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A day in the life of a Graduate Trainee: Taylor Institution Library

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As we are now approaching the final months of the Graduate Trainee year, I thought I’d write a quick post detailing what I’ve been up to throughout the last twelve months! Although my work has changed throughout the year, in this post I have tried to describe a “typical” day in my library; detailing both the routine activities I do virtually every day and giving a snapshot of the individual projects that have changed throughout the year.

Here it is:

9.00 – Arrive at work and prepare the library for opening at 9.30. This involves switching on the Desk and SOLO quick search computers, setting out the cash boxes ready for collecting fines, and opening some windows in the main reading room and computer room to let some air circulate. I will also normally do a spot check of the library; tidying up anything left from the previous evening and shelving any books left on tables.

9.10-9.30 – Once the library is ready to open, I then start Aleph (the University’s Library Management System) on both desk computers, and open my email inbox. Afterwards, I download the daily “Lapse List”, which contains a list of both the Bodleian and PTFL books that need to be returned to the Book Storage Facility in Swindon every day. I then find these books on their shelves by the main desk, process them, and place them in the box to be collected by the delivery van at lunch time. If my colleague has not already done so, I will also check the Book Returns Box to check whether any books have been returned to the library outside of opening hours, and then return them to the shelves.

9.30-11.00 – Now that the library is open, readers start to enter and I therefore start my everyday desk duties. As it is now close to exam time, several readers are entering the library returning or borrowing books, but there are also regular questions from readers both in person and on the telephone, and I advise them on a case-by-case basis. This week, for example, I have answered questions about the payment of fines, the use of the Bodleian wide printing system (PCAS), the location of resources both in the PTFL and in the wider Bodleian libraries, and had to chase up books for readers that had not been returned on time.

When readers are not at the desk, I also start to reply to any emails that come through either to my own inbox or to the generic library inbox. These can be from readers asking questions about resources, or from colleagues asking me to complete specific tasks. Additionally, I help to process any fines payments coming through from the online store and reserve places on information skills sessions run by the library.

11.00 – Tea Break!

11.10 – 13.00 – In addition to my regular desk duties and answering email enquiries, as the day goes on, I normally take the opportunity to work on one of my individual trainee projects when the desk is quiet. These have been varied throughout the year and have changed depending on the individual needs of the library. So far, I have written a blog post advertising the library’s collections to a wider audience, created a new PowerPoint presentation for the Library Information Screen, and taken part in a project to reclassify the remaining Theology classification to Library of Congress (more details to follow in my presentation for the Trainee showcase!).

13.00 – 14.00 – Lunch!

14.00 – 15.00 – Shortly after 2pm, the Bodleian delivery van usually comes to collect the outgoing Closed Stack Books and to drop off any books that have been ordered in the last 24 hours from the Book Storage Facility in Swindon. After they are delivered, I process any new books with colleagues and then place them on the reservation shelf at the Enquiry Desk. When they are processed, a reader gets an email informing them that their request has arrived, and they can then come to the desk to collect it. After processing the stack books, I normally continue on the desk, answering any further enquiries and shelving any returned books once I have any spare time.

15.00 – Tea Break!

15.10 – 16.45 – For the past few months, in the afternoons I have often been in the back library office as we are currently completing a weeding project. As we are trying to make space in the library for new acquisitions, I have been selecting low use books from the open shelves and processing them ready for ingest into the Book Storage Facility. I therefore need to replace the barcode on these books and update their catalogue record to reflect their new location. Once they have been processed, these books are placed in a special ingest box and collected by the Bodleian delivery van the following day.

16.45 – 17.15 – If it is not term-time, in the last half an hour of the day I help other colleagues to prepare the library for closing at 5pm. This process is basically the reverse of the opening procedure, but we always make sure that we check all areas of the library for any stray readers before we close the building! As it is currently term-time, I normally hand over to the evening staff at this time at the moment, unless I am on an evening shift myself of course. The library then closes at 7pm.

Summaries of Showcase Talks

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If anyone’s wondering about the sort of work the trainees get up to during their year in Oxford, below are the summaries of the talks we gave at the Showcase. Slides from the presentations can be found on Slideshare. Due to technical issues, Clare Hunter’s presentation has been uploaded as a separate file.

