Author Archives: Beth Ellis

Ely Trip Part 2: a spin around Cambridgeshire Archives

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After a quick lunch and short walk to see the outside of Ely’s cathedral, we headed to the Cambridgeshire Archives, a former bowling alley that has been expertly converted into an archive centre. The Archive holds records dating back to the 13th century, relating to the area now covered by Cambridgeshire (which includes Huntingdonshire and the Isle of Ely).

The archivist began our tour in the strong room, pointing out the features which made the former bowling alley an ideal space to store archives, such as the easy access areas and lack of windows. As the interior was renovated prior to the archives being moved to the new site, they were able to ensure the space could be completely functional for storing special records, with systems in place to keep the temperature at a constant 19°c and the humidity at 50%. This also included setting up a small quarantine room just as you enter the storage area, where newly received documents are initially taken to be checked for possible risks, such as mould or silverfish – pests you definitely don’t want in your archives!

Most of the records are kept in boxes on mobile shelves, with enough space to hopefully last for the next 25 years. The archivist explained that they try to place highly requested items on the front shelves, such as parish records and maps, to ease accessibility. With many of the items being official records for the county, and therefore irreplaceable, they also have to maintain good security. In total, the Archive currently holds 20 million documents in approximately 35,000 boxes – the weight of 171 elephants we were told!

After finishing our tour of the storage area, we were shown into the Archive’s conservation room, full of contraptions and equipment to clean, preserve and restore archival items. For example, stretched out on the table was an early 17th century map, which the team were flattening and cleaning prior to it being digitised.

This posed a good segue to the next space we were led into, the digitisation and scanning room. The Archive employs a professional photographer to create high quality digital images of the collection, providing a useful income stream as they prioritise digitising requested items. The photographer had just finished a digital image of the Cromwell family tree from the 16th-17th century – the original document is huge, and so the photographer had stitched multiple images together to create a seamless, high-definition digital copy.

Following the digitisation room, we also dropped in on the Cataloguing and Accessioning team, where we discussed the Archive’s policies on collection storage and their use of CALM catalogue – an archive management system. It was interesting seeing the similarities and differences between how they catalogue archival material, and our own experiences with cataloguing books using library management systems. 

Finally, we ended our tour in the reading room, and chatted with the archive assistants about their roles and the kinds of queries they deal with. Their jobs involve copious amounts of research and detective-like work, such as tracing ancestors, finding family archives, and uncovering information needed for land disputes.

Helping families and the local community is a key function of the team, and the archivist mentioned how the image of archives has changed from formerly being a space for academics, to now being open and welcoming to the public. For instance, the Archive runs numerous outreach activities with school groups, taking them on tours of the space and putting out a ‘wow’ display of items, such as letters from famous people, and (always popular) the smallest and biggest items held in the collection. The archivist had kindly prepared a ‘wow’ table for us in the reading room too, showcasing the plethora of material that Cambridgeshire Archives owns. This ranged from a collection of late 19th century mugshots featuring local people accused of crimes, to documents dating from 1855 relating to Cambridge Free Library, and also a collection of notes on nineteenth century Whittlesford and its neighbourhood by local antiquary and natural historian George Nathan Maynard. A particular favourite of all the trainees was a spectacular hand illustrated history of Little Shelford by Fanny Lucretia Wale, compiled between 1908-1919, which featured beautiful watercolour images of the local area.

Thank you to the team at Cambridgeshire Archives for giving us such a lovely tour, and for providing us with an insight into the work that local archives do!

Ely Trip Part 1: Behind-the-Scenes at Cambridge University Library Storage Facility

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On a wet and windy day at the end of February, the trainees hopped on a train to Ely, with visits scheduled for both the Cambridge University Library Storage Facility (LSF), and the Cambridgeshire Archives.

After initial difficulties figuring out how to get to the LSF (Uber failed us!), we eventually squeezed into a taxi and made it to the large warehouse on the outskirts of the city. The LSF is a purpose-built warehouse, providing over 100km of shelving space with the potential for holding up to 5.5 million items. With the UL being a Legal Deposit library, and therefore entitled to claim a copy of every published item in the UK and Ireland, the LSF is a useful solution for storing low use printed material, freeing up space in the UL for higher demand items.

Following the journey of a book through the LSF system, the warehouse team began our tour in the loading bay, where crates of books are received every day from the UL. The books are all sorted by size, using a wooden measuring scale to determine their category – this will then denote which size tray the books are stored in.

We were then taken through to the processing room, and shown the large pile of acid free cardboard ready to be transformed into trays. The team explained how they initially had to construct a tray every 90 seconds when the facility first opened to keep up with the number of books arriving from the UL. One of the trainees had a go at building a tray themselves, finding out first hand how fiddly they can be!

Once sorted into trays by size and weighed to make sure they are not too heavy for the shelves, every book is given a unique barcode and scanned onto the warehouse management system. This is then linked to the unique barcode given to the tray, which is then further connected to the barcode of the shelf where the tray is placed – all in all, the three barcode system ensures every book is tracked and can be found again. Each tray goes through quality control, with all items being double checked to make sure nothing has been misplaced. Having such a well organised system is essential for the smooth running of the LSF – as items can still be requested by readers from the UL, the team need to know where every book is stored, and keep track of where they will need to reshelve it once it’s returned.

