Visit: Bromley House Library, cataloguing projects, volunteers and fundraising

Last week I went on an Historic Libraries Forum workshop covering retrospective cataloguing projects, working with volunteers and fundraising. I found it really useful, with lots of great networking opportunities, as well as a chance to see a lovely library and get some new ideas to try. The photos on this post were taken by me, with permission from Bromley House, but I didn't use flash so they aren't the best photos I've ever taken!

The visit was hosted by Bromley House Library, a subscription library in the centre of Nottingham, which has existed for nearly 200 years and been in its current building since 1821. The library is home to about 40,000 books, (about 200 of which could be described as "rare" and about 100 manuscripts), and the staff have spent the last couple of years getting them catalogued using the Heritage LMS from ISOxford; the OPAC will be available shortly online. The visit was centred around this process, but commenced with a tour of the building and its garden, which really helped to set the context for the project.

Children's book section - there are some lovely classics I remember from my childhood here!

The building is tall, with rooms leading off each other, and the in-house classification system had become split between rooms making it hard for people to find items using the card catalogue. The collections have been gathered together over the years, and although sections such as modern fiction are weeded, anything published pre-1970 isn't. Whilst environmental control is difficult in a building like this, an enthusiastic conservation group meets each week, trained by a conservator to take basic book conservation measures, such as cleaning, making boxes and tying tape. Other issues are the beautiful gallery room, with books shelved to quite a high level (although it now takes 2-3 people together to get books from the highest shelves) and a vertiginous spiral staircase on which only one person at a time is allowed!

 Background and staff
 A series of talks gave the background to the cataloguing project, which was funded by a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. Before the application, research had been done into how other libraries had coped with using volunteers to catalogue books, and it was clear that a system of training and supervision would need to be set up. This entailed recruiting a part-time project leader, plus several part-time professional cataloguers, who would then each oversee a team of volunteers, covering the whole week between them. Volunteers were mostly drawn from the library's own members, and to ensure consistency, each were asked to commit to at least one half day session each week. Adverts were placed for the professional staff, and copies of the job descriptions for these and the project leader were available for us to see.

Cataloguing process
The new professional staff put together a cataloguing procedure for their newly acquired LMS, together with the compact agreed with volunteers and handlining guidelines for the books. The cataloguing procedure was revised and updated as they went along and learnt from their experiences, particularly as the volunteers had varying levels of IT ability. Help sheets were developed for difficult groups of items. Although Heritage doesn't use MARC, records could be downloaded from the British Library and the cataloguing procedure used AACR2 and DCRM(B) (where appropriate). They aimed for a greater level of detail than in most of the downloaded records. Quality control was achieved by sampling and checking work, creating lists of commons errors to watch out for and conducting a stock check near the end using the accessions register to make sure nothing had been missed.

Rare books
Work on this area was done by two people who already had experience in cataloguing rare books. These books again were catalogued to a much higher level of detail, using DCRM(B) and with help from the CILIP RBSCG guidelines. Particular attention was paid to recording details of bindings, provenance and marginalia, in a standard form in the Notes field in Heritage. A useful feature of Heritage was the ability to add local notes (not visible in the OPAC) to record condition, meaning that reports can now be run to pick out items for conservation work. Where appropriate, items were submitted to ESTC, contributing to the international world of scholarship.

Fundraising
Money for the project had come from the Heritage Lottery Fund, and a variety of small grants from charitable trusts. Tips shared about fundraising were:

• Consider carefully the goals of each trust you are applying to and make sure your aims are tailored very specifically to their terms.
• Generally you won't get funding for things that should be a normal part of the library operation, e.g. the expense of acquiring a new LMS.
• Local trusts are particularly worth looking out for, although individual grants may be small.
• Be aware of what the rest of your institution is doing, you don't want to be obstructing their fundraising efforts, or vice versa!
• Be aware of reporting and evaluation requirements throughout the project, and try to involve the funders in your work, e.g. by inviting them to volunteers' parties.
• Be aware of outreach potential, often a key part of making a fundraising application. Trusts will often want to see outreach beyond your usual customer base, and maybe a culture change in the organisation so that this is sustained in the long term.

Photocopies are paid for by putting money in the frog

 Lessons learned
I found it really useful to hear what might have been done differently with the benefit of hindsight, as well as what had gone well.

