Why Libraries?

Last one! Can't believe it's been an entire month of lockdown blog entries. And obviously we were in lockdown before that. I was off sick from 12th March, I thought with tonsillitis but who knows? - I know I've never had tonsillitis so bad before. I then came in while still ill but the museum was closed in order to collect materials to work from home on 17th March and a couple of subsequent days. We started full social distancing with all the family (the toddler was still going to nursery that week) on Saturday 21st March, so this is officially Day 41, though as you can see in some respects I'd started before that.

So now I come to Why Libraries?, the last prompt. Here I want to mention something which has been gaining traction in library circles, called "Vocational Awe". This phenomenon was first coined by Fobazi Ettarh in a wonderful article here, which really should be mandatory reading. TL:DR:

Vocational awe describes the set of ideas, values, and assumptions librarians have about themselves and the profession that result in notions that libraries as institutions are inherently good, sacred notions, and therefore beyond critique. I argue that the concept of vocational awe directly correlates to problems within librarianship like burnout and low salary. This article aims to describe the phenomenon and its effects on library philosophies and practices so that they may be recognized and deconstructed.

I think it's really important, even more so now, to understand this, and to prevent it. But I think it extends to not just libraries but schools and healthcare too. By calling something a vocation we're allowing it to overrule any sort of common sense approach to things like ...ooh, how about decent pay or reasonable working hours? It's like calling the NHS "heroes" - because obviously a medal is sufficient token of our appreciation that they've been dying due to a lack of PPE that could have been fixed by a competent and ethical government.

So to get to the point, why libraries isn't because libraries are amazing, and do amazing work, and we should all stand up for all libraries, everywhere, because they are all perfect. They're not. They're imperfect spaces filled with imperfect people and imperfect situations. But they're still useful for what they can (and should) be doing - connecting people with information. And that's what I enjoy doing. I love sharing what I discover in the library, and I hope you've enjoyed some of the things I've shared here.

Library Goals

I think goals have probably changed a lot in the 6 weeks of lockdown. Before the lockdown, my goals were to keep the library ticking over, to catalogue everything, to increase readership, to finally have a clue about what stock we have and where, and dispose of the unwanted material in a sensible way. If I were overreach, my goals would be to have a new reading room which is spacious and welcoming, always open and always full! To have shelves which people could browse once again, and full of interesting things. To make the link between the material on the shelves and the objects in the museum much clearer.

Now?

We have no idea what we're returning to. We know that the "normal" of pre-coronavirus can no longer exist. Museums need visitors to survive, so many want lockdown to end as soon as possible, but the last thing we want is a second wave, so there will no doubt be measures that we'll need to take. So what will my goals be then?

I think a lot of the higher goals are gone - always full is great when there aren't deadly viruses about. I suspect we'll need to be a lot more stringent about visitors, and stop anyone who doesn't have an appointment from coming in. Appointments will have to be stricter on time, so that there's no overlap between people and will we still be able to have our volunteers coming into the same space?

Documentation is still a big thing though, so the cataloguing will continue, the collection management... And I still dream that one day we might even do a stocktake!

Library Inclusion

Nearly there now!! On the one hand, hurrah!! But on the other hand...how did it take so long to get to this subject?! It's such a hot topic, I sort of feel like we should have covered it maybe a couple of weeks ago...

Venus Noire : black women and colonial fantasies in nineteenth-century France / Robin Mitchell

There's a notable lack of diversity in libraries, museums and Oxbridge.

I know of one, maybe two non-white librarians in the university, and one of them will be retiring this year! And the reputation of "pale, male and stale" precedes museums (we've had 3 different directors in the last decade, and all of them fit the stereotype).

Witnessing slavery : art and travel in the age of abolition / Sarah Thomas

The university is making small inroads into addressing the problem of lack of diversity in HE - Stormzy's scholarships are a big-name success, but there are little ones too, like the English Faculty Library had a "Twitter takeover" where students who aren't white discussed how they felt about the curriculum and what the lack of representation meant to them. And I've definitely seen an increase in the number of black students visiting the library over the years, so hopefully things are gradually starting to head in the right direction.

The Creative Case for Diversity is a good start - it's about building in ways of improving diversity to make them as embedded into museum practice as possible. To that end we're doing things like working with Magdalene Odundo, and getting other artists, particularly BAME artists, to engage with the museum's objects.

Boston's Apollo : Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent / edited by Nathaniel Silver

There's also the decolonialisation aspect of museums. One of the really meaningful exhibitions we had recently was one by Matt Smith: Flux: Parian Unpacked, which set a number of busts of 19th century figures against a backdrop of wallpapers featuring British atrocities - the Irish potato famine, the Opium Wars and the subjugation of India.

And it doesn't stop outside the library door! I've been working on our collection, trying to put together a number of resources for staff. The pictures are of some of the books in this collection. Obviously it's a work in progress, very much so, but you've got to start somewhere!

On decoloniality : concepts, analytics, and praxis / Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh

Library Hacks

I don't really have any particular library hacks. I went on a bit of a trawl through a search engine, having a look at the things they considered library hacks - and some of them were great ideas! I loved some of the ideas on this list, like having a list of the classmarks for difficult topics, and reading down fines. I particularly love the grab bag idea - that would definitely help me decide what to read next!

