9am: Arrive and settle in
This involves checking and responding to emails, both from readers and external researchers, and confirming what’s in the diary for the day. We have a team of graduate invigilators who cover the early morning, evening and weekend shifts in the library, so if they’ve noted any issues or enquiries we’ll follow these up.
9.30am: Shelving
I am responsible for shelving the Arts and Humanities books in the upstairs Laudian Library. While I’m doing this I also ensure that the reading room is tidy for today’s readers.
10.15am: Book Processing
Part of my role is to process new books and journals acquired by the library. For books, this involves giving each item a barcode and shelfmark, before labelling, stamping and covering it. We have our own in-house classification system, and it’s interesting working out where each book should be placed in order to ensure easy accessibility for readers.
11am: Coffee Break
11.15am: Other Projects
I supervise a manuscript reader in the Old Library and use the time to catch up on other general tasks, such as updating the Library Facebook page and creating posters and captions for our new books display, which we change on a termly basis.
12pm: Issue Desk
I cover the issue desk while other members of staff are at lunch, issuing and returning books and dealing with reader enquiries.
1pm: Lunch
I get a free lunch every day, which is a definite advantage of working in one of the Colleges!
2pm: Cataloguing of Spike Milligan Papers
The College has a collection of papers originally belonging to Spike Milligan, which includes original manuscripts and drawings for many of his literary works. I’m cataloguing these to archival standards (this process is somewhat different to library cataloguing so has taken a bit of getting used to!) by describing each individual item in detail and uploading this information to the Archives Hub website. I also add tags and access points (using mainly Library of Congress subject headings) to aid any readers who might be interested in consulting this material.
3.30pm: Law Library
The Law Library is a separate 24 hour study space on the other side of the college, so once a day I head over there to shelve new acquisitions of books and journals and have a general tidy up.
4pm: Tea Break
4.15pm: Exhibition Preparation
For my trainee project I’m working on an exhibition, using the Library’s Special Collections to explore war throughout history. We put on two exhibitions a year in order to give College members a chance to view some of the rare books and manuscripts they wouldn’t generally have access to. My main tasks are to research the items I plan to display and write captions for them, and to design a poster and a handlist to accompany the exhibition. (Note: I wrote this post a while back but forgot to upload it until today, so the exhibition is now up and running!)
I start the day by reading emails and printing new enquiries. The amount of enquiries we receive varies and there can be anything from none to seven or eight in a day. Some enquiries can be answered quickly, whereas others can take hours of research into our records to answer. The University Archives holds the administrative records of the central University and these records date from 1214 to the present day. The colleges in Oxford also maintain their own archives, and this means we sometimes refer enquirers to individual colleges for certain information as well. (http://www.oxfordarchives.org.uk/college%20archives.htm)
Enquiries are related to various aspects of the University, such as the examination systems at different times in the University’s history, past syllabus’ and requirements for degrees, information relating to departments, University buildings and ceremonial and non-ceremonial events. One of the most frequent enquiries we receive is regarding past members of the University, often from a descendent of that person or researchers looking into prominent figures who had previously been educated at Oxford. For past members up until 1891 we hold printed volumes, and between 1891 and 1932 we have a card register. The sort of information we have, dependent on when a person was at the University, can include their college, matriculation date, some biographical information, degrees and any University scholarships or prizes.
At the moment, including one of today’s enquiries, we have a lot of interest in members of the University who served in the First World War due to the centenary. For this I check the printed volume we hold which includes information about members of the University who served in the war, such as when they joined up and where they served.
10.45-11.10 Break
11.10-11.45 Imaging Request
Today, along with a couple of past members enquiries, we also had a request from Imaging Services. An enquirer has ordered photographic copies of some of our material, and this is done through the Imaging Services department based in Osney. To complete this request, I locate and extract the relevant items, package and label it and will send it out with the courier in the morning. I also update our loans register, which keeps a record of all the material being loaned to different departments.
11.45-13.30 Duke Humfrey’s Library
Part of my role is also to make our records accessible to readers. Material from the University Archives is viewed in Duke Humfrey’s Library in the Bodleian Library. Our material is stored in the Lower and Upper Archive Rooms (in the tower of the Bodleian Library), the Examination Schools and also out in the Bodleian Storage Facility in Swindon. When readers request to view items, I then either order it back from BSF using Aleph, or find and carry it to Duke Humfrey from the Exam Schools or the tower. This week a reader has ordered quite a lot of material to view, which means several trips back and forth from the Schools to Duke Humfrey to carry it all up.
