August Headlines

Hello!

Although we are always very quiet in August in terms of our readers, those who have been around will no doubt have noticed that we have been very busy in other ways.

Staff staring stupefied at spreadsheets, piles of labels on desks, random running in and out with laptop bags… all may have contributed to an air of mystery, but the truth is simply that we – like almost everyone else in the Bodleian Libraries – have been caught up in the work to prepare for the move of Special Collections back into the Weston Library.

Our particular task has been to reclassify the collections which are going into the Charles Wendell David Reading Room, which will house the Oriental, Rhodes House, and Indian Institute collections. We have opted to use Library of Congress Classification, but have retained a prefix similar to those used at OIL to maintain the divisions between books as they currently are on the shelves, thus: [Arab.] will denote Arabic books, [Cat.] will indicate catalogues and so on.  It has been a long, complex and occasionally fraught task, but we have done our best and hope to get as much as possible re-labelled and re-organised before the SCRR closes on the 19th September.

We are proud to have been involved in this project, and also very pleased to have been able to maintain our own library services without a break during a period when at least one person at any given time has been in the Radcliffe Science Library under a pile of labels!

We would like to thank other contributors, in particular Joshua Seufert, who took time out from the opening of the new China Centre to print a mammoth lot of labels at the start of the project, and who gave Kate and Lidio a very interesting tour of the new Chinese Library when they visited to pick them up, and the staff in Systems who have been patiently sending us reports to enhance the original list of books so that we have been able to do a lot of preparatory work without being in the reading room.

 

September reminders

 

As usual the Library will close over the weekend of St Giles’ Fair – this coming weekend, 6-9 September. Other than that, we are open as normal and looking forward to gearing up for the start of Term!

As I mentioned before, the Special Collections Reading Room closes on the 19th September and the first of the new Weston Library reading rooms opens on the 22nd. Please see the Bodleian’s webpage for details of closures and collection moves over the next few months.