But most of these don't work for my library.

I don't have fines, the library is reference-only, so there aren't any borrowing hacks. Browsing is already impossible due to the fact that all the books are on closed access to readers, and most are very different sizes and shapes than the standard fiction book size, so don't lend themselves to being upended to allow for easier reading of the bottom shelf.

I guess if I were to try and give advice about the library where I work, the biggest thing I would say is:

TALK TO A LIBRARIAN!

If there's one thing I've learnt, it's that every library is different. Every library has its own foibles, borrowing limits, ways of setting out everything. Even efforts to standardise everything across the university's libraries have been met with limited success, because the way readers use resources is different; for example, people don't borrow a score and set of parts from a music library to read for an essay to be submitted that week, they're usually required for much longer, so music loans have always traditionally been for months at a time.

So my library works very differently from most of the libraries in Cambridge. Because everything is on closed access, I have to fetch it all. Because I'm on my own in a building with priceless objects, I have to keep the room secure. So it's hard to explain to readers that they can't just turn up, classmark in hand, and expect to find a book on the shelf and borrow it - I know that's how their libraries work, but I just can't do the same for them here. I try to couch it in positive terms: reference-only means no one else will have borrowed it before you, for example, but really, the best way to manage expectations is to have talked in advance!

Something Scary

I'm going to completely ignore the prompt today. We've got all the scary we can deal with at the moment, and I think it's time to revisit something Stephen Fry once talked about on QI - Room Lovely (the antithesis of Room 101).

So I'm going to list a few of my favourite things, and things that are making me smile or bringing me comfort. Hopefully you've got a list of these things too, and no matter how short the list might be, or how trivial you think some of the things on it might be, I hope it brings you comfort too.

Crochet is a relaxing - and productive - way to spend time!

1. My family, and the fact that I've got my nuclear family here in lockdown with me. My bonkers children make me smile most days, even though there are the usual hair-tearing moments!
2. Crochet
3. Sitting by a window so that the sun shines on my feet
4. Watching the birds in the garden
5. Mashed potato
6. Catching up more often with people precisely because we can't meet face to face anymore
7. Seeing the results of less traffic in pictures - like seeing the Himalayas clearly for the first time in years
8. Reading
9. Not having to commute - I have three extra hours a day now, and this really has been a balm to my soul
10. Cat memes - a perennial favourite!

Himalays rising above a north Indian city - via TrailMagazine

Surprisingly, music hasn't made it onto the list. I haven't felt up to playing music since lockdown began, which is really weird, but I just don't think I'm in the right mental place for it, which is annoying since I have a lot more opportunity to do it now!

What's on your Room Lovely list? Why not share in the comments?

Fashion

Cardies, glasses and hair in a bun, right? Simple! Done.

It's not that far from the truth when I'm at work - I tend to wear jeans because the basement is kinda filthy and I don't wear my smartest clothes at the moment because with a toddler around I'll come to work and find someone has left toothpaste on my shoulder, or Rice Krispies on my sleeve, so on the top a short-sleeve top and cardie tends to be the uniform.

Since lockdown it's a whole different ballgame though - no readers, no uniform! So at the moment only my team (which is a hotch-potch of research facilitator, registrar, exhibitions officer and assistant director) get to see me. I still wear jeans because I live in jeans (slobby tracky bums are just a bit too slobby for me), and then they've been subjected to my personal fashion taste, which mainly runs to retro kids tv and American sports.

So we've had Dungeons & Dragons, Seattle Seahawks, Rainbow Brite, He-Man, NY Mets, Transformers, MLP: Friendship is Magic, Battle of the Planets, Yankees... I don't know if anyone follows Gyles Brandreth on Twitter, who's been wearing a different jumper every day for lockdown. I could probably manage much the same with my t-shirts!

My Workspace

Only one more week to go before #Library30 is over - I wonder how much more there is of lockdown? Do I need to dig out my #Museum30 prompt list for May? I won't - this has been fun but time-consuming, and I need to have a break and get back to my Framework Five tasks, not to mention my actual work!

So my workspace - that's changed a bit very recently, having gone from this:

To this:

You'll notice, I suspect, the terrible mess and heaps of boxes - see, we only moved quite recently and there was still work to be done on the house so we have three rooms we can't actually use. Then the library uses a lot of stuff, so I've got boxes of books, files and equipment, in addition to all the stuff crammed onto my desk. The table is also used as a desk for the children, so I'm sharing it with their art supplies.

But there are similarities, I suppose. The first, and most important, is the light - I could not work without heaps of sunlight! The next is I tend to keep both spaces quite regulated - here's where I do this task, then here's where this task happens, and so on. And there is one small advantage to working from home - two monitors!! Cataloguing takes half as long when you can have both screens available! Also a much faster computer, running Windows 10, even if it is on crappier internet - talk about swings and roundabouts...

I will say that I miss my absolutely humungous desk at work though. And my trolleys!

Something Small

A short post for something small, I think. Only a week's-worth of prompts to go now!

The museum has a few staff who have been here longer than I've been alive. And it's definitely full of people who can't THROW. ANYTHING. AWAY.

