Library Day in the Life #8, part 3

It seems like Friday has come around very quickly!  Today will be a very busy day, to celebrate National Libraries Day, CLIC (Cardiff Libraries in Co-operation) have organised a series of tours of Cardiff libraries for library staff.  We have two planned for today, one in the morning, and the other in the afternoon, plus both myself and the other library assistant will be heading off to attend tours of our own.

The day starts with an all staff briefing first thing in the morning to introduce the new exhibition, The Queen: Art and Image, opening to the public on Saturday.  These briefings are a really great opportunity to hear about what went into the planning of an exhibition and to get a chance to look around it before the building opens.

After the briefing we race back up to the library to start getting everything ready before the first tour arrives at 10.30am.  We put out on display a number of items from our locked cases that the visitors will be able to handle, including a 15th century incunabula, a copy of Pliny's Natural History!


Museum scrapbooks from the early 20th century


I'm a little nervous about the first tour, as I will be leading it for the first time.  Normally the head librarian is responsible for all the tours, but he decided to give me and the other library assistant the chance to do the morning one.  I think everything goes ok, I don't forget anything too important or get too tongue-tied, and everyone seems to enjoy it.  They weren't however, quite prepared for just how much walking was involved as we showed them around all the many departmental libraries we have scattered throughout the building.  Thankfully, no-one got lost in the labyrinth maze of the basement corridors!



Doing the introduction to my tour


There's time for a quick break for lunch, and a trip across to the art department to drop off some new books and see if they have anything for me to collect.  The art staff are often sent free copies of books and exhibition catalogues, or they pick them up on their travels, and they usually donate them to the library.  We have a shelf in their department where they leave books for us to collect and catalogue, today there is only one, a V&A publication on Jingdezhen porcelain.

The second tour of the day is conducted by the head librarian, but I have to duck out early in order to make it up to Cardiff University's SCOLAR (special collections and archives) department for my guided tour.  When I arrive at SCOLAR, I get the opportunity to check out the latest exhibition they have put on in the foyer.  A selection of students were each given a display case to exhibit items from the special collections that illustrate their chosen theme.  It was a wonderful example of how you could showcase your 'treasures' in different ways, and the various ways books could be interpreted depending on how they were grouped together. 

Also out in the foyer is Cardiff University's Turning the Pages kiosk, a massive thing which must be incredibly difficult to move, on it students can view ten items from the collections that have been digitised.  Going through to the main area, I see a few researchers hard at work in the reading room, before we duck in to the closed stacks to see shelf upon shelf of books and archival material that staff are working through. 

Items from the Cardiff Rare Books collection at SCOLAR, Cardiff University

The largest project that the SCOLAR team are working on is the collection of over 14,000 items that make up the Cardiff Rare Books collection.  The collection was acquired back in 2010, and although work began on cataloguing it immediately, only a fraction of it's potential as a research tool has been explored yet.  The collection includes many rare and unique items, including 175 incunabula (pre-1501 printed books), Shakespearean material and a wide selection of private press material.  I spent most of my visit oohing and aahing at all the amazing books, and feeling very jealous of what an amazing experience cataloguing that collection must be!

Reading Aloud event - 5th November 2011

Last Saturday I took part in the BookIns Reading Aloud event at the National Museum Wales.  Organised by Leona Jones, it's the second of these events to be held at the museum (the first was back in March 2011 to celebrate International Women's Day) and aims to create an "aural and visual impact in unexpected places".

 Participating in the BookIns Reading Aloud event at the National Museum Wales

The theme of this event was travel writing, so we all brought along our favourite travel related books to read aloud for half an hour.  Mine was Round Ireland with a Fridge by Tony Hawks.



Courtesy of Amazon

Participants spread out over two locations, the Main Hall and the Welsh Landscape Gallery.  As we were reading a large screen in the Main Hall displayed images from the library's collection of travel books including; Gerald Cambrensis The Journey through Wales/The Description of Wales; Sarah Anne Wilmot's Diaries (c.1810) and Shirley Jones's Taith Arall/An Other Journey (2008).



