were other points to consider for all projects.

• Consider use cases for the digitised material both for the present and future, before you sign: keep things open!
• Broaden your reach by hosting the digitised content in multiple places (eg Wellcome Library website and the Internet Archive)
• Don’t neglect your internal departments, eg the conservation team.

3. Abby Matthews, Sutton Archives. ‘From Cellar to Hard-Drive: The Challenges of Digitising Glass Plate Negatives’

On a much smaller scale than the Wellcome Library, Sutton Archives is digitising fragile glass-plate negatives. ‘The Past on Glass’ is a 2-year Heritage Lottery Fund project, working with negatives from a photography business that was abandoned in 1918. The collection of negatives is vast, and there were several issues to address.

• The time-frame of project was set in advance, at the point of applying for funding, with little idea whether it was realistic or not, so part of the project has been working out how to best prioritise the work.
• There is a large and unknown number of damaged plates, so they’ve prioritised those in good condition.
• The project relies on volunteers, who have varying skill sets, so the workflows need to be written very carefully, with different volunteer roles available.
• There are a limited amount of resources available, including space and equipment, so they have been inventive about how to make the most of the scanner.

Abby gave some really useful advice:

• Do as much research as possible before you start. Seek advice. Know your options.
• Think carefully about specific needs and long-term requirements.
• Be prepared to go your own way.
• Set strict project methodology and workflow, and make sure everyone follows it.

4. Jamie Robinson, John Rylands Library. ‘CHICC - Heritage Imaging at The John Rylands’

Jamie described the work of the The Centre for Heritage Imaging and Collection Care (CHICC), based at the University of Manchester Library. They work for the university and external organisations, too. With university items, they try to digitise the whole item when there’s an imaging request for one part of it, to save having to do further work again later on the same item. They are constantly updating their equipment, and make the most of new developments, for example working with a pigment specialist on how best to image gold used in printed books and manuscripts.

Key points

• Different specialist materials need specialist imaging: this developing all the time.
• New techniques, such as multi-spectral analysis, have a lot to offer, and are leading to new research avenues on the primary sources.

Key resources

• University of Manchester digital collections
• Bosch project at the Rijksmuseum: new ways of presenting paintings research
• Association of Historical and Fine Art Photography

5. Steven Archer, Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. ‘The legacy of Parker on the Web’

Parker on the Web was one of the first major manuscripts digitisation projects. It launched in 2009. Steven spoke about how digitisation is only the beginning with a project of this scale and scope. The project has a large maintenance demand: corrections and additions to images, references and bibliographies appear in semi-annual releases. In addition to this, the interface is now starting to show its age to some extent, so plans are underway to launch a new version in due course.

Steven also had some interesting reflections on the way digitised content has changed reading room culture. Remote access gives the librarian much less idea what people are working on, and thus fewer outlets to help them! They hope that the new version of Parker on the Web might have more facilities for interaction between scholars working on the manuscripts.

Some resources mentioned:

• Mirador: an open source image viewing platform that can display resources from systems supporting the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF).
• DigiPal: a resource for the study of medieval handwriting
• T-PEN: a web-based tool for working with and transcribing images of manuscripts.

6. Naomi Korn, Naomi Korn Copyright Consultancy. ‘Copyright issues in digitisation’

You can't consider digitisation without considering copyright. And copyright is complicated. Works whose authors died before 1969 and whose works weren’t published by 1 August 1989 are still in copyright until 2039. Something that looks like it might be 'one' item, like a scrapbook or diary, might have multiple copyright holders. Naomi had some very practical advice for how to manage rights in (our rights (or lack thereof) to digitise and reproduce) and rights out (what rights we’ll grant other people to use the digitised images).

Key points:

1. Be aware what the digitisation contract says re: what’s expected and required. You need to exercise due diligence!
2. Be aware of layers of rights: for example, cuttings stuck into a diary. Resources are needed to check and clear rights.
3. Rights management is risk management.
4. Check what the terms are regarding the licences on the digital images. Heritage Lottery Fund projects are required to use a CC-BY-NC licence, so you need to ask rights holders for this level of permission. When asking for rights you can ask for equivalent rights, or ask for as much as possible (but latter has risk that rights holders will say no as asking too much.)

Tools for reverse image searches (to try to uncover image sources)

• Google
• TinEye
• Foto Forensics

Conclusion

So, to sum up… Knowledge is power when thinking about a digitisation project. The more detail and understanding you have about the materials you want to digitise, the easier the planning and implementation should be.

• Think before you act! Know your collections. (Really know your collections.) Know your audience(s).
• Think about the future: allow for possible new uses.
• Host it far and wide – the more places, the better.
• Have clear project plans and workflows.
• Talk to everyone as much as possible, and don’t forget your internal partners and collaborators.
• Plan for what happens after the project finishes: how do you maintain it?
• Factor in the time and money involved in copyright clearance from the start.

John Dee gifs part the second

Following the success of the John-Dee-inspired gifs I put together for #musgif day in October 2015, our publicist asked if I could make a few more to use in the promotion for 'Scholar, courtier, magician'. So I duly obliged.

