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A Day in the Life of an Osney One Trainee

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07:55 – Arrival

Since we’re not beholden to specific opening/closing times at Osney One, we have a little more control over what time we choose to come into work. I usually aim to get in for an 8 o’clock start, but I could theoretically come in at 10 o’clock if I so wanted.

08:00 – Work begins!

Thursdays are special days in English Cataloguing, as they’re when we dismantle our Virtual Book Display (VBD) to send the current week’s Legal Deposit books to their new homes. It can be a bit of a fiddly process to sort out the different categories of books, but since this week’s VBD is quite small it shouldn’t take too long. First up are the Shared Cataloguing Programme books, which need to be given to specific cataloguers. I pick them off the shelf, put them onto their trolley, and wheel them over to their new overlords.

An image displaying eight shelves of books. Each of the books have different coloured pieces of paper sticking out of them.

08:10 – Picking out books

Next up in the process are the books picked by external libraries. As they need to be sent away as soon as possible, I pick them off the shelf, arrange them by library, and change their assigned locations via an immensely helpful spreadsheet. I then take them down to the post room, place them all into the appropriate boxes, and bid them farewell.

08:35 – More picking out books…

After finishing with those books, I pick out the remaining books that have been chosen for reading rooms. A few of them can be sent directly to their new homes, so I hand them to a colleague to alter their location in our records. I place the rest of them on the priorities shelf so that they can be catalogued and sent away as fast as possible.

08:55 – Even more picking out books…

Sometimes we get books that are specialised enough that they need a particular cataloguer to handle them, but as none fall into that category this week, I move on to the X Material. Sadly, this is not an off-brand superhero team, but the name we use for non-academic legal deposit books. After picking them off the shelf, I put them onto a trolley, wheel them over to my desk, and use the previously-mentioned spreadsheet to begin the process of sending them to the Central Storage Facility (CSF).

09:10 – The end of the VBD

At this point, all the rest of the books on the VBD shelves are destined for the CSF. Some can be sent there right away, so I count them, add them to a specific trolley, and wash my hands of them. I put the remaining books onto yet another trolley and wheel them over to my desk, changing their records to reflect the fact that they will remain in our backlog for the foreseeable future. Thus, the VBD is defeated and I can move on with the rest of my day.

9:45 – Cataloguing

Since I’ve finally finished with the VBD, I get on with some good old cataloguing. It’s become easier over time, but every couple of records I’ll find something strange and have to ask my colleagues for some advice. Today’s main issue is an ISBN in a downloaded record that seemingly only exists on Amazon Japan. After taking a moment to marvel at how someone even found it, I cause a bit of debate amongst my colleagues by asking whether or not the ISBN should be coded as being invalid.

13:00 – Lunch

One of the major perks of working out in Osney One is the fact that we sit right in the fork of a river and get to enjoy all the associated flora and fauna. Today, as it’s warm enough that I can sit outside without turning to ice, I grab my sandwiches, wrap up warm, and skedaddle over to our riverside patio to engage in my daily ritual of staring at the water while I eat.

13:30 – Classification

As my colleagues are terrifyingly efficient, many of the books destined for the Art, Archaeology and Ancient World Library are already awaiting classification when I return from my lunch break. As these books need to be classified according to an in-house scheme, I use a folder of shelfmarks to determine which location would best suit each book before assigning them their fate.

14:10 – Back to cataloguing

Since there are no other major tasks that need doing today, I spend the rest of the afternoon doing some more cataloguing. I get extremely distracted looking at an old auction catalogue at one point, but that’s par for the course in this job.

16:00 – Home time!

Like the time I choose to arrive, the time I choose to leave at the end of the day is also quite flexible – so long as I do my contracted hours of work, of course. I could choose to stay a little later to accrue some flexi, but I can feel my new game crying out for attention – and who am I to deny it? I say goodbye to my colleagues, sign out, and begin my journey home.

Let’s Talk About Toy Books!

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As we move into December, it feels like the festive season has finally begun to settle over Oxford. But while the joys of the season limit themselves to one month a year for most of the Bodleian libraries, Osney One has the unique ability to retain a little Christmas spark throughout the entire year. This is all down to the presence of one of my favourite collections at Osney: the Toy Books.

What are Toy Books?

Despite the slightly misleading name, Toy Books are not always toys. Instead, they are books from our Legal Deposit intake that require special treatment for the sake of conservation. A book could fall into this category for multiple reasons, but broadly speaking it’s because they have the potential to either damage or be damaged by other books as they are moved around and/or start to deteriorate. We therefore handle this kind of material with slightly different processes to better ensure that they are available for reading and research in perpetuity.

