Hello, I’m Ceri, I’ve been at the Institute of Historical Research Library as a Graduate Trainee Library Assistant for just over four months. Before joining the IHR, I was a residential library intern at Gladstone’s Library for 13 months. As a history graduate, the chance to be surrounded by history and to work in a historical building is a dream come true. The building is a grade II listed building in a beautiful Art Deco design, something that still takes my breath away every time I come to work and look up.
When I first graduated I was unsure whether I wanted to work in museums, with archives or in a library. I gained experience doing all three! But to me a library is something that has always calmed and excited me – one of the main reasons I wanted to become a librarian is not just because of my love of books, but mainly because of the love I have for helping people. One of my main responsibilities is helping people finding the correct information, or to use resources within the library.
In the IHR library you can find antiquarian books housed with modern books. Another aspect of my job is ensuring books that get left on the desks go back to their own shelf. I like seeing what people have been reading, but also getting to explore the collections by looking at the shelves. When I was in university I loved using the library to research and also shelf browsing – finding similar books that might be useful to my research. Getting to browse and tidy the shelves for my job is my idea of heaven.
My favourite aspect of the job apart from being surrounded by books – is that no one day is the same – I can be rebinding, reclassifying, cataloguing, helping someone with their photocopying, finding information they need, scanning books for virtual learning or interlibrary loan or having a book adventure in the tower (our onsite storage facility). I also get to buy books for the library – at the moment this is supervised and is testing my German language strength but eventually they will trust me to choose books for the collection – I will get to leave my own mark on the library! I am also involved in promoting the library – this can involve anything to writing blog posts, helping to set up an exhibition to promote the library collections, or adding social media posts. Promotion often leads to another chance to explore the collections – finding for example an inscription from H.G. Wells or discovering other treasures in the collections.
As part of the traineeship, I have also been encouraged to attend various courses and conferences such as the CILIP new library professionals’ day, the Internet Library International Conference, the library has kindly paid for me to travel to Manchester to attend a Rare Books and Special Collections conference and also attend an applying to Library School Day, as well as a variety of other courses such as one on social media. I have also been to a various seminars held here at the Institute of Historical Research and at the Warburg Institute.
This traineeship is allowing me to gain experience, to receive support and training. As well as meet up with the other London trainees and gain support and a chance to discuss our experiences with each other. As a Welsh person, moving to London for this traineeship was an extremely daunting task but I have loved every second of it so far. I feel I am continually learning and have been heartily welcomed into the small team here. I’m not sure whether I want to continue to live in London next year, study part-time or full-time, but I’m certainly in the right place to gain support and advice regarding those decisions. I would recommend anyone who is looking to gain more experience in librarianship to consider the Graduate Trainee Programme!
Farewell, Molly Richards
The Library staff would like to thank Molly Richards for the time she spent with us as a trainee librarian (August 2017 - January 2018), and wish her all the best in her new post working at the Oxford English Dictionary.
Visit to the British Museum Libraries - 27th April 2017
Our latest library visit brought us behind the scenes of the British Museum. Not many people realize that the museum houses not only around eight million objects but nine libraries as well. We had the opportunity to visit four of them.
Starting in the Great Court we first were pointed towards the remainder of the library which is usually most famously associated with the British Museum, the Reading Room. It used to be the main reading room of the British Library until both institutions were formally separated in 1973, and the library moved to its new purpose-built location near St Pancras. Currently the Reading Room's future is still being determined but there are plenty of other functioning library resources within the museum offering alternative spaces to read and study.
The first stop on our tour was the Anthropology Library and Research Centre, located near the museum's north entrance. Formed through the amalgamation of the British Museum's Ethnography library and the library of the Royal Anthropological Institute, it is now one of the world's major specialist anthropology libraries, containing over 120000 volumes. The collection is particularly strong in material culture and its global outlook. With holdings stretching back to the sixteenth century, the collection developed roughly in sync with the evolution of the field of anthropology in Britain during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and continues to be expanded with current publications. It features many books of collectors for the museum, including original travel accounts by European explorers and settlers in Africa, North and South America, Asia and Oceania. Among them, you can find curiosities such as a little book titled: "The hairy giants: or a description of two islands in the South Sea, called by the names of Benganga and Coma [...]" from 1766 narrating a (possibly imaginary) discovery by Henry Schooten. The library will also assist in upcoming projects in the collaboration between and British Museum and the Google Cultural Institute, so check back in future for further updates.