Watch #JohnDee revealed by x-ray in a circle of skulls. Read about it in today's @guardian https://t.co/wdlngTc5SQ pic.twitter.com/mp9H9aq5n9

— RCP museum (@RCPmuseum) January 18, 2016

Thief! See how the man who stole #JohnDee 's books tried to write his name out of history https://t.co/GRJfyVlHj6 pic.twitter.com/iFeiL8FLzW

— RCP museum (@RCPmuseum) January 13, 2016

The magical manicule hand of #JohnDee A Christmas gif(t) from our new exhibition open 18 Jan https://t.co/GRJfyVlHj6 pic.twitter.com/32Riqurpei

— RCP museum (@RCPmuseum) December 21, 2015

I was quite blown away by how popular all of the gifs were, and with the fulsome praise and enthusiasm they received especially among the early modern history crowd on Twitter.

Thought I could not be more excited about this conference. And then they start giffing marginalia. #marginaliamonday https://t.co/UUEcFxqH5o

— Liesbeth Corens (@onslies) December 22, 2015

@onslies @RCPmuseum heartily concurring. Gifs that are fabulous AND educational!

— Kirsty Rolfe (@avoiding_bears) January 13, 2016

They were picked up by various media outlets, too.It wasn't such a surprise to see one crop up on Hyperallergic, but New scientist used them, too. Pretty cool. (Although, if I'm honest, the fact-checking in that December 2015 article leaves a something to be desired. The more recent review is rather better, but gif-less, seeing as it went out in print.)

The gifs are successful because they fun to watch and because they add something to the understanding and experience of the books and painting by showing things you can't see from a photograph or from seeing the static item on display.

Watch this space for a post or two about how I did the photo editing on Dee's over-written signature and how I made the gifs.

Pressed flowers in books revisited

One of the things I'd like to change about my working life is that I don't currently find time to keep up with the research that's being done about, and using, rare book collections.  This is a pretty major omission, really, given that supporting research is one serious why 'my' collection exists and is made available. I'm sure I would be making much better decisions about all sorts of procedures and practices if I had a greater understanding of what academic readers would like to know and the research questions they're trying to answer. And I suspect I may not be the only one who feels like this...

So imagine my delight when a historian friend of mine stumbled across my post from last year about discovering, preserving and describing preserved plant specimens in rare books.  She writes:

I was fascinated by how librarians deal with the issue and just want to say that it would be great if catalogues did mention specimens enclosed in books. You will see why from the attached paper I wrote some time ago - the bit about loose specimens in books is towards the end of the article. The idea that librarians can decide whether a specimen is 'relevant' or not, fills a historian like me with dread! As does moving the specimens from their locations in the book without noting their original location. But I can see that loose specimens would seem a problem to librarians. 

...

I completely take your point about librarians and lack of time, and the difficulty of coping with something so out of the ordinary realm of cataloguing practice.  But perhaps if they knew that these scraps of plants might have significance this might make them feel it was more worthwhile to add the info to the entry.

The attached paper was:

• Anne Secord, 'Pressed into service: specimens, space, and seeing in botanical practice', in David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers, eds, Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011, pp. 283–310.

So there you have it folks - it *is* worth carefully recording and keeping this things when we find them. If only there were time and staffing enough to describe all these copy specific features in the detail we'd like to.

If you have other examples of where going the extra cataloguing mile has helped research or other outputs, I'd love to here them.

Handy hand-out: fold an octavo sheet

I took a handful of books to a medical museum object handling session on Monday 17 November, and made a fancy handout to go with them.

The museum is on the road today @BartsPathology for a handling session with some of our best rare books pic.twitter.com/WZhlmYga51
— RCP museum (@RCPmuseum) November 17, 2014

I wanted visitors to be able to take away the details of the books on show, but thought it might be fun if the handout was also a practical demonstration of one element book construction, namely of imposition and sheet folding.

So the fold-your-own-octavo-sheet handout template was born.

There are two main parts, which I'm happy for you to use and reuse as you wish. CC By 4.0 - you can do whatever you like, but please attribute the original to me:

1. The template for creating your own handout.  This is put together in Powerpoint, and set up for an A4 page. You'll probably need to adjust the position(s) of the grid of boxes on one or both pages to allow for the peculiarities of your local printer: it might not print the pages exactly lined up on each other without a bit of fiddling.
2. A how-to illustration showing how to fold the sheet into a booklet.
1. As a Powerpoint file that you can fiddle with and substitute the 'FIRST PAGE' text with the actual first page/image of your handout, or add page numbers into the corners, or signatures into the other corners, if you want to.
2. As a .png image file (use this link for full size file) ready to insert into any document.

There's also a bonus third part:

3. The pdf of the handout I used for the event itself as an example and a prompt for you to create something better. It's set in house-style Calibri font, which doesn't give the most rare books vibe, it has to be said. 

Someone will doubtless point out that Powerpoint is a ludicrous choice of programme to do this in, but it worked for me when I was in quite a rush to get this done, and I'm pretty happy with the result.

And there's a non-zero chance that I've actually got something technically wrong with the layout and imposition, in which case, do please yell! It took an embarrassing number of attempts to get watermarks right. (The elephant is Briquet 5948, by the way.)

I'm going to write up further thoughts on museum-style handling sessions using rare books in due course, and I'll be hoping for contributions and thoughts from other people who are doing this already or who would like to. So get your thinking caps on!

Preserved flowers in books

We made an exciting discovery in one of our rare books this week, when a visitor at a handling session found a pressed flower between the pages of John Gerard's Herball or generall historie of plantes (1597).

