Transforming Libraries - RLUK 2021 conference

 I         I was really keen to attend RLUK’s 2021 conference on Transforming Libraries, and so was delighted to win a bursary which covered my conference fee. I have been working in the area of special collections and archives for well over 15 years now, and had the opportunity to attend various conferences and events, but invariably closely connected to my specialist area. Having completed a teaching qualification in Higher Education (AFHEA) and the Aurora women’s leadershipdevelopment programme, I was keen to attend a more broadly focussed conference, broaden my knowledge of the research environment and put my recent learning in context.

I wasn’t disappointed. The key points I took away from the conference were that:

• Most (all?) university libraries already do a huge amount to contribute to the research environment of their institutions. What they’re often less good at is communicating this, both to their users and to those higher up the university hierarchy. There was much to take forward about alignment with strategic objectives, finding out user needs and communicating how we meet those needs.
• The pandemic had created opportunities for research libraries to demonstrate how central they are to the university – often staying open throughout lockdown to provide study space and resources for students, as well as providing digital content. For many, this had helped to communicate the library’s worth higher up the university, and there was a sense of urgency around making the most of this opportunity to influence and advocate.

I also found much more content than I had expected about teaching, with its links to research, and especially teaching with special collections material. From this I have noted down ideas to explore further, including around inquiry-based learning, aligning our services with what users want/improving communication with users and using visualisers to improve the service we can offer both now and when in-person teaching in the reading room is possible once again.

I also thought the practical aspects of the conference worked very well. I had anticipated missing the opportunities for informal networking at an in-person conference, but there were several ways around this. I enjoyed exploring the virtual terrace, including the swimming pool(!) and having the chance to chat with whoever I came across. This went some way to replicating the conference experience of chance meetings over coffee. Similarly with the ability to explore the virtual marketplace of vendors/sponsors and see what they have to offer. I also found the searchable list of delegates useful, and used the chat feature to contact a few delegates directly and to follow up with questions after one of the talks. In some ways, this worked even better in this environment than at a large in-person conference where you have to physically track down the person you want to talk to. Although it was a rather intense three days, it wasn’t overwhelming, as the talks were spread out, with plenty of time inbetween to have a break from my computer screen or to contact other delegates. There was a very friendly atmosphere, and everybody I approached to speak to was happy to talk to me, or to refer me onto a more appropriate person.

 
So, what next? I switched off my computer feeling like I’d got a better grasp of the ‘bigger picture’ in HE and research libraries, as well as picking up some useful tips for teaching using my collections. I’m hoping I’ll be able to put some of those into practice in my job over the next few months.

A big thank you to RLUK for sponsoring my place at the conference.

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? 

Buildings, books and blockbusters: balancing access and preservation

In November I attended (and co-organised!) the 2019 Historic Libraries Forum conference, which was a great opportunity to explore issues around access and preservation. It took place at Westminster Abbey and we were lucky enough to get a look round the new Queen's Diamond Jubilee Gallery at the Abbey as part of the conference. These are well worth a visit in their own right, offering both spectacular views of the inside of the building and a chance to encounter myriad items from their collections. Photography isn't allowed inside the gallery, so all my images are of elsewhere in the Abbey.

The Cloisters

The conference kicked off with Caroline Bendix, exploring what we mean by access -  any means of using a book, including reading, seeing, touching, smelling, hearing. Of the 25 causes of damage to books, 14 of these can be attributed to poor handling, which is why it’s so important to have handling guidelines and make sure they are followed, especially by staff, who are setting an example to users. She offered some tips, including:

• Have supports readily available to readers and make sure staff know how to use them, eg they need to be adjusted as different pages are opened.
• Provide regular training to staff on handling books and archives.
• Train staff to intervene positively when they see a reader exhibiting poor handling technique (eg by offering "help").
• The key is to reduce the rate of deterioration to the lowest possible. Users may not understand the need to handle books in a particular way - so it's helpful to have some spectacular examples of the results of poor handling to show them.

