2020 and onwards

One of my aims a year ago was to blog more often - as you can see, that didn't happen. I had a plan, but ended up with so little time available thanks to lockdown and WFH with a small child around, that I had to prioritise other things. Whilst 2020 had many negatives, we were very fortunate - able to keep our jobs and WFH in relative comfort (especially once the small child returned to preschool!). We already had a regular Ocado delivery slot, and were able to share it with our elderly neighbours and also get supplies requested for the local food bank. In fact, Ocado gave us a very regular delivery slot because of all this spending!

Although I found the initial lockdown uncertainty rather frightening, I got a sense of perspective from my work. An early enquiry about 19th century cholera epidemics, and looking into those sources for a researcher (who had no way of accessing the finding aid for themselves with all libraries shut), really brought home how much better off we are in a 21st century pandemic. I also recalled even earlier pandemics, the Pharmacopolium, dating from 1630, at Kedermister Library, where I am the Hon. Librarian, includes remedies against plague. I am very glad not to be in a 17th century plague outbreak!

Plague remedy from Pharmacopolium [Kedermister Library]

Thankfully, my well-established work social media really came into its own. I'd been teaching a group of MA students not long before lockdown, and they produced creative writing assignments, which I published weekly on the blog - it ran for the final eight weeks of the first lockdown. And I was able to use existing blog content to take part in Twitter campaigns running at the time - a great way to make the collections known to a wider audience. Whilst it was strange to be separated from the collections for a while, I enjoyed making connections online, and also found much more accessible CPD opportunities became available. Whereas I'd been struggling to attend some things previously - it's hard to go to a full day or longer event involving travel if you don't have childcare available on that day - it became a lot easier to drop into short webinars/mini conferences/AGMs on a range of topics and I even ended up co-organising one for the Cathedral Archives, Libraries and Collections Association. 

Professionally, this was the year I'd been planning to complete a teaching qualification (Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy) and to revalidate my CILIP Chartership. I had also been fortunate enough to win a place on Aurora, a leadership development initiative for women in HE, the previous year and was due to join this between February and July 2020. I successfully revalidated early in 2020. I had been working on the AFHEA since the summer of 2019, had a plan for the reading I needed to do, which teaching observations to do and knew which evidence I was going to write up when. Which meant I was in a good position when lockdown happened, as I'd already completed a lot of the work. I still managed to submit on time and was delighted to discover later on in the year that I had passed!

Aurora ran for one session in a central London hotel in February. It was amazing, and I came away with some tools and tips to use, plus some new connections. It then restarted in October, all online. It is still amazing, and I am learning a lot from it, but I am still rather sad not to have the full experience all the way through - particularly those incidental conversations at breaks and lunchtime. It also includes some mentoring, which I am finding really helpful.

So, what does 2021 hold? I will finish Aurora early in the year. I am planning to revalidate my Chartership again, this time making the most of the online learning skills I acquired in 2020. Last year I also started working towards Registration with the Archives and Records Association, the equivalent of Chartership for the archives world. I am really pleased with how my planning and organisation paid off last year, despite having such seismic changes to deal with - my blog post back in 2017 on getting organised seemed really apposite and I will definitely be carrying on with this, although I need to update that post with tweaks I've made since.

What are your professional plans for 2021? 

Future past: researching archives in the digital age

Last week I took part in this research symposium at the Institute of Historical Research in London. It was a great opportunity to find out what other archives are doing about digitization and born digital records, and how academic users of archives are finding their experience. It was a really interesting day, and my notes go on for pages, so I'm going to attempt to pull out some of the common themes that emerged. There were many opportunities during the day to ask questions, get feedback and talk to others, so my notes are a mixture of speakers and thoughts/ideas found from networking.


The hashtag was #digfuturepast and the symposium was recorded and should be available soon on the IHR website.

Barriers to using digital material

Paying for content. Digitization is expensive but academic users are used to having "free" access to collections (actually paid for by their institution). Yet, the digitization has to be paid for somehow, whether through institutions funding it themselves, grant funding or commercial companies providing a paid-for service (eg Ancestry) 

Making copies available. Gone are the days when a student or academic would come into an archive every day for a week or a month to do their research. Pressures of time mean they want to make the most of a single visit and be able to take copies away with them or download copies to use at home, yet it is impossible to digitize everything, and there are various reasons why copies may not be allowed at all, eg copyright, commercial sensitivity or preservation.

Poor documentation and/or OCR mean that researchers can't find what they're looking for. They may miss relevant items in a plethora of search results, or not get the result they need at all. A reliance on keyword searching misses the opportunity to search the collection more widely and loses the connection between archival sources.

Lack of a seamless user experience make it hard to use the material eg legacy systems, different systems for library/archive material, system not optimised for finding archival material.