13.30-14.30 Lunch
14.30-17.00 Cataloguing
In the afternoons, if all the enquiries are finished and no more material needs to be moved up to Duke Humfrey’s Library for readers, I usually work down in the archives in the Exam Schools. There I have been cataloguing new accessions to the Archives. The first collection I worked on was a series of graduate student files, which we accession every year, and involved making sure they were organised alphabetically, checking they were in the right series (ie. the right year), boxing and labelling them. Now I have finished that I am working on some files from the Events Office, which relate to non-ceremonial events in the University. This includes appraising, describing, labelling/boxing and allocating reference codes to the files and then adding this information to the existing Events Office catalogue. Once finished, it will be moved to spare shelving in the Archives and its permanent location added to our location lists so it can be found in future.
Well, better late than never, here is a glimpse of life at St.Hilda’s.
Today the Librarian has taken the 0830 start, so the opening procedures have been undertaken by the time I arrive. In general this involves opening the front door, unlocking any internal doors, closing the Lawyer’s entrance which gives them access outside opening hours, logging-on the OPACs, switching on the printers and photocopier and clearing any mess/items left on desks overnight.
0900 – Check returned books through the library management system. Student invigilators who man the desk after 5pm can accept returns but cannot remove the records from reader accounts.
Separate any books that have been recalled by readers, reserve them and contact them to let them know that they are ready for collection.
0930 – Chat about changes being made to the way we deal with book requests from Graduate students. There is a separate fund for Graduate taught courses and on feedback from the MCR at Library Committee we are attempting to improve and streamline this process.
1000 – Enquire about a book that was returned to us in error. Contact student and set it aside for collection.
Check book repairs that I left to dry overnight. One is satisfactory and ready to find its way home. The other hasn’t quite taken so I try again.
1030 – Student requests: There are a couple of book purchase requests in our recommendation book and e-mail. I check that we don’t already have the books as some students have not checked the catalogue fully before requesting. Check for availability and prices before sending off the request to the subject tutors for approval. Update the spreadsheet where we keep track of what has/hasn’t been approved.
1130 – Arrange the shelving trolleys in shelfmark order, ready for shelving later on.
1200 – Desk duty: My desk is the issue desk so when I am not in the reading rooms I will be issuing/returning books, signing out reserve shelf items, bookstands, giving paper for the printer/photocopier.
Accession some journals: Fill in the index card, add details to accessions spreadsheet, write accession number and shelfmark, stamp with St. Hilda’s logo.
Prepare book to send back to another library.
Receive approval from subject tutor to purchase book. Ring Blackwell’s who don’t have it in stock and as we try to make student requests a priority this book will be ordered from Amazon as it would be quicker than having Blackwell’s order it in from the publisher. Pass on details to the Librarian to order with the credit card.
1300- Lunch: I receive some gentle ribbing about how “orange” my lunch is – roast potatoes, chicken in some unknown sauce, beans and tomato ketchup for luck.
1400-Attempt to check-in a delivery from our suppliers but after much rooting no invoice is to be found. Detective work suggests another box will shortly be arriving.
Shelving journals: Place current subscriptions in their respective Science or Arts/Humanities racks. Shelve the previous issues with the rest of the back issues in the rolling stacks in the basement.
Take this time to give a quick patrol of the library for noise, food and drink, maintenance issues, check the printer cartridge levels and for students leaving unattended items and using up desks. I find a folder with important personal documents, (including a passport!) in a pile of papers next to the recycling bin. Save these and contact the student, who picks them up within 5 minutes. Such is the immediacy of a college library, I will sometimes not even have placed a book on the recall shelf 5 yards away from my chair before the reserver is at the desk to pick it up.
1430 – The subject tutors have all replied and it’s time to order some books. Blackwell’s will send one over the next morning and another will be ordered in and with us early next week. The tutors have asked for extra copies so I order these from our web-based supplier. It takes longer but they come pre-processed.
I create the orders on our library management system and create minimal catalogue records, which will show that these books have been ordered. The Assistant Librarian will make complete catalogue record when they arrive.
1530 – Shelving: As mentioned, no trainee goes without the daily duty. My faithful trolley and I trundle off to put some books to bed.
1615 – Wrapping up: Remove items from the returns trolley so as not to mix them with those to be returned overnight.
Redo some spine labels that have faded or fallen off.
Hullo! My name’s Will, and I’m the graduate trainee at the Codrington Library at All Souls College. I graduated from Merton College, Oxford in 2009 with a degree in English, and then studied for a Masters degree at the same College before starting at All Souls. Since no single day is entirely representative of my experience at work (variety being one of the main attractions of working in a college library), this little diary is a bit of a chimera, with lots of different events from my usual working week unceremoniously lumped together. Still, I hope it will sketch out some of the things you might encounter as a trainee at an Oxford College. Here goes…
8:45am – Arrive at the Codrington. Say hullo to Betty (our library scout). Open office. Switch on lights. Sigh. Put on kettle.