As a result it's chock full of stuff - not just museum stuff, awesome stuff, important stuff, general stuff...also heaps and heaps of stuff that really should have gone the way of the dodo. So to combat this, and generally improve the cleanliness of the space (because it's easier to clean when it's tidy, as most people probably know), we instigated a 6-monthly tidy-up week. We did our first one in January - I'm excited to see if we'll be back in time to tackle the next one!

Anyway, I had vague plans, but I could only feasibly do anything on the Monday, since the library was going to have visitors the rest of the week. It didn't matter anyway - about 3 departments decided that what they were going to tackle included a whole ton of books, so my day was spent rescuing library books from recycling dumps, and collecting books from other people. In the end I had three trolleys of books to sort through and deal with, which kept me busy for the rest of the month!

Amongst the stuff deposited by the paintings department was lots of pamphlets. Most were dealers' catalogues or sales lists, which we keep because they're important for provenance work and so terrifyingly ephemeral, largely due to their size, but one was a flyer advertising the services of the new print room and rt library of the City Art Gallery, Leeds:

In case you can't read it, it says: "Mr v. Hasselt / Mr Chamberlain } please see, it can then be thrown away. JWG [Jack Goodison], 14/XII/59." So it's been waiting over 60 years to be thrown away!

Hidden Histories

The museum began in 1816, in one sense, as it was that year that Viscount Fitzwilliam died and left his collections and funds to build the museum. It also sort of began in 1848, since that was when the museum buildings were first built. But 2016 was a good year for a bicentenary, since the next one isn't coming along for another 30 years.

To celebrate, a book was written by my then line manager, and of which there are probably around 100 copies in the museum at any one time, since most of us received a copy for free:

It's also available in the Reference Library, so feel free to come in and have a look at it once the museum's open again. However, if you're interested in finding out more about the library, you'll be sorely disappointed; it's mentioned once in the entire book, and that's in a rather desultory way, something like: "[the department] benefited from the split from the reference library". Charming!

Which is a shame, because I'm sure there's lots of interesting history there. So today I'm considering the hidden history to be the history of the reference library itself, which was almost completely ignored. For one thing, I think something has to be said about Miss Giles, who was librarian for some time in the fifties and sixties (I think - again my lack of annual reports lets me down!). She was the author of some of the exhibition catalogues and handlists produced by the museum during that time (notably ones on heraldry that I can recall), but really I know her more from the notes I find here and there in the museum. As far as I can tell, she seemed to have been quietly competent - I'm always grateful for the previous library staff for their "just in case" collection development policy, since we have excellent holdings for most areas, and I aspire to do just as well now.

Just a final share, as it rather tickled me. This is what passed for the library manual before I started compiling everything I know into a currently-17-page document:

I have no idea how old it is, but it's full of choice nuggets of information, for example where the division is between objects for Applied Arts and those for Antiquities (it's various dates depending on which areas you're talking about). My favourite card of all has to be this one though:

Closed? Open? In case you're curious, they're currently closed. And I've got a couple of ideas whose signature that might be (looks like a JD to me, which would be one of two people), although I'm pretty sure that date can't possibly be 1954 - maybe 1994?

Misconceptions

I really feel like we're getting to the home stretch now - two thirds done!

So, misconceptions. I think there are several massive misconceptions about libraries and library staff, so stop me if you've heard any of them:

1. Working in a library is all shushing and stamping
2. You work in a library? How wonderful, I'd love to read books all day!
3. The typical librarian (see also Fashion, which I'll be talking about on 25th) - female, spinster, wears cardigans, glasses and hair in a bun. Loves cats.

That's enough to be getting on with, I think! Right, let's tackle them one at a time...

Shushing and stamping

My four stamps!

Okay, I'll accept the stamping part - I got four of the dang things! But as everyone who's ever worked in a library knows, it's not the librarians who do the shushing - it's the readers ;) Seriously though, there's no space behind the scenes for me to do my work, so if I have to talk to people, on the phone or in person, I have to do it in the library. And in lots of libraries it's quite common to see areas for silent study, quiet study and group study nowadays. And have you been to the public library during Rhyme Time?!

Reading books

Last year I attempted a "19 for 19" - I would read 19 books, watch 19 films, play 19 gigs, cook 19 dishes/bake 19 cakes, finish 19 craft projects... I successfully completed 19 films, and that was it. I read 3 books last year. Three. And one of those I'd read before!

At work, I don't really read at all. I read to keep up with current trends and see what's happening in the library world (Twitter is very useful here), and then the bare minimum when cataloguing in order to classify something correctly. There are people who work in libraries and read all day. They're called researchers!

The Typical Librarian

Desk Set (1957) starring Katherine Hepburn as a librarian

Alright, there's a kernel of truth in this one, bound up in a lot of fiction, assumption and subversion. So yes, historically, being a librarian was a respectable job for a single woman. Because it's a service industry, it's female-dominated and poorly paid (female-dominated until you get to the higher echelons, anyway, grr...). The spinster thing - yes, if you were single, you had to work. Mind you, given what seems to me a high number of LGBTQ+ people in libraries around (I know probably 30-50 library workers in libraries in Cambridge, and maybe a third of them are LGBTQ+), I wonder whether librarianship is just diversity-friendly? Maybe of those spinsters, there were some who had no intention of finding a man to settle down with...

