Category Archives: Catalog

Ely Library Storage Facility Visit

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In our first visit outside of Cambridge, last week the trainees travelled to Ely for a tour of Cambridge University Library’s remote storage facility (LSF). The LSF is a large (but surprisingly difficult to find) warehouse with over 100 kilometres of shelving, designed to house books from the UL’s collection which are deemed both low use and low value. As a Legal Deposit Library, the UL is entitled to a copy of every book published in the UK and Ireland, many of which are unlikely to be regularly consulted by readers and so are sent directly to the LSF (particularly non-academic monographs such as children’s fiction and cookbooks).

The books are stacked three trays deep in each shelf


The LSF receives hundreds of books by van from the UL every day, which enter the facility via an airlock system to ensure the temperature inside the warehouse remains stable and cool enough for the books. There are currently 6 members of permanent staff at the LSF, one of whom is a librarian, and all of whom are warehouse operatives. On receiving the books they categorise them by size (shelving books according to size maximises space efficiency) and pack them into acid-free trays, which are then taken into the main part of the warehouse to be shelved. Here the trays are loaded onto cherrypickers so that staff can drive to the correct part of the warehouse, and reach even the highest shelves (the height of two adult giraffes!).

The staff were kind enough to take each of us for a terrifying spin on the cherrypickers


It was fascinating to see a library facility which functions so differently to our own college libraries, and to meet the team who work so hard to ensure that students both now and in the future have access to all the books they need, regardless of their obscurity.

Queens College old library: Historical Bibliography Workshop

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And another tour rolls around…

Another month, and another tour, to Queen’s College old library. Its claim-to-fame being the oldest library in Cambridge. Emma, our grad trainee, and the library staff at Queens College gave us a tour with a hands-on historical workshop. We looked through texts that varied between the 1500s and 1700s. Have a hankering for library tour posts? Check out Lauren, Jess & D’s experiences of The UL Tour. Or Lucy’s Cambridge Central Library post. I promise you won’t regret.

Queens College

One thing I love about the college libraries is that each college has its own distinctive characteristics. Katie’s post on Newnham College library tour will give you a flavour. Queens College is certainly distinctive. Across the mathematical bridge (remove the screws and the bridge would remain) span beautiful buildings and lush gardens. The architecture was a mix of “old country town” and “modern build”. But the nicest thing was, every person I saw was smiling. Queens is one of the smaller colleges in Cambridge, built of just over 1000 undergraduates, graduates and academics. Nonetheless, the college is utterly charming and quirky. I felt a lovely sense of community, even just walking through!

The collection

The main library is fairly modern and bright.. and busy! It was the end of term. And we heard nothing but ferocious keyboard clicking from students getting essays in. Because Queens caters for first year undergraduates of all subjects, it has few books that cater for other years. As a grad trainee working in departmental libraries, this is a major difference between our collections. As our collections are tripos-based, we cater from undergraduate to fellow. Our collections are based soley around one tripos.

Bliss Classification scheme

Queens use the bliss classification system. Bliss builds classmarks through a combination of letters and numbers. The alternative is a numerical-based system like Dewy. We call the former a faceted scheme whilst the latter an enumerative scheme. Whilst it’s possible to have a system that is in-part enumerative and faceted. Bliss is fully faceted. Faceted schemes allow for in-depth subject analysis, aswell as freedom and flexibility for the classifier. This is because they build their classmarks rather than pick from a list. Therefore it’s easier to show links between subjects, accommodate new subjects. With enumerative schemes, subject headings are already

As libraries strive to be more inclusive and accommodating, faceting elements can prove to be desirable in schemes. This is because of the hospitable element, made possible by the classmarking system. It helps to endorse and embraces new subjects that sprout, and ones that arise from existing subjects.

The old library

  • Some of the old books kept in Queens College old library.
  • The ability to use two different colours for ink indicates wealth.