9:00am – Check the Fellows’ borrowing register (latterly an impressive leather-bound tome, currently an orange exercise book, soon to be an impressive leather-bound tome again). I add any new withdrawals to the relevant spread sheet, and update the book with today’s date.
9:25am – A mysterious parcel has arrived overnight. Excitement builds. It contains law textbooks and periodicals. Excitement fades.
9:30am – Open exterior door to Readers. Switch on recess lighting in the Great Library and the law reading room.
The Great Library.
9:40am – I add the new law journals to our Scandex (a sort of squashed filing-cabinet used for keeping track of standing orders/journals), stamp, and then shelve on our ‘New Journals’ display. Eventually these issues will be catalogued online, but serials cataloguing is a scary business that I leave to braver people. For the moment, I notice that some of the series from last year are now complete, so I bundle them up and put them aside ready to be sent to the binders. I add holdings records for the textbooks on Aleph (the university’s circulation and cataloguing software), create catalogue cards for them (yes, we still do this), stamp and bookplate, then shelve.
9:45am – I continue with my trainee project. This is the part of your traineeship where you’re allowed to undertake a self-contained task that will benefit the library, or conduct a bit of research into the library’s collections and history. I’ve elected to create a database of Codrington Readers up to 1900, based on signatures in the original admissions book. The library began admitting non-Fellows from the wider university in 1867, on the condition they behave nicely and sign the admissions register. Creating the database involves transcribing hundreds of signatures, of varying legibility. In many cases I have to make an educated guess, and cross-reference with the Oxford Historical Register , individual College Registers, and “other sources” (i.e. Google). My success rate is reasonable, but progress can be painfully slow. I’ve reached the early 1880s.
10:15am – Two new readers arrive (an historian and an archaeologist). I process their applications, make up their library cards, and give them a brief introduction to the library.
10:20am – One of the new readers requests a book from the stack (something on military history). I mooch off to fetch it.
10:25am – New reader no.3 (a geographer).
10:45am – Tea time. Someone’s eaten all the white chocolate wafers.
11:30am – Much excitement. I think I have pinned down one of the more elusive signatures from the admissions register: “R. Caldwell, Tmnevelly”. Much searching turns up a Dr. (later Bishop) Robert Caldwell, an evangelist missionary and linguist who travelled widely in Southern India (“Tmnevelly”, it seems, is the transliterated name of a settlement in the modern Indian state of Tamil Nadu).
12 noon – Lunchtime! Spicy sausage with couscous and chili jam.
12:30pm – The post has arrived. A donation from the Warden (the head of the College) concerning European Merger Law, a few invoices from EBSCO (our main journal supplier), the latest issues of three journals, and a book about Early Gunpowder Artillery. I add the invoices to our accounts spread sheet and add a holdings record for the Artillery book, pausing for a wry chuckle at the author’s picture (think Bill Bailey in a jerkin). I then process the journals (more wrestling with the Scandex), and strategically ignore the donation for the moment.
My desk, looking quite tidy.
1pm – Back to the admissions book. I’m using the 19th century registers of Lincoln’s Inn and Inner Temple in an attempt to track down a few of the more stubborn signatures.
2pm – Spend a frustrating 10 minutes attempting to locate a book in the stack, only to find it was sat in the office – 6 feet from my desk – the whole time. Grrr. Time for tea.
2:30pm – Another donation, this time from an avant-garde artist in Poznan. The book is beyond my cataloguing skills, so I pass it to my colleague Fiona. Instead, I do the easy physical processing stuff, such as the donor’s bookplate, library stamps, and pressmark. I add the title to our donations spread sheet, and write a brief acknowledgement note (discovering lots of new Polish letter-forms in Microsoft Word in the process). Eventually this note will be signed by the Fellow Librarian, and sent to the donor as a thank you.
3pm – I carry on with my cataloguing training. I’ve already been taught how to add simple holdings records for single and multipart items in Aleph , but now I’m learning to catalogue books from scratch. This involves mastering the shadowy art of the MARC record. MARC is a sort of rudimentary programming language that allows bibliographical data to be read by machines. It’s not impossibly hard, and I’m getting better with practice, but it can be rather pedantic and fiddly. There are lots of rules and procedures to remember, and it’s a real test of my concentration. Mercifully the person running the course at the Bodleian has a sense of humour, and my practice cataloguing tasks are all for ludicrous made-up books. My favourite so far is “Proceedings of the fourth California Prune Symposium”.