We've just discovered a real piece of dried plant preserved between the pages of our 1597 herbal book! pic.twitter.com/3C4t0r4FGU
— RCP museum (@RCPmuseum) November 17, 2014

It's not such a surprise to find a forgotten plant specimen in a book all about plants, but it's not something I'd much come across before, and I'd certainly never known what any institutional approach or policy would be to dealing with such a find. So I asked the LIS-RAREBOOKS mailing list for information about what other people do when they find similar things in their books. This is a summary of the responses, which I've also posted to the list.

Firstly, I can report that the specimen has been identified as a legume, most likely most likely to be bird’s-foot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus).

DISPOSAL
Most libraries are keeping specimens. Two replies mentioned that they might dispose of them if they were disintegrating, or if they were of no apparent relevance to the book in which they were found.

DOCUMENTATION
Most replies mentioned documenting the specimens in the catalogue record. One specifically said that they don’t document. Those who gave details specified the 561 field or, in once case, a 590 field. For archives records, the description field was mentioned in one reply.
Examples:

• A briefe method of catechizing (1630)
• The works of the Most Reverend Dr. John Tillotson (1728)
• The life of Edward Earl of Clarendon (1759)
• A systeme or body of divinity (1662)
• A voyage from England to India (1773)

STORAGE INSIDE THE BOOK
The great majority of respondent indicated that they would keep the specimen inside the book in the location in which it was found inside an appropriate enclosure, if the added thickness would not cause strain to the binding.

Another common alternative was to place the specimen in an enclosure at the back or front of the book, or to place it in the box of a boxed item.

Some libraries with specialised collections containing a lot of material of this kind have enclosure made by a conservator that are then either mounted on guards in the book, or kept with the book in another suitable manner.

The library that didn’t document specimens found also noted that it doesn’t enclose them, either.

At least one respondent suggested labelling the enclosure to indicate where it belongs – a sensible idea!

ENCLOSURE MATERIALS
Melinex and acid free tissue were both used in roughly equal numbers of replies. Melinex has the benefit of allowing you to see the specimen, and to see through the enclosure to the page beneath. Acid free tissue is rather thinner.

Two more involved enclosures were suggested by one conservation officer:

• A ready made product from Preservation Equipment, 'Herbarium specimen sheet protectors': http://www.preservationequipment.com/Store/Products/Archival-Storage/Natural-History-Collection/Herbarium-Specimen-Sheet-Protectors
• Making a bespoke enclosure: put the flower on artists water colour paper, cover with tissue and place in a polyester storage bag with a piece of desiccant paper for moisture absorbing then remove the air and seal.

But this same conservator also notes that leaving plants between the pages of a book, has been done successfully for centuries, and you can tell if the specimen has been causing damage.

STORAGE OUTSIDE THE BOOK
Several responders noted that they would store the specimen separately from the book if it was harming the paper or binding, or if there are too many specimens in one volume to be kept in place in the book.

Separately stored specimens are stored with the book in a folder or envelop shelved next to the book.

Louise Roberston, a conservator at the University of Glasgow, made individual pockets to store plant material found in Fuchs’ De Historia Stirpium, as documented in this blog post: http://universityofglasgowlibrary.wordpress.com/2013/09/02/a-blooming-binding-blog-part-4/

There’s also guidance available on making herbarium samples:

• Royal Horticultural Society: http://www.nccpg.com/Conservation-resources/RHS-Guide-to-making-herbarium-specimens.aspx (pdf link)
• Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust, Australia:http://www.rbgsyd.nsw.gov.au/plant_info/identifying_plants/processing_plant_specimens/Preserving_plant_specimens

AND FINALLY
This is a lovely blog post about a specimen found in a war memoir in Surrey: http://www.exploringsurreyspast.org.uk/sherriff-blog-1/

And Kew Gardens managed to germinate some 200-year-old seeds found in the High Court of Admiralty Prize Papers at the National Archives.(This was missed out of my message to the list. Links via @Frieda_M and @rjc_archives.)

What are we here for and where are we heading? #dcdc14

At the end of October I went to ‘Discovering Collections, Discovering Communities’ (#dcdc14), a collaborative conference between The National Archives and Research Libraries UK, exploring ‘the ‘discoverability’ of collections across different formats, institutions and professions’. It had a focus on archive and museum collections and institutions, and was held at the new Library of Birmingham. The full programme is here (pdf link) and video of sessions will be going up in due course.

   by  Chris(UK) 

There were 9 panel sessions and 10 workshops split over the two days. I went to:

• Panel 1: Exploring the mechanics of cross-sector collaboration
  
• Panel 6: Visualising the digital discovery
  
• Panel 7: The community within: volunteers as a route to discovery
  
• Panel 9: Collecting - for whose sake?
  
• Jisc Workshop: Finding and Using Digital Collections: Do we need new tools?
  

There was a lot of interesting and engaged discussion on the Twitter hashtag, which cut across the different sessions and themes and helped to make connections between them. I think it’s also the first conference I’ve been to that had an end-of-day summary session in which each panel chair gave a short summary of their session. I found that very useful, too.