Read more Summaries of Showcase Talks ›

Jamie Stokes, Sainsbury Library

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So I’m halfway through week two here at the Sainsbury Library (based in the Saïd Business School) and so far so good. Currently I’m sat at the enquiry desk by myself for the first time, and with only one person using the library just now I think it’s safe to say it’s pretty quiet. So far (touch wood) there have been no enquiries, though I feel it’s only a matter of time…

Other duties of the Graduate Trainee at the Sainsbury Library (according to previous trainee Emily who left a very thorough handover including a list of places to eat and get drunk) include putting together welcome packs for new members of staff in the Business School, processing new books and journals, weeding old journals, sorting out overdue book records, mending books, reclassifying books, making shelfmark posters and sorting out a variety of emails. So far I’ve made three welcome packs and done a little book and journal processing, which was pretty fun. I think I’m looking forward to term starting but at the same time I’m pretty glad it’s a few weeks away yet.

New workplace — the Saïd Business School

I ended up exploring librarianship as a career somewhat unexpectedly after spending five years at Liverpool John Moores University doing an undergraduate and then postgraduate degree in Creative Writing. Plan A had always been to write for a living in whatever manner possible, which, after a brief stint as a freelance writer for a dodgy Hungarian internet start-up, led me to work which definitely did not involve writing, in a pub kitchen desperately trying to make ends meet and hating every second of it. Then I saw an advert for an internship at Gladstone’s Library, which was pretty much an excuse to escape from the kitchen and live in a humongous residential library for what turned out to be six of the best months of my life. This involved some awesome people, a really wide-ranging experience of typical (and non-typical) library work, free attendance at a load of fantastic lectures and events, an awful lot of gin, and two free two-course meals a day! After that experience applying for the post in Oxford seemed the obvious thing to do, so here I am.

Gladstone’s Library — one of the very best places on Earth

The only thing to do now is enjoy the rest of the year, get to know Oxford a bit, and prepare for the next step (whatever exactly that may be…)

Library Trainee Day In the Life – Day 11

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Looking back to my last post, I’m amazed that time has passed so quickly, and how pleasantly I have found myself in this mixture of routine and variety. Now that term has ended, the pace at the library has altered: with fewer reader enquiries, we have the opportunity to implement longer-term changes, like reorganising the English Literature section.

It also means I have dug out my ‘Day in the Life’ and am finally (!!) posting it on the blog. I chose to document a term-time Monday when, because the Librarian works four days a week, the Trainee is the sole member of staff. This means I often start my week with a reminder of both how much I’ve learned and how much I’ve yet to learn! As time progresses it’s been more of the former and less of the latter, but Mondays remain a unique challenge in the week.

8.55: Arrive. The run up the stairs is my daily exercise.

9.00:  Check the Periodicals Room.

The Periodicals Room is one of the reading rooms of the Meyricke Library. Its desks are cleared first thing every morning to ensure that readers can always find a place to sit. Elsewhere in the library, students may leave ‘Please Leave’ notes to reserve their desks.

9.10: Check emails. Nothing needs to be dealt with immediately, so I scoot ‘round the return points (one by every entrance to the library and a Book Returns box in the hall) and tidy the desks. I separate the returns according to their respective floors, return and re-shelve those in the Lower Library and the Lower Library Gallery.

9.30: Return to my emails, process a book recall, answer a few reader queries, open post that arrived over the weekend.

Opening post in a library often feels like Christmas, especially since I usually get books for Christmas. Today’s present is five issues of a Welsh journal called Ysgrifau Beirniadol, or ‘Critical Essays.’  To get a sense of what I am dealing with I take out my friends Dictionary and Google Translate. Between them and my term and a half of Welsh lessons, I discover where in the Celtic Library they should live.  I cover, stamp, and bookplate them and update their ‘On order’ status on Aleph.

11.00-12.00: Issue desk duty in the Upper Library

Jesus Library is entirely self-service, but this term I’ve been in one of the reading rooms for an hour each morning. Having library staff as a visible presence within the library has meant readers can ask for help more quickly and easily, and that I can spot when someone is looking lost or confused. It also has a positive impact on levels of noise and disruption. I do the second half of my shelving at this point.

12.05: Check post.

12.10:Work on ongoing reclassification of Reference Section.

Like many college libraries we have our own in-house classification system that has grown with the collection. Sometimes this means there are inconsistencies and inefficiencies that need to be ironed out. I take the Italian reference material, reclassify it within the existing Italian section, re-label the books and update their Aleph records.