4pm – I have a long chat with the Assistant Librarian about her on-going attempts to construct a database of College Fellows (current and historic). Seems very complicated. More tea required.
4:30pm – More cataloguing exercises. My concentration wavers when an external researcher arrives to view a manuscript and some early printed books. The Codrington has lots of these (about a third of the entire collection of 185,000 items dates from before 1800), and I never miss an opportunity to shamelessly peer over people’s shoulders when something interesting gets called up.
Spiral staircase in the library office (my desk is at the bottom).
5:30pm – Some re-shelving (apparently a task no trainee can avoid), re-filing of catalogue cards (most hated job), and general tidying up.
6:15pm – I lock the Fellows’ door (an entrance reserved for members of the College) and do the washing up.
6:25pm – The Assistant Librarian politely encourages our few remaining readers to begin packing up.
6:30pm – Home time!
Well, I hope that’s given you an idea of an average (ish) day as a library trainee at All Souls. The traineeship for 2013/14 is being advertised now (closing date: April 5), so if you have any questions about the job please do feel free to drop me an email, either at will.beharrell@all-souls.ox.ac.uk, or via the library’s general enquiries address: codrington.library@all-souls.ox.ac.uk. You can also find more information on the library website: http://www.all-souls.ox.ac.uk/content/The_Codrington_Library.
[I’m posting this on behalf of Sian, the trainee in the University Archives.]
It’s Day 6 of our ‘Library Trainee Day in the Life’ series and I’m going to confuse matters a bit as I’m not actually a library trainee – I’m the archives trainee. My name is Sian and I’m the Archives Assistant at Oxford University Archives. It’s the only archives trainee post currently offered at the University and it’s separate to the library trainee programme, although I’m allowed to tag along to their training sessions. It’s a one-year post, like the library traineeships, and I believe it will be advertised around March. What happens in archives? Well, let’s begin…
8:30-8:45 – The day begins
I arrive (a task in itself as our office is in the tower of the Bodleian Library, so my journey involves a trip up a worn stone spiral staircase) and turn on my computer. I check the phone messages and the diary but there’s nothing going on. I check our enquiries email account and find that there’s only one new enquiry. Rather disappointing, but not unsurprising. The number of enquiries we get seems to vary wildly for no particular reason – one week it’s incredibly busy, the next no one wants to know anything.
8:45-10:15 – Answering enquiries
I was in the middle of researching an enquiry when I left on Friday, so I start by finishing that off. It’s a bit of a tricky one so it takes me a while. It also involves some scanning, so that’s a trip down the stairs to use the library’s machines. The new enquiry, however, is a simple one. It’s one of our most common – ‘did this person attend the University?’ For pre-1891 students, there are published registers, whilst for students between 1891 and 1932 there is a card register in our office. I check it, the person’s not there (the usual result of such enquiries), I reply.
10:15-10:45 – Bits and bobs
I update our loans register and my to-do list before starting on this post. This is a good point to say more about what my job is. The University Archives is just one section of the Special Collections department at the University and we hold the administrative records of the University itself. So that’s things like some records of the departments, matriculation records, examination records, and so on. A lot of my emails involve redirecting people to the right place! Generally, my job involves answering enquiries (from both people within the University and external), making material available for readers, and sorting through new material and cataloguing it.
10:45-11:10 – Coffee break
Coffee and KitKat – just what’s needed by this point in a morning.
11:10-12:05 – More enquiries
We had another enquiry whilst at coffee, so I answer that. It’s another ‘this person went to the University, what can you tell me about it?’ question, but a little bit more complicated this time because it involves attempting to understand the University’s examination system. (Near impossible, if you’re wondering.) We also learn that the skeleton found in a car park is indeed Richard III – how exciting.
12:05-13:05 – The reading room
Next, I go and see what’s happening in Duke Humfrey, the reading room where archives material is read. I sign out some of our material that has been finished with and return to the office. (A two trip job.) My trip to the cupboard inspires me to do a bit of spring-cleaning, so I email a couple of readers who still have material out from before Christmas. There are also four heavy boxes that want bringing to the office for a bit, so I bring two of those up. It works up a good appetite for lunch.
13:05-13:25 – Transporting material
It’s nearly lunchtime but first I take some of the material I removed from Duke Humfrey back to storage. Whilst our office and some older material are in the tower of the Bodleian, the archives themselves are mainly stored in the basement of the Examination Schools. So returning items to storage involves putting as much as I can carry into a bag and walking down the High Street. Thankfully, today’s quite nice out (but material still had to go to and fro even in the recent snow…).
13:25-14:25 – Lunch.