The damage that can occur, includes:


• Abrasion from removing from shelf.
• Shelves at the wrong height
• Historical application of leather dressing (too much and to books in too poor condition)
• Wrong boxes used (eg box too big for book so it can move around). Boxes and enclosures need to provide support.
• Using acid free paper slips for shelfmarks in the book cuts down on handling
Books on brief display can be preserved by:
• Creased sheet of melinex on top of book will stop some damage
• Mitchell book shelter – protects book whilst making it available
• Blickling Hall put books on temporary display with one person by each book to talk about it and ensure it is protected.

Remember – any step taken is a positive action to reduce deterioration

Susan Jenkins from Westminster Abbey collections then provided an introduction to the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Gallery, followed by our visit.
The Gallery has been a very positive development to showcase items from the collections. Creating them had been a lot of work:

• Work had to stop everytime a service took place in the building.
• Light plans undertaken to understand how light would fall around cases.
• Computer modelling of the space used to work out where to lay out objects.
• Annual lux budget decided to try and get balance right.
• Continuous programme of improvement eg clerestory windows were discovered to be letting direct light in in March and October.

Visit was very inspiring with a chance to discover all of the treasures gallery – well worth a visit - I highly recommend!

View from the conference room

After a delicious lunch and the HLF AGM, Rosemary Firman (Hereford Cathedral Library) spoke about Screen sharing: the role of broadcasting and the media in extending access
Hereford Cathedral is the only library remaining where all books are still chained to shelves. References to chained libraries generally echo Hereford, but they have a total lack of control over people using images of chained libraries eg Game of Thrones is assumed to have been filmed at Hereford (it wasn’t!). The publicity is good but it can lead to increased requests for more access – observed increase in visitor numbers after TV programmes, but often little control over what is said in them, with much repetition of basic facts. Hereford doesn’t charge for factual/documentary filiming but filming can take up large amounts of staff time.
Some top tips:
• Don’t expect producers to be well prepared
• Have some key messages ready for them.
• Review recordings before release (this may be difficult to arrange)



She was followed by David Iggulden on Empowering Global Research: the Biodiversity Heritage Library
These are natural science research collections – literature and archives critical to studying life on earth eg species descriptions, info on extinct species, history of scientific discovery. Lack of access to this literature impedes scientific research especially in developing countries.
The BHL provides open access to digital library, inspiring discovery through free access to biodiversity knowledge. Much of the material is out of copyright but agreements are negotiated for the rest. 57 million pages – Kew was a founder member and the initial idea was a joint union catalogue. Reduces the need to consult physical items although the digital should exist alongside the physical. Had nine million users since it started.



Molly Bigwood, a student who had researched the balancing act between conservation and access, then spoke about her study into how historic libraries manage preservation and access as part of her undergraduate degree. There have to be concessions on either side eg the optimum temperature for storage isn’t compatible with reader comfort. She compared four collections.
Seeing books in worse condition can be beneficial to their future – the visually shocking helps emphasise the point.


Sarah VanSnick (The National Archives) finished off with a talk on mouldy books: preservation improving access
Over 1% of TNA’s collections are mouldy and they have changed their processes so that readers can still access them. They clean on demand, as they don’t have time to clean everything, but have to be careful as mould damage is cumulative and is classed as a biohazard. They carried out research to inform risk assessments and looked at how access could risk cross-contamination. It was found that boxes were good for keeping the fungal count low, so additional mechanisms were not necessary for moving items around. They now clean based on the risk of transfer. Readers now requesting mouldy material are given a list of the risks, and provided with an apron and mask (if they want to use these) – which means they now have access to a mouldy item when previously they would have had a long delay for cleaning before being able to use it.


