Conservation Win

This is a tough one - I've been racking my brains for several days trying to come up with something, particularly something I've got to hand, but I've so far come up with a big fat zero. Most of my books don't need conservation in the usual sense of the word - maybe a bit of binding repair, or cleaning, or sometimes the books are so damaged that were they valuable they might be conserved, but because they're often not rare or too old, I can usually source a replacement which is cheaper than getting a conservator in to do any work.

So I thought I'd share a conservation win from the main museum instead. People still remember the pots getting smashed 14 years ago, and they still get asked about by visitors! Here's the story about the work that was done to repair them so that they look stunning from far away, but you can see the huge amount of work done on them when you get close up.

In the meantime, I think a lot of conservation wins probably happen after conservation fails. "Oh dear, this happened, what steps do we need to take to not let it happen again?" sort of thing. I'm sure every museum has a disaster plan, and I think it's going to be interesting to see how these plans hold up to the current situation. Flood, yes, fire, no problem - but epidemic?

That brings me to another win, although it's not really conservation-related. Being part of the university, we're very lucky to have a lot of infrastructure ready for everyone to be working from home in a way that I imagine a lot of the bigger museums, particularly the ones in London, probably don't. It seems anathema to have to work away from the collections, but many of us have no choice, and the fact that we're even trying (and sometimes succeeding) is surely a win!

A Collection

There are lots of collections within the library. They are mostly due to bequests - people leave the museum their priceless art, and their thousands of books (thanks guys!). These can be a bit of a double-edged sword. It's great to receive free books, particularly from discerning collectors, because they can really enhance our collections with the research they incorporate. However, there's no such thing as a free book - it takes time to process donations, and they can take up a lot of space. Recently we acquired a library from a collector of ceramics - he gave us hundreds of pots, and 26 boxes of books (eep!).

13 boxes of books from a very generous former keeper of Prints!

 But I don't have any of those collections with me at the moment. What I do have though, is a small donation of some lovely little art books from the daughter of an artist who was working out of Berlin just before the war. Aren't they adorable? Each book is about the same size as my phone! They don't seem to exist anywhere else in the university, and they're over 100 years old, most of them, which means getting hold of them if we ever wanted them in the future could be tricky.

And just all the love for the stunning book plate too!

Library Path

How is everything? I'm coping relatively okay, I think. I'm writing this on day 7 of my first week on lockdown with both children at home, and it's been a bit fraught this morning (I think we're teething again, which is an unpleasant experience for all involved). But never mind - let's think about libraries!

Today the prompt is library path, which I'm interpreting as how I made it into libraries and this library in particular. It was in hindsight a fairly straightforward path, if a little accidental.

Image by JamesDeMers from Pixabay

I'd finished a music degree, with no idea what to do next - no one was suggesting I carry it on any further, although at the time I think I would have liked to without any particular idea how. Now I feel like I've forgotten everything about it except the opening bars of Puer natus est, which began our Melody as Ritual lecture series.

I ended up doing a music PGCE, which was very challenging. I enjoyed the work at one school, but not the second, and while it equipped me with lots of skills, it really wasn't what I wanted to do at the time. However, it had got to June and I was just finishing up some of the written work. I was in the UL looking up resources on one of their catalogue computers, and just happened to think, "let's just quickly check the careers website, not done that for a while," and saw an opening for a library assistant at the Pendlebury Library of Music...

Reader, I got the job.

It was tedious work - the library was in the process of moving online, and my day was spent literally scanning hundreds of barcodes, but I got my in. A few months later, the librarian changed jobs and the rest of us were bumped up a bit with responsibilities while they hired a new librarian, so for 12 weeks I got to find out what the rest of being a library assistant was like. And clearly that didn't put me off, because when the contract finally expired and nearly everything was online, I moved to the Squire Law Library, then four years later to the Fitz.

I'd just started my distance learning library degree with Aberystwyth then, and that carried me through the next 6 years. In that time, the other staff at the Fitz library took early retirement and left me mostly alone, so I took over most of what they did for a modest promotion: my official job title is now "Chief Library Assistant".

I'd never considered being a librarian, or working in libraries, up until that fateful day in the UL. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I'd not seen that posting. Where would I be? Would I have left Cambridge entirely? Sucked it up and been a teacher though I know I would have hated it? It's funny, but I clearly didn't know myself at all, because when I found library work, I found something I enjoyed and was pretty good at. So the library gods were truly smiling on me that day.

(Image of Wiborada, patron saint of libraries in Switzerland. Deutsch: wahrscheinlich Friedrich ColnerEnglish: probably Friedrich Colner / Public domain)

Favourite Item

Wow, getting to the tough questions straightaway!

So it's naturally very hard to have one particular favourite, and even harder to show you any of them when I'm not currently at the library. When things were looking serious, I made a few trips in the car to grab what I could in order to work from home, which wasn't an awful lot - I really don't have a lot of room at home for everything. So instead of showing you my absolute favourite, which even if I knew what it was, I probably don't have access to it, I'm going to show one of my favourite items I happened to bring home with me for cataloguing.

Gorgeous, isn't it? So, what is it?

It's a Christie's catalogue, for an 18-day sale in 1856. These are really useful for us - for provenance, we can use them to track down items which may have seen the inside of an auction house - some things more than once. Why did I pick it? Firstly, that psychedelic binding! A close-up below:

Here also we find that the book has its own provenance. Spencer P was a keen collector of antiquarian delights, and his bequest to the museum included a collection of chapbooks among many other things. But below is the other reason why I picked this item out.

