Me in the Enquiries Room

Hi everyone! I’m Katie, and I’m the new Graduate Library Trainee based at the Taylorian this year. I’ve only recently finished my Bachelor’s at the University of Chicago, where I’d been living for five years. I had some experience with the library work at UChicago, but confined to the Google Books Project rather than direct reader interactions, so my experience of work in the day-to-day ebb and flow of a library was pretty limited.

The Taylor Institution Library, or the Taylorian, as it’s also known, is on St. Giles, at kitty-corner with the Ashmolean, and the Sackler Library the next road over. It was established in 1845, when architect Sir Robert Taylor left a bequest for a centre for the study of modern European languages, which the university then placed in the east wing of the building built to house both the Taylor and the Randolph Galleries (which later became the Ashmolean); the library was officially opened in 1849.

Exterior of the Taylor Library in the early years

In 1938 there was an extension made along St. Giles’ in order to accommodate the increasing collections that had resulted from the official establishment in 1903 of the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, which have been centred around the Taylorian ever since. The latest growth of the library has been in the past five years, with its’ enveloping of the Slavonic and East European collections (previously housed in Wellington Square).

The Main Reading Room from the balcony

Here, amongst over 70,000 books, we now have both the Western and Eastern European languages collections, alongside the Slavonic collections and the collections for Linguistics, Film Studies, and Women’s Studies, all spread between over a dozen different cataloguing systems that have all grown on themselves. My previous library was all Library of Congress (LC), so learning them all has been rather a trial by fire! I’ve yet to get irreparably tangled, but I won’t get cocky just yet.

At the Taylorian, my tasks have been pretty split between the Circulation Desk on the ground floor (come say hello!) and the Enquiries Desk on the first, next to the Main Reading Room. Amongst many other tasks, so far I’ve processed the BSF (Book Storage Facility) deliveries from Swindon, processed incoming periodicals, prepped new DVDs for shelving, designed flyers for the new library tours, and (to my great excitement) gathered materials for an upcoming exhibition in the Voltaire Room on the White Rose group. All this alongside the day-to-day of the library, getting to know my co-workers and fellow trainees, and the group trainee training sessions out at Osney, where Bodleian departments like Staff Development, IT, etcetera, are based. There’s never been one day the same as the next yet, and now term has begun, that looks as though it will only continue. So far I’ve been having a wonderful time; here’s looking forward to a great rest of the year.

Hi, I’m Tom and I’m the trainee at the Taylor Institution Library this year.

Unlike many of the other trainees, immediately prior to taking up my position I was an undergraduate student. I graduated in July with a BA degree in History from the London School of Economics. I don’t have any prior experience of working in a library – my only previous job was as a sales assistant in a busy, grubby garden centre, an environment quite different from the Taylor’s quiet book stacks and grand décor! I feel very lucky to have started my library career in one of the Bodleian Libraries – it is the best possible place to get my first taste of working in an academic library.

The Taylor Institution is a beautiful, labyrinthine library that specialises in European languages, as well as Film Studies. It is split up into two parts – the Research Collection (of most use to those studying beyond undergraduate level) and the Teaching Collection (used primarily by undergraduates). Most of the time I am based at the Issue Desk, which is situated at the entrance to the Teaching Collection.

In my first few weeks here the most fundamental challenge I have been faced with is the difficult task of learning the layout of the library. It is fair to say that the Taylorian isn’t the easiest library to get to grips with, at least at first. However, the maze-like nature of the rooms found within this handsome building means that there is always something new to be discovered lurking amongst the towering stacks. When I haven’t been at training, I have also been gaining my first taste of the basics of library work: loaning and returning books, registering new readers, helping readers to find the material that they need, dealing with deliveries from the book storage facility in Swindon, and processing new books and DVDs (adding barcodes, security tags, etc.). I must admit though that, as the world’s least practical man, I’m not much good at wrapping new books in protective plastic.

Currently the library is not seeing much footfall, as term hasn’t started yet. I am grateful for this period of calm, before the inevitable storm that will no doubt arrive in the form of enthusiastic students come October – it has allowed me to ease myself into familiarity with the everyday tasks that will occupy me much of the time I am here. I am, however, looking forward to the arrival of the students, and I hope that I will be able to help them to access the materials that they need for their courses in the most pain-free way possible.

My first few weeks have been somewhat hectic and I still have a way to go towards memorising everything I need to and putting it all into practice, but I’m very much looking forward to the coming year in Oxford and everything that it brings.