The cardigans - most of us would be overdressed in a suit, and cardigans don't mess with your hair when you put them on. The glasses, yes, that happens a lot, and frankly so do the cats - I'm seeing a lot of them now we're all working from home! So I guess this is not so much of a misconception after all. Which is interesting, because I see a lot of library staff getting huffy online complaining about how they don't fit this stereotype, when actually, a lot of us kinda do. What I think the problem is, largely, is that the stereotype is somehow a negative portrayal of a person. But why's that?

Unusual Item

Naturally I'm a bit limited by what I've got with me, but there was something that did spring to mind for this prompt:

Surprise! It's an exhibition catalogue!

I chose it because we have lots of exhibition catalogues which are catalogues of an exhibition, but this is the first catalogue I've ever seen which is a catalogue of exhibitions - that rather tickled me.

Included with it is a letter from the Keeper of Circulation, which is another aspect about it that I like - we don't have curators here in the museum, we have Keepers. The Keeper of Applied Arts, Keeper of Paintings, Drawings and Prints and so on. We even have a Keeper of Administration, though sadly the head of security is not called the Keeper of the Keys which is a shame because that would be AWESOME.

And there's an application form too - unfortunately it looks like we missed our chance, because we didn't send it back before October 1966. But given I appear to have two copies of this catalogue in the collection, maybe we even had three and returned our form to book our loan exhibition from the V&A?

One day, I would love to see our annual reports fully digitised, and it would take seconds to see what exhibitions we had in a particular year - that day is not today, and I'm acutely feeling the loss of not having any of the annual reports with me at all!

Library Mystery

Once again I'm a bit stumped - there's nothing mysterious within the material I have at home, so I'll have to rack my brains and think back to some of the more surprising things in our collection.

So we don't have any "mysterious objects" in the collection itself, not really - if it's not a book, we're not likely to have it anyway. There are a few random objects, photographs, microfilms, even a CD-ROM or two, but they're not exactly surprising things for a library to have. Certainly not mysterious!

One of the things I suppose I could talk about are some of the mysteries I had to try and solve when I took over the library from the retiring librarian. Of course there was a handover, but everyone knows that there's tangible knowledge and intangible knowledge, and it's all very well handing over the library manual or whatever, but there's so much information stored away inside a librarian's brain that doesn't get handed over.

I certainly found that despite my best efforts each time I went on maternity leave - we get lots of books, and it's always a puzzle to work out where they've come from and why (when they've not been ordered, that is). I've got this down to a pretty fine art now, but it's something I was taught when I started there, and then honed through the years, and I come back and find that a book hasn't been treated how I'd expect it to have been treated because the source wasn't identified correctly in the first place - I hasten to add this is only the case for a small number of books, the majority of work people did in my absence was fantastic!!

My library manual currently runs to 17 pages, and most of what I do still isn't in there yet *weeps*.

But anyway, one of the mysteries I had to solve was trying to understand the contents of the shelves of the library office.

I'll be honest, there's still plenty there I haven't worked out yet, but here are some of the mysteries I have solved:

• Guidebooks of Italian churches - these are part of the Pouncey donation still waiting to be catalogued
• Intelligent Design and other strange and irrelevant titles - these books used images from our collection just to make their books pretty
• Lots of our catalogues - for a while the librarian wanted to house the archive of museum material...separately from the archives...
• Part of our collection of auction catalogues - some of them are richly annotated so held separately from the rest of the collection (I can only assume)

As I said, there's still plenty I haven't figured out yet (and I've had the last 8 years to try!), for example:

• What's on the floppy disks??? (I've got nothing that will read them!!)
• What are all the Russian books? (Are they even Russian?!)
• Where's the missing volume from the set of original catalogues?
• What is the thing that looks like an enormous stapler but has nowhere for staples to go?

Maybe when I get back I'll have a go at trying to solve a few of these mysteries!

Typical Day

Ahahaha, hahaha, ha. Ha.

This will be a post of two parts, I think - a typical day as I remember those things how wot they used to be, and a typical day for me now. Let's flashback...

So in olden days, I would go to work in my library. I swing past the library pigeonhole to collect the post in the morning, and deal with that first, before checking my inbox and triaging it. I'd check for enquiries, or requests for purchase, and go through those unless there was anything more pressing. Then I'd look at the plan I made in my bullet journal the day before and do anything urgent from that.

Preparation for the day ahead, assuming the library is open that day (the museum is closed on Mondays so the routine's a bit different and involves far more time shunting books around), usually takes me to opening time. We have a lot of volunteers who need their work prepped and ready to go, and if I've not fetched a book for a reader then I'll need to go and do that. Sometimes I'll try and deliver new books to their excited recipients around the museum - that's a great opportunity for a 5-minute chat with various colleagues and can lead to great ideas or progress being made somewhere along the line.

At opening time everything stops for a few minutes while I grab my coffee from the café, but I rarely have an actual coffee break, because usually I'm supervising visitors and can't leave them alone. I carefully make sure I've left the jobs I can do at the desk for opening time because I'm stuck there for the next 3 hours most days - that will usually include processing books, updating files and budgets, answering reader enquiries...all those typical library chores.