Next we were led to the Asia Library, which is only accessible to museum staff and managed by only one librarian. We were given some valuable insight into what it is like to the the sole librarian in a museum library. The position involves a lot of overlap between library and archival work with a high focus on research and collection curation. Although the job is usually quite secluded, the librarian also serves museum curators and at times external researchers who utilize the library to support their research. At the end of the presentation, we were challenged with a very useful cataloguing exercise, in which we had to spot
mistakes in catalogue records using examples from the collection ranging from Chinese lacquer to East Asian propaganda posters.
The library of the department of Greece and Rome was the final stop on our tour. The main function of the library, as with the ones before, is to hold books relating to the museum's collections to aid its curators. At the same time though, we could also see a strong glint of institutional history in the items we were shown. For example, the library holds extensive correspondence from previous collectors, curators, librarians and researchers, which show a history of the library's and the museum's collection development and its interactions with the public.
My main thought when we had completed the tour was that it is a great shame that these libraries are not more well known. They are an important resource and support service to one of the UK's major cultural institutions and form an integral part of its institutional history. The visit made me appreciate another layer of the British Museum beyond its objects and exhibitions. There are multiple important services behind the scenes that we often don't even consider. I was prompted to think differently about how libraries are used too. In my mind (and possibly in most other people's) the library user is someone who mainly consults textual materials and reproductions of non-textual materials. Museum library users are able to view textual and material cultural items in one space to increase their understanding of what they study, creating a more intimate relationship between the text and object than is usually found in most humanities disciplines. This is part of the great benefits of our visits: being able to consider and compare our experiences as new librarians in relation to the vast landscape of all kinds of ways libraries can be used and how librarians adapt to that.
We were then escorted to the Coins and Medals Library, one the world's leading numismatic libraries with over 20000 books, 600 journals and a wide range of pamphlets and sales catalogues. Running over three floors is covers numismatics and economics from across the globe. Access is by request only for numismatic researchers and the library is also used by the staff of Coins and Medals department to consult the books alongside the coins in the collection. How this simultaneous consultation of both textual and material collections works in practice was demonstrated to us by one of the curators of the department, specializing in coins from the Middle East. Combining the historic coin collections from early Islamic times with a modern book of engravings documenting Middle Eastern coinage from different periods, we were able to identify matches between the two.
My main thought when we had completed the tour was that it is a great shame that these libraries are not more well known. They are an important resource and support service to one of the UK's major cultural institutions and form an integral part of its institutional history. The visit made me appreciate another layer of the British Museum beyond its objects and exhibitions. There are multiple important services behind the scenes that we often don't even consider. I was prompted to think differently about how libraries are used too. In my mind (and possibly in most other people's) the library user is someone who mainly consults textual materials and reproductions of non-textual materials. Museum library users are able to view textual and material cultural items in one space to increase their understanding of what they study, creating a more intimate relationship between the text and object than is usually found in most humanities disciplines. This is part of the great benefits of our visits: being able to consider and compare our experiences as new librarians in relation to the vast landscape of all kinds of ways libraries can be used and how librarians adapt to that.
If you would like to know more about the British Museum and its libraries, the museum offers information on its page for its libraries and archives and you can consult all of the libraries' collection via their catalogue.
Visit to the London Library - 15th December 2016
Our last visit of 2016 led us to
the London Library. Tucked away just a few minutes’ walk from the hustle and
bustle of Piccadilly on St. James’s Square, the London Library is what many
avid readers and librarians would most likely call their “dream library”.