“Queens College old library is the “Elmer-the-elephant” of libraries. From 12th Century Windows, to 17th Century wooden safe. It was a beautiful mesh of time periods”

The trainees were taken through to Queens College old library, which was like stepping through an architectural time capsule. It featured the most aesthetic walls, ceilings and furniture from across different time periods. Queens College old library is the “Elmer the elephant” of old libraries. From 12th century windows, to a 17th century wooden safe, it was a beautiful mesh of time periods. The top half of the shelves were from a different century to the medieval bottom half of the shelves! And there were modern spinny desk chairs dotted around too. The mismatched museum of vintage library furniture made Queens College old library more charming.

On the right, the key to Queens College old library. Even the key is aesthetic…

Towering above us were shelves of old books. They were beautiful and unique. Meanwhile Emma talked us through how she catalogues these books. Broadly speaking, this involves; subject analysis, publishing information, a physical description and classification. If you’re after an idea of cataloguing, Lucy’s blogpost on cataloguing training is a great start. 

The history of the printing press

The trainees were then given a 101 on the history of the printing press. I’ll keep this brief – I’ve left a further reading list at the end of this post. But, the compositor would have to manually select the type from his case. Then, set this onto the composing stick. And as you can see in the image below, the composition stick is composed letter-by-letter. And, the individual characters would have to slot onto a stick corresponding to a line of text. Each stick (line) would then accumulate to create a page of writing.

Pages would have to be set, letter by letter, before printing.

Once the page was complete, the ability to rewrite or edit a sentence became impossible. This is unlike modern times, where the touch of the button can easily rewrite words and sentences.

man standing at his wooden desk choosing a type from his case. In the background there is paper hanging from the ceiling.
A composer selects type from his case and places it in a composing stick. Printed sheets are hanging, drying from the ceiling.

We also learnt about imposition. Now, imposition (in terms of books) is the way the pages are laid out. When folded, the pages appear in the correct order. The below image is an example of imposition. After printing the page, people would have to fold the sheet in the correct order.

Old book workshop

We were handed books ranging from 15-17th century. For me, a French book from the 15th Century on the French revolution. The book contained three forms of handwritten notes and, suggested it had been rebound at least once in its lifetime. One of the handwritings seemed scrawny, child-like in nature. We thought that a child aged 7-10 could be behind these notes. We concluded that the book was used for school. It was fascinating to see children’s notes from centuries ago. Handwriting is personal to the individual, and these have been frozen in time.

Finally, a bit of show-and-tell. The grads got to grips with miniature books from the 18th century. Roughly 3cm by 4cm, these dinky books were usually ye old testaments. And whilst they were not practical, they were very cute!

Thank you Queens!

Overall, it was a fascinating visit and I certainly thouroughly enjoyed it. The tour of Queens I want to say a big thank you to the Library staff at Queens for making the visit possible. And, for taking time out of the day to provide us with this workshop. A special thanks to Emma for giving us an informative tour of the college grounds and library.

Further Reading:

General Book History

Robert Darnton, ‘What is the History of the book?’ Daedalus, 111 (1982), 65-83 David Pearson, Books as history. The importance of books behong their texts (Newcastle, DE: Oak Knoll; and London: British Library 2008) Sarah Werner, Studying early printed books, 1450-1800: a practical Guide (Hooken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2019)

Printing History

Phillip Gaskell, A new introduction to bibliography (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1972) Joesph Mocon, Mechanick exercises; or, THe docterine of handy-workd. Applied to the art of printing (London: Joesphy Moxon, 1683)

https://www.loc.gov/ghe/cascade/index.html?appid=580edae150234258a49a3eeb58d9121c

Decolonising Through Critical Librarianship – Practical Approaches to Decolonising Library Classification

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On the 1st July 2021, the Decolonising Through Critical Librarianship group hosted a workshop on practical approaches to reclassification. This roundtable discussion arrived in good time for the summer period, in which academic libraries are usually quieter and librarians are more easily able to access the shelves for large-scale classification projects. 

