LAMs (Libraries, Archives, and Museums)
MLIS (Master’s of Library and Information Science)

Week Two
Day Nine: British Museum Archives
No One is Immune

“If I had walked into a fully organized collection, it wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting”

Francesca Hillier, Senior Archivist, The British Museum

I hardly know where to begin with The British Museum. It’s The British Museum. They have so. much. stuff. to see. Yet there is so much that is not there because it’s in storage because like nearly every institution, they have collected more than they have capacity to display. How do they keep track of it all??

The short answer is, to a degree, they don’t. They just can’t. Not to the item level. It’s an archive. We had a big row over this my first year in library school. When you have too much stuff, no matter how much you want to, no matter how much you may think each individual item has intrinsic value and “belongs in the museum”, there just isn’t enough time in the day, people on the staff, or money in the budget, to do the job that kind of justice. Even if you are The British Museum.

You would also think that getting the opportunity to move your archive from the dark, dank basement to the decommissioned grand round Reading Room of the British Museum would be an archivist’s dream. But that room was not designed for the archive, and it’s not climate controllable enough to function properly as an archive. It’s a temporary make-shift solution. Albeit a beautiful one!

What struck me again with the archivists, this day, is their same concerns and issues that plague most archives and libraries. The backlog which shall not be spoken of (20 years, at least, according to archivist Angie Grimshaw), to an overseeing regulatory authority and laws that directly impact how you can (or sometimes, cannot) do your job properly (according to Senior Archivist Francesca Hillier.) No one is immune to these realities.

They have three offsite storage facilities. This I do not find surprising. Or should there be  more?? 

The history in that room, the history in that building. I could type for days and not cover it all.

4.2 miles/10,600 steps/12 flights climbed

LAMs (Libraries, Archives, and Museums)
MLIS (Master’s of Library and Information Science)

Week Two
Day Eight: Blythe House
(The Archives of the Victoria and Albert, Science, and British Museums)
The History Goes Deep

“The shorter and the plainer the better”

Beatrix Potter

Things about Beatrix Potter one never knew. She was smarter than the average… well, virtually anyone. She wrote in code for 15 years assumedly to protect herself from a society that didn’t take kindly to brainy women, and if women had been respected for having such intelligence and ability to use it, the world may have had penicillin 50 years earlier.

We had two excellent talks today. The first from historian and former USM educator Andrew Wiltshire about Beatrix Potter, her life, her secret code, and the man, Leslie Linder, who took a total of 13 years to break, process, and then publish the 15 years of journals written in the code. He also spoke of the collaboration with his sister, Enid, to amass a substantial Beatrix Potter collection of artifacts that is the a core of the V&A’s collection today. Much of the talk was about the history of the Linder Family in shipbuilding and Leslie’s in engineering, which combined with his intellect, gave Leslie a unique set of skills and background with which to pursue the codebreaking. That deciphering Beatrix Potter’s code revolved around the word “execution” is interesting, however, it’s really the fact that it was an identifiable event in history, the execution of Louis XVI in 1793, and that Potter didn’t put the Roman numerals nor the year into code that were the real clues.

Annmarie Bilclough, Children’s Librarian for the Victoria and Albert Museum, gave us a second talk about Beatrix Potter, but about the history of the museum as a museum of “good design”, and more about the library’s children’s collections, as she is their curator. She brought along many examples of precious items, from the delicate and well-worn John Marshall miniature encyclopedia set in a small wooden bookcase, paper dolls, and a small volume history of England that would fit into tiny hands of tiny humans, to several examples of Beatrix Potter’s hand-written, -drawn, and -painted works of several of her books. This included the permanent loan of the mounted original letter that has the Peter Rabbit story outlined, which she called the “Peter Rabbit picture letter”, and her mycology drawing. The museum has over 2000 object attributed to Potter.

We were allowed to take photos at Blythe House, the archives of the Victoria and Albert Museum, but asked not to post most of them online for reasons of copyright. So I chose not take many photos. I have a few photos of the library shelves and the card catalog, because who doesn’t love a beautiful wood card catalog? And I took some shots of the Potter family photo album, which Annmarie told us were out of copyright.