Originally an old town house, extended over the decades to accommodate its
rapidly growing collections, the library is full of picturesque reading rooms
with old wooden furniture, comfortable armchairs and balustrades for, of
course, more books. It is also probably one of the only libraries that still
maintains its book lifts. The library opened in 1841 and was
envisioned by its founder, Scottish author, historian, and biographer
Thomas Carlyle, in contrast to the then often overcrowded and reference-only
British Museum Library. Carlyle wanted to create a subscription and lending
library where readers could join for a membership fee and read or study in a
tranquil, comfortable atmosphere as well as borrow books to read at home. Now members are able to read a vast
variety of over one million books, mainly on arts and humanities subjects, ranging
from the sixteenth century to the present day, across 2000 subjects and in 55
different languages with about 8000 new acquisitions made annually.
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| One of the book lifts in the London Library |
Caring for such a large and
historically significant collection while allowing most of it to be open access
and borrowed is no small task. So it seems appropriate that we were first
ushered to the conservation studio, where the team’s current project is to
implement preventative conservation techniques by packing old and fragile
books into specially made preservation boxes tailored to each book’s individual
size to prevent exposure to light, dust, pollution or other wear and tear.
Afterwards we were led to the Victorian grille-floored book stacks which run
over four floors and form part of the structure of one of the first
steel-framed buildings in London. Dating from the 1890s, they were a then
great innovation in the construction of libraries to aid with ventilation and
temperature control.
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| The Victorian Stacks of the London Library |
Here we were also introduced to
the library’s unique classification system, invented by Charles Hagberg Wright,
who was appointed as librarian of the London Library in 1893. He set out to aim
for a good balance between readers finding what they were interested in while
allowing for browsing and serendipitous finds. Some sections we found included:
a section for every King Charles you could think of, epigrams, and cheese. The
classification system was particularly interesting to me because the library in
which I am completing my Graduate Traineeship, the Warburg Library, has a
similarly idiosyncratic way of sorting its books. In the Warburg Library we talk about
the concept of the “good neighbour”, in which books are grouped to aid
researchers to serendipitously find the book they did not know they were
looking for and which could provide them with a key new insight into their
field.
While being led through the many rooms and floors of the library, including the
famous Victorian Reading Room, we encountered further interesting features. One
of them was the Small Books Cabinet, in which around 350 books measuring up to
5 inches tall are kept, so they do not disappear between their larger
companions. Another was the enormous, multi-volume bound catalogue (now
supplemented by a digital version) of the library and the so-called Times Room
in which the back runs of hundreds of
periodicals, including original copies of over 200 years of the Times newspaper
are stored.
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The Small Books
Cabinet
|
While exploring the library’s
many corners, our guides illustrated the London Library’s history for us. The
London Library has had a lively history with many illustrious patrons and
readers to people it, including T.S. Elliot, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf
and other giants of the literary world, which gave the staff a rich canon
of narratives to pass on to us. One we were told was how T.S.
Elliot presented a hand-written manuscript of The Wasteland for auction to help fund the London Library to pay a tax bill from Westminster Council after it had been
incorrectly classed as a “gentlemen’s club” rather than an educational institution.
Another was about how library staff actually lived in the library during the
Second World War to be prepared for immediate on-site rescue action should the
library be bombed (as indeed it was in 1944 destroying over 16000 volumes). Its
history with its many eccentricities is part of the essential character of the
library and what makes it so appealing.
As a Library trainee from an
academic research library, it was very worthwhile seeing how a historic, independent
lending library differs in its nature, particularly in terms of its readership,
membership policy, collection policy and funding structure. Thank you to Amanda
Corp, Head of Enquiries, and Amanda Stebbings, Head of Member Services, for the tour and for answering our questions afterwards.
For more information on the London Library, you can visit
their website here: http://www.londonlibrary.co.uk/
Trainee Profiles 2016-17
The Institute of Historical Research
Tundun Folami
Hello, I’m Tundun, the
new graduate trainee at The Institute of Historical Research Library. Before
starting the traineeship in September, I was a Library Customer Service Officer
at Barnet Libraries. I graduated from Kingston University in 2015 with a degree
in International Relations with French, and like many others, considered many avenues
after graduation such as the Civil Service, teaching and further study. In the
end, my positive experience with the academic liaison librarians at my
university as well as my experience of working in a public library led to my
decision to become a librarian.
