Our conference venue - the beautiful Christ Church, Oxford
It was great to be back at another HLF conference, having organised the previous year's! This one was especially pertinent to many of us, because who hasn't found themselves dealing with all sorts of things as part of a library job? Particular highlights for me included:
Ann Sylph (Zoological Society of London) on managing the many weird and wonderful items that make up their collections - as well as books and archives, this includes sculptures, paintings, pictures, slides, transparencies. She described how they had done a SWOT analysis, identified their USPs and a vision of where they would like to be in five years' time and then worked on this. They had begun by
Spending an initial six months focussing on documentation and doing a strategic review, which then led the way forward.
addressing storage issues by obtaining suitable boxes, monitoring the environment and for pests (all of which we do already in Special Collections) and developing a disaster plan. Evidence from the monitoring was then used to improve conditions.
Celebrating outreach wins - eg produced bookmarks rather than leaflets as these are more likely to be kept, featuring in magazines and newspapers, putting on talks for staff enabling them to get to know the collections, using zoo events to attract a different audience, lending items to exhibitions external to the zoo. They also targeted historians to publish about their collections eg by targeting history of science departments.
Don't forget the bigger picture - the rest of your organisation and the world
Take opportunities when they come up
Have work-life balance
Louisa Yates (Gladstone's Library), the only residential library in the world had won a grant from the Carnegie Foundation in New York. Over the previous six years they had brought upon a huge increase in usage, from no data being kept and no strategic plan, and only an average of three people a day using the library, they now have a plan, six years' worth of usage data and are now at daily full capacity, with bedrooms at 95% occupancy. The grant was to pay for a project they had always wanted to do - digitisation of Gladstone's books, thus making them available to a much wider audience. He had carefully collected books that were important to them, and annotated richly. It was quickly realised that the original plan, to digitise 350,000 items would be impossible, as they weren't catalogued and very limited metadata already existed, and transcribing this amount of material unrealistic. A revised, much more feasible, bid was written, detailing the digitisation of 15,000 letters (70,000 pages) and 5734 books and involved establishing a digital studio on site, with crowd-sourced transcription of a limited amount of the material. They had used SMART goals to set the project stages but did encounter problems along the way:
Images couldn't go onto the existing server as they were too big and the cost of alternative storage hadn't been included in the bid.
Adding subject keywords, whilst straightforward for trained library staff, wasn't a suitable task for many volunteers or work experience students.
Her learning points from the bid experience were
People delivering the project should have been involved from the start.
Library staff needed improved knowledge of tech
Get paperwork in place before recruiting staff, eg manuals and workflows
I also enjoyed talks by Freda Matassa on valuing your collections, Judith Curthoys who managed to make a talk on implementing GDPR very amusing, Dorota Antoniak on accessibility and Sian Prosser and Laura Dimmock-Joneson developing professionally.
At the beginning of September I attended the first day of the CILIP Rare Books and Special Collections Group conference, at the beautiful Downing College in Cambridge. The theme of the conference was around teaching using Special Collections, a really good fit with my job where we already do quite a bit of teaching using our collections. I was hoping to pick up some tips and tricks for how other libraries with special collections used those collections in teaching, as well as make the most of the networking opportunities afforded by the well thought out conference space.
First up was Jessica Gardner, the Cambridge University Librarian and Director of Library Services with an inspirational keynote Memories of wonder and discovery which really emphasised the career changing moments brought about by encounters with special collections.
"Fundamental turning points in a learner's journey"
Hers had been with a medieval manuscript in the Brotherton Library at Leeds University. She talked about embedding content in undergraduate learning, first through the Adam and Eve projects at Exeter University back in 2002 - 2005, to the video poem earlier this year by Imtiaz Dharkar showing the digitisation journey from shelf to screen at Cambridge University Library.
and leading on to breaking down barriers between developers and scholars with a medieval manuscripts hackathon - creating webapps using manuscripts from the University Library's collections.
The next speaker was Tabitha Tuckett, rare books librarian at University College London, with particular responsibility for academic support and events across their Special Collections.
Strong collection management is the key to learning and teaching
Object-based learning is something that Special Collections have been engaged in for years, so the Connected Curriculum represented a brilliant opportunity to broaden the reach of this. The Connected Curriculum means students have to meet and work with other professional staff, connecting to workplace learning eg getting involved in producing exhibitions and having their assessment based on a presentation about this. Students are trained as 'professional researchers' so receive handling training so they can access the books in Special Collections. It also involved setting their own research agenda, so coming up with problems experienced by Special Collections and then using other depts., such as Maths or Medical Physics to solve them. One project used a tool normally used to look at images of the back of people's eyes to investigate how hard woodcut images in early printed books were pressed into the paper.
Concrete physicality stimulates imagination in research
After Tabitha, Sarah Mahurter, Manager of Archives and Special Collections at the University of the Arts London, spoke on Archival pedagogics: exploring the significance of teaching as a creative endeavour using Archives and Special Collections. They had created a vision in their library research strategy that all students should have the opportunity to experience Special Collections, and have established a community of practice within the university to help make this happen. They created several workshops:
researching skilfully cutting across subject divides, which included skills in handling, examining and curating, whilst introducing students to a range of collections.
researching with archives giving practical skills in searching and finding archives and what to expect when using them
escape roomsession was offered as part of their annual Library Services staff conference and as a staff development opportunity.