14:25-15:50 – Even more enquiries and more transporting material
There was some excitement this afternoon as, on returning to the basement after lunch, it transpired that the power sockets in half of the rooms had stopped working. As this included the room with the computers, I was utterly lost. Usually, my return from lunch sees me logging on and checking emails. Today, though, I went straight to my filing (more on this joy later) whilst my boss sorted out the power issue.
Once power returned and the computers were usable, I looked up some locations and put away the material that I brought over before lunch. There had been a further enquiry following one of my replies this morning, so I researched that as best I could and replied again. Sometimes answering enquiries, like this one, ends up being far more difficult than it should be because I have to try and find the exact right words to explain what’s going on – there are a lot of assumptions about what words mean and a lot of confusion about what exactly was happening when, and it’s hard to try and get across exactly what it is an enquirer wants to know in a way that cannot be misunderstood (especially when I have a rather tenuous grasp of it all in the first place). But I rather enjoy grappling with it all.
15:50-17:00 – Sorting/cataloguing
I check my personal emails for things of archive-related interest and write most of this post. And then it’s filing time. (Technically, I believe I am cataloguing, but it feels a lot like filing.) We recently had an accession of a batch of academic staff files, so my current task is to make sure they’re in alphabetical order and to put them all in boxes, noting down their dates as I go. Once I’ve boxed them all, I’ll go back through them and give each file a reference code and add them to the catalogue. That won’t happen for a while, though – today, I reached the Os. As I’m sure you can imagine, this is not the most riveting task, so I have to find a way of entertaining myself while I work. There are not many perks to working alone in a basement, but one of the few is the ability to sing along to my iPod as much as I like. I take full advantage of this – there’s nothing like a rousing rendition of Do You Hear the People Sing? to brighten up an afternoon’s work.
17:00 – Home time
So with that final insight into the life of an archives assistant, it’s time for me to go home. This has been a pretty typical day – answering enquiries, doing some cataloguing, limited human interaction. I’m aware I may not have made it sound particularly spectacular, but I do enjoy my job and I wouldn’t rather be anywhere else. If you like extracting information, enjoy helping researchers, are rather organised, will feel great satisfaction at the sight of hundreds of beautifully boxed and labelled files, and don’t mind constantly having paper cuts, then archives could be the career for you!
Today’s Day in the Life comes from me, Kat, the Information Resources trainee at the Law Bod. For an overview about what I do, have a look at my earlier posts: introducing myself, and a bit more about what I do. Like most of the other trainees, I have quite a few different things to get on with these days, and although this was quite a typical one for a day in the office, I also get to go on quite a few training courses, meetings with colleagues from other libraries and visits to different libraries around Oxford.
Moysing the USA section
9.00-11.45 : Moysing the USA section. You can’t spend much time around the Bodleian Law librarians without coming across Moys. It’s a classification system specifically for law books, arranging them by subject, and we’re gradually progressing with the mammoth task of converting all our textbooks into the Moys system. We’ve done all of the UK law section (many thousands of books), and now we’re doing the USA section. They’re not actually being moved yet, because that would be carnage with books being reclassified as we went along, but lots of the staff spend a few hours a week reclassifying the books, and recording what the new shelfmark will be when we eventually swap them all over. Then we’ll have the fun of reshelving them all! This happened in the UK section over last Summer, and it was apparently a pretty surreal experience with all the books off the shelves. I enjoy reclassifying, because it’s one of the more problem-solving things that I do – does this book called ‘Punishing Corporate Crime’ come under Criminal law – companies, or Company law – crimes? There is no right answer, the whole thing is very subjective, so the rule is generally that if you can justify your decision to someone else, that’s fine. You can also look at what other books have been given similar classifications to see if they’re about the same kind of thing. So far we’ve got through 100 pages, which is about 3000 books, so not bad going since the Summer! I’m still pretty slow, (not knowing very much about law, particularly US law, doesn’t help!), so this takes most of my morning to reclassify, write the new shelfmarks in the book, and add them to the catalogue record.
There is also the extra complication of our Secondary Collection: because law changes all the time, it’s important to distinguish between outdated or superseded old editions of textbooks and the most recent ones. So the old ones are stored downstairs in another area of the library. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always get reflected correctly on the catalogue, and sometimes things have been incorrectly shelved in the main library as well. So often doing Moys reclassification also involves finding the physical locations of the books, making some catalogue changes or reshelving, and reclassifying the things that should be on the shelf. This sheet had a whole series of books on the History of the Supreme Court which needed some shuffling around.