That right there is some serious calligraphy porn. A beautiful hand, and some really fascinating information: he (I assume Spencer but haven't confirmed this) has noted down the price each items was sold for, and who it went to. Colnaghi is a dealer that we also have catalogues for, so maybe some of these items will be in some of their later catalogues too?

And finally, just another picture which shows the attention to detail when it was bound: the fore-edge has the same marbling as the end papers and the covers. Okay, it's no careful painting, and the design is the same all the way round, but for a book which is in my library, rather than the MSSPB collection, I think it's a quite stunning little work of art with a lot of interest!

PS For those of you who care about this sort of thing, yes, it really does smell fabulous.

My Library

#LIBRARY30 1: My Library

My library is a bit of an unusual creature, as far as I can tell. It's based in a museum within a university, which I often say is the triple whammy of public service - all three are underfunded!

It's mainly a reference library, since the museum's archives are entirely separate, as are the museum's outstanding manuscripts and rare printed books collections. We have several main foci: exhibition catalogues, particularly of exhibitions we've lent objects to, general art texts and periodicals for research, and dealers' and auction catalogues, which I think is our USP. Mind you, no one group seems to demand more enquiries than another, which makes me think that we get the balance about right.

Here is the library as it looks now. When I started, it was about three times the size, but we lost the bit at the front to a locker area, and the open shelves where people could browse the books became a closed off space, so it's somewhat of a corridor now. It can get a bit crowded when we have a lot of visitors! It's open to all: university members, researchers, members of the public, and although most of our visitors are students of history or history of art, sometimes it's surprising who does come to visit.

Of course, that's not happening right now - it's not surprising, but we're currently seeing very few research enquiries or requests to visit while we're all on lockdown!

#LIBRARY30

So the world has gone a bit mad, and I'm working from home whilst also teaching my school-aged child and simultaneously entertaining and stimulating my 17-month-old, while also trying to make sure we keep on top of all of the things but also staying 2 metres away from anyone else...

... These are strange times indeed, and it feels very odd trying to do any work while I'm so far away from the collections and people I work with. I came across a Twitter post a couple of weeks ago which really caught my eye:

#Archive30 launches next month! Which day are you looking forward to? 🤩 pic.twitter.com/1kVFcVTW2F

— ARA Scotland (@ARAScot) March 10, 2020

 And while it's for archives, I thought it might work well for libraries too. So, over the next month, I'm going to try and write a post each day for my own #LIBRARY30. If it captures your imagination, why not have a go too?

Framework Five - Thing 1: What is Information Literacy?

I have enrolled onto the Framework Five as a fun way to do CPD, and although I wasn't sure about the time commitment, I'll see how far I get.

Thing 1: What is Information Literacy?

magnifying glass Image by geralt CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay

Your task for Thing 1 is to write a short, reflective paragraph on what informs, and contributes to, information literacy in your context. Think about some of the types of information you deal with as part of your job. This could be metadata, student information, statistics on anything from borrowing to social media, budgets, lists of holdings, palaeographical information, etc. Try to narrow your thinking down to a specific information-based task that you feel particularly fluent in or confident about.

I thought about what I felt most confident about, and decided cataloguing was a good subject for me. I started brainstorming where I picked up all my cataloguing information, and it started to become quite a long list! Initially, I learnt on the job when I first started in the Fitzwilliam Museum Reference Library, then I went on half a dozen courses run at the University Library. The training uses a variety of resources, which do inform what I do - using Library of Congress Subject Headings, for example, or making sure that the catalogue meets minimum ISBD requirements involves knowing what those requirements are. I've also attended training run by other groups for specific types of resource - exhibition catalogues, maps and music are all treated differently, for example. And finally I had to learn the theory behind cataloguing as part of my library degree (and did an exercise in cataloguing computer games, which was a lot of fun).

But the learning only begins with the formal training, and my cataloguing now looks very different from the cataloguing I did when I first started, even after I'd completed this training. Since then, new guidelines and specifications have been rolled out, and new software has been made available (and obsolete software has been retired). I've made new connections with relevant communities - the Cataloguers' Forum is one, and talking to colleagues and volunteers about our work means we share information with each other. Twitter is a helpful tool to extend communities of practice beyond the immediate workplace, and can lead to useful advice and articles - for example although I'd learnt that there were limitations to the world view espoused in Dewey and LC classification schedules, the problematic language still used by these world views was something I learnt much more about through the Twittersphere. And finally, my cataloguing is informed by the people I catalogue for: the readers who want to access the books I'm cataloguing. If they can't find something, then the record hasn't served its purpose.

Now write a short paragraph on how fluency in this activity is defined, and where that definition emerged from. Think about whether fluency in this activity has changed, why it changed, and how you incorporated those changes into your practice. Consider too the community within which you developed your fluency with that activity, and if and how it influenced you.

So my fluency in cataloguing is going to be different from that of someone who is a cataloguer, I suspect, but there are various ways I think fluency is defined, again some formal and some not so formal. Formal ones include the software we use to catalogue, which won't save a record if it thinks it's not correct, or will flash up warnings of varying degrees of severity (some let you save a record, some don't). Then there's also the bibcheck that the UL runs to check some of the machine-readable data. Fluency changed dramatically for many of us when we switched from one library management system to another and had to learn new ways of working, and that was where I saw the community of librarians change too, to become more collaborative rather than hierarchical - as we were all finding our feet some of us were finding workarounds to solve problems instead of waiting for the fix from 'on high', and sharing these tips, sometimes upwards as well as across.

That's my reflection on Thing 1 - hope I've managed it correctly!