Books showoff - Librarygeddon
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The library collections of specialist institutions are a representation of the intellectual activity of that institution, or ‘intellectual encrustations’. Their loss is a cause for regret. A talk in the Books Showoff at Waterstone's bookshop in TCR, London, on 27 April 2017.
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Books showoff - Librarygeddon
- 3. Feel the love •I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library • Jorge Luis Borges
- 6. Ranganathan’s laws •Every reader their book •Every book its reader
- 8. Ranganathan again •The library is a growing organism
- 9. Growth and change •To build up a library is to create a life. It’s never just a random collection of books • Carlos María Domínguez
- 10. Radical change
- 11. Librarygeddon
- 12. NIMR, Mill Hill
- 13. NIMR library
- 14. Disposal / dispersal • #NIMRlibrarybyebye
- 15. EmptyEmpty
- 16. I will remember them
Editor's Notes
- I’m Frank Norman, a librarian. Tonight I want to talk about collections. An old-fashioned job title for librarians is ‘Keeper of the Books’. But sometimes we are required to be the opposite of that.
- When I say I’ll talk about ‘collections’ I don’t mean this kind of thing but… this kind of thing. That’s a Library -
- a boon to civilisation and scholarship, and a little bit of Paradise.
- My career has been in special libraries, specifically what are sometimes called workplace libraries, where the raison d’etre for the library is the needs of a group of people in a workplace. The needs of the users define the shape and contents of the collection, . I think of it as librarianship’s …
- …chicken and egg situation – “Which comes first, the reader or the book?”.
- The great Indian librarian, SR Ranganathan, answers the question by saying, in effect, “both”. His famous five laws of library science include these two: Every reader their book; Every book its reader In special libraries it is definitely the reader who comes before the collection.
- Special libraries When it’s done right it is a wonderful thing. The collection dedicated to meeting a specific need: carefully selected, sensibly arranged, appropriately indexed, comprehensive in its coverage and variety. It’s precisely calibrated to meet a need. Put such a collection together with a community of users and a team of knowledgeable library staff and you have a special library. A mature special library collection can be seen as a record of the parent organisation’s interests and development. It reflects some of the organisation’s history. Here are some examples A library devoted to a single subject over a long period of time, like the Linnean Society library, is a world resource for the subject. Individual items gain value from their proximity to the rest of the items in the collection; the whole is more than the sum of its parts. This is a fine example of a special library.
- Another of Ranganathan’s laws of library science expresses the fact that the collection is not a static thing. It has to grow and change and is constantly developing.
- A good library has a strategy for what to acquire, what to keep, and what to discard. Over time the library’s users and their needs may change, so the collection and the strategy must change too. The library cannot stand still. There should be a tight link between the collection, its users and the workplace, so that they change in harmony.
- But if an organisation undergoes a more radical change then the collection is threatened. When organisations close, restructure, split, or suffer severe financial troubles, then there may be dire consequences for the library service and collection. This is the way of the world but, especially for longer-established collections, it can be a cause for some regret. [This is an understatement]. The inevitable consequence of rapid organisational change is the loss of many items of real historical interest and their connections. There is a worldwide …
- …librarygeddon – the loss or destruction of many specialist collections. Does it matter? Maybe, but probably not enough that we can do anything to change it.
- My interest in this topic became more focused in 2003, when I first learnt of plans for my Institute to be moved. The plans changed over time, but it was blindingly evident to me right from 2003 that if the Institute moved from Mill Hill it would spell the end for our Library collections, and I was right.
- The NIMR library began in 1920. The aim of the library was to support scientific medical research at the Institute and to be a resource for the nation’s medical researchers. (There weren’t all that many of them back in 1920). Work to assemble the collection had begun prior to 1920, collecting materials from around the world. As well as books, journals and reports, the Library had an extensive collection of pamphlets and reprints. The whole collection represented an intellectual encrustation of NIMR in that unique period of British 20th century biomedical research.
- The disposal/dispersal project The institute moved in 2016. There were about 3km of shelving filled with printed materials that had to be disposed of. Printed journal volumes accounted for much of the shelf space. It is very hard to find homes for printed journals. A small quantity of them found homes in other libraries but most of the journals were sent for recycling. #NIMRlibrarybyebye Few libraries had an interest in more than a small proportion of the other books, reports, etc. That is not surprising – libraries can only collect what matches their strategic needs, and their collection policies. The 5,000 pamphlets went as a single block to the Wellcome library. Several hundred books and reports were transferred to other libraries, mostly in London but some further afield. I tweeted pictures of many of them, under the hashtag #nimrlibrarybyebye. A few hundred books have been retained to form a historical collection in the new institute. Some others have been retained by some of the labs for their use. And a few hundred have been transferred to members of staff as mementoes of NIMR. Several thousand items have gone to the secondhand trade – I hope some will eventually make their way to good homes, and not all get pulped.
- From October 2016 this is the NIMR library. I should play funeral music at this point.
- It’s a strange thing, but when scientific publications become old they often have less value to science, but more value to the humanities, especially history. Just by keeping hold of our science literature collections as they aged so we acquired a history collection. The trouble was, we were not funded for historical research but for scientific research. Most items in the NIMR Library collection were not unique – probably not even rare by the standards of rare book collectors. And not really old either. Most of the collection was 20th century. I can think of no valid argument why things should have been any different, but I still regret that things had to be this way. It is not so much the items themselves that I am mourning here, but the collection of all the items, the connections between all the different documents within the context of the Institute . That idea (value of the collection versus value of individual items) is a bit intangible, and unquantifiable; perhaps not a thing at all. That’s why now that it is all gone, probably no-one notices, or remembers that the books were there, apart from me. I will remember.