• One good point was that the volunteers were in for 10 sessions a week, which left no time for system maintenance or downtime. 
• There were also useful tips on communication between part-time staff, especially where they don't overlap, and in motivation (apparently sweets are the key, as well as parties!).
• It was clear that both the staff and volunteers had really taken ownership of the project and had gained a lot from it, both in terms of skills acquired (such as IT) and by building networks and adding value to the institution.
• I also found it very useful to see the documentation, ranging from job descriptions to cataloguing manuals.

And finally, a picture of the garden behind the library, a little oasis in the centre of Nottingham, maintained by volunteers and much enjoyed by members.

Thank you to Bromley House for a really interesting day.

Conference: National Trust libraries, mobility and exchange in great house collections

As with my previous post, I've been taking full advantage of not working on Fridays to go to conferences that interest me, but aren't directly relevant to my job. Or so I thought. I was very pleasantly surprised by how many ideas I took away with me from this conference. Organised by the Centre for Material Texts, it was held in the beautiful surroundings of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

I'd initially signed up out of interest as I spent several years cataloguing rare books for the National Trust and wanted to find out more about how much had come out of this work. After many years work from a lot of cataloguers, detailed catalogue records are now available on COPAC. The aim of the conference was to bring together interested parties, librarians, curators, conservators and academics, to discuss potential areas for future research. Jason Scott-Warren has already blogged about the day, so I won't go into too much detail.

Papers ranged from the problem of accessing some books, as not all country houses are in public ownership, as well as research that has been done on how books were used in the houses, where people did their reading and who owned them. For example, the Earl of Carlisle, at Castle Howard, tended to store books in the more private parts of the house where it was more convenient for him to use them. Great pains have been taken in the cataloguing to record as much copy-specific detail as possible, as this is what makes these books unique and especially valuable for research.

It was clear that there is much research still to be done, in particular with nineteenth century libraries, which haven't attracted as much attention as earlier ones. There was also discussion of the practicalities of more research taking place, and the same practicalities that affect special collections librarians in other institutions.

• How to cope with rising demand for access to material.
• How to raise public awareness and get across to a non-academic audience why these collections are so important.
• How to balance the tension between sightseeing and exploring research in these libraries, especially as people with an academic interest in rare books are just one of many special interest groups who visit National Trust properties.

There was much discussion over lunch, and a round table discussion at the end, both of which I found very useful. It was also good to catch up with some former colleagues.  A highly enjoyable day and my thanks go to the organisers.

Provenance masterclass

Back in January I was fortunate enough to get a place on a provenance masterclass, Discovering provenance in book history at Cambridge University Library, taught by David Pearson, Director of Culture, Heritage & Libraries at the City of London Corporation.

CUL with the remains of a very large snowman outside.

This was a great overview of provenance evidence. Although I've been recording provenance in library catalogue records for over nine years now, it was good to be able to take a step back from the catalogue records and look at the whole provenance picture.

To me, it seems obvious that the history of what happened to a book is interesting and worth recording and studying, but this hasn't always been the case. Recording provenance evidence means we can see how books were used, read and circulated around society, who owned them and how they fitted in with other books they owned.

Provenance isn't about association copies - book owned by famous people. It is a lot lot more than that, as it's about all the marks of ownership that occur both in the books (bookplates, armorial bindings, inscriptions, annotations, marginalia) and externally (sale and library catalogues).

Pearson took us through different styles of inscriptions (names, mottoes), the development of bookplates from the late 15th century onwards as well as some definitions of bookplates, book labels and stamps. He then discussed provenance found on the outside of books, such as armorials stamped onto bindings. A brilliant new(ish) reference resource for this is the British Armorial Bindings Database, which has plenty of illustrations to help in identifying armorial bindings.

He also discussed the problems of provenance research, where no markings have been left, or they are incomplete, illegible or partly removed. Ways of dealing with provenance evidence included taking the time to practice, for instance inscriptions can become much easier to decipher with a knowledge of palaeography and lots of practice. The National Archives has an online palaeography tutorial. A bibliography of provenance related reading and suggested sources of help for different types of provenance was one of the workshop handouts. CERL is another good source of provenance information.

Finally, we were shown examples of different types of provenance and their associated difficulties, using incunabula from the Cambridge University Library collections. As we were a small group we were able to handle the books and examine the evidence for ourselves.

I really enjoyed having the chance to spend an afternoon taking a step back to think about provenance, as well as the opportunity to see such rich provenance evidence provided by the incunabula. It provided much food for thought for how to record this information in catalogue records and in a way that is useful to researchers. My thanks to David Pearson and all in the CUL Rare Books department for organising the masterclass.

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.