I found it interesting to hear about lots of different projects going on at institutions of different sizes, and in different sectors – archives, museum, and library. It’s easy to forget the different approaches of the three domains, given how often they’re lumped together as ‘heritage’ or ‘memory institutions’. It came out early on that museums have a very different attitude to research use compared to archives and libraries: it’s what the latter two exist to facilitate (in large part), but it’s not what a museum is set up for. So when a keen academic turns up to a tiny museum and spends a long time looking at artefacts or talking with the curator, that can feel like a huge investment of time for the museum, with little tangible reward.

Three broad themes appeared to me over the three days. So, as ever, I won’t précis each session I attended, I’ll throw together some thoughts under headings.

Representation

This is something that I think all of the first three panels touched upon, but which certainly struck me in a session that was ostensibly about cross-sector collaboration. One speaker mentioned that in a museum display of archival material exploring ‘hidden histories’, people to whom no photograph or artefact could be attached had to be omitted from the display because of the visual demands of displays.

In the social media panel there was discussion of the double-edged sword of high-volume but low-depth attention: can we call click-bait archives images that go viral (44 medieval beasts that cannot even handle it springs to mind) successful engagement? Or, under what circumstances can we call that successful engagement, and how to we balance the demands and delights of that kind of promotion with archival collecting and use that allows for and encourages the discovery of more complex, more nuanced, stories and understandings?

It’s a concern that digitisation, an increased focus on exhibitions, and/or a focus on social media overly privilege the visual and the tangible and disadvantage the textual? Lots of people talk about their exciting online collaborative projects exposing hidden histories and forgotten stories, but I worry there’s a risk that we do this at the expense of another, doubly disadvantaged set of histories that aren’t sufficiently photogenic.

I’ve pulled together a Storify of the Twitter discussion on this topic, rather than paraphrasing it all in this post. 

Strategy

Collaborating

The first session I attended was all about the ‘mechanics of cross-sector collaboration’. We heard about the Making Britain project – a collaboration involving the BL, the OU and many others – and the Inspiring Women project – a collaboration between Tunbridge Wells Museum and the University of Kent. They both sounded like really interesting projects, but in both cases the collaboration was born out of pre-existing relationships and networks: people already knew people who’d be interested in working on the project. Now, there’s nothing wrong with using your network, but it can seem like an impossible task to create this sort of collaboration if you don’t have a handy connection already.

The third paper in the session sought to address this. The Share Academy is a project run by UCL, the University of the Arts London and London Museums Group that aims to ‘build sustainable and mutually beneficial relationships between the higher education sector and specialist museums in London’. They strongly advised taking a more strategic approach to collaboration, by taking a pragmatic approach to planning. It’s important to have collaborative relationships documented and agreed at the start: what will the outputs of the project be (academics and museums might want very different things)? What happens if and when key people move to new institutions? How much investment of time, money and resources is expected from each side?

One really striking point for me was the comment that small museums can feel used by academics who come and research their objects and then publish without seeming to give anything back to the museum. There’s a really large investment of very limited staff time involved in providing access for researchers, and it seems that museums having necessarily been doing a great job of explaining that – unlike in libraries and archives – facilitating this access isn’t part of their core work, and that they would appreciate a more equitable relationship.

Unfortunately, Share Academy is only short-term funded, so it’s not clear whether it will continue, and be able to act as the matchmaker many of us would like!

Lots of people agreed that national advice and support on setting up and running collaborative projects would be welcome, and there’s promise of this coming from TNA. In the meatime there is, for example, this report on collaborative working practices in science heritage: ‘Mind the gap’ (link via Melinda Haunton).

Collecting

Karen Pierce presented a really inspiring paper about her work on the History of Human Genetics library at the University of Cardiff Library. This is a collection of materials concerning the history of the study of human genetics.

It was conceived of by a geneticist – Peter Harper – who was concerned that the history of this comparatively new discipline wasn’t being preserved. It now includes three complete personal libraries as well as selected donations from other people’s collections. It includes printed books – including classic textbooks and other works – as well as grey literature. There was a conscious decision to collect grey literature, because it represents an otherwise undocumented stage in research: networks, transient developments, events, suppliers and so on.

(The quote of the conference was undoubtedly Karen’s two descriptions of grey literature: 'publications by organisations whose main business isn't publishing' or 'floppy stuff’. The subsequent cries of recognition and anguish from cataloguers on Twitter is worth a read.)

This paper really made me think how fine the line is, and how variable is the location of the line, between a library’s perception of something as ‘usefully collected stuff from and expert’ and ‘endless shelves of rubbish we don’t need’. There’s real, serious, professional skill in evaluating the value (current and potential) of collections particularly of this type, and sometimes the smart professional decision is to say ‘we don’t need it’, but this isn’t always so. Sometimes we need to be brave enough to say ‘yes, we’ll take it, and love it, and make it great’.

Karen’s paper was an inspiring example of how to negotiate this boundary by setting clear aims, remits and procedures for such a collection. It’s great to see that at least one place is negotiating this successfully, rather than succumbing to the inertia of the ‘bay and a half of Stuff that someone gave us three librarians ago’.

Data and the catalogue(s)

Ah, shouldn’t we have got past worrying about catalogues by now? More than once people said and tweeted ‘the aggregator is dead’ and ‘it’s all discovery now’ and so on, but in the JISC workshop on digital discovery tools I stuck my head above the parapet and pointed out that the one key thing that would improve the discoverability of my (so-far-non-digital-)collections would be better catalogue data. Or better metadata if you prefer. It turns out that I wasn’t, in fact, expressing the view of a behind-the-times old fuddy-duddy, but actually a feeling that was in the room and online, too. Never mind aggregators being dead, we’re still trying to sort out how to get stuff into them nicely.