It was a great conference, and included plenty of networking time in breaks too, so I left with plenty to think about! My actions to take forward:


• Review our handling guidelines and ensure readers know what to expect
• Review staff training to ensure staff are confident to help readers handle books correctly. Make sure volunteers are confident to handle items correctly and understand why it is important.
• Work on a media pack, including key messages for film crews etc about our collections
• Look into the Biodiversity Heritage Library (personal interest)
• Have a couple of “worst examples” available (physical and photographs) to demonstrate consequences of poor handling

Historic Libraries Forum conference 2018: Any other duties as required: skills for non-traditional library responsibilities

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.
• Did a monthly blog to highlight examples from their collections, rather like we did with Brunel 50 library objects

Ann's suggested actions were to:

• Multi-task!
• Constantly promote and use to engage
• Have a disaster box
• Use volunteers to help in practical ways
• Be inventive/creative
• Read. Go on visits and to conferences
• Seek advice and talk to others in a similar boat
• 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-Jones on developing professionally.

Oh and the conference lunch venue - Hogwarts!

RBSCG conference 2018: The library as classroom

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.

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/special-collections. She talked about how the Connected Curriculum was implemented across the university - this was a research based curriculum which enabled students to actively engage with research and enquiry.

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 room session 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.
• to have a look at A Connected Curriculum for Higher Education by Dilly Fung (available as a free download at that link)

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.

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.

CLAA conference 2015

The theme for the 2015 Cathedral Libraries and Archives Association Conference was 'Placing the library and archive at the heart of the cathedral', which doesn't immediately appear to be connected to my current job! However, the theme could be applied to any institution and proved to be highly relevant to many working situations.

Westminster Abbey

The conference was held in the beautiful historic surroundings of Cheyneygates at Westminster Abbey. The first speaker was Ellie Jones, the Archivist from Exeter Cathedral Library & Archives, who spoke about the cathedral's highly successful HLF funded project to share their treasures more, which eventually also led to them becoming one of the first institutions to earn Archives Accreditation.  She outlined the improvements they had been able to make to their facilities, and how their increased outreach had made it possible for more people to experience their collections. This included a year 8 teacher who had seen one of their blog posts, leading to a project about Shakespeare. They have had a big push to make material more accessible online, partly via having an EOSweb catalogue, although there is currently no archive finding aid available online. Working with colleagues in the cathedral was very important, so they encouraged directors to bring their families in to visit to support more engagement with the collections.

Emily Naish, from Salisbury Cathedral Library and Archives, then gave a talk on the dangers of encouraging collections to be for scholarly use only, as had happened at Salisbury from 1983 until recently. This had resulted in the library becoming invisible within the cathedral and attaining an almost mythical status, with the only catalogue one printed in 1880 and available in a few Oxbridge libraries. The big change in recent years had led to the creation of a number of policies covering access and collections. Collections have been consolidated, spotlight talks now take place in the cathedral, with improved information available on the website. They are also working with the Education Officer to encourage school groups to visit. Volunteers and cathedral staff now have dedicated drop in sessions twice a week, which has encouraged guides to know more about the library. It is important that the library is relevant to the cathedral rather than an historical curiosity - it has to be useful to staff and volunteers, and has to be useful to the fundraising department.

General Synod chamber

After a trip round the corner to Church House to see the Cathedral and Church Buildings Library, Synod chamber, an extremely good lunch and the CLAA AGM, we returned to Cheyneygates for the afternoon's speakers. First was Lisa di Tommaso, from Durham Cathedral, on the renewal of their collections. Durham had already supported scholarship and learning for 1000 years and are working to make their collections more accessible now. Lisa gave a brief overview of the history of the collections and the team working there, before explaining the "Open treasure" project, designed to bring the collections into the heart of Durham Cathedral's visitor experience. The project encompasses an exhibition space and a new specialist search room, along with outreach programmes. This includes developing reading groups with people who historically have had less contact with the cathedral, and 11 - 15 year olds will be able to have a go at curating an exhibition. Key activities have included taking a replica of the Lindisfarne Gospels to visit people who couldn't visit the physical exhibition and raising awareness of the collections by making exhibition loans.