Lunch is usually away from my desk, with a Welsh lesson or two from Duo Lingo, then the afternoon is much the same as the morning. I've noticed that the organised readers tend to want to book in for mornings, while the ones who tend to assume that they can just walk in and get what they need the same day tend to leave it to the afternoon. One phoned up at 4pm to ask what time we closed, before requesting books and announcing that they'd just walked to the museum and were waiting outside - it was lucky I was able to fetch the items so quickly!

And now...?

Obviously now there are significantly fewer enquiries from outside (and I wouldn't be able to help much even if there were). I start my day with the children, doing #PEwithJoe which is a great way to boost my energy and spirit in the morning. Then it's call negotiation with my husband, where we work out which calls we have and what time, and who's going to look after the kids while the other's working.

Then our rest of day is pretty much governed by the children's routine: milk/snack at 10:30, lunch at 12, daily walk until the toddler's asleep, then milk at 2:30, snack at 4, dinner at 6. In between, I try to meet with my team or whoever I'm seeing that day, doing the little jobs that crop up (purchasing or paying invoices, emails to colleagues or vendors, work on Framework Five). The rest of the time I'm mostly cataloguing. I say rest of time - that could be 20 minutes of the day or 2 hours, depending on how guilty I'm feeling about the amount of work my schoolchild is not doing!

But I still try and end my day the same way I did as at work - plan the next day on my bullet journal. It keeps me aware of what things are more pressing, and how much I've done (and if there's anything I ended up neglecting). I find routine is really helpful at the moment, and stops me sinking into a completely unproductive black hole!

I'm not sharing mine - this one is so much neater!

Library Building

Aaaaaand I've managed to get behind - a combination of too much work and too many children! There was a nosebleed today, so that was half the afternoon gone. But no matter.

Courtyard Entrance of the Fitz

There's not much to say about my own library building - it's pretty modern, not very exciting. Mind, better to be warm in winter and chill in summer in a modern building than the opposite in a pretty but old building that is not designed with comfort in mind! Founder's Library is beautiful, looks just like an educated person's study, but it's not the most comfortable place to work.

Founders Library

So, I have visited other libraries, both in Cambridge and further afield. I think the Library of Congress is probably the furthest afield, and is absolutely amazing, and  holds a copy of the Gutenberg Bible, but I did love the New York Public Library, which contains the original toys that belonged to Christopher Robin.

New York Public Library

But buildings-wise both the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library are a fairly generic sort of Hellenic style. It's grand, certainly, but perhaps a little dull? And I had to laugh when we went on the Library of Congress tour. The guide warned us to be careful on the marble staircase, which was over a hundred years old and worn unevenly - I couldn't help but think of some colleges which had been around a bit longer than that with steps which have worn away to nothing!

Main entrance hall of Library of Congress

Entrance to Jesus College - very worn!

A few years back, I was at a conference which had a visit to the John Rylands Library included. That was fascinating, because on the face of it, the building is absolutely fantastic. It's Victorian neo-Gothic, rather like the classic London stations, but so peculiar, because we have actual Gothic buildings around. One look at this, and it feels like a stage set - it's all far too new to look convincing!

John Rylands Library

That was the same feeling for me when I visited the Cloisters (not a library, but bear with me). The building was basically constructed using parts from Gothic ruins across Europe - some from Spain, some from Germany, some from France. It was lovely, but bizarre, a sort of chimera of not-quite-right, and made for a very unsettling feeling!

Cloisters

So instead it's the old college libraries I love, with wooden panels, ornately carved architraves and  ceilings. There's often a greater quirkiness to them, and no two are alike. I've visited a few, and don't think I have a particular favourite, but I have a bit of a soft spot for Christ's, since it was where I had  a rehearsal once, and definitely makes the grade as one of the prettiest places I've ever rehearsed!

Christ's College Old Library

Library Advice

Today marks the start of the second half of this prompt list, which means I am officially halfway (even though in trying to avoid having to write on weekends I've actually done a few out of sequence and so I'm actually further than halfway - woohoo!). I don't know of any advice I can really offer about libraries particularly, beyond getting to know your readers, finding out what they really want, and staying abreast of developments generally, so you can give them what they want before they even ask for it.

But as we're all in a very strange situation right now, and struggling to work at home through a crisis, maybe I can share the advice I've found useful to my situation.