Innovation is great, but often data quality is the thing people want investment in! #dcdc14
— janestevenson (@janestevenson) October 30, 2014

Elsewhere, it was pointed out that even if we have all the resources to record all the stuff we want to record, we don’t have cataloguing systems that really allow us to usefully (or at all) record the stuff that makes special collections well, err, special.

Trad library catalogues don't suit special collections, "doesn't let you say *why* something matters" #dcdc14
— Hannah (@verylongnovels) October 30, 2014

A catalogue record for a Shakespeare first folio? Quite possibly won’t mention that it is the ‘first folio’. Probably can’t easily link through to that amazing exhibition you had about it last year. May manage to link through to the digitised version you have, though not necessarily. Unlikely to record other context or importance... As curatorial tools, and tools for the people Out There to understand our stuff, there’s a lot that’s still desired.

(Incidentally, the problems of what’s in the catalogue not matching what the users are looking for also cropped up a recent event at Harvard. We can’t easily meet the needs of researcher’s who’re interested in all sorts of copy-specific features, because they just haven’t been recorded. This extensive conversation is well worth a read – it brings out several different issues affecting our ability to achieve this.)

In summary...

There’s so much going on out there, and there’s so much that we can all do in our services (big or small). There’s huge pressure to do more, to reach more people, to work with more people, to get out stuff out there as much as we can. This is facilitated by things like social media, the spread of digitisation projects, and so on, but these tools don’t themselves ensure that we’re doing things well. We need to keep in sight that we should be doing stuff for a reason and that we ought to be able to set and measure against criteria for for doing this stuff well would look like and we need to consider how it will be sustained in the future.

New space for old books: #rbscg14

At the end of August (Wednesday 27 to Firday 29), the CILIP rare books and special collections group met at the University of Aberdeen for its annual study conference, this year on the theme ‘New Space for Old Books: Building for the Future’. The full conference programme with details of all the speakers and paper titles should still be online (.docx link).

The conference took place in the new University Library building, a dramatic blue-ish cuboid that stands above the city on a hill, and which has probably the best views of any library anywhere:

View from #rbscg14 pic.twitter.com/OV7ZhTsjtQ
— Naomi Percival (@naomi_percival) August 27, 2014

There were 17 papers in total, and I don’t propose to write them up individually. I felt that three main themes emerged: project management, knowing your collections, and managing the environment.

Projects
Project management is hard. Everyone said this. Major building projects are incredibly complicated and you will need to set aside a lot of time to manage them. Architects, tendering for services, buildling, weather, finances … Try not to have everything happening at once, but do try to have a plan from beginning to end when you start. In particular, it’s very useful to have the utilities and air conditioning designed together, even if they’re implemented in separate phases.

Be prepared with ideas about what you’d like for your buildings. Decisions are sometimes made very quickly – particularly if money suddenly becomes available – and you’ll want to be able to put your case forward well. Don’t be afraid to be ambitious and imaginative when you do.

Unexpected difficulties will come up. You can try and prevent some of these – for example, by checking the financial health of your contractors – but some of them, like the weather, you can’t. And sometimes it may be that things don’t move forward because there just isn’t sufficient institutional interest.

Therefore you need to be pragmatic at all stages. You might be able to keep your service running as usual through most or all of a project, but you might not be. Communicate with your staff and readers about this – it’s not the end of the world to stop doing things if people know why, and for how long. It’s likely that staff roles will morph during the project, as different areas of expertise are needed. This might be uncomfortable for people who’re already adapting to the changed priorities and working conditions, so, again, being honest and upfront about what’s happening and why is important.

Two resources were mentioned as being useful:

• RIBA advice on working with an architect
• The Major Archives Project Learning Exchange

The stuff
We heard about the construction of several brand new buildings, all of which to some extent or other also involved the bringing together of previously separate collections and services from one or more institution, the creation of new services, and deliberate moves to engage with new audiences and communities.

The Keep in Brighton brings together the special collections from the University of Sussex, the East Sussex Record Office and Brighton’s Royal Pavilion & Museums Local History Collections. From the point of view of readers, there is no difference between the collections: everything can be searched in one place and there are no differences on access rules and regulations. However, behind the scenes the collections remain separately owned and managed. This meant that there was significant work to do in harmonising policies and procedures (such as fetching, handling, registration requirements for readers, reading room rules and so on) before opening the service.

The Hive, Worcester, is Europe's first joint university and public library. It combines the University of Worcester research collections, the collections of the Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service, the university research repository, the public library, the local government one-stop shop and more. It has admirable aims, even if its list of ten core values reads to me like something from 2012: inspiration, connection, aspiration, learning, integration, inclusivity, enduring values, well-being, sustainability, visibility. I was very pleased to hear about the efforts that had been put into staff training and customer service. Staff for the Hive were drawn in from all the different areas represented in the collections. They held staff workshops about how to answer customers’ queries: customers see all the staff as the same, whereas each person has a particular background and areas of expertise and non-expertise. They devised a very structured referrals process, so that people know what they should pass on (and how to do it) and what they can answer themselves. All this under the matra: ‘We welcome, we innovate, we respect [each other's specialisms]’.