So far, I am really
enjoying being a trainee. 10 weeks in and I am now overseeing a range of daily
tasks. A typical day consists of shelving, fetching requests from the onsite
store, checking the library’s social media accounts, answering enquiries and
French acquisitions. I also help with cataloguing and reclassifying the Latin
American and North American collections, book conservation and repairs and
creating research guides to the collections. This has involved a fair amount of
research, locating books and journals, and definitely tests the limits of my
language skills from time to time. It has taken quite a while to settle in and
get used to new library systems, collections and readers, but I am definitely
starting to get to grips with what it means to be a ‘real’ librarian.
What is so great about the traineeship is that as well as
receiving a great deal of support and training internally, we are also
encouraged to attend courses and visits throughout the year. It is also a huge
comfort being part of a group of trainees in London, as not only do we get to
visit other libraries across London and beyond, but we can discuss issues that
come up along the way. I’m still not sure if I want to study full- or part-time
next year, or look for further library work, but I’m looking forward to the
rest of the traineeship and what might follow.
Trainee Profiles 2016-17
Naomi Rebis
Institute of Classical Studies/Joint Societies Library
Hello!
I've been the Winnington-Ingram trainee at the ICS Library for about two months now, and have already done so many new and exciting things that I felt I ought to write something about them before they fade to the back of my mind!
A bit about me: I graduated from Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, in June 2015 after three wonderful years studying Classics, and found myself unsure of what to do next. During my final year, I had helped the college librarian sort a large bequest of Classics books, and was then offered a fortnight's paid work there over the summer, so library traineeships seemed the logical next step. I was very excited to come across the Winnington-Ingram traineeship, and the chance it offered to be involved with Classics again, so, although I worried I might not have enough experience for the post, I applied. And I am very glad I did!
It seems apt that I should write my first ever blog post after what feels like three months of 'firsts'. Not only has moving to London been something of a culture shock, but my new job has opened up all sorts of events and opportunities that I never anticipated. I cannot speak for other traineeships, but at ICS the whole team has been very eager to get me 'out and about' doing things, and it has definitely not just been two months processing new books in the back room!
There has been some processing, of course, but that is very good fun as it involves using stamps, several types of glue, and even a little knife to score the spine where the beetle is going to go (beetle being the in-house term for the sticker that we write the book's classmark on). Sometimes it feels a little like being back in primary school, happily cutting and sticking different things, though of course when it comes to repairing old or damaged books rather more reverence is required! I have learnt how to make an Oxford hollow (a tube of paper which you put beneath a damaged spine to strengthen it, and help the book open/close more easily), how to straighten dog-eared corners, and how to 'tip in' (i.e. glue back in place) loose pages. Being forced to cover my workbooks with sticky-back plastic in Year 7 has finally come in useful, as sometimes we use Vista-foil here to cover books and stop them getting tatty.
Other day-to-day jobs include shelving; issuing/returning books; sending out postal loans, or books for academics to review; signing people up for membership to either the Institute [reference only] or one of the Joint Societies [borrowing]; and scanning articles for readers all over the country. I also spend a lot of time directing people up to the fourth floor, as the Senate House library is just above us and that can confuse visitors. (Number one rule for when people say they want to join the library is to ask WHICH library, as you don't want to go through a whole speech about Society membership if they want to join Senate House!)
Outside the library I have been to an exhibition on ancient Sicily at the British Museum; a set of talks at IHR (Institute of Historical Research) about emerging research into Library and Information Studies (LIS); and an information day about the LIS Masters programme at UCL. The Institute has very kindly agreed to pay for me to attend a day-conference in Cambridge about historic libraries and engagement with special collections, so there is definitely huge scope on the traineeship for visits and events.
In short, I would heartily recommend this graduate traineeship to any Classicist, or ancient historian, with an interest in working in libraries. It has already been such a rewarding experience, and it is really lovely to be surrounded by Classics books all day (even if I can't read them on the job!). It is also incredibly exciting to talk with undergraduates/postgraduates/academics about their research, and be encouraged that Classics is still a living, breathing, endlessly relevant subject.
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