2.1 miles/6,000 steps/2 flights climbed

Beatrix Potter quote from http://www.plainlanguage.gov/resources/quotes/historical-quotes/

LAMs (Libraries, Archives, and Museums)
MLIS (Master’s of Library and Information Science)

Week One
Day Five: Oxford: The Bodleian and Christ Church Libraries
or Harry Who-ter? What about Diana and Matthew??
Which Witch is Which?

“Book buying is just great!”

Steven Archer, College Librarian, Christ Church College Library

At nearly a millennium old and holding over 13 million items, The Bodleian is more than just the old building home to scenes from The Harry Potter films and the All Souls Trilogy that we toured upon our arrival in Oxford. It includes storage areas dispersed throughout the city as well as immense digital resources. Though our tour guide did not have any talking points on the heft of the digital repository, a quick search located the About page on the The Digital Bodleian, which gives some background information, but no hard statistics. Considering this is information that is constantly changing, it’s not difficult to understand why they wouldn’t list the current gigabytes or petabytes of data that holds the collection. They have been digitizing for 20 years, however. Wisdom tells me their space needs are immense, but the website reminds us they haven’t scratched the surface of their collections.

The coup of the day was the tour of the Old Library of Christ Church College. Librarian Steven Archer was exceedingly generous with his time and access to the Old Library. I suspect this is partially because students do not study in the Old Library, so we would not be disturbing some of Oxford’s hardest working scholars.

Seeing the hand-stitched books and having Steven describe how they were created was a rare treat. The nearly thousand year-old book of portable psalms and Queen Elizabeth I’s personal Bible were personal highlights. Though again, I found myself looking for unique textures, angles of books on shelves, and interesting repeating patterns on the shelves. It’s what I do.

Regrouping in Steven’s office to hear more about his career path, and even more to hear about how the Christ Church Library is a working Academic Library for the current students of Christ Church College. It’s not just a repository for dusty old manuscripts. As a librarian, the students here today are Steven’s first priority. They have budgets to acquire whatever a student needs, sometimes “In 35 minutes” (I doubt “or less or it’s free”…) I found this immensely heartening. While the historian in me loves the old things, the human in me is partial to the belief that the students that are here now are the highest priority. If only that was the thinking pattern for more university administrators.

This was the kind of “Behind the Scenes Library Tour by Librarians for Librarians” that excites us all. I would come back and spend more time talking with Steven if I could.

5.4 miles/14,700 steps/11 flights climbed

William Shakespeare – Coriolanus

LAMs (Libraries, Archives, and Museums)
MLIS (Master’s of Library and Information Science)

“The world’s mine oyster, which I with sword will open”

 William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor

Week One
Day Four: Stratford-upon-Avon and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s As You Like It
All the world’s a stage…

Rising early for a trip in a luxury coach to the country did not disappoint. Though the early morning made for a sleepy ride. This day was more touristy for us than LIS-sty. LuLu and I checked out the Stratford Library and Registration Service. Funny running into our professor at the computers!

The library is small by comparison to The Barbican, of course, but it did not disappoint. I even found a volume by a comedy author from Indiana whom I follow on Twitter on the shelves. I was a little surprised to find James Breakwell’s Bare Minimum Parenting book, so I tweeted it to him (no, @XplodingUnicorn has not responded as of this blog posting.)

The purpose of our sojourn to Stratford-upon-Avon, of course, is All Things Shakespeare. Seeing the birthplace of The Bard added a bit of interest to the day. Walking the streets where he had walked, seeing a few of the sites he may have seen. Drinking the Americano he would have dra… No wait… not that. I managed to source a few souvenirs for my former classmate, team mate, and fellow officer in three student groups. More than just an aficionado of Shakespeare, Hennepin County Substitute Librarian Trish Vaillancourt used our core cataloging course to begin creating her own schema to classify Shakespeare’s works, which she is calling BARDS. (The acronym stands for Basic Annotation Rules and Description for Shakespeare. No. I didn’t remember it from our class together in 2016. I messaged Trish back home in Roseville, Minnesota via the internet because it’s 2019 and we can do that now.) How could I leave Stratford-upon-Avon without acquisitions?