Finally Vicky Harrison, Collections Manager at York Minister, spoke about unlocking their collections. She gave an outline of York's successful HLF bid for "York Minster revealed". Communication with the rest of the cathedral, particularly Chapter, was key, and reports were structured into four sections as per the Accreditation standard, which helped to show that they were working to the future rather than concentrating on the past. The future will involve working together rather than as three separate disciplines (library, archive, collections). The key is to plan what you're doing, and to communicate this. And always have three top messages you want to get across at the forefront of your mind.

CILIP Conference 2015

At the beginning of July I spent a couple of days in Liverpool at CILIP Conference 2015, having been lucky enough to win a bursary from the ARLG London & South East region. I was keen to attend the conference, having worked in the area of Special Collections for well over ten years, so my conference attendance had tended to be restricted to those events that were closely connected to my specialist area. 

Concert Hall, where the keynotes took place

Keynotes

Perhaps what I most enjoyed about the conference were the keynote speakers. They included R. David Lankes, Erwin James, Cory Doctorow and Shami Chakrabarti. At previous conferences I’ve attended the keynotes have all been very connected to the specialist conference theme, and invariably given by someone from the library or archive world, so I had been interested to see in advance that this wasn’t so much the case with CILIP conference keynotes. It was great to see how engaged all the speakers were with the world of libraries and information, and brought an interesting perspective from the outside. Indeed, Erwin James’ account of the difference a prison library had made to his life after his conviction, what it had meant to his rehabilitation and then to his release had me almost in tears. R. David Lankes on ‘World domination through librarianship’ (you can’t beat a title like that!) was more controversial from a Special Collections perspective, as he talked about how collections are the demon, and how you may not have one to be a librarian, as often now they are leased or rented. But I could agree with him that librarians are educators, even if I am educating users about our special collections!

Erwin James

Session speakers 

The sessions I attended were mostly in the ‘demonstrating value’ stream, and I found many of the workshops particularly useful. I found that it was helpful to have to think of real life examples, and we were encouraged to share our ideas and processes with someone sitting near us, which also helped break the ice. I enjoyed the practical elements of these workshops, which provided a nice contrast to the keynotes. I also took some time out from ‘demonstrating value’ to go to the ‘digital futures’ stream and a session on MOOCs and small-scale CPD for library and information professionals. I found this interesting, having participated in one MOOC so far, and working towards my second year of revalidation, always being on the lookout for different ways to do CPD.

Exhibition

As I very rarely buy anything other than preservation supplies, I hadn’t been expecting to get much out of the exhibition, but, spurred on by a sheet to fill in with a sticker from each exhibitor, and the possibility of winning an iPad if this was completed, I spent some time on both days visiting each stand. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed meeting all the exhibitors and finding out about their products. Most of them also appeared to be interested to meet me, and I think it was a good way of finding out about new products and services, which I can always tell colleagues about, even if they aren’t so relevant to my own role. 

Rather amazing surroundings for the exhibition

Networking

Taking part in networking between sessions was one of my main reasons for wanting to attend the conference. It proved to be very different to networking at the smaller conference I have been used to attending, as with 600 people there and no delegate list in advance, it was hard to work out who I would like to meet with once there. I found that manning the ARLG stall during one of the breaks helped, as people then came up to talk to me and found out about ARLG, and I did manage to arrange to meet up with a few people by using social media in advance of the conference. I think this was something of a missed opportunity though, as with a delegate list in advance and people’s Twitter details, for instance, it would have been a lot easier to arrange a meet up. It was possible to register as an event attendee on the conference app in advance, which I did, but very few people did this.

ARLG stand

What now?

So, what next? The conference was an intense couple of days, but I came away feeling like I’d got a better grasp of the ‘bigger picture’ in librarianship, as well as picking up some useful tips for demonstrating value. I’m hoping I’ll be able to put some of those into practice in my job over the next few months. I’ve provided feedback to CILIP on ways in which I think the conference was beneficial, as well as how it could be improved – particularly the venue, which really wasn’t very accessible with huge numbers of steps everywhere, but there were also issues with timekeeping and sessions running over. My thanks go to the ARLG London & South East for sponsoring my place.

The speakers' presentations are now available on the conference website.