What kind of books ‘require special treatment’?

There are many factors that could transform a regular old Legal Deposit book into a Toy Book. In fact, there are so many heavily contextual reasons that it would be immensely tedious to have to slog through a paragraph or two of reasonings and caveats. So, for your viewing pleasure, I have instead picked out a selection of seven Toy Books that represent a range of conservation concerns. Some of the books could pose threats to others, some could be threatened themselves – but all of them are an absolute joy to look at!

 

A collage of three images of books. The left-hand image shows a yellow toy dog and blue ‘Spot Says Goodnight’ book inside a light blue box. The central image shows a furry blue-and-yellow striped book titled The Yuckiest and Most Fun Counting Book in the World. The right-hand image shows a book made up of multiple differently-sized pages that layer together to form a jungle-scape with monkeys when the book is closed.

First up we have the triple threat of Spot Says Goodnight: Box and Toy Gift Set, The Yuckiest and Most Fun Counting Book in the World, and Exploring the Adventurous World of the Jungle.

Spot, despite its innocent looks, poses some of the most varied risks of any Toy Book on this list. We have no idea how the degradation of its (adorable) toy might affect any books located nearby, and its box could easily be damaged by the pressure or sharp corners of other books around it. Furthermore, its plastic window may eventually become brittle and shatter with age, creating further possibilities for damage down the line. Similarly, The Counting Book’s fluffy exterior could degrade strangely or leave loose fibres on the covers of other books. Finally, the layered pages of The Jungle could easily catch on other books when being moved around on shelves, causing damage to itself or the other books.

 

A collage of three images of books. The left-hand image shows a black book titled Chinese Proverbs Illustrated that has been bound using red string. The central image displays a book called Dior: Style Icon, which features a fashion illustration of a woman in a white dress on its pale pink cover. The right-hand image shows a book called Play Along Humpty Dumpty, which features an illustration of the titular egg-shaped character wearing a red and blue outfit whilst sitting on a brick wall. Attached to the bottom of this book is a small, playable keyboard.

Moving on to our next selection, we have Chinese Proverbs Illustrated: The Wisdom of Cheng-Yu, Dior: Style Icon, and Play Along Humpty Dumpty & Other Songs.

Chinese Proverbs Illustrated is difficult to deal with because of its binding. Although it is a wonderful example of stab binding, the threads could end up fraying or damaging other books were they to end up catching on anything in their surroundings. Moving on, a quick test performed on Dior’s gilded edges revealed that the gilding is liable to come off when rubbed against other bits of paper – which is an issue for a book that could see high use in a library setting. Last but certainly not least, Humpty Dumpty not only comes with a protruding, difficult-to-shelve keyboard, but with one of Osney One’s most feared enemies: a battery. Were we to miss this battery in our initial check of the book, it could end up quite literally exploding right in the centre of the Bodleian’s offsite book repository. This would be (to put it mildly) an absolute disaster.

 

A collage of two images that show the same book open and closed. The right-hand image shows the book closed and directly facing the camera. It is titled ‘Calligraphy Manual’ and displays a sample of calligraphy in a rectangle at the top of its otherwise plain brown cover. The left-hand image shows the book opened and at an angle. Its pages are made up of one long sheet of paper that has been folded many times to fit within the book’s covers.

Finally, rounding out our selection with an image all to itself, is Sun Guoting’s Calligraphy Manual. The source of this beautiful handbook’s conservation concerns is its form; its concertinaed pages have no protective spine to cover them from the sharp corners of other books or the stressors of handling and time. Whilst this might not be a concern for a more specialised library, the regular shelving methods of the Bodleian may expose this handbook to more wear and corrosion than is warranted.

How could you get hold of a Toy Book?

Once we’ve finished the fiddly process of cataloguing a Toy Book at Osney, we place it in a conservation box and send it to the Collections Storage Facility like we would any other book. After it goes through the intake process there, it would become possible to request delivery to Rare Books for in-library use only.

So, if your research endeavours require you to one day meet Spot in-person, it is very much possible to do it through the Bodleian! You would just have to live with the tragic knowledge that you cannot take him home with you – no matter how much you might want to.

Trainee Introductions – Digitisation and Resource Description

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A Broad Overview of the Next Few Weeks

Hello everyone!