Hello! I’m Will and I’m the second of the two trainees at the Taylorian this year. Before coming to Oxford, I studied German and Spanish at Durham and therefore working at the Taylorian – Europe’s biggest Modern Languages Library – is a really great experience! It means I can use my language skills on a day to day basis and (attempt at least) to learn the basics of new ones, especially as the Slavonic Library has now moved into the Taylorian as well.

As my fellow trainee Jessica mentioned in her post a few weeks ago, the two trainees at the Taylorian are split between the Issue Desk and the Enquiry Desk. For the first half of the year, I will be working on the Enquiry Desk and so I thought I should write a short post about my duties and the first few weeks at work here!

As I am on the Enquiry Desk, my work is completely different every day as we never know what a reader may want! Most days I have to help readers (especially freshers!) find books in our labyrinthine Research Collection, but I also have to answer queries from academics, process new books, and handle some donations.

Additionally, I am in charge of the daily delivery from the BSF in Swindon. As the Taylorian has around 500,000 books but only enough space for around 150,000, this means that a lot of readers order items from the Book Storage Facility! We get two deliveries every day (one at 9 and one at 2), and I collect these books, process them, and then put them ready for collection in the Main Reading Room – a beautiful room and easily my favourite in the library!

My first two months at the Taylorian have gone so quickly but I’ve really enjoyed them – I feel very lucky to be here. We’ve have had a lot of training, and then library inductions to give to the new cohort of freshers so I’ve always had a lot to do! I look forward to spending the rest of my year as a trainee here, and hope to post on the blog sometime in the future – especially as I might be helping to organise an exhibition next year!

Hello! My name is Jessica and I’m one of this year’s Taylorian trainees. For those unfamiliar with Oxford, the Taylorian is a vast maze of a library that specialises in European languages, Women’s Studies and Film Studies. (The languages used to be Western European only, but this summer the Slavonic and Modern Greek Library reintegrated with our collections, so some of the shelves now look very exotic, with Я’s, Λ’s and Σ’s everywhere.)

Each trainee at the Taylorian gets to try two distinct experiences: working at the upstairs Enquiry Desk (used mainly by readers in search of lesser-known or more specialised books) and working at the downstairs Issue Desk (used mainly by undergraduates borrowing the key texts for their course). I’m sure my fellow trainee, Will, will have lots to say about life upstairs, but here is my take on starting work downstairs.

It has been a whirlwind couple of weeks so far, with about half the time spent at training sessions and the rest spent practising new skills at the desk. I have learnt intriguing things such as how to give a book a new barcode (this involves more than putting a sticker on the cover!), how to add a security tag to a book, and how to register an external reader for membership of a Bodleian library. It has also been really fun to meet essential non-human members of the team (Louis the shelving trolley and Xavier the Xerox photocopier!), decorate the Issue Desk whiteboard ready for the start of term, and discover that as staff members Will and I get the same borrowing privileges as academics – meaning we can borrow large numbers of foreign books and DVDs and keep many of them for a long time!

To finish off, a bit about my background and how I came to do the traineeship: I studied French and Spanish at Keble College here in Oxford, then did an MA in Translation at Surrey University, which I loved. During the Master’s, I managed to set up as a freelance translator, and I came out with the idea of continuing with that part-time while finding another, more stable career path to pursue alongside it. As I am an avid reader and enjoy studying and learning, I could imagine being happy working in a library.

I found a part-time job as a Library Assistant at Corpus Christi College in Oxford and was later given the opportunity to do extra hours at St Peter’s College. I absolutely loved discovering how the library world functions behind-the-scenes and learning to perform all sorts of exciting book-related tasks, so decided to build on my experience by applying for the traineeship – and now here I am! I still translate, but am lucky enough to know I am also part of another very enjoyable profession, and this has taken away the nerve-inducing unpredictability of freelancing. What’s more, I’m working with language books, which can’t do my translation skills any harm!

All in all, the first couple of weeks of the traineeship have been exhausting but very exciting. I can’t wait to see what the rest of the year will bring.

Hello! I’m Sarah and I am one of the trainees at the Taylor Institution Library, alongside Yannis, who has already posted a wonderful introduction to the Taylor.