The ultimate jewel of the day was the matinee performance of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s As You Like It. The field trip was for the LIS students and the theatre students of the British Studies Program, so I feel critiques of the staging, direction, and performances are best left to the students studying those aspects of the theatre. I enjoyed the show for what it was for me, an afternoon of engaging entertainment.

2.9 miles/8,300 steps/2 flights climbed

LAMs (Libraries, Archives, and Museums)
MLIS (Master’s of Library and Information Science)

Week One
Day Three: The Royal Geographical Society
Archives. Archives for Days

“This is discovery by western explorers for western science”

Eugene Rae, Librarian, Royal Geographical Society

The Royal Geographical Society (RGS) was our first more-archive-than-library to visit. Also: my first upper deck London bus ride! I hadn’t partaken of that travel opportunity during previous visits. I must admit I enjoyed these views quite a bit more than the usual Underground. 

Eugene, the Librarian for the RGS, told four engaging tales of “Hot and Cold” spread across the 19th and 20th centuries. Well, perhaps only three or three and a half, depending on how one might want to delineate the story of the search for origin of the Nile based on the stories of Richard Francis Burton, John Hanning Speke, & Sidi Mubarak, Dr. David Livingstone’s later sojourn based on his own theories, concluding with Henry Morton Stanley’s subsequent search for Dr. Livingstone culminating in the tale of their meeting with the oft-quoted, if irreverent “Dr. Livingston, I presume?”. Having the reproductions of the maps, photographs, and 3D artifacts spread out on the table in front of us helped bring the tales to life. Livingstone’s cap & Stanley’s pith helmet, for example, were unique items to see in person. The pith helmet was smaller than I would have thought from years of Hollywood movies and a few school plays featuring very wide-brimmed pith helmets, but conversely, the cap seemed rather large. It changed my perspective a bit of the event as I have always pictured it in my head.

Having been fortunate to meet contemporary Antarctic explorers, Ann Bancroft, Liv Arnesen, and most members of their Access Water Initiative Series expedition team and then also have shared a table at a luncheon with Liv in 2016 to hear more about her life and adventures, the Shackleton Expedition was of special interest to me. Hearing about the first Antarctic expeditions from the RGS librarian after having hearing about Liv’s expedition(s) first-hand.

The volume of the items at the RGS is again astounding, as they have been collecting items for nearly two centuries (more so if you consider the older clubs subsumed by the RGS over the years). Eugene told us that they have an estimated 2 million items, of which 1 million are flat maps, 500,000 are images in the form of photographs, glass slides and plates, and 250,000 volumes of books and periodicals.

A small group of us took a side trip to the Natural History Museum before heading back to campus. I like dinosaurs as much as the next human, but I found myself more enamored with the architecture and the textures of the stonework and mosaics on the floors of the building. I have added to my Texture Library.

4 miles/10,300 steps/6 flights climbed

LAMs (Libraries, Archives, and Museums)
MLIS (Master’s of Library and Information Science)

“We are the masters of freeloading of anywhere on the planet”

Kevin Mehmet, Librarian, The British Library

Week One
Day Two: The British Library
Conservation, Conservation, Conservation

Conservation is a serious business at the British Library. The partnership with the British Library and the Qatar Foundation to digitize and make available the history of the Persian Gulf that is in the British Library collection shows a dedication to openness and sharing knowledge with the general public. Working across languages and cultures takes interaction with many players to ensure accuracy and to maintain contextual meaning of the documents. Interjecting an erroneous viewpoint due to assumptions based on misunderstanding the material can lead to miscataloging items, which leads to loss of important, significant cultural and historical information.

I need to make sure I ask more often about the digital repositories when digitization is mentioned. Salvador mentioned briefly digitization, OCR imaging, and some other forms of reading items and artifacts, but the discussion about digital curation was limited. Understanding how many gigabytes versus terabytes versus petabytes for which the different repositories are currently responsible and how much they expect to grow would be enlightening for me. Especially if they have audiovisual collections.