1. Goalsetting: don't expect too much of yourself or others - productivity is way down at the moment across the board. But do try to set a goal or a task with a definite result if you can - little successes will boost your spirits.
2. Routines are really helpful. We have young kids, so this was a no-brainer for us. Every morning we're up and dressed at the same time (yes, even weekends), then we schedule the day around the kids' food times and baby's nap. This has been especially useful with the 5 year old, who would otherwise sit in front of the tv all day. Knowing that 2pm is quiet reading time means that they're more likely to actually do some reading.
3. Get outside, every day, even if it's just your front porch, and see sunlight. If you have a park nearby, take a turn around it. If you have a garden, go there and stretch your arms to the sun and breathe deeply. We feel better when we're closer to nature (most of us, anyway).
4. Never work outside your working hours. Seriously. Just don't. If you can't get the work you planned done during them (and this is a target you set yourself, rather than one set by your work), revise your expectations down and try again. If it's set by your work, hopefully you can talk to your line manager about pushing back deadlines to something achievable.
5. Take time to be creative. I'm finding about an hour a week with my work knitting group, but it really, really helps. Something that occupies your mind enough that everything else just has to switch off for a while is so therapeutic.
6. Limit news - particularly about Covid-19. Only check in once, maybe twice in a day. Anything more and you're just creating unnecessary anxiety for yourself.
7. Boredom is good for you, improving creativity. Embrace it if you can. If, like me, it's not so much boredom in stillness because it's the boredom of repetition of exhausting tasks (like childcare), I don't really know what to suggest. I always have a book on the go on my phone, so any minute I can pick it up and read, and I've been learning Welsh on Duo Lingo, so those have been my outlets most of the time!
8. Help others if you can, and only if you can. It gets you outside of yourself and makes you feel like you are doing something productive. But it might be too much, so looking after just yourself is okay too.

I think that's all the advice I can give. I know I'm doing things wrong, like I haven't played my piano for ages, which I'm missing but just can't work up the energy to do it. But you do what you gotta do to get through, and that's the single biggest take home I can give at the moment.

Sport

I've got some fragmentary thoughts about sport, today's prompt. Hopefully by the time I've finished this post they will have coalesced into something meaningful!

We don't have a lot on sport generally, and I'm even more starved now that I've only got the books I brought home with me, but we do have this:

Sport and modernism in the visual arts in Europe, c. 1909-39 / Bernard Vere - find the hard copy in our collection (the UL only has E-Legal Deposit which means it's currently unavailable). It was bought because we are thinking about an Olympics exhibition (I think Paris 1924 was mentioned).

I'm sure most people are aware that the Olympics when it first began didn't just include sport, but also the arts. Quite sad that this element hasn't been continued! There have also been a lot of changes throughout, as you might have guessed. As an archer, I got quite nerdy about archery in the Olympics - it was present in most of the very early Games (1900, '04, '08 and 1920) but was dropped, possibly with good reason. Firstly, archery has a lot of different disciplines, and various different disciplines were popular with each different country that hosted - that included target archery, field archery, and even popinjay (which is still quite popular in Belgium, which hosted that year)!

Popinjay Archery: image from The Jorvik Group

That basically meant that the home nation would triumph in the medals. Secondly, not enough nations would field teams at all, so it was quietly dropped after 1920, not being picked up again until 1972 in Munich, when the competition had become a lot more standardised under FITA (Fédération Internationale de Tir à l'Arc, now World Archery Federation).

I was lucky enough to go see the archery at London 2012, held at Lords Cricket Ground. Here's a mention of the 2011 test event we got tickets for. And having completely deviated from the library and fully into sport, I'm now going to pull it all the way back again with a new resource I've been enjoying from Gale (we have a free trial for a few months): Gale Primary Sources.

One thing I've done idly, in spare moments, off and on, is try and dig up a bit more about Cambridge University Bowmen, the university's archery club. It certainly existed in some form in Victorian times, then it seems to have disappeared (much like archery from the Olympics!) until it restarted, possibly in the 40s, with the first we hear of it again being the Varsity Match held in 1950. So I did a poke around on Gale for any more information, and found out lots of information - that 1950 was the first of the modern matches (and has been held every year since - until now!), but in the 1910s and 1920s Cambridge city actually held the Grand National Archery Meeting (GNAM) a couple of times! I need more time to do more digging, but it's really exciting to see that the Varsity Match was so important that an article on it actually appears in the Times!

Varsity Match 2003 - the winning team!

Environment

Eesh, 4-day weekend means the days have caught up with me and now I'm behind schedule again. Doesn't help that this one hasn't inspired me in the slightest!

Just before lockdown we did receive this book, which I ordered not too long ago:

I think it is available at the UL as well, although there seems to be a bit of discrepancy between titles (theirs is Eco-Visionaries: Conservations for a Wrecked Planet, which is a bit more harrowing a subtitle, but has the same ISBN) - I hadn't got around to cataloguing our copy before the great lockdown, but we do have it. Climate change and environmental catastrophe affects us all, and this is a conversation between artists and architects, discussing very real and present problems such as species extinction, depletion of finite resources and our future.

It follows a previous touring exhibition in Europe, which resulted in another book: Eco-Visionaries: Art, Architecture, and New Media after the Anthropocene, which asks similar questions. I can't help but feel that if we survive Covid-19, another chapter will need to be written.

Outreach

I think, although this is day 13, that I'm actually now halfway through this prompt list (I've been doing some out of order as they've inspired me) - woohoo, turns out 13 can be lucky for some!

Interestingly, I live on a road where there is no number 13 - 11 and 15 are nextdoor neighbours. I hadn't really considered it, although I guess I should have - when I visited New York a few years back we simultaneously admired the beautiful art deco buildings and inwardly smiled every time we saw a 12th floor, and a 14th floor, but no 13th floor.