Several libraries had already undertaken their own reclassification projects, and gave brief overviews of these talks as an introduction to the discussion. 

African Studies Library 

The African Studies Library had moved from the UDC to Library of Congress – previously, books had been classified by country first and subject second, which meant that there was an overwhelming wealth of first-level subsections, with similar subjects being distanced from one another. The new classification scheme means that writers across a certain diaspora (e.g. Anglophone, Francophone) are now within borrowing distance of one another, which improves the user browsing experience and is simpler to explain to new users; more scope is allowed for comparative literatures, and there is no longer a backlog of cataloguing due to difficulties in deciding classifications. 

The African Studies librarian noted that this reclassification process might not work in the same way elsewhere due to the focused scope of the library; while these books would be siloed into specific geographic sections in more general libraries, in the African Studies library ‘African literature’ is just literature, ‘African economics’ just economics, and so on. This was a useful demonstration of the way in which suitable classification schemes will depend on the collection of a library and its primary user base. 

Divinity Library

The Divinity Library reclassification project had started in 2015. Of particular concern was a so-called ‘section 11’ for ‘non-Judeo-Christian religions’ – this contained not only religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism but philosophical and comparative texts on a variety of other miscellaneous subjects.  Due to the scale of the project, a split-approach to classification was taken after the new librarian joined in 2015. Books which had arrived before March 2016 remained in the old Section 11, while books which arrived after were classified according to the new classification system, which distinguished non-Judeo-Christian religions in more detail: section 11 became Islam, section 15 Buddhism, 16 Hinduism, 17 Other Religions or religious movements (e.g. Greco-Roman pagan, Zoroastrianism), and 18 Comparative or Inter-Faith texts. At the current rate of staffing the project was expected to take 15 years; the length of time taken to fit in reclassification around daily activities was shown to be a recurrent concern throughout all the discussions. 

Squire Law Library 

The Squire Law Library had – enabled by the lockdowns of the past 18 months – had time to identify areas to be reclassified throughout the library. The library itself was structured on an in-house classification system written in the 70s loosely based on Moyes (a legal classification system), which is kept on paper and is not regularly updated. This classification system organises books according to the country to which the legal system applies; this itself poses problems, as countries have changed over time and are sometimes contested. However, there are also higher-level organisational problems: these countries themselves are organised into two sections depending on the origin of their legal system, which has its roots deeply embedded in colonial history (that is to say, often dependent on who the country was occupied by in the past). This also means that countries are not represented in geographical order; neighbouring countries may be on opposite sides of the library. This distinction is notable enough to have been queried by some students and was said to be both complicated and embarrassing to explain; this was noted as an example of reclassification being motivated by reader-stimulated input. 

Pembroke Library 

Pembroke Library had recently undertaken an extensive overhaul of their history section, reclassifying around 8,000 books. The in-house classification system, which was theoretically based on Dewey but more accurately reflected teaching practices, started with two specific classmarks which heavily centred colonial empires: the history of the British Empire and Commonwealth, and the Expansion of Europe (this being the other colonial powers and their commonwealths). The new classification system maintained the geographical subdivisions in history, but divided by continent and subsequently by period, which allowed for all continents to be placed on an equal standing in their own right rather than being seen through a Eurocentric lens. This also allowed gaps to be identified and supplanted in the collection, often ahead of the curriculum – for example, expanding the section for Oceania – and for buying patterns to be critically analysed in the future. 