Information literacy issues. We can't always assume that researchers will know how to search in our system, so we need to equip them with the tools to do this. We also need to address the common misconceptions found below.

Misconceptions about online access to archives

• Any online resource is complete and comprehensive. Many only represent a tiny fraction of an archive's holdings, so how do we alert users to this and encourage them to look beyond the digital? It is impossible to digitize everything, due to copyright, staff and equipment resources, having metadata available, issues with storing electronic files etc.
• Everything will be catalogued. No, digitizing is not the same as cataloguing. Most (all?!) archives have a cataloguing backlog, and, until the material is catalogued, there is no way to access it. This then gives rise to the question about whether it is better to spend resources digitizing some already catalogued material, or catalogue unlisted material that cannot be used at all yet.
• Digitized version is just the same as the original. No, frequently this isn't the case and their are users who will still need to see the original. This is also one of the reasons why it is vital never to destroy the original.

Educating researchers

Time and again the need to educate researchers came up. It was agreed by all present that this is a vital part of training as a historian and that it should be done as early as possible in an academic career. I was pleased by this as we are already doing several of the suggested activities to encourage researchers to engage with our collections, including:

• Running workshops for all history undergraduates to find out how to use Special Collections material
• Running dissertation drop ins and workshops for students needing help with a dissertation using Special Collections
• Looking for entry points beyond history - we get a lot of use by creative writing students and have widened our reach to include English and Sports Scientists too. This has repercussions for collecting policies too - are we collecting material that resonates with our researchers?

Case studies

• The archivist from Boots Heritage who explained how Boots had moved from an entirely internally-focussed business archive to one that was available to researchers thanks to funding from the Wellcome Trust to develop a new digital resource aimed at academic researchers. She had found that getting the right tools was essential so proper cataloguing software (CALM) had been acquired and material was catalogued to stringent standards to make it helpful and meaningful, including creating authority files to be a repository of information about buildings, brands and people. For many researchers this has turned out to be the entry point into the collections. Preservation issues affected the usability of some items and repackaging them into smaller units greatly improved this issue. Care had to be taken to protect Boots' interests, so images are watermarked and download prevented, and commercially sensitive information is not available.
• Transport for London archives are aiming to collect the evidence that every journey matters, including the digital output of the organisation. They took the opportunity presented by needing to archive born digital material to overhaul and restructure their cataloguing. Although this was resource heavy it has created a more useable catalogue for staff and made it much more available to researchers.
• Kathleen Chater talked about her research into black people in England in 18th century and how digitized records hadn't helped her solve research problems such as identifying where "black" didn't refer to a person, or to those instances where a black person was identified using another term. Keyword searches frequently produced unusable quantities of results. One of the more helpful things she did was spend three months going through 10000 Old Bailey records on microfilm, which also gave her the helpful context of many other cases (eg how common was it for anyone to be convicted of a particular crime). Although the Old Bailey records have now been digitized they are difficult to search because of OCR problems (the long s) and context is lost.
• Jo Pugh, a digital development manager at The National Archives, discussed his PhD research in information journeys in archival collections. He related how the problem now isn't amassing information, but restricting what we see. His research had compared how enquiries are formulated on email, phone calls or Twitter and had looked at how the experts (archivists) worked with researchers to resolve archival queries. He had found that research guides could help to reduce uncertainty, eg by explaining how to get the best out of a search.
• Tom Scott from Wellcome Collections explained how the context of their collections isn't just medical and so users don't know what's in the collections. Searching digitized collections meant items were isolated from their context "searchable but not understandable". They wanted to provide access by having a good reading experience, whether in person or online, so had tried to "encapsulate a librarian": a single domain model from a mix of systems for books, archives etc, extracting meaning of enquiries (eg cross references for TB/consumption/tuberculosis). He stressed that it is really important to record the metrics of what people are actually searching for.

The symposium rounded up with a discussion of how we could futureproof our collections. My take aways from the day are:

• Keep doing our existing work on educating researchers as early as possible, and look at how we can expand that with the resources we have.
• "Futureproofing requires quality cataloguing" - making sure our cataloguing is up-to-scratch.
• Assess any digitization project to ensure that high quality metadata is in place first and that it will support the needs of researchers wanting to use our collections.

RBSCG conference 2015: Hidden collections: revealed

In the first week of September I attended one day of the CILIP RBSCG's conference, Hidden Collections: Revealed. The conference was split between Friends' House Library, Lambeth Palace Library and the Friday was at the British Library's conference centre.

Where they have possibly the comfiest conference seats I have ever sat on.

It can be a bit strange arriving towards the end of a conference, when it feels like everyone else has already been networking for a couple of days, but I think the different venues for each day made this a bit easier? The conference had been divided up into six sessions, and I was there for the final two.