But anyway, I digress. So...outreach. The bulk of this in the museum is actually done by people who are paid to do it and do it well. It's something that as a mostly-solo librarian I just don't really have time to do. So I don't really do outreach in the way of ensuring that the library is accessible to everyone, I just hope that the people who do need to use it know that it's there and do get the access they need.

However, I may not be able to do outreach with readers, but I have done a lot to raise the profile of the library within the university community, so that hopefully other libraries who do more to engage with their readers are able to point to us as a resource that is available. That started even before I first took over the library following the departure of the librarian and senior library assistant, through doing the Cambridge 23 Things, which not only taught me about Web 2.0 (as you'll see from the beginning of this blog 10 years ago!), but got me talking to a number of librarians across the university. That, plus the Faculty and Departmental Libraries group, helped to get to recognise a lot of the real library superstars around (you know, the ones who spearhead all the initiatives and lead lots of cool projects).

Then I volunteered for the libraries@cambridge conference working party, and all of a sudden some of the superstars also knew me! That was awesome. And hopefully it helped - I think most librarians in Cambridge have gone from not even knowing there was a library at the museum, to knowing that there is, and who runs it!

Library People

Happy Easter everyone! Finally, a slightly easier one than the past few!

So on the face of it, it's just me and Barbara B - I'm full time in the library, and she puts in 12 hours a week on the dealers' catalogues.

But the museum actually has effectively three libraries: the Reference Library, the Coins & Medals Library (which is technically part of the Reference Library but works largely autonomously), and the Founders' Library, which started as the collection given by the original founder and which has grown from there. So that means we need to include Nicholas and Tanya in the head count. Then there's the library at the Hamilton Kerr Institute - ably run by Sarah.

Aaaaand then we have all the volunteers who come and work in the Reference Library each week - that's Lally and Paul, our volunteers, and then the MSSPB volunteers work in the library too, so that's Barbara, Jean, Trudy and Erika. Lots of library people! So I did a picture:

Object

This one's tough - in my WFH library I have literally zero objects which aren't books/catalogues, and I can't think of anything right now in the rest of the rest of the collection either. Objects usually go to other departments, which makes sense!

One thing I'm missing a bit are my IKEA Fejka plants. I'm no gardener, and real plants are too much of a risk to have near museum objects, because they can encourage pests, so fake ones rule the roost at the library. About £20 saw three mini succulents, a trailing plant and a small shrub which all sit on the library windowsills.

Why bother with them at all? Because real plants have a very positive effect on library spaces, as shown in a number of studies (see this news post from the Moore Library for some links). And okay, I can't clean the air or reduce the effects of Sick Building Syndrome with these plastic beauties. But they add a splash of colour into a very white room otherwise, and who knows? Maybe the clearer thinking, positive feeling and idea-generation effects of real plants aren't just because of the greater oxygen and cleaner air but also because plants cheer people up? That's certainly been the evidence of activity during lockdown - everyone's been busy in their gardens (if they have one)! Even I've planted lavender, tomatoes and sunflowers, and I'm more finger of death than green-fingered!

Food & Drink

Apart from the parties (see Library Celebrations from two days ago) there's not really much food and drink in the library, apart from the endless amounts of coffee that I drink solely to survive.

But as you might be aware, there is currently a glorious giant pineapple outside our museum.

This is the key emblem of our fantastic exhibition "Feast & Fast", which is about food, material culture and the art of food 1500-1800. Sadly, it's going to have ended before the museum can reopen, so if you didn't get to go then your best bet is buying the sumptuous catalogue that accompanied it (I'll put a link here if anyone's interested once the museum's online shop is up and running again) - obviously there's a copy for perusal in the library too, once we're back!

One thing people might not know is just how far in advance some of the work is done for these exhibitions. Here is a tweet I wrote nearly 3 years before the exhibition opened, about some of the sources we used for research!

Someone please tell me how you are supposed to catalogue books about food without getting hungry? #EatExhibition @FitzMuseum_UK pic.twitter.com/B0YkVe1RSb

— Diana Caulfield (@dsw26) August 24, 2017

Library Secrets

What a silly title, right? If I told you all my library secrets they wouldn't be secret anymore!

Once again I'm racking my brains for something I can say - and this time it's got to be something I can say without giving away too many state secrets. So...hmm. Let's go behind the scenes a bit and talk about the side of the library that most people never see - the really grotty, dank and shadowy side that even I try not to think about too hard most of the time..

Secret The First: We actually have a lot more books than you might think.

Although I've actually got no idea of the exact figure, I'm fairly confident that we have over 350,000 books and catalogues. And the reason why I have no idea of the exact figure is

Secret The Second: We have never done a stocktake.

For many logistical reasons, including multiple catalogues (including two card catalogues!), too many books, too many locations and not enough staff. One other of those logistical reasons is

Secret The Third: Most of our books are NOT in classmark order.

A good majority of the books are held in departments across the museum. They're roughly organised by subject where there's been space to do so, but librarians past (curse you guys!) used some very rough classifications at times, not being consistent at all (we have at last count 5 separate classification systems for all our books, catalogues and periodicals), and where they've been consistent has actually been a bane too - for example we have around 300 books on maiolica all with an identical classmark (42 NK4315). So when I'm fetching a book, I'm drawing on a lot of skills to locate it!