Alma and Primo (iDiscover) support team 

A representative from the technical support team explained how issues of classification applied to Alma and iDiscover. A particularly high-profile case which had occurred recently had been the changing of the subject heading ‘Illegal Aliens’ to ‘Undocumented Immigrants’ and associated terms (such as ‘children of’). This change had occurred at the local level in Cambridge Libraries following the blocking of the intended terminology change at the top level by Congress. It was explained that this subject heading had only been changed at the display level rather than at the back-end for a number of reasons: Alma records get exported so there is a need to stick to the agreed rules; the searchability for the original subject heading should be maintained for external users – and, most crucially, as subject headings were usually decided centrally by the Library of Congress, a display-name change allowed the subject headings to be changed automatically rather than manually in the future should a change occur at the top level. This was a useful insight into the technological background of reclassification and the practical problems which could arise. 

Roundtable Discussion 

Some practical advice was offered more generally by those who had already done reclassification – Pembroke suggested a pre-arranged workflow with books being sorted and done a bay at a time to limit the ‘switching’ from decision-making to updating Alma. Newnham suggested a similarly systematic approach, noting that available space should be considered and that the area to be reclassified should work around stockcheck (or vice versa) to avoid books getting lost. Parts of the reclassification project – such as comparing old and new shelf lists – could also be done at home. Pembroke also noted that books on loan have to be considered – Newnham suggested that this could be resolved by adding fulfilment notes, but that this was quite a laborious way of approaching the process. 

In addition to some unexpected budgetary concerns – the stationary spend for one library was massively extended from the cost of book labels and tape alone! – it was widely acknowledged that reclassification projects were rarely given extra funding; however, much of the time, a larger budget would not have helped, the pace of the project decided by other limiting factors such as library space and time available around daily tasks. The skillset of the involved librarians was also important, and many teams were limited by the number of cataloguers they had. 

There were some concerns raised regarding specific classification systems – people argued that Dewey Decimal Classification poorly managed the distinction between history and history of a topic. This meant that ‘lenses’ on history – such as women’s history, LGBTQ+ history, and Black history – were placed in the early 300s and effectively siloed away from the ‘mainstream’ historical canon. In addition to the problem of the implicit theoretical hierarchy which this entailed, on a practical level this also meant that library users were less likely to encounter these ‘lenses’ on history while browsing the ‘mainstream’ canon on the shelves. 

Some participants enquired what they could do to indicate to users the inadequacies in the current classification system if they did not have the resources to undertake a full-scale reclassification project. Multiple librarians recommended putting up signs indicating where other relevant material might be found. One noted that it was appropriate to train staff so they could answer any enquiries on the subject appropriately. The Scott Polar Research Institute Library had had some success hosting workshops with users on the classification scheme; while primarily an information literacy event, it also increased familiarity with the collection and the way it was structured. 

Reflection 

As a trainee relatively new to the field of classification, the discussion was incredibly eye-opening and helped me think about classification more broadly at both the practical level – considering how classification could impact browsability – and theoretical level – how existing classification schemes reinforced or subverted existing power structures. Such a workshop made me think more carefully about how I personally approached classification, reminding me that what often seems like the ‘easiest’ or most obvious classification for an item might not necessarily be the most appropriate: for example, rather than siloing an item on LGBTQ+ history into a general LGBTQ+ section, we might consider where it might fit into the core history collection to increase its general browsability. This sometimes might involve reclassifying whole groups of items which could be better placed rather than adding new acquisitions to them just for the sake of consistency – classifcation should be an ongoing, considered, and fluid process, rather than a strict and immovable system which should be adhered to. 

As a final note, I was particularly enthused by how many libraries noted their classification systems had been remarked upon by users: this surely demonstrates that reclassification is not only worthwhile for its own sake, but is noticed and appreciated (and sometimes initiated!) by users who, as one librarian put it, ‘appreciate that something is being done in the library for them’.

– Katherine Knight, Newnham College

CILN Framework 5 Thing 3: Critical Assessment

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CN: discussion of anxiety disorder and CBT techniques.

Following on from Part 2, Beth Walters takes on the third task set by the Cambridge Information Literacy Network ‘Framework Five‘ programme which looks at critical assessment.