Session five was uncovering your collections - promotion
The first speaker was Adrian Edwards, Head of Printed Heritage Collections at the British Library, who spoke about the work they had done with the BL's comic collections to bring them to a much wider audience. The initial problem was having a large collection of comics, but not all of them catalogued, many of them poorly catalogued (wrong end dates, missing issues, hardly anything before the 1930s referenced) and stored in three different locations, all of which made it very hard for all but the most determined researcher to use them.  When the library at Colindale closed and two comics experts approached the library wanting to celebrate British comics, the decision was taken to put on an exhibition. Now, any exhibition is a huge amount of work, and this one was no exception, as the objectives included getting all that cataloguing done and supporting a wider range of researchers in using the collection. The eventual exhibition, Comics unmasked: art and anarchy in British Comics was successful, containing 217 unique exhibits and attracting a lot of new users into the building. Achievements included:

• Many comics catalogued for the first time
• All comics available on one site for the first time
• The material is now used more, including two doctoral students working on it.
• Staff expertise in the subject has increased enormously
• Selected rare material has been moved to a higher level of secure storage

Adrian concluded by saying that the exhibition had been a good way of highlighting hidden collections, and a good way of getting management support to get the essential cataloguing and collection moves completed. It is important to seize opportunities such as this.

Lara Haggerty from Innerpeffray Library then spoke about the difficulties in dealing with people's perception that it's just a load of old books. Her library is physically difficult to access, being five miles from the nearest town with only one bus a week. It is highly significant though, as it is the first public lending library in Scotland. The library had effectively become a museum but was doing very little promotion before she was appointed as a result of a business based forward plan. The key to success has been concentrating on the visitor experience and making it unique. They are too small to attract big tour groups on their own, but by working with other local organisations, have been able to increase the numbers.

Katie Sambrook, Head of Special Collections at King's College London then spoke about the Foreign and Commonwealth Office library, which was transferred to KCL after two years of negotiations. The collection had been rather hidden at the FCO as their primary remit wasn't to run a library. The transfer to an academic institution meant it would be more accessible, but the initial problem was how to reveal and promote this collection? Initially there was no catalogue in a useable form, so the first task was to catalogue the books (this took eight years with 2 or 3 project cataloguers working at a time. About 30% of the collection is now catalogued) as having the items on the catalogue is the most important form of promotion you can do. The cataloguers became expert in the subject matter so were able to assist readers and answer enquiries, whilst student assistants were employed to do basic collection processing and download catalogue records for non-special collections material. The collections were then promoted via real and virtual exhibitions, and visitors have come from all over the world. Promotional activities have included:

• Have a poster on the library gates, as many visitors spot it when walking past
• Produce leaflets and guides on certain aspects/themes of collections
• Bear in mind that many exhibition visitors will never make the transition to reader but will help to spread the word.
• Foster teaching and research for academic users by developing teaching seminars using special collections material and introducing students to the material. Getting use of collections incorporated into teaching assessments is key.

Katie also stated that she had found it easier to engage English academics with Special Collections, than History academics, which certainly echoes my own experience.

Session six covered Beyond the library and first to speak was Katharine Hogg, Librarian at the Foundling Museum. This is a research library of c.10,000 items, and the first priority when the collection first arrived there was to create an online catalogue. Paintings and prints have been catalogued and digitized, and making sure items appear on external websites has been key for promotion, such as Your Paintings, Concert programmes database and the English Short Title catalogue.  Collaboration has worked well for conservation projects with West Dean College and Camberwell College of Arts.

A PhD student, Hannah Manktelow, then spoke about discovering provincial Shakespeare with the British Library playbill collection. This collection had never been used for research as many of the playbills had been closed to public access. The key here was a digitization project which also captured a lot of metadata, including dates, keywords from bills and an indication of what would attract audiences. It was a really exciting project to work on as there is very little work on provincial theatre of this period, and the collection includes c. 75000 playbills. Her PhD has focussed in on case studies based on five provincial towns, although a major obstacle is that playbills of many performances won't have made it into collections.

Finally, a rare books collector, Mark  Byford, talked about his collection focussed on Tudor and Jacobean books. He has c. 1000 books, and has no catalogue whatsoever, but welcomes people to come and see his collection, or takes them out himself to events. He also loans books to academics.

I had a really interesting time at the conference. Not only did I find that others' experience echoed my own (for instance, that it is much easier to engage English depts. in Special Collections than History depts.), but it also emphasised the importance of cataloguing first and foremost in promoting collections. Repeatedly it was made clear that you can't choose what items to put on display without them being catalogued first. You can't plan outreach activities if you don't know what you have. No one will be able to find the item for their research, or do their PhD on your collection if it isn't catalogued.