One of the first things the veteran librarian from the British Library, Kevin, said to me after enquiring of my area of study is, “Ah, yes, digital preservation has not been cracked yet”.

I will try to go back to the British Library and see the audiovisual collection. I noted in the sorting room that Kevin initially showed us BetaSP tapes, VHS cassettes, 1/4” reel-to-reel audio tape, audio cassettes, and 12” vinyl recordings all sitting on shelves. “Ancient” (by todays digital standards) technologies still seemingly in circulation.

The sheer size of the British Library is staggering. That most of it is underground is not surprising. The Anderson Library at the University of Minnesota has the relatively famous “Caverns” hewn from the banks of the Mississippi River, and the bulk of the Minnesota Historical Society’s archives are also underground, built into it’s bluff overlooking downtown St. Paul. Using the Earth for climate control is as old as humankind. the British Library just has done it in the way only the British can, marrying form and style with substance and purpose. Perhaps not always focusing on “as beautiful as possible”, but addressing how to make it functional first, then “we’ll see about making it pretty”. Though depending on your personal architectural taste, it offers more to the eye than that of the Brutalism of the Barbican.

Several of my classmates and I took an afternoon stroll to the canal in Camden to the Bookshop on the Water, a tiny bookstore built into a boat. Katy had seen photos of it on Instagram and she guided us there using the maps on her phone. The internet is a wonderful thing that we certainly didn’t have in 1990!

4.4 miles/11,800 steps/6 flights climbed

LAMs (Libraries, Archives, and Museums)
MLIS (Master’s of Library and Information Science)

Week One
Day One: The Barbican Library
Jet Lag Becomes No One

The Barbican Library is one of two public libraries in the square mile that is the City of London, proper. As it seems many of my classmates have interest or current positions in the public sector, starting our journey here is particularly fitting. In some respects, the Brutalist architecture style of the Barbican complex belies the current state of libraries in both the U.K. and the US. Originally built with the intention of employing inexpensive construction methods to rebuild war-torn England after the Second World War, the repeated onus on librarians “do more with less” from either overseeing government councils or library boards is not an unfamiliar discussion in the break room nor the classroom, the starkness of Brutalism is mirrored in not only the name, but also the simplicity of the design itself.

Both Helen, the Assistant Librarian, and Geraldine, the Librarian at the Barbican, who generously gave of their time, had the dry British wit mixed with the realism of the public servants who understand that funding will always be a challenge, and digital knowledge is forgone conclusion moving forward. The number of times “income generation” was repeated was notable. Geraldine put a very fine point on digital when she concluded with, “Can’t do anything these days without some sort of digital knowledge”.

It seems librarianship is the same no matter which side of the pond. Concerns over ever-shrinking budgets, remaining relevant to the patron age population in the digital age, and the ever-popular oft-heard lament of “things I never learned in library school…” have been heard from librarians on panels or during tours since I began my education into librarianship.

A bit of the discussion was about the self-service machines offered by Bibliotheca. I was looking forward to this, as my Management of Libraries and Information Centers course spent a great deal of time investigating Bibliotheca and the Open+ Libraries Initiative for our final project in the spring semester of 2019. The U.K. along with several other European countries have been pioneers in the open libraries movement. Having the opportunity to speak with a librarian in the U.K. about the technology and how it worked in practice (often not as easily “as advertised”) and not just in theory was the kind of real-life experience that would have been wonderful to have just a few weeks earlier for our final project last semester!

Music libraries are always of special interest to me as I come from an amateur musical background. I then also know many professional musicians. We have an opera singer/professor in the family, and I have another among my friends from high school. Having an opera singer to spare was never something I thought I’d be able to say! The complexity, sheer volume, and variety in the Barbican’s music library was stunning. Finding my home-town superstar, Prince, highlighted in several spaces among the collection wasn’t necessarily surprising, but fun for me nonetheless.

The river cruise down the Thames was the relaxing button on the evening. Seeing Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament sheathed in scaffolding was a little disappointing, but then seeing the shiny results of the Victoria Tower makes it worthwhile, even if we miss it this time around.

6.1 miles/15,200 steps/20 flights climbed