Two members of staff from the Glasgow School of Art library spoke about the work they had been doing (pre-fire, of course) to encourage wider use by their students and others. This included bringing artists and writers in to use the collections to ‘inspire, challenge or expand their practice’ through a project called the hatchery. This has included using the library space for installations and tableaux vivants. They cited the Library as Incubator project as a useful resource and inspiration for this work. In a newly designed special collections area they’ve also been running workshops and sessions based on the collection both to draw out items to use as inspiration, but also to explain to students how special collections and archives work. Various pieces – such as a camel (!) - have been inspired by this.

Bringing lots of things together can obviously have its benefits. Aberdeen University Library special collections reported a huge increase in use once they were in the same building as the rest of the university library, instead of being hidden in the back of somewhere else behind 5 doors and several corridors... But I wonder whether collaboration sometimes isn’t just seen uncritically as a Good Thing by senior management, without consideration of the individual requirements of user groups and services.

The key, it seems to me, to making a collaborative project work, or to getting the most from your collections is to know really well what it is you have in the first place. You have to invest time and effort in understanding the potential of your collections and the interests and needs of your current and potential future readers. I think this is a moral I hear in a lot of conferences because I never feel like I spend enough time getting to know my own collections...

Environment
Environmental control can be really difficult whether you’re in a historic building or a new one.

Susie Bioletti spoke about the difficulties in managing the conditions in the Long Room at Trinity College Dublin. It’s Dublin’s second biggest tourist attraction, with something like 550,000 visitors annually. It gets loads of sunshine, there’s heaps of dust (that follows no known settling pattern), people bring in humidity and heat with them. Since 2004 they’ve been undertaking detailed surveys. They measure dust using a ‘loss of gloss’ technique in which glass microscope slides are placed in various locations and their reflectivity (or lack of it) is measured to give a value for the quantity of dust that has settled. They plot environmental recordings against a calendar in order to demonstrate trends and to pick out dates that are particularly bad because of particular events – a useful visual way to map this data.

You can expend a vast amount of time, energy and money trying to keep a very tight control on temperature and humidity, when it could be a lot more efficient to take a more relaxed attitude (especially considering that facilities management is rightly increasingly concerned with wider environmental impact, carbon usage and so on). NAME from ORGANISATION summarised the recommendations of PD 5454 (the replacement for the BS 5454 standard) as:

• know your collection and assess the risks that apply to it specifically
  
• recognise the difference between mixed traditional archive materials which can’t be split up easily, and those specialist materials that need particular conditions
  
• re-conceptualise environmental control as ‘allowing fluctuations within set parameters’ rather than ‘rigid control’
  
• Keep the RH up in reading rooms – it’s a shock for documents to move from 50% RH in the store to maybe only 25% in the reading room. Temperature is less of an issue. (Would that this will end the scourge of 16ºC reading rooms...)
  

These are all sensible and encouraging, and echo what was said at the late BL Preservation Advisory Centre ‘Knowing the Need’ conference last year.

Several people in the audience, however, raised a very important point: it’s all well and good to adopt a more relaxed approach to conditions in which PD 5454 is a guide not a rule when considering your own collections. However, the stipulations in PD 5454 are routinely used by institutions loaning objects and books as the guide for acceptable storage and display. If you want to be borrowing items for display and exhibition, then you need to trying to meet these conditions for many places to allow you to borrow. I’m not sure we’ve found a way to square these two approaches yet.

And last but not least

1. The recurring theme of the conference was having the Queen visit to open your building. It’s not compulsory but it does get all sorts of otherwise disinterested people to notice you.
2. Need a better name for your basement? Try ‘Garden Level’, a term used at – I think – St Andrews.
3. Aberdeen is gorgeous. I can’t wait to go back:

   by  Katie Birkwood 

Making the most of possibilities of digitisation: an #rbscg13 write-up

  by  Keith Marshall 

Rare Books and Special Collections Group Conference (programme (.docx)).  The theme this year was digitisation (last year was fundraising and advocacy).  The three recurring themes across all of the papers were audience, metadata, and the 'thinginess of things', with some very useful practical advice thrown in. I'm not going to give a blow-by-blow account of every paper, but rather to pick out the bits I've been chewing over since.

All three themes were addressed in Simon Tanner's keynote, which adeptly summed up the current situation as well as challenging us to think more imaginatively about the future and shaking us out of complacency about what we're doing now.

Tanner started by using the analogy of an ant mill to describe the fate of too many digitisation projects.  He emphasised that it's vital to plan properly and to seriously consider audience, opportunity costs (what aren't you doing if you are doing digitisation instead?), and to keep asking the 'so what' question to keep you focussed on why you're doing what you're doing. He also shared lots of useful resources:

• Inspiring research, inspiring scholarship: the value and benefits of digitised resources for learning, teaching, research and enjoyment. A report from a JISC-http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5829453287508418737#editor/target=post;postID=8554323225911761063funded project.
• Measuring the impact of digital resources: the balanced value impact model. A report which examines impact in its widest senses, and suggests means to measure it.
• Why your cultural website is rubbish*. Report in the Guardian revealing that the UK's 40 biggest cultural venues get 0.04% of web traffic.
  