1.00: Lunch.

Roasted winter vegetables, a cheese scone AND garlic bread, apple juice, an orange. The food at Jesus is pretty yummy and as a member of staff I get my lunches for free.

2.00: Check the Fellows’ Library.

The Fellows’ Library is a beautiful room that Fellows have access to, as well as external researchers on application. Checking it means making sure it is tidy and that there is nothing amiss. I usually do this in the morning, but I enjoy seeing it in the light of different times of the day.

2.15: Trainee Project Proposal.

For my trainee project I am creating a bank of display cards for books of particular interest in the Fellows’ Library. Writing a proposal for my supervisor is useful and stimulating— particularly thinking about what the phrase ‘of particular interest’ really means. I brainstorm and think of examples of aspects I might highlight: provenance, bindings or other material elements, value. I have lots of notes so I sit down with a cup of tea and a pen to make sense of them.

3.00: Pre-emptive shelving

I have been at my desk for a while, so I decide to get a head start on the returns that have been coming in throughout the day. Looking around to see what needs to be done is the task of a Trainee any day of the week, but Mondays are a particularly good test of this skill.

3.30: Make a start on reclassifying Theology reference books.

As above with Italian, though I feel some of the books should be reclassified in History. Classifying is among my favourite jobs because it is one of the rare opportunities that you get to see what’s inside a book. It also means you gain a surface understanding of the shapes of unfamiliar disciplines.

4:00: Type up my proposal , flesh out this post.  

4.45: Check the reading rooms.

5.00: Tidy my desk, put on my coat, brave the cold.

Library Trainee Day in the Life – Day 4

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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 away
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
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
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!

Library Day in the Life Round 8: Tuesday

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This is the second of five blog posts written for round 8 of the Library Day in the Life Project  by the graduate trainee at the Radcliffe Science Library.

9.15am: Usually on Tuesdays I would spend the whole day at the Alexander Library of Ornithology, but this week my Tuesday starts with an All Libraries Meeting.  Once a term the Bodley’s Librarian gives a talk to staff of the Bodleian Libraries updating us all on what is happening in libraries around Oxford.  Tea and coffee is provided before the meeting and I get a chance to meet a couple of people I’ve not met before.  The meeting starts with fancy fly-through presentation of the plans for the new Weston Library (due to open in 2014); goes on to cover various digitization projects, most of which I’ve not heard about before; then there’s an update on the Bodleian Libraries website development project; the proposed plans for moving the History Faculty Library to the central Bodleian site are discussed; and it finishes with a question and answer session.

One digitization project which particularly caught my attention was a project called What’s the score at the Bodleian?  The project aims to make available a collection of uncatalogued music scores from the 19th century.   The difference with this project is that once items have been digitized and made available online with basic descriptive metadata, members of the public are being asked to help make the material more easily discoverable by adding more information about it.  Does anyone know of any other projects using crowd-sourced creation of descriptive metadata?

11.15am: Arrive at the Alexander Library of Ornithology in the Zoology Department.  Start up computer, greet colleagues, have a quick discussion about our thoughts on the All Libraries Meeting and check emails.

11.25am: My first task for today is carrying on with a something I started last Tuesday.  The Alexander Library moved to its current home last summer and the listings for our geographical and subject reprints sequences still had the old shelf marks on them.  I’m updating the lists, but I’m using the box numbers that were added to help with the move, rather than shelf marks so that if there is another move in the future it doesn’t have to be redone again.  I’m starting today in the middle of the Africa part of the geographical sequence.  I check that the box name on the list matches the box name on the box, write down the box number and when I’ve done that for a reasonable number of boxes go to the library office and fill in the table I’m making.  The process is complicated by a lot of the countries having changed their names and boundaries over the years meaning there are a number of mismatches and some confusing labelling.  I find Wikipedia very useful for demystifying these mismatches!

Geographical Reprints Boxes
Geographical Reprints Boxes

12.30pm: I get to the end of the Africa sequence and take a break from the reprints listings by flicking through the lastest copy of Outline – the Bodleian Libraries staff newsletter.  An article about an exhibition at the Bodliean called The Romance of the Middle Ages catches my eye and I make a mental note to go and see it.