11.45-12.00 : Looking for catalogue records. Every week Law gets all the legal deposit books about the subject that the Bodleian has claimed. This means (in theory) any book published in the UK within about the last year can be claimed and a copy will come to the Bod, and then to us. In practice this means we get 40-50 books a week. Some of them will already have been catalogued, but others have only a very minimal record of the title, author etc., and I save our English-language cataloguer a bit of time by having a look to see if there are any better records anywhere else that we can use. This involves searching other library catalogues (the British Library and the US Library of Congress) and databases of catalogue records from lots of libraries (Research Libraries UK and WorldCat) to see if they have anything to offer. This didn’t take very long today because there were only about 15 books to check, and quite a few were already in the British Library (the most reliable source), so that was good!
12.00-13.00 : Lunch
13.00-15.00 : Desk duty. The Law Bod is different from quite a few of the other Oxford libraries (but the same as the Bodleian itself) in that it doesn’t lend books, but we have a desk at what is called the Reserve Collection, where we ‘lend’ the most in-demand, high-use books within the library, so we can keep track of who has them and so they don’t just get left on a desk somewhere when people need them. Today I worked with a more senior member of staff at the main desk, where she could answer the phones, operate the entry gate if people didn’t have their cards, and go with readers to help them with queries. The library was very busy, so I spend most of my time lending and receiving books from the Reserve Collection, explaining that a lot of them were already out (all the first-years want Roman law at the moment!), helping readers find books in the main collection, lending ethernet cables to research students, and generally answering questions about how to do or find things. One particular DPhil student wanted to see several DPhil dissertations, which we keep on the ground floor in locked cabinets, so that involved a fair amount of going up and downstairs and fetching and carrying, but he was very grateful to have a look at them. On top of all this, I was getting on with some looseleaf filing at the desk. Lots of staff do this during their desk duties – it involves getting one of our many looseleaf binders and the new issue of loose pages, and following filing instructions to insert the new pages and remove the ones they supersede. We are pretty much the only academic library in the country that files all of the looseleaf law parts (the British Library receives the new issues, but doesn’t file them, which makes them almost impossible to use). I find it quite relaxing, although it can get a bit difficult if there are a lot of loose pages on the desk when readers are trying to borrow or return books. There were a few hairy moments where I thought the pile of returned books on my desk was going to topple over before I could check them in! Desk shifts are one of my favourite parts of my job, and I really enjoy the fact that we’re a popular library for students and researchers at all levels to work in. I recognise a lot of our regular readers now, so it’s nice to slowly build more of a rapport with them. And of course, the more I work at the desk, the better I am at knowing what we have in our collection, so the more confident and competent I am at dealing with them!
15.00-15.15 : Tea break!
New journals
15.15-16.15 : Book processing. This is a substantial part of what I do every day – remember those 40-50 books a week? When they arrive, they need to be stamped, tattle-taped (this is what we call the electric alarms that go in books) and recorded that they have arrived. I also have to tattle-tape most of the 60-75 new journals we receive each week, and they go in files behind my desk in alphabetical order, ready to go on the New Journals Display, which I update every Tuesday. Today there are only a few late arrivals by legal deposit, some new purchases, and a small pile of journals to add to the groaning boxes.
Another part of book processing is labelling, which I do once the books have been catalogued and classified by other members of the team. I finish up some of that, after which the books are ready to go upstairs to be shelved.
16.15-16.40 : Shelf-reading and shelving. This is about Moys again! We’ve just got a new edition (the 5th) of Moys, which makes some changes to the previous edition. So now, some of the books which have been reclassified already in the UK section, need to be re-reclassified to fit the new edition! A few months ago I spent quite a bit of time relabelling a big section of the housing and construction law and reshelving things. Over the last couple of weeks, there have been some more changes made, but the relabelling is now finished, and so I spent a little while checking the order of the books was correct (it wasn’t in a few places), since it’s easy to miss things when you shuffle a lot of books around. Then I spent some time shelving books which readers were finished with. I don’t spend very much time shelving day-to-day, but in term-time things can build up pretty quickly so it’s useful to lend a hand.
16.40-17.05 : Suggestions book. We’ve had a suggestions book at the main desk of the library for the last 11 years, and it’s finally full!
Suggestions book
The suggestions in it have been dealt with as they were added, obviously, but it’s now my job to look at the comments and book and journal suggestions that have been written over the years and create some pretty graphs and interesting statistics about them. At the moment this involves making a huge spreadsheet with the details of each comment, and whether or not we bought the items suggested. It’s interesting to see themes and trends emerge over time, as wells as the occasional funny comment about the heating or the comfort of the chairs, or the librarians complaining about publishers who never deposit their books without being chased. I’m looking forward to really getting stuck into the data once it’s all on my spreadsheet – I’m about 1/3 of the way through at the moment.
