Sophie Quantrell – Reader Services: Old Bodleian

Hello! I’m Sophie, the Reader Services trainee for this year. I’m based in the Old Bodleian so I see Elizabeth (see above – Archives trainee) every couple of days and Danielle (also above) quite a lot!

Old Bod

I came to this position from a background in Theology (BA and MA), followed by a brief stint teaching in a secondary school, and eventually a year’s volunteering a day per week in a Special Collections library. I’m currently very happy to be here, six weeks into my Graduate Traineeship, at the point at which the world is beginning to make sense again. The last few weeks has been a deluge of information, systems and the obligatory new-job cold, though it’s been very enjoyable – the job, that is, not the cold.

To work in the Bodleian is to have a very unique library experience. It is an organisation of many layers that somehow manages to function as a fully operational academic library, a historical monument, and a tourist attraction all at the same time. It has somehow gotten the balance between the three and they exist, the majority of the time, in harmony. There are people who have been here so long that they can explain the migration of and changes to collections and buildings over many years, and people who, like me, are new to Oxford, city, university and library, and are just about functioning!

The first few weeks here have involved trying to understand how the Bodleian manages the transference, cataloguing, lending and tending to thousands of books per day while negotiating its layers of tradition, history, policy and practice. Duke Humfrey’s library is a great example of this. It has managed to achieve its goal of being a quiet and working study space while respecting its ancient trappings (really, let’s not put sellotape on the medieval panelling) and, of course, admitting quite a few tours per day. Fortunately, most of the trainees have had a few weeks of vacation to learn the ropes before the rush descends, although I’ve certainly been enjoying the beginning of Michaelmas term, book deliveries having doubled and many more people needing help around the library.

There have definitely been two things that I have found particularly perplexing as a newcomer to the Bodleian.

First of all, the classification systems are confusing at first. Most libraries have beautiful things such as the Dewey Decimal system or the Library of Congress. Not so, here! Or at least, not only. There are many classification systems, the worst to navigate being the Nicholson in the Gladstone Link but the worst to get wrong in terms of distance walked being “Hist.” and “S. Hist” which are not even in the same building.

Secondly, how did Mr Henry Aldrich manage to get two portraits of himself in the same room of the Lower Reading Room? Maybe he just thought nobody would notice…

I had had visions of my first week here being very similar to the scene in ‘The Mummy’ where we are first introduced to the librarian, Evie, sitting in a pile of books, manuscripts and bookcases which have just cascaded to the floor in one glorious domino effect. Fortunately, though, most of the Bodleian’s bookcases are attached to the wall – for the moment.

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