For those of you who are returning readers, welcome back to the Trainee Blog! We’d like to say a huge thank you for sticking with us over the quietness of the last few weeks. Rest assured, we shall be back to a regular posting schedule shortly. For those of you who are new readers, welcome! We hope that our content over the next academic year will keep you entertained and informed about the Bodleian Libraries and life as a Graduate Trainee.

As you may have seen in the previous post, a new year means a new cohort of trainees – and since there are quite a few of us, it might be a little hard to keep track of us all. As such, we’ve dedicated the next four weeks to doing a few small introductions to ourselves and our roles within the Graduate Trainee Programme. We hope you enjoy!

 

Evie Morris – Weston Library

My background before I started in the library was mostly in sciences. I have a BSc in Biology and worked as a researcher and ecologist after I graduated. Like so many people, the pandemic completely up-ended my life and for a while I was lost… I worked a range of jobs in the aftermath, but when I got a Saturday job in the local library, it was a real ‘lightbulb moment’- I knew I belonged in the stacks! At heart, I have always been a polymath, and struggled with the ‘one track mind’ one seemed to need to be a successful scientist. But even my eclectic work history hadn’t imbued me with the experience needed for most full-time library jobs. As an undergraduate, whereas history students (and similar) have to use the primary sources contained in the library, everything I wanted as a researcher in genetics came from the internet.

The traineeship was thus my golden ticket and now I work in the Weston Library (or the ‘New Bod’, despite being *checks notes* yep, almost 100 years old) in Archives and Modern Manuscripts, which means working with records created between 1800 to the present day. As libraries and archives begin collecting materials created more recently, a lot is in digital media. Working in digital archives combines my skill set from computing for science research with my passion for expanding the reach of knowledge. It’s exciting to be working in a field where it’s still ‘all to play for’: if and how we decide to preserve these collections now will impact the scholars and combined knowledge of the future.

At the moment my time is split between the Bodleian Web Archive and a project to digitise catalogues, but that’s another blog post.

 

Lilly Wilcox – Weston Library

Hello world! My name is Lilly Wilcox, and I am one of two graduate trainee digital archivists with Archives and Modern Manuscripts in the Weston Library.

My academic background is in literature and communication studies, with a healthy dose of digital humanities. During my undergraduate, I worked on a digital humanities project that used the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines for XML to make pre-Victorian women’s writing digitally available and facilitate research on underrepresented writers. I found text encoding so fascinating, I moved to Oxford to do my MSc in Digital Scholarship. During my master’s, I got to design my own TEI/XML projects with Taylor Editions—the digital editions publishing platform run by the Taylor Institution Library—and learn about the variety of digital projects happening behind-the-scenes at the Bodleian Libraries. Now working at the Weston, I’ve swapped TEI/XML for EAD/XML (Encoded Archival Description) to support the retro conversion of the Africa & Commonwealth collection’s print handlists to digital catalogues. I also work on web archiving, so that online information about the running of the University in 2024 is preserved and can be made available for research in the future.

 

Yasmeen Khan – Osney One

Greetings! I’m Yasmeen, the Graduate Trainee Resource Description Assistant for this academic year. If you’re wondering why you’ve never seen a predecessor of mine on the blog, my position was newly created for 2024-25 – so hopefully there will be many more of us to come!

An image of a desk with two computer screens, a keyboard, and a mouse. On the left of the computer are four small piles of books, and on the right is an open green file
My (very organised and extremely uncluttered) workspace

Perhaps predictably for someone on this scheme I have been circling the idea of working with books for long time. Throughout primary and secondary school I could be found volunteering in various libraries, only taking a break when I went to study books for three years as an English undergraduate. Following my graduation, I worked in a boarding school for a year, where I naturally ended up volunteering in the school library (because I am, at the end of the day, a creature of habit). When my contract at that school came to an end, I finally gave in to the inevitable and applied to be the graduate trainee at Osney One, which houses a lot of the behind-the-bookshelves work that keeps the Bodleian running. Now my days are largely filled with tasks such as sending newly acquired books to their required locations, classifying books, and working to cram as much cataloguing theory into my head as possible. But one of the interesting quirks of my role is that I’ll slowly be shuffling from department to department (and occasionally library to library) over the course of the year, meaning that my workload could look entirely different by the time Hilary hits.

So, if you happen to see a member of staff looking entirely baffled by the mere concept of your favourite library’s shelving system later this year, there’s a good chance it could be me – feel free to come over and say hi!