I suppose I’ll start with a little bit about myself… I  arrived in Oxford almost exactly four years ago to begin the MSt in Greek and Roman History, and then started the DPhil in 2011 – young, full of hope, and in blissful denial…. (“Well the thesis is only, like, eight times what I’ve just written for the Masters…. and I’ve got 3 to 4 years to finish it! No problem!!”) Anyway, 3 years later I have learned several things: 1) a year goes by very quickly, 2) overly optimistic attitudes to fragmentary and obscure ancient Greek inscriptions get you nowhere – they do not, after all, hold all the unknown secrets of Athenian civilisation, and 3) if you listen to ‘Last Christmas…’ just that little bit too loud on your headphones in the Sackler – you will get funny looks. I could also talk about how the experience has been rewarding and made me grow as a person, but I’m sure no-one wants to read all that so I’ll leave it there. All that really matters is that since story time at my local library at the age of 4,  it has been very difficult for anyone to extract me from a library. Not content with my weekdays studying in the Bodleian Libraries, I also decided to apply for weekend work at the Bodleian and SSL, where I found both interesting tasks and lovely people in abundance. Now here I am at the Taylor, embarking on my trainee year! When I’m not working or writing my thesis, I knit, draw, write other things, and meticulously organise my bookshelves. (I’m kidding about that last one… but only slightly.)

I was particularly happy when I found out I would be located at the Taylor. I had never set foot in the building until my interview, when I first discovered the library’s beautiful architecture, fascinating collections, and a tendency for books to be located in the oddest little nooks and crannies. The Taylor is the Bodleian library for Medieval and Modern Languages, as well as Film Studies and Women’s Studies. As Yannis has already said, the Taylor has an incredibly beautiful reading room, which I am very lucky to spend rather a lot of time in as I work at the Enquiry Desk in the Research Collection. The workload has been really varied and interesting so far… Alongside the day-to-day tasks of collecting the delivery, shelving, and dealing with reader queries, I have tagged and labelled new books, dealt with material for inter-library loans, and searched through volumes from Sir Robert Taylor’s own architecture collection for a particular drawing of an English stately home (it wasn’t there – but the Rare Books Room was a lovely place to spend half an hour). Learning to recognise the variety of classifications here at the Taylor is like learning to speak another language (appropriately), and the stairs, well … the Taylor reminds me a little of M.C. Escher’s ‘Relativity’, with stairs going in all imaginable directions. The day I make it up from my locker in the basement to the break room in the attic without nearly collapsing on my knees as I stumble through the door – I will know what it feels like to conquer Everest.

All in all, I have really enjoyed my first few weeks at the Taylor, and I am very excited for all the opportunities the next year will bring!

Hi all, I am Yannis and I am one of the two Graduate Trainees at the Taylor Institution Library. You’d think that my desire to become a librarian is linked to my love of reading. However, you are gravely mistaken! My initial inspiration came from Terry Pratchet’s Discworld novels, which (among other things) chronicle an orang-utan librarian at the Unseen University. This librarian-cum-ape was formerly a wizard who decided that he actually quite liked being a primate librarian – with his opposable toes he could deftly climb the shelves to get to the more hard-to-reach books. Plus, readers had to give him a banana if they wanted access to any of the books in his library. (Personally, this seems like a quite a good idea, and something worth considering for the future of library services. Prospective readers, please note that I prefer biscuits or chocolate to bananas.)

When not reading Pratchett, I read all sorts of history books. In fact, I did my BA in History and Archaeology at the University of Crete and came to England for a Master’s in Medieval History at the University of Birmingham. Before withdrawing from Oxford’s DPhil in History, I spent many a procrastinating moment watching librarians in the Sackler go about their business and secretly fantasising about what it must be like to be in their shoes (these fantasies quickly subsided when I realised what you see is what you get). I landed my first library job at the Oxford public libraries (an experience that I value deeply), before I was employed by the Bodleian Libraries. Indeed, I am not a stranger to the Bodleian: I have already spent a year as a part-time employee at the Taylor and the Education Libraries.

The Taylor is an imposing building next to the Ashmolean, containing an infinite number of staircases (who said that librarianship is for the weak?) and a labyrinthine basement (it would come as no surprise if I was told that people have been forever lost in its dark recesses…). The Taylor also contains one of the prettiest reading rooms in all of Oxford. It is the place to go to if you are studying Western European Languages, Film Studies, or Linguistics. I am based on the ground floor at the Teaching Collection, which is the part of the Taylorian that caters mainly for undergraduates, as opposed to the Research Collection (about which you’ll hear more from my Taylor soulmate, Sarah). At the Teaching Collection, readers can also find a huge DVD Collection of international films and also a comfortable viewing room with a large screen and dim lights (unfortunately no pop-corn allowed). I am very excited about spending another year in this warm and friendly environment. Given my Greek background, I was also thrilled to hear that I am to spend a term gaining experience at the Taylor’s sister library – the Slavonic and Modern Greek Library.

Look forward to seeing you at the Taylorian – don’t forget the biscuits!