Anne Jarvis, the University Librarian, disappointed her audience at Senate House by telling us that the undergraduate rumours that the tower of Cambridge's University Library is stuffed full of pornography acquired under legal deposit are baseless. In fact, there is now a project to exploit and make known the riches of the collection in the tower, which Anne described as the airport literature of the past, and of course there is a project blog, the Tower Project Blog. Other University Library projects also have blogs, such as the Incunabula Project and the Sassoon project. what was interesting here was not simply that they had established project blogs, which seems to be a requirement nowadays but how they had used these to involve scholars. Thus, she told us, on the Incunabula blog, scholars had become involved in some of the intricate cataloguing issues such material can raise. What interested me about his approach was that Anne described it as a way to show the 'human face of the profession', to let people know what it is that we do. This lesson could well be applied outside university libraries, for example to show those who think public librarians can be replaced by volunteers.
She told us that the library had rubbed along happily in much the same way for 640 of its 650 years, but then the past ten had been a decade of revolutionary change. She showed a slide of walls, emphasising that keeping people out was an important part of Cambridge's history. 48% of staff time is spent on work with materials on their 100 miles of shelves. An OCLC analysis of their 4 million catalogue records found that they had publications form 239 countries in 446 languages, but the whole collection probably consists of 7-8 million items: nobody knows. And they have rich special collections; Anne mentioned the Siegfried Sassoon collection above and Gilbert de Botton's Montaigne Library, acquired in 2008.
She described their digitisation projects, Not all are as open as they should be, for example a project the UL is undertaking with CUP, but she recognised the problem. The Foundations of Faith and Science project, though as far as I can tell not yet online, will be freely available, and will digitise some of the UL's unique holdings in the history of science, such as Darwin's manuscripts, 9,000 of his known 14,000 letters, and some of their theological treasures. And she spoke of the lunacies of the pricing of digital subscriptions, when trying to rationalise the holdings of over a hundred college and departmental and faculty libraries.
She has opened up the collections to the world, and to visitors, allowing undergraduates to borrow for the first time in the library's history, and encouraging school visits. She said that we remain poor at measuring our impact. She spends £12 million a year, and £8 million comes from the University (how will £9,000 fees change this, I should have asked). That leaves £4 million to be found elsewhere. Donors are changing too, and expect more tangible results from their donations.
Much of what she said will be familiar to anyone who has followed the debate about the future academic library. I suppose what I took from her talk was a better understanding of the complexity of moving forward in such difficult times in such a large and inherently conservative institution. Speaking of conservative institutions, we heard her in the Senate Room, and the senators, venerable men, clearly have no need for electronics, so there was no 3G signal not public wifi. Consequently I post this some days after the event.
I have my own memories of the UL. Ann mentioned that they were opening up the UL to school children, but I pioneered that in the 60s. An annoying child, I was obsessed with heraldry and read everything the public library had on the subject. My father who used the library as one of the privileges of a Cambridge MA, infiltrated me into the building after school and persuaded the staff, many of whom were his patients, to admit me, I spent long happy hours getting to grips with the unusual shelf arrangements. My father knew the foreman of the bindery too, who would bind his flute music. Later, as an undergraduate, my father arranged for me to use the UL in my vacations form the University of Kent, though I spent more time in the tea room than I did on serious study.
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