Our final stop was the store room, where rows of 11m high shelves towered above us, with over 100,000 trays currently stacked upon them and room for another 300,000 more. The lower shelves can be accessed easily by the workers from the ground, and therefore hold smaller and lighter items. Larger and heavier items are shelved higher up, requiring the use of cherry-picker type machines, where trolleys of books can be loaded onto the back. Excitingly, we were all given the opportunity to go up in the cherry-pickers, which feel far faster than they look as they speed down the aisles! Many of the trainees didn’t quite realise how scared of heights they were until 11m up in the air – it’s definitely not a job for the faint hearted! The possibility of dropping a tray of book from this height was also terrifying to consider, although the warehouse team assured us this was very unlikely to happen, as the trolley on the back of the cherry-pickers is designed so that you can slide the trays onto the shelves, avoiding any heavy lifting and reducing the risk of things falling.

As the books are all organised by size, we noticed the variety of items that were placed together in trays, such as children’s books, modern literary fiction, cookbooks, and nineteenth century novels. The LSF mostly holds books, but there is also storage for maps, with drawers holding a range of material from ministry of defence maps to ordnance survey maps. We also saw some rather creepy looking paintings tucked down one of the aisles!

We had a wonderful time looking around the LSF and seeing all the behind-the-scenes aspects of how the UL maintains and stores its vast collection, whilst keeping it available for current and future researchers. Thank you to the LSF team for giving us such an in-depth tour and introducing us to how library warehouses operate. See part two of the Ely trip for our visit to Cambridgeshire Archives!

St Catharine’s College Library Visit

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Although not one of the libraries we were scheduled to visit for our traineeships, the librarian at St Catharine’s kindly extended an invitation to visit their library, which we eagerly accepted. We’re all very grateful for any opportunity to see different libraries, and with every Cambridge college library being unique, this was a great chance to see how another library works and how they support their students.

St Catharine’s has two student library spaces – the eighteenth-century Sherlock library holds the collections for Modern and Medieval Languages and Literature, English, and Art, whilst the newer 1980s Shakeshaft library contains the material for all other subjects.

We began our tour at the Shakeshaft library, marvelling at how much light the big windows at the front let in to create a bright study space at the front of the library. The librarian confirmed that both the long line of desks in front of the window and the comfy seating area beside it were popular spaces in the library. Our attention was immediately grabbed though by the large duck sat on the sofas, which had been given the perfectly accurate name ‘Big Duck’. Big Duck is a great initiative run by St Catharine’s library – the small tag around its neck states that Big Duck is ‘available for gentle hugs’ and that students can take it to sit with them whilst they’re in the library, having it serve as a giant study-buddy to support them through times of stress.

The maze-like layout of the shelves in Shakeshaft produces lots of little nooks you can get lost in exploring books, with most of the study spaces tucked around the edges. The tall shelves actually support the ceiling of the library, and are therefore a permanent design feature.

Another interesting initiative the library has introduced is how they loan their wellbeing and light reading collections – students don’t take the books out on their card but instead borrow them anonymously on a basis of trust for as long as they need. This is a great way for students to feel comfortable borrowing any books within these collections, and helps improve their accessibility and inclusivity. The wellbeing and fiction books themselves were all nicely organised on the shelves, further making it an approachable and welcoming space to borrow from.

As we circled back to the front of the library, we were shown the display on Thomas Sherlock, a former Master of St Catharine’s, who left both money and his personal book collection to the college library. Alongside an image of Sherlock’s portrait, painted by Jean-Baptiste van Loo, the library team had done some detective work and managed to find a finely decorated book in their collection which looked very similar to the one he is holding in the painting – the first of four volumes of ‘Several discourses preached at the Temple Church’ by Tho. Sherlock, printed 1754-58.

The display was a good introduction to the name behind the Sherlock library – St Catharine’s older library space and our next destination. With its high white ceilings and original dark wooden shelves, the Sherlock library is a beautiful space which perfectly evokes those aesthetic academia type vibes.  The librarian emphasised the importance of keeping this as a working library rather than as a place for the rare book collection, providing the students with a usable study space and a different library environment to work in.

Some of the lovely features of the Sherlock library include: window seats, where students can sit and study whilst looking out over Main Court; both old-fashioned green banker’s lamps and modern museum desk lights – adding to the ambience; and original bookshelves with rests for reading. The librarian pointed out that the shelves still retained the eighteenth-century labelling at the top, highlighting again the history of this space and its longevity as a library. We were also shown the two different methods for accessing the higher to reach books: the first a small stand with a pole to hold on to (which turned out to be more secure than it looked!), and then some sturdier looking steps, which of course we tried as well!

Leaving the warm and cosy Sherlock library behind, our final stop was the new reading room. This is a wonderful space, providing plenty of room to study requested books and manuscripts from St Catharine’s special collections. The librarian had laid out several books for us to peruse, all notable for either their unique subject matter or for their condition. For example, a copy of the German book ‘Denkmäler Provenzalischer Literatur und Sprache’ by Hermann Suchier, previously owned by the London Library, had somehow been run over by a train – it is still in one piece, albeit slightly squashed! Another book which we all enjoyed looking through was ‘The Pityfull Historie of two loving Italians, Gaulfrido and Barnardo le vayne…’ by John Drout, a sixteenth century LGBT text written in rather questionable verse.

Overall, we had a wonderful time looking around St Catharine’s and managed to squeeze a lot in to our brief visit! We were all impressed by the student focused approach of the library team, and the different wellbeing initiatives they have put in place. Thank you to the library team for inviting us!