The librarian suggests I help her with a project to update the inventory of items in the rare books cupboard.  The shelf marks need updating since they changed due to the move in the summer.  We decide on the best way to go about the project and agree to start it next week.

12.50pm: Back to the reprints list.  I start on the last section of the geographical sequence – America.  This turns out (as expected) to be much simpler to deal with than Africa.

1.10pm: Lunch

2pm: Reprints list again

Photograph of books on biography at the Alexander Library
Biographies – just one of the resources available to me in the Alexander Library

2.50pm: I finish the listing for the geographical sequence so decide to move on to another task.  I continue an ongoing project creating summaries of the lives of people whose archives the library holds.  This should hopefully make it easier to work out whether an archive is likely to contain the information a reader is searching for and to find the best part of the archive to look in for that information.  Today I’m working on a life summary for Sir Julian Huxley, who was also the first director-general of UNESCO and did many other things as well as conducting ornithological research.

I tend to start by searching for the person in the online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which is available via the university’s subscription.  Other sources include the biographies and autobiographies we have in the collections, the biography reprints we hold (which include newspaper clippings of obituaries as well as journal articles) and information I can find on the websites of organizations the person was particularly involved with.  Sometimes the information is easy to find, sometimes it is not but I enjoy a challenge.

3.45pm: Tea break time

Desk in the library office at the Alexander Library
My desk at the Alexander Library

4pm: Back to writing up Sir Julian Huxley’s life summary.  I enjoy finding information and some of the people I have researched had absolutely fascinating lives, so this is a task I find rewarding.  However, the Alexander librarian only works part time, so the library is only open to visitors three days a week 9.30am until 2.10pm.  Although members of the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology have 24-hour key fob access, the library is always very quiet in the afternoon.  By the end of the day it is getting a bit lonely and I’m looking forward to getting back to the hustle and bustle of the Radcliffe Science Library tomorrow.

4.55pm: I pack everything away, shut down the computer, close up the library office and then head off home.

Trainee project showcase – From QEH to LoC: reclassifying pamphlets in the SSL

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For our trainee project we have been reclassifying the pamphlets in the SSL from an in-house classification scheme to Library of Congress. The pamphlets came over from the International Development Centre at Queen Elizabeth House in 2005 and cover a huge range of topics including constitutional and conference publications, political and economic reports. Some of these pamphlets are actually the only copies held in Oxford and often date back to the 1940’s and 50’s, so altogether they make a really interesting, almost archival collection.

Why was the reclassification needed? We are still using the shelf marks from QEH, whereas the rest of the SSL uses Library of Congress, which is familiar to our readers and they can already navigate it. Also, the boxes were messy, with unequal amounts in them, and were underused. We hope that reclassifying the section will improve their use and accessibility.

After a brief explanation of Library of Congress classification the presentation then shows the steps we go through in order to assign each pamphlet with a new shelfmark. This involves looking at the item’s MARC record to find the subject heading which can then be used to find a relevant shelfmark on Classificationweb. The final part of the shelfmark is then constructed using information taken from the MARC record such as the author’s name and the publication date. Once a new shelfmark has been found we then update the holdings so that the new shelfmark appears on the catalogue. By processing the reclassified pamphlets in the same way and keeping them all in one section we hope that they will be easy for staff and readers to find.

The project has been going really well, and we are making steady progress. We won’t finish the whole section, but we will be passing it on to another member of staff. It has been an enjoyable project, especially getting to read the pamphlets! It’s also been a fantastic opportunity to learn assigning original classification, which is a really useful skill that not everyone has the chance to learn, especially as a graduate trainee.

A day working in Room 206 (Rare Books)

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In the recent post about noise levels in libraries, much of the discussion has focused on what libraries are for. The consensus seems to be that libraries are for the readers: they are institutions intended to facilitate the research conducted by a varied demographic. In such a conception, customer care is the first and highest priority of the staff. That such a view should be unchallenged is demonstrative of the fact that nearly all of the trainees spend most (in some cases, all) of their time either dealing directly with customers (answering enquiries, lending material etc.) or helping to render the library a more reader-friendly environment (for instance, changing shelfmarks and labels or opening and updating Facebook pages).