Illustration from Taith Arall by Shirley Jones

The event was a great success, and I'll definitely be taking part in the next one to be held at the Museum, which is happening  in February 2012 to coincide with the LGBT week.

LibCampUK11 Session 2: Special collections

This was the session I was most looking forward to as I work in a museum library with a number of special collections, and I always love hearing about how other people have promoted theirs (and steal ideas!).

I don't think I can top the excellent write up from Girl in the Moon (well it was her session!) but I'll give it a go.

We started with introductions, I think this was one of the only sessions I went to where everyone introduced themselves.  Forty-five minutes isn’t very long to discuss your topic and introducing everyone does eat into it, but it was useful to get a feel for the various backgrounds and experiences of special collections that people had.

Next Laura (@theatregrad) gave us a brief overview of her dissertation, which had focused on library exhibitions and the sorts of issues involved.

Our 'Book of the Month' case in the process of rearrangement

There were two points that came up in the session that were particularly pertinent for me, the first was that libraries can tend to be a little over protective of their special collections, and in some ways treating them more like private collections.  We become so concerned with saving them from wear and tear that we can restrict access more than is entirely necessary. 



The sign at the top of the stairs to the library
 - not the most welcoming of images!

The second point was that many libraries are still not taking full advantage of the benefits of the internet for online exhibitions and digitised access to material.  It was pointed out that if a collection is deemed special, it won’t just be the local population who find it so, it may well have worldwide appeal.  There was a concern that advertising too much will result in a flood of requests to visit the material that the library cannot possibly cope with.  But agreement was reached that in many cases most people would be happy with just consulting the online versions, so you wouldn’t see too dramatic a rise in requests to consult material. 

I think this may be where the experience of a museum library can slightly differ from some of the other types of libraries that hold special collections.  We already have a steady stream of visitors into the museum building to see our collections so we are more likely to get requests to visit the library in person.  Although we have always made it clear that we are an appointment only library, we often receive on the spot requests from visitors.

A very good point was made that raising the profile of your collections, can also raise the profile of your library within your institution, and that it can often be used as leverage to apply for more funding.

We tried to define what a special collection is, which was not as easy as we thought.  The general consensus was that it is a collection of material (books, photos, journals, letters etc.) on a certain subject or period, or gathered for a particular reason, or by a particular collector, that is kept together in a library often separate or distinct from the main stock.  The items could be valuable or old, but not necessarily as it is just as common to find special collections of contemporary items.  One thing we did seem to agree on is that they do tend to be unique in some way, either because of the scarcity of the items themselves, or in the way they have been put together.



An artists book from Shirley Jones of the Red Hen Press
 in the National Museum Wales library collection

This then led on to a discussion about the types of materials found in a special collection, and how easy it is for an organisation to not realise the value of what they hold.  Some rather harrowing tales were shared of people trying to rescue discarded items from skips because an organisation didn’t understand (or care!) about the significance of what they were throwing away.

A very interesting discussion rounded off the session, about the practice of small companies that cannot manage their special collections loaning them (on a permanent basis) to larger institutions with the necessary experience to care for them.  Some interesting questions were raised about how to choose an institution.  I have to admit I did privately think at this point, "you’ll be lucky to find more than one that wants it!"  If an institution takes on a collection from another organisation, they will usually be responsible for all care and conservation, housing it, providing access and promoting it to the wider public.  As they are likely be working with limited budgets and space requirements for their own collections, they may not be falling over themselves to take on the added burden of someone else’s, regardless of the prestige that may accompany it.  However, it was decided that if you did have the luxury of choice, to go with the one that already has similar material in their collections, as that way any researchers using the material can see it all in the same location.


Egenolff Herbal c.1536 in the National
Museum Wales library collection

Sadly the session felt like it was over way too quickly, I would have happily stayed longer if I could, as there were still so many other aspects we could have talked about.  But it did inspire me to take more of a look at how we are using our special collections, and ways we could do more.