Critical assessment: making judgments about information and understanding how those judgments can be affected by levels of expertise and influenced by others who similarly create, select and curate information. 

Personal: critically assessing the information your own brain gives you 

For someone who lives with an anxiety disorder, one of the most popular methods of treatment – CBT – aims to offer patients a toolkit for critically assessing the information their brain under the influence of anxiety gives them. The modes of critical assessment CBT or other talking therapies offer a patient often use a controlled vocabulary and exercises to go through and evaluate the ‘information’ an anxious brain gives an individual.  

When learning about critical assessment for this task, I was really interested to see outlined all the ways in which humans are really quite bad at critically assessing – this is definitely something that becomes apparent when someone is trying to de-escalate a panicked situation or thought pattern.  

Evaluating my own experience of deploying these techniques, it’s interesting to see parallels with noted trends in fake news. For example, ‘decoding the work of writers whose track records of faulty reporting are occasionally interrupted by stories that are actually true’ (Swaine, 2017) can also apply to evaluating your own thoughts. A brain affected by anxiety will likely be a brain that at other times, offers reliable and sensible input – telling you to eat and sleep, co-ordinating movement and recalling memories to mention just a few. So, it does make sense that when an anxious brain screams inaccurate information at you, you might be inclined to listen. This is where the evaluation, which is just critical assessment by another name, of those thoughts becomes important. You are asked to assess if you are ‘catastrophising’, what the ‘worst’ outcome is really likely to be and whether the information is based on any reliable evidence or sources. Although the first two aren’t helpful in an academic research scenario (they could perhaps be substituted with methodology evaluation questions), the latter is pretty indistinguishable to questions we might ask of information we’re evaluating.  

A case study for this was handily provided to me by the COVID-19 outbreak. A global pandemic is likely to cause anxiety for anyone – so critical assessment actually became vital as individuals had to assess their own risk factors, information sources and emotional responses. For me, the information sources and emotional responses were quite interlinked – a deluge of information being delivered near constantly put my brain into an overwhelmed state and made it nearly impossible to then tease out information that was immediately relevant and reliable. In this situation I pared back the information I was receiving, sometimes asking for a trusted family member to convey fragments of the news they deemed to be relevant. This proved to be a great, non-inflammatory way to curb my overwhelm, at which point I could select a reliable news source to received limited updates from. I didn’t realise it until doing this exercise, but these were all critical assessment methods, from reducing the initial overwhelm of the saturated information ‘marketplace’ to then making decisions about which news sources to follow.  

Professional: upgrading records from home

Although this anecdote may seem entirely unrelated to the personal anecdote, it does have a link in my mind. When we were planning projects to do from home, we decided to undertake a mass-upgrade project to upgrade our oldest, most brief records for our collection. There are tens of thousands of these records, and it is a job that really relies on human critical assessment. Being relatively new to the job and the world of cataloguing and Alma, this was a nice new challenge for me. To make the job simpler for me, I was given instructions to upgrade things that seemed straightforward and had existing, more complete catalogue records within the Alma system.  

The period of working from home the Library entered in response to the COVID-19 situation also meant I was without my usual source of fact checking and reassurance – my colleague. Although the wonders of the internet meant I could stay more or less in constant contact with her, I felt obliged to at least try to increase my knowledge and skills. Thankfully the day before I started working from home, I thought to grab the exhaustive handout given to me on a cataloguing training course I attended in the first few weeks in the job. This meant I could quickly flip through the rules for required information, punctuation and so forth. Although it slowed down the process at first, over time my critical assessment of the records improved. For questions that weren’t easily answered by the handout, I could still ask my colleague!

Overlap?

Both of these situations were a little bit unprecedented, and critical assessment can feel cloudy or difficult especially if there’s an emotional charge to events. However, reaching out and asking for help tie these elements of critical assessment together. Crucially, in doing so it addressed the need for some expert advice and calming any emotional reactions to the point where expert resources and advice can be applied.