Curious collections: what do we keep, and why?

Last night I spoke at the Seminar in the History of Material Texts in Cambridge as part of a session looking at 'curious' library collections and how we manage them.

The first half of the session was a chance to see the Radzinowicz Library's collection of 'banned' books: books that had either been banned under the Obscene Publications Act, or that had been submitted by members of the public who wished that they be banned. The contents of the collection (in brief, a lot of books about flagellation and sodomy; a few with raunchy pictures of women; and a fair number about marriage, reproductive health and birth control) are more or less as you'd expect. What really interested me about them was their provenance, or rather, how quickly information about provenance can be lost.

The books were donated to the Radzinowicz after the break-up of the old Home Office library at the time of the creation of the Ministry of Justice in the late 2000s. The collection that came to the Radzinowicz is not the complete (there's a thought that the 'best' books had already been whisked away, perhaps by staff), and there's apparently little documentation about the collection itself - no indication, for example, about which books were banned and which were submitted by the public, or when any book was accessioned. It's the contextual information of this kind that often really brings special and archival collections to life, and visiting the 'banned' books was a good lesson in the necessity of documenting institutional memory and knowledge about collections.

My talk took an overview of the challenges of managing a modern archival collection in a library context. The discussion afterwards centred particularly on the issue of retention - academics are horrified to hear that we might not like to keep every last scrap of paper, because of the potential that it might be useful or interesting *one day*. These slides don't really address that - but I'd be interested to hear thoughts about whether you think it's getting easier to 'keep everything' or whether the enormous volumes of electronic data now produced will need a more, and not less, ruthless attitude to appraisal and disposal in the future? 

Managing a curious collection: a brief overview of the challenges of the Fred Hoyle papers / Katie Birkwood

View more presentations from Katie Birkwood

Curiouser and curiouser

Curiosity killed the cat?

On Thursday this week (24 February) I'm speaking at the Seminar in the History of Material Texts at the English Faculty.  It promises to be a really interesting seminar: it's a double bill on the theme of 'curious collections' starting with the chance to see the Radzinowicz (Institute of Criminology) Library's collection of banned books, followed by my thoughts on the challenges of managing the Hoyle collection.

All are welcome to the seminar, whether researchers or librarians or anyone else with an interest in the subject matter.  Proceedings start at 5.30pm at the Radzinowicz Library and then move over the the English Faculty for my paper.

Visual metaphors for libraries/librarians/information professionals

After the agonies of choosing images to use for my Ignite talk, and with a fairly whacky idea forming for an entry into the LISNPN library advocacy competition, I've had visual metaphors on my mind these last few days.

What can replace pictures of books?

What images can we use to illustrate and promote the work of the modern-day library and information world? Time was that a picture of a shelf of books, a card catalogue, or a set of library steps, would suffice to create in the viewer an impression of library-ness. But if we want to convey something of the multi-faceted nature of library work, of the focus on information evaluation and organization, of the myriad formats and sources used, how can that be done? Is there a single visual image that conveys the idea 'information'?

I'd be very interested to hear people's ideas. Do you think that we need something more than books? Can you do better than the Guardian's brain?  A few people have commented on the aptness of the yarn slides (10 and 11) in my 'Why Libraries are Great' slidedeck; is there a way to express that idea more succinctly?