My thanks to the RBSCG for an interesting and enjoyable conference.

CILIP LIHG: Lost libraries walk

Back on 22nd June I joined an evening walk around London, organised by the CILIP Library & Information History Group (LIHG). It was entitled: "Lost Libraries: a walk through some of London’s forgotten book collections", and I wasn't really sure what to expect, after all, if a library's lost, how can you go and see it? But the blurb attracted me:

Twenty-first century London contains some of the finest book collections in the world, but what about the libraries that haven’t survived? If you know where to look, London’s streets and alleyways are crammed with the ghosts of libraries past.       

This brand new walk will carry you back through London’s history, to long-forgotten libraries, readers, librarians and collectors. In the company of Alice Ford-Smith (Principal Librarian, Dr Williams’s Library), Lost Libraries uncovers some of the links between London’s past and present book collections. From Bloomsbury to the City, you will hear tales of enterprise, transformation, obsession and destruction.

I wasn't disappointed. Not only did the organiser (Renae Satterley) and leader (Alice Ford-Smith) miraculously manage to arrange for the rain to stop for an exact 2 hour window whilst we walked, I also found out more about London's history and its libraries, as well as exploring all sorts of hidden corners I wouldn’t normally have ventured into.



The rendezvous was at Gray's Inn library, one of the Inns of Court and the only library we were able to see inside. We were allowed a silent look around upstairs (it was still open to users) before Alice gave us some background. Although the origins of the library lie back in the 15th century, the Holker Library building was opened in 1929 and subsequently destroyed (along with about 32,000 books) during World War II. The library you can see in the picture below was designed by Sir Edward Maufe and opened in 1958. This was one of several moments during the tour when the sheer scale of destruction at various points in history took my breath away.

Our next stop was a short walk along High Holborn, where we stood outside branches of WHSmith and Boots whilst Alice told us about the earliest subscription libraries, including those run by Smiths and Boots.

And on to stand outside the old Public Record Office building, and hear about its history, as since 2001 it has been the home of the Maughan Library of King's College, London. Of course, the old PRO is now part of the National Archives, housed at Kew.

On again to near Samuel Johnson's house where there was an opportunity to sit down by the statue of Hodge, whilst Alice told us about the sale of Johnson's library. The books were in poor condition, but were sufficiently annotated and signed by him to make it easy to reconstruct his library.

The following stop in Crane Court (now a tiny and unprepossessing alleyway but once the home of the Royal Society) was the site, in 1742, of the first circulating library. This was launched by Samuel Fancourt, a dissenting minister and librarian. He popularized the idea of a subscription library, and the Leeds Library is now the oldest surviving model of this type.

Down another alleyway by a pub we found ourselves in Devereux Court, where there were once four coffee houses. These offered newspapers and journals, as well as libraries of books. In Tom's coffee house here there were about 2,000 books available for use. Many of these coffee houses were wiped out during the Great Fire of London (1666) when more than 13,000 buildings were destroyed.

Although it isn't a library, we walked past Temple Church, which I thought warranted a photo.

as well as the huge picture attached to Sea Containers House for the Queen's Jubilee!

Which we walked past on our way to Sion College. Founded by Thomas White in 1630 and entitled to receive a copy of every book published in London between 1710 and 1836, it closed in 1996 and the collections were split between Lambeth Palace Library, King's College London and Guildhall Library. It seemed very sad, as the building is now home to investment managers and the trading floor is in what was the library.
 

Further over towards the City we stopped near where Samuel Pepys was born, outside St Bride's library. Although not a lost library as such, it is currently closed to researchers and is at risk, although recently it was announced it will reopen at the end of September 2012. Alice talked here about ways in which to support this and other libraries under threat, such as the Women’s Library (you can read about this in my earlier blog post).

Final stop on the walk was Stationers' Hall. This has its origins in 1403, and is a City Livery Company, which once held the right to enforce legislation over publishing. Their hall in Ave Maria Lane was another casualty of the Great Fire of 1666, when another book collection was lost. However, there is still a library available on site here today.

We ended the walk by St Paul's Cathedral. Many booksellers stored books in the crypt beneath St Paul's and during the Great Fire John Evelyn records that these remained burning for a week. After the fire over 90% of booksellers returned to the area, but World War II caused more chaos and destroyed business records as well as books and catalogues. Nowadays the area is very different.

My account doesn’t do the evening justice, as there was an immense amount of detail provided by Alice and a lot of work must have gone into preparing the walk. I would highly recommend joining a future walk if you haven’t already done so though, as I thoroughly enjoyed my evening. Thank you to both Alice and Renae for organising the evening.