And that’s about it! It was a pretty full-on day, but I enjoy desk shifts, and there wasn’t too much mechanically stamping and tattle-taping books which there can be late in the week, when all of the legal deposit arrives. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this post, and have a bit of an idea what another trainee gets up to day-to-day. Do check out the other posts in this series, as our jobs vary a lot – I’ll certainly be reading to find out what traineeships are like in other libraries!
The experiences most readers have of libraries are of gentle wanderings around the shelves, furious frustration with the establishment’s electronic equipment and the relentless pursuit of fines conducted by ever vigilant staff. Obviously such an experience is one-sided: libraries consist of far more than their public face. A vast amount of work is done ‘behind-the-scenes’ and most of it is vital to keeping the public services of the library in operation. Acquisitions provides new stock, cataloguers make sure the library’s collections are accessible, bar coders make electronic check-in systems possible.
My time in Technical Services was spent between four sections of the department, each with an integral role in keeping the Bodleian Library operating: the Copyright Receipt Office (CRO), Foreign Cataloguing, Acquisitions and Room 215 (where a significant number of differing tasks are completed). However different the work of each of these sections is, they are all part of essentially the same process: the acquisition of material , its reception into the library and then preparation for public use. In the Bodleian, this process is somewhat different to that of an ‘ordinary’ library (does such a place exist?) because of the Bodleian’s legal deposit status. This means that the Bodleian is entitled to claim any book published in the UK (and some from beyond the coasts of this sceptered isle): publishers must send a copy of a work if it is requested. This means that Technical Services have to deal with an absolutely vast quantity of material, not all of it useful. As I found in the Rare Books department, the Bodleian’s role is not simply that of a library: it is also a museum, collecting and preserving the bibliographic heritage of the English-speaking world. Preserving untold numbers of Mills and Boon ‘erotica’ (I use the word in its loosest sense) may not seem to be important to us right now but who knows what service they might render to future generations of scholars studying subjects like gender or popular literature?
Much of my time was spent in Room 215 where I was heavily involved with the X-Backlog project. Books that arrive at the Bodleian are usually either shelfmarked ‘M’ or ‘X’: the ‘M’ titles are usually academic works or works that will be of use to academic research whilst the ‘X’ titles are much more popular books. As such, the ‘X’ shelfmark is an umbrella that encompasses a wide variety of different material: children’s books, the autobiographies of modern luminaries such as David Beckham and Jordan, puzzle books (Sudoku as far as the eye can see), film tie-ins, self-published manuals developing elaborate conspiracy theories and travel guides. As I’ve already mentioned, the Bodleian is obliged to keep at least one copy of these books for the purposes of preservation and this means that significant resources have to be employed to making these books accessible: bibliographic records need to be imported, bar codes inserted, shelfmarks assigned, shelve space found. These were the general tasks with which I was occupied whilst in Room 215. As these tasks are time-consuming (especially when we consider the rather low-level of demand coming from readers for ‘X’ books), a backlog of several thousand books currently exists, a backlog that needs to be dealt with before the closure of the New Bodleian takes place. Naturally, this deadline has forced certain procedural changes so that it can be met. Room 215 also deals with English-language cataloging and it is also the home to the Bodleian’s liason with the Library of Congress.
The Copyright Receipt Office (CRO) deals with books when they first arrive at the library. They unpack the crates of books delivered by the porters, stamp them and register their reception and their bar code (in a process known as ‘CRObaring’). Journals are checked in and sent to the various reading rooms of the library whilst books are placed on display: the subject librarians flock to the display to pick and choose the materials they want for their collections. Necessarily the pace of work in this section is very brisk indeed due to the sheer quantity of the material submitted via copyright: it all needs to be cleared. The staff here also pursue claims that have not as yet been fulfilled by reluctant publishers. Many problems encountered by CRO staff have been caused by the recent move of the Copyright Agency from London to Edinburgh, a move which caused the loss of the experienced and well-connected staff it had accumulated.
Foreign cataloguing probably needs the least explanation: it is their job to take those new materials written in a foreign language (the Bodleian deals with occidental languages only) and establish bibliographic records for them within OLIS. In some cases, this requires making entirely new records whilst in others it simply requires that records be imported and modified for the purposes of the Bodleian. As graduate trainee, I helped them deal with the large number of auction catalogues that had accumulated in recent months: in doing so, I was given a crash course in the basic principles of cataloguing.