The second part of the day was given over to academics providing their perspective on teaching using Special Collections. Simon Eliot, Professor Emeritus of the History of the Book, spoke on teaching book history at MA level and the need to provide vivid material examples (likening the experience as a relic to a pilgrim), for example comparing the actual Geneva and King James Bibles provided both comparison of their physicality as well as their content. However, this was hard to timetable and teach because of needing access to the books themselves. He had eventually assembled a collection of battered books solely for use in teaching, which then instilled confidence into the students when handling them. The module on the book in the ancient world had proven particularly difficult to teach with physical examples due to the rare and fragile nature of the survivals from this period. They had got round this by displaying fragments but couldn't allow handling. And a course on modern first editions had shown the need for the actual book to be studied, as it was impossible to distinguish between editions, impressions etc from digitised versions alone.
Teaching shows the need to look at the book itself rather than pictures of it
Finally, Jason Scott-Warren (Reader in Early Modern Literature and Culture at Cambridge University) and Andrew Zurcher (Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Queens' College, Cambridge) did a double act on teaching the early modern material text. They likened undergraduate students' engagement with texts in a nice tidy modern edition as being as far removed from the creation of the book as the image of a stork bringing a baby is from an actual birth! Engaging undergraduates with the process of making the book is what helps those students to stand out from the crowd, but then also creates a pressure to work with original texts. The students are still encouraged to learn quasi-facsimile transcription as it helps to develop a systematic understanding of the printing of a title-page, and the same with collational formula
πA⁶(πA1+1 πA5+1.2) A-2B6 2C2 a-g6 χ2g8 h-v6 x4 “gg3.4”(± “gg3”) ¶-2¶6 3¶1 2a-2f6 2g2 “Gg6” 2h6 2k-3b6 (collational formula of Shakespeare's First Folio)
This loosens disciplinary identity for the students and allows the teacher to develop intimacy with the collections, as well as changing teaching methods, such as writing blog posts about their subjects.
Organised classes and events are what gets students into Special Collections
Questions at the end of the day included, "Where does cataloguing sit with this?". The answer was that academics should feedback that they need to have things catalogued in order to use them and to encourage libraries to prioritise cataloguing.
It was a great conference, and, although I could only be there for one day of it, I learnt a lot. My main take away points are:
the importance of cataloguing when needing to use collections, whether that is for teaching or displays.
ideas around developing workshops for researching skills rather than on a strictly subject basis.
ideas around problem solving using other subjects.
Many thanks to the committee of the RBSCG for all their hard work organising the conference. You will find tweets from the conference using the hashtag #rbscg18 and there is a Wakelet bringing together all the tweets in one place.
I attended this day long event at The National Archives in June - it was designed to launch a refreshed guide to collaboration between archives services and Higher Education worked on by History UK.
Background
The previous guide was produced by RLUK in 2015, based on research done in 2014, so this is a much needed update. It had been found that individual archives were being approached by academics keen to collaborate, but archives were unsure what REF2014 was, and the relationships that formed were not particularly resilient as they were often reliant on a single academic. From this the DCDC (Discovering Collections; Discovering Communities) series of conferences emerged.
The new guide
Includes refreshed case studies and references to REF, TEF and KEF, the 2017 HE Bill, UKRI and the Office for Students, all of which affect the landscape in which collaboration is now happening.
Several case studies were offered. These included Our Criminal Past, which brought together academics and archivists through engagement vehicles such as workshops, an advice forum and social media. They used HistoryPin to allow members of the public to add information about their criminal ancestors. I found the case studies particularly useful as they outlined the obstacles they had found to collaboration. It was apparent the same issues cropped up repeatedly, namely:
Time/resources - without the resources for an assistant it becomes very difficult to keep the momentum of the project going.
Maintaining relationships with the other collaborating organisations, each of whom may have their own interests/objectives, which are different to yours.
Collaborators will have their own routines, working practices, lack of expertise and skills. There may well be several layers of processes that each collaborator has to work through internally before a project can happen
Managing a website, particularly the costs of developing and maintaining it
Copyright issues, particularly around using images
Lack of awareness of the amount of work involved, eg the timeframe to produce an exhibition is usually years
My group worked on identifying the challenges and benefits of collaboration
The audience at this event was fairly evenly split between archivists (working in a variety of sectors) and academics. We weren't allowed to just sit and listen either, there were several group exercises including "speed dating" where we had a few minutes at a time to talk to various academics in turn about what we were hoping to gain from a partnership. These were a great way to meet academics engaged in a variety of areas, plus people looking after other collections.
The guide itself outlines the steps needed to be taken when instigating a collaborative partnership, and encourages the answering of some key questions, such as who are the key decision makers, finding out what is important to each partner and getting everything in writing. It also provides a complete project template to use.
Priority cards
The final exercise was to arrange a series of priority cards into a diamond nine shape, which encouraged us to explore in groups why others had different priorities and how they might align with ours. I particularly liked this diamond nine produced by another group, who had added an extra priority card for 'budget for cake and refreshments'!
am looking into using HistoryPin to put our collections on the map
have put a reminder in my calendar to check for the publication of the new collaboration guide this summer
have followed up with a couple of academics from other universities who are interested in using some of our Special Collections in their research and/or teaching
have put a reminder in my calendar to check on work being done to track citations of archive services across published papers and journals