There - three secrets. And now I've said too much!

Shhh...

Library Celebrations

Taking this one a bit literally, we used to have Christmas parties in the library for all staff at the museum, which was always good fun. Sadly there's no longer the space (the above picture is pre-removal of open shelves), and there are plenty of other museum festive celebrations - and other celebrations too, like when we've worked really hard on an exhibition, or a refurbishment of a gallery.

Of course, at the moment ain't no celebrations at all. I can think of two recently which had to be postponed (let's not say cancelled just yet) - the building of a lab which meant the library got its office back (can you tell what I was most looking forward to celebrating? ;) ) and the refurbishment of a gallery which has just recently reopened to the public to glorious fanfare.

It's times like this you think you're never going to take those moments for granted anymore.

Famous Archives

I have to say, this one has stumped me a bit. But it's Day 7 and I'm going to have to come up with something, so maybe I'll talk a little bit about some of the donors of collections that have come to the library, because some of them are pretty well-known.

Richard, Viscount Fitzwilliam

Obviously there was the original donor: Richard, VII Viscount Fitzwilliam of Merrion, whose donation set up the museum in the first place, but I'm fairly sure the reference library has nothing of his in its collection. The "library" that was received in his bequest is kept in the Department of Manuscripts and Printed Books, and includes the famed Fitzwilliam Virginal book.

Work by Degas

One that seems to have been incredibly generous was the classicist A.S.F. Gow, who spent much of his life at Trinity College, and served on the museum board. When he died, he left the museum his collection of works by Degas, which is reasonably well-known. However, he also left hundreds - perhaps thousands? (I don't know, I've never counted) of books - his Loeb Classical Library collection, his texts on the Italian Renaissance, I think we even received his complete Dictionary of National Biography (vastly superceded nowadays, but a really useful resource at the time)!

Godfrey Gompertz

It seems a trend for collectors to not only donate their art objects but also their enormous libraries of books on their favourite subjects. One, Godfrey Gompertz donated one of the finest collections of Choson and Koryo ceramics outside Korea, in the spirit of improving Western understanding about this remote country. But also we have his many books on "Corea", as it was referred to in the 1930s! Another ceramics collector more recently, John Shakeshaft, has considerably added to our Applied Arts material with 26 boxes of books and hundreds of pottery items, particularly studio pottery.

Sir Sydney Cockerell

There are a few directors of the museum who perhaps deserve a special shout out: Sir Sydney Cockerell is one, who had a bit of a reputation for cajoling people to gift their artworks to the museum in their wills. We have a couple of his books which were actually gifts to him from Queen Mary of Teck (the irony, of course, being that Mary was herself quite acquisitive!). Louis Clarke was another whose name crops up in reference library books time and again, but unsurprisingly I think we've had gifts from most of the directors through the years.

Winifred Lamb

Finally, just because this is a rather male list, a few of the women who have also contributed through the years: A woman called Helen Forester (who I know nothing else about!) had a keen interest in art history, and her books can be found in the reference library and in the Hamilton Kerr Institute library. Winifred Lamb, a former Keeper of Antiquities, left many books to the collection, complete with annotations about our own collections of antiquities. Stella Panayotova, Keeper of Manuscripts and Printed Books until very recently, has donated a huge number of books on manuscripts and incunabula, while Julia Poole, a former Keeper of Applied Arts, frequently gives the library her personal copies of books on maiolica. Without these contributions, the holdings of the reference library wouldn't be nearly as rich and wonderful!

Something New

Here's my something new - bit of a cheat because it's not particularly new, having been published a couple of years ago, but it's new to the library: The Anatomy of Riches : Sir Robert Paston's Treasure by Spike Bucklow.

Spike is one of the staff at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, the part of the museum which deals with easel painting conservation. Recently he put together a rather wonderful exhibition called Sharpening Perceptions : How to copy a masterpiece, which takes works which had been conserved at the HKI and puts them alongside the copies that the first year students did of them as they cleaned and restored them. One of the paintings included is Spike's copy of Flowers and Fruit by Jan Van Os which he himself did as a student at HKI many years ago!

The Paston Treasure is a painting that Spike conserved, of the treasured possessions of Sir Robert Paston. Included are some exquisite works of art, nautilus cups, jewellery, vases and so on. It was the subject of a big exhibition too, for which we have the catalogue (classmark: New Haven.2018).

I've picked it because it has a little more meaning for me at the moment, as I'm part of the conference working party of ARLIS's Cambridge 2020 conference - which has been postponed to 2021 now, but so much of the planning had been done already. Spike was going to talk about this for us (and will hopefully do so next year when the conference finally happens) from his conservation perspective.

However, it's also a very uncomfortable painting. We don't actually know much about the people in it - it's thought that the girl might be Paston's granddaughter, and in place of the clock there was for a while a silver platter, and before that a mystery woman, but never mind how lavishly the boy is dressed, in his brocade and gold chains, it's very likely that he was a slave.

I think it's curious though that we don't have a name for the artist either. So much discussion goes on about the artist's gaze and looking at the models (there's an interesting exhibition which looks at the relationship between Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent at the moment at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum), that it's really interesting that we lack both sides of this communication, not just one.