Sian Prosser presented a case study on cataloguing and digitising a comparatively small collection of  manuscript fragments. She emphasised that even though there weren't many fragments, a very high level of specialist knowledge was required to describe them well, and that any project of this type is likely to take more time than envisaged.

• TEI by example. Sian's project used TEI to mark up the descriptions. TEI by example is a set of free online tutorials.
• Ransom Center Fragments. This is a very useful Flickr site displaying images from a large collection of manuscript fragments at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

My favourite paper from the conference was  Rowena Willard-Wright on 'Transforming our data for the internet on a tight budget'.  Willard-Wright works for English Heritage and described their work on digitising and improving their catalogue, including photographing objects, improving old records, cataloguing from scratch, and create varied means of access to the records.  Her talk really exposed infuriating and frustrating the problems faced by all cataloguers are.  As she spoke I wrote:

Willard-Wright's description of migrating and updating catalogue data is very familiar: data has been lost and garbled in transfers over years. Cataloguing has been and still is viewed as archane, and a thing not worth funding, because catalogues were and are seen as not for general consumption. I.e. they are perceived as been the exact opposite of their whole point. This problem that has been seen with the English Heritage catalogue is *exactly* what is being exposed as libraries moves from traditional OPACs to resource discovery/next-generation systems. And, most infuriatingly, the things that cataloguers have known and have been saying forever (e.g. consistency matters, access points matter) is suddenly being "discovered" as if it's new.

Willard-Wright was talking from the perspective of a museum catalogue, which is in some ways very different to a library catalogue.  Museums don't have such a tradition of the publicly accessible comprehensive catalogue, and write much more descriptive and less codified entries for their objects.

The English Heritage cataloguing project used teams of volunteers with very well-defined tasks.  They write clear, concise, engaging, small chunks of description - i.e. entries that confirm to the principles of good writing for the web. The volunteers aren't necessarily experts on the objects, and they're writing for audiences who aren't necessarily experts either. However, there's a recognition that the audience may have additional knowledge or stories to share, and for this reason a 'tell the curators something about this' button is being built into the public catalogue.  I absolutely love this - it's baffled me for years that so few library catalogues have a 'tell us if there's a mistake' button. Copac is a notable exception.  I fear that many libraries don't have one because, if it was ever mentioned in a meeting, someone piped up and said "but think of all the extra work" which likely trumped "think of how handy that will be for our readers, and how useful for us to make use of their knowledge".

That lack of connection to the audience was hammered home for me in another way throughout Willard-Wright's talk.  The museum descriptions are being written for general audiences.  Rare books records contain descriptions that are, frankly, written for librarians.  Not even, really, for most researchers. Yes, we include all sorts of useful information, but we code it up in impenetrable ways, and there's all sorts of information we don't include accessibly.  This has maybe been less of an issue in the past, when catalogue records were only seen by those initiated into our arcane world. But now catalogue records go along with beautiful/intriguing/important digitised books that all sorts of people might want to see, and our gibberish means *nothing*, and doesn't explain any of the basics. (How many records for the first folio show clearly that this is a first folio? Or the Nuremberg Chronicle?)

During Willard-Wright's paper Jill Dye commented that "The only difference between an online catalogue and a digitisation project is adding a photo?", and I think that in one way she's right: it's completely wrong to think that a digitisation project stands apart from cataloguing. However, making materials accessible in any way, but especially if they're freely available online demands a new attitude to description. We really need to step up our game.

Melissa Terras is director of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, and she presented a wide-ranging paper highlighting some of the possibilities of high-end digital imaging. She works on these projects in collaboration with computer scientists and engineers, and they're often adapting techniques already used elsewhere (such as in medical imaging). As well as drawing our attention to current projects, Terras made some important points about the theory and practice. Digitisation means lots more sorts of metadata needed so that we can properly interpret the images. As Hannah Thomas put it, Terras' work is "not just about creating a surrogate but about using the image to discover new things, inspire new research". Terras made the point that digital images are *not* exact reproductions of originals. Terras asked us to talk to her if we know of collections or items that would benefit from advanced digitisation and imaging work; part of her role is to connect the various people involved.

• The one resource I'll share is this breathtaking (there were audible gasps in the room) video of the digital flattening of the great parchment book. Watch it. It's amazing.

Alixe Bovey spoke from the academic's perspective, and addressed some of the threats posed by digitisation. She was heavily involved in the campaign to try to prevent the sale of some of the Mendham Collection books last year. Bovey passionately explained that the digital is not the same as the physical, and we all need to communicate this better.  With the Mendham sale, the existence of digitised copies of the titles on databases such as EEBO and ECCO was used as justification for the sale, ignoring the copy specific details of the Mendham copies, as well as the failings of the scans themselves. Earlier digitisations have been particularly lacking. Never mind the poor black and white reproductions of scanned microfilm, they tended, for example, not to include any blank or apparently blank pages.in the source copy (see this post), and also ignored bindings, and made it difficult to determine the original size of the book. But we're not past such difficulties even with the best modern digitisations; they tend not to include scale rules, (see this post for difficulties of determining size), and give little indication of other factors such as weight, quality of materials used, or even smell.

Anne Welsh spoke very pragmatically from the point of view of libraries and library staff themselves.  She pointed out that we are continually needing to update and improve what we've done before: both content format and types of description.  She faced the fact that we can't do everything, and used the example of the University of Manchester Library Digitisation Strategy Group's 'Criteria for ensuring value to the Library for partnerships' (pdf link), which considers the value to the library of any potential projects.