Last but no means least is Acquisitions. Although the Bodleian can and does acquire the majority of its stock for free through a copyright claim, this is sometimes inadequate. Copyright claims can take a very long time to produce results, which is clearly detrimental when a book or journal is urgently required by an academic or the student community. Books also need to ordered from abroad so Acquisitions (formerly known as ‘Foreign Acquisitions’ for precisely this reason) places these as well, in countries as diverse as Argentina, Russia and Japan. So the Acquisitions staff deal with orders, some copyright claims, invoices and the receipt of foreign journals. Here the constraints of budget and the library’s financial policies are most strongly felt as the Acquisitions staff must ensure that budgetary limits imposed on book orders are adhered to by librarians. I helped process the invoices, set up claims and I also spent a day at the Taylor Slavonic, where I was able to assist with some acquisitions work due to my knowledge of Russian.
Although the work of Technical Services is far from glamorous (it is far removed from the human contact encountered on the desk and is sometimes repetitive to the point of monotony), it is utterly vital from any perspective. Without the complex systems set up and administered by technical services staff, the Bodleian could not cope with the large demands placed on it by its legal deposit status.
People have been talking about ‘day-in-the-life’ blog posts to give everyone a better idea of the different kinds of work we all do and I thought I’d kick things off. For those that don’t know, I’m the trainee for the futureArch project and I’m going down the archiving, rather than librarian route. From what I’ve heard from some of the other trainees, my job is quite different, so hopefully people will find this quite interesting. I think the big difference is that I’m only in a reading room dealing with enquiries and visitors one morning a week and the rest of the time I’m in an office and only have to talk to my colleagues!
So anyway, here is a typical Thursday: I’m based in Osney but on Thursday mornings I go over to the Logic School in the Bodleian Quad as I’m being taught how to use EAD, the cataloguing programme. I’ve been given a small collection of Victorian letters to catalogue first, which thankfully is a pretty standard collection. EAD is pretty simple to use, once you get used to all the little quirks and rules, like when inserting the scope/content you have to also insert a paragraph element within it before you can start writing. If you don’t, EAD has a bit of a tantrum and starts highlighting everything in red. It’s also very fussy about punctuation and where you can and cannot have a comma. The hardest part (but also the most fun) is trying to read the signatures of all the correspondents and work out who they are so I can list them in the catalogue – there’s a lot of variation in the standard of handwriting. Thankfully most of them are famous enough to be in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, or as a last resort, wikipedia. It can be frustrating (one letter was signed ‘H.H.’) but it’s very rewarding when you finally work out who they are (for anyone interested H.H. turned out to be Hugh Haweis).
I finish at the Bodleian at 1pm and get back over to Osney (for which I love the minibus). In the afternoon I get on with my ongoing struggle with the CD imaging programme. The futureArch project is looking at born-digital archives (computer files, emails, MP3s etc.) and trying to develop an infrastructure for preserving and archiving these. CD imaging is a form of forensic imaging whereby a programme examines a disk to see what’s there without disturbing any of the metadata. For instance, we don’t want to change the last modified date, so we can’t just open all the files normally to see what’s there, besides which not all files are compatible with PCs. The programme also harvests and creates other metadata, like MD5 hash values. These are unique identifiers, so you can easily see if a file actually is a duplicate, or just looks the same. The programme can also retrieve deleted files (though not always intact), but this brings up a whole set of issues over the morality of archiving files the owner doesn’t realise we have. The imager also produces a copy of all the files, which eventually will be preserved in our secure server. This means we’re not reliant on computers still having CD drives in fifty years time to be able to view the files – just look at Amstrads: a lot of disks still exist, but if you haven’t got the computer they’re pretty much useless and the data on them is lost.
Anyway, I have a set of disks to image and we have a robotic loader, so in theory I should be able to pile them up and set the loader to put each one in the machine, image it, take it out and put the next one in, but of course technology is never that simple! Most of the time the loader seems to get confused and tries to remove the disk without first opening the disk drive and then decides to sulk and stop working. It also can’t seem to work out when it’s run out of disks and will bring up an error message and again stop working. I was getting a bit worried I’d pressed the wrong button or something, but my manager assures me other people who use it also complain about it being temperamental. Maybe it just doesn’t like being left in a room by itself.
When I get too annoyed with the loader, or just need a break I move on to one of my other tasks, which is sorting out one of the boxed collections. It’s in one of the cages across the hall and when it was archived nobody properly went through it, so I get the exciting job of going through the boxes and removing any staples and paperclips left in there and removing papers from metal ring binders and folders and putting then into plain card ones. A lot of the metal has started to rust and it’s quite dirty work, but it makes a change to do something manual that doesn’t require much brain power and it gets me away from the computer screen for a while. I normally spend the afternoon alternating between the imaging and the box sorting and then comes home time!
There are other jobs I do on different days of the week, but that’s a pretty typical Thursday. It’d be great to hear what other people get up to and compare it.
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