The problem is, however, that this view does not represent the full gamut of librarianship. In some instances, the reader and their purposes have to be subordinated to other priorities. Dealing with rare or antiquarian books is one of those instances. Here the books themselves are the most important thing: their care is the Librarian’s objective. Indeed, the book itself assumes an entirely different character in the job of the Rare Books Librarian. No longer is the book secondary to the knowledge it contains but instead becomes an object of value in its own right, regardless of its specific contents and their use to the reader. Books become cultural artifacts, as opposed to tools in the quest for knowledge. Libraries become museums, dedicated to the careful storage and preservation of the book. Bibliography, conservation and literary history become the key areas of study for the librarian, rather than information management and customer service.

So too do relations with the reader shift, becoming far more troubled: they adopt some aspects of being a struggle for control. The reader wishes to use the book for his or her particular purposes but the Rare Books Librarian has to defend the book from any usage that may damage it or render it liable to theft. So the kind of reader permitted to view the book needs to be restricted to only the most trusted, the most qualified, the most experienced. Even those who meet such stringent criteria need to conduct their research in a place specified by the Librarian: it cannot be dispatched to other libraries or other reading places.  If possible, the item should be handled by the reader only when being supervised by a qualified member of staff. The things that such reader can do with the book must also be severely curtailed: photocopying, scanning or photographing the material is forbidden. The needs of the individual researcher are thus pushed into a subsidiary position: the librarian exists not to indulge the whims of the reader but to defend the book from harm and preserve it for posterity.  It is no surprise, therefore, that some patrons become frustrated with what they perceive as the contumacious behaviour of the staff handling the rare books they need to continue their research. However, they need to understand that, where antiquarian books are concerned, the customer is not always right nor even very important to the entire process.  In an age of consumerism and egoism, such unflattering principles can be difficult to accept but it is ultimately for their own good: if such books are not preserved and kept safe, they may not survive to see another century. They will be lost to future researchers.

One of the tasks that I was given earlier this week demonstrate these principles splendidly. I was asked to move several hundred pre-1800 books from the Nicolson classification scheme to the protected area on J-Floor of the New Bodleian Stack in preparation for their reclassification. Why was this done? As is well known, the New Bodleian Library is going to be demolished and rebuilt. Those books on J-Floor will remain under the direct supervision of Special Collections. However, books in the Nicolson classification scheme will be removed, photocopied and sent to the Social Science Library where they could ultimately be lent out.  This is bad enough for the 27,000 pre-1900 items present but it would be utterly disastrous for the 700 pre-1800 Nicolson books. They would not receive the proper care nor could access to them be regulated. Theft and intentional damage would become far easier. Thus it is necessary to move them and reclassify them so that they do receive the protection they require.

Of course, it is not always possible to defend the books: the outside world will inevitably find a way to invade the closed  and orderly edifices we erect and maintain. This was proved to me earlier on Tuesday when we had a leak reported in K-Floor that had been caused by the heavy rains. The water was dripping in an area where many pre-1900 books were stored. The entire Room 206 team were dispatched to remove those books that were in harm’s way and place them in a safer and, hopefully, drier area of K-Floor. Some books unfortunately were wet enough to warrant a speedy dispatch to the conservation team but most were unharmed.

That we cannot always win should not discourage the Rare Books Librarian from maintaining his or her focus on caring for the book: as Brecht once said “Those who try may fail but those who do not try have already failed.” This is one area of librarianship where the reader must be held resolutely at arm’s length: their satisfaction is not the ultimately objective of this kind of library work.

Jessica Jones, English Faculty Library

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JessHello! I’m Jess, and I am the trainee at the English Faculty Library. I have just graduated from Liverpool John Moores University, where I studied English.

I chose the Oxford trainee scheme as, as well as providing valuable work experience, I felt it would be particularly helpful to meet and engage with others who were about to enter the field of librarianship. Through the weekly training sessions, we have been able to compare experiences and ultimately gain a more widespread knowledge of the many different aspects of work in the library field. Alongside this, it seems that the trainees roles can differ quite greatly from library to library – and so it is interesting to be introduced not just to the varied work of my colleagues within the English Faculty Library but also to learn about the other libraries through my fellow trainees.

This year, I am particularly looking forward to being involved in the library’s ongoing reclassification project, which is taking place in preparation for the English Faculty’s planned move to a combined humanities building. I am very excited about being part of the English Faculty Library team, and hope that I will both fulfil my duties well and learn a lot along the way!