Nicolas Pickwoad spoke about one element of early books which is too often overlooked in digitisations: book bindings. Most bookbinding digitisations (Pickwoad mentioned the Uppsala Probok project as an exception) show only beautiful, expensive, fancy and/or fine bindings, turning bookbinding digitisation has into "a decorative arts ghetto". This doesn't represent most early book bindings, which are less extravagant, but can tell us a very great deal about the book's history, and may often be the most interesting.

There's also a vicious circle at work: bindings aren't so often described in catalogue records, soscholars can't ask for them, so there's not so much research, so it's not seen as a priority... At least when books are viewed in person, the binding will be seen 'by accident' as it were.  If they're not included in digital surrogates they disappear altogether. Like many specialist aspects of digitisation, imaging bindings takes special requirements, including lighting, including to show structures accurately.

• I'm keen to keep an eye on Pickwoad's Ligatus project, which is working on guidelines and terms for describing bindings better. It's hoping to develop vocabulary and multilevel descriptions for bookbinding including the ability to record negatives (e.g. 'no clasps'). This is key, because otherwise you just can't tell whether a feature is absent or it's just a bad record.

  by  Xavier de Jauréguiberry

So all in all, my summary would be that we need to be using better, subtler and more flexible descriptive frameworks and presentational tools to make digitised materials accessible and available to the audiences who want to see them.  Digitisation can help with some, but not all, problems, and we need to advocate loudly for the intrinsic physical value of the things we want to digitise, to try to stem the tide of feeling that a copy is as good as, and entirely replaces, the original.

There was lots of tweeting throughout the conference:

• The rare books group storify of all of the conference tweets is here. 
• My archive of my #rbscg13 tweets is here.

Illicit collections: some thoughts

One evening in February I rocked up at the Wellcome Trust for the start of the Library & Information History Group's walking tour of Bloomsbury and surrounds, 'Lonely hearts, wedding bells and illicit pleasures'.  Led by Alice Ford-Smith, the tour was absolutely super: I learnt new things, found new bits of London and had fun.  It started with an introduction to some of the Wellcome Library's superlatively diverse collections, given by the Wellcome Library's own Ross McFarlane, including a book on Psychopathia sexualis, the ephemera of King's Cross phone booths over 20 years, international AIDS-awareness posters and public health films and adverts.  After that we set off into the night, taking in John Bejteman's rather creepy advances towards Joan Hunter Dunn, the first lonely hearts ads (published in the eighteenth century), books banned at Bow Street Magistrate's Court (including Fanny Hill and The Well of Loneliness), the information management of an eighteenth-century pimp, and 84 Charing Cross Road.

Bow Street Magistrates
by  remittancegirl 

The stop that most caught my imagination was at the British Museum, where we heard about hidden collections at the museum and its library (now the British Library). The BM Secretum was a designated area intended to keep closed away items considered to be obscene, including ancient erotica donated by George Witt (1804–1869).  (I guess this post isn't going to get this blog well and truly blocked by all 'good' web filters. So be it.)  The secret or private area or class is by no means limited to the historical British Museum.  The British Library Private Case (with the unimaginative shelfmark 'pc') was a similar collection of donated material deemed far too corrupting for most people to access.  In Cambridge University Library the rare books class Arc (short, I believe, for 'Arcana'), holds material deemed at one point, either through morals or law, not to be fetched for readers.  Some particular historic items in the collection may still not be fetched, as they are still, technically, illegal. Some modern material is still placed in this class, as also happens with the Phi (a pun on "Fie!") class at the Bodleian in Oxford.

Another similar sort of collection acquired and amassed by different means is preserved by the Radzinowicz Library in the Institute of Criminology in at the University of Cambridge: it now houses a collection of printed books once held by the Home Office as examples of banned books.  Some of these books were, indeed, legally outlawed, but others are examples of books sent in by the public demanding that they be banned.  Obscenity trials and banned books featured in more than one of the National Archives' LGBT History Month podcasts, which I happened to be listening to shortly after the walking tour. I'd recommend 'Fictional obscenities: lesbianism and censorship in the early 20th century', and 'Genius on trial: key sources relating to Oscar Wilde at The National Archives'

These sorts of collections are fascinating to me, because they seem to bring to the surface a great number of questions which apply to most collecting.  Many of these books (or objects) were brought together and kept by individuals or institutions out of a particular interest or for a particular purpose.  Others drifted in through chance and accident, not deliberate action. But the controversial nature of the material throws into relief the chancy nature of preservation, especially of non-mainstream material.  The controversial nature of the material ensured it was kept together, and that's hugely useful to us now, as the grouping reveals a lot about historic attitudes. On the other hand, it's luck and chance that these books and objects were preserved at all: they may not have been accepted for inclusion in the collections at all.  What items do we all reject today (for whatever reasons) that we should be hanging on to instead?  Is controversial material, perhaps, more likely to be kept, but the mundane to be disregarded and lost?

How can we tread the line between keeping every last scrap and creating collections that can actually be managed? I've no idea.  But this tour and the thoughts it provoked have inspired me to consider the marginal more and the obvious a little less when considering collection development.

Edited to add Ross McFarlane's name.

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.