{"id":1192,"date":"2016-09-30T12:36:22","date_gmt":"2016-09-30T12:36:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/?p=1192"},"modified":"2016-10-03T07:33:14","modified_gmt":"2016-10-03T07:33:14","slug":"librarygeddon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/2016\/09\/30\/librarygeddon\/","title":{"rendered":"Librarygeddon"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Library, the collection<\/strong><\/p>\n

When it’s done right it is a wonderful thing. The\u00a0collection dedicated to meeting a specific need: carefully selected, sensibly arranged, appropriately indexed, comprehensive in its coverage and range of formats. It\u00a0is precisely calibrated to meet a need. On its own it is a collection – worthy of celebration<\/a>. But put the collection together with a community of users and a team of knowledgeable library staff and it turns into a Library – a boon to civilisation and scholarship.<\/p>\n

To my way of thinking it is the community of users that comes first. \u00a0Perhaps this is librarianship’s chicken and egg situation – “Which comes first, the reader or the book?”. \u00a0Ranganathan answers the question by saying, in effect, “both”. His famous five laws of library science<\/a> include these two:<\/p>\n

Every reader their book
\nEvery book its reader<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Neil Gaiman has written thoughtfully<\/a> about the value of public libraries as “cultural seed corn” and he hails the way that libraries encourage knowledge discovery:<\/p>\n

\n

there\u2019s nothing quite like\u00a0<\/span>the glorious serendipity of finding a book you didn\u2019t know you wanted to read. Anybody online can find a book they know they want to read, but it\u2019s so much harder to find a book you didn\u2019t<\/strong> know you want to read.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Public libraries are under great threat, even though they\u00a0have many vocal defenders. Other kinds of libraries are equally under threat but don’t attract the same passionate advocates.<\/p>\n

My career has been in special libraries<\/a>, specifically what are sometimes called workplace libraries<\/a>, where the raison d’etre<\/em> for the library is the needs of a group of people in a workplace. In special libraries it is definitely the reader who comes before the collection.<\/p>\n

Information needs are expressed by users, and\u00a0captured by the librarian, who must take actions to meet those needs. The user needs define the shape and contents of the collection, and its organisation. In an engineering library you may find a small section of books on ‘medicine’, probably all lumped together under\u00a0one classification mark. In a medical library those books would need to be classified in far more detail (dividing them into finer shades of topics), but any books on ‘engineering’ would be lumped into a single section. Thus, indexing and classification in the library must be determined by the needs of the users. Classification is relative, not absolute. A creative librarian will also develop services on top of the collection to meet particular needs of the community of users.<\/p>\n

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.\u201d \u2013 Jorge Luis Borges<\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The library when NIMR was at Hampstead, ca 1930<\/p><\/div>\n

Growth<\/strong><\/p>\n

The library’s collection policy is an expression of\u00a0its approach to managing the collection. It defines what\u00a0to acquire, what to keep, and what to discard. It may aim for homeostasis (a fixed size) or\u00a0it\u00a0may attempt to keep hold of everything it has ever acquired (continual expansion). \u00a0Often libraries will make use of secondary storage space, where less-frequently required items are sent. (A bit like sending your old possessions up to the loft, or into the garage). A mature library collection, with a long historical overhang in secondary storage, can be seen as a record of the organisation’s interests and development. It reflects some of the parent organisation’s history.<\/p>\n

A library devoted to a single subject for a long period of time, e.g.\u00a0a learned society library like the Linnean Society Library<\/a>, becomes an unrivalled repository of knowledge about the subject.<\/p>\n

“To build up a library is to create a life. It’s never just a random collection of books” – Carlos Mar\u00eda Dom\u00ednguez<\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Over the years the library’s users and their needs may change, and this will impact on the collection and services too. Of course library staff may also change, and while they will strive for continuity there will inevitably be changes in emphasis as new staff replace old staff and make their mark with their own particular quirks.<\/p>\n

Another of Ranagathan’s laws is:<\/p>\n

The library is a growing organism<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The library cannot stand still. Space limitations may mean that it cannot grow indefinitely large, but it still needs to live – to develop\u00a0as user needs change and\u00a0publishing trends change. \u00a0The library will\u00a0discard (or relegate) no longer needed\u00a0items as well as ingest new items. It must also exploit new developments in technology and the information industry, and adapt to changes in the broader environment.<\/p>\n

“The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.\u201d \u2013 Albert Einstein<\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The NIMR library at Mill Hill, 2011<\/p><\/div>\n

Radical change<\/strong><\/p>\n

There should be a\u00a0tight link between the collection, its users and the workplace, so that they change in harmony. But if an organisation undergoes a more radical\u00a0change then the collection can come\u00a0under threat. When organisations close, restructure, split, or suffer severe financial troubles, then there will be dire consequences for the library service and collection. This is the way of the world\u00a0but, especially for longer-established collections, it can be a cause for some regret. Simon Barron has pointed out<\/a> that sometimes there is a conflict between those who worship books regardless of use and the drive for efficient collection\u00a0management. I saw a project advertised a couple of years back about the “non-economic benefits of culture<\/a>“. I wonder whether it included a strand about the cultural value of libraries (of all kinds)?<\/p>\n

A few years back I was the membership secretary for CHILL<\/a> (a grouping of independent health-related libraries). These all count as special libraries, many of them relatively small. It was salutary to count up each year how many members had fallen by the wayside in the preceding 12 months. One member\u00a0was a charity called\u00a0Drugscope which had a fantastic information service on addiction, run by a dynamic information professional. But one year some of the charity’s key funding grants were not renewed, leaving a funding hole. There was no money to fund the information service. It just closed. Apparently it was not the only one. An editorial in\u00a0Addiction<\/em><\/a>\u00a0in 2012 said:\u00a0“Special libraries in the addiction field have been\u00a0downsized or closed at an alarming rate during the past\u00a0decade”.<\/p>\n

The Royal College of Midwives<\/a> also had an enviable collection and information services\u00a0run by knowledgeable staff. Financial pressures led to closure. Happily the Library of the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology stepped in to rescue the collection in this case, or it would have been lost. Sadly the knowledgeable staff were lost. When the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain was split, into a professional society and a regulatory body, this also occasioned a massive change for the library.\u00a0Retaining a large historical collection was no longer economically feasible and a “lean and mean<\/a>” approach was adopted instead. Large numbers of older items were disposed of.<\/p>\n

Anecdotally I have heard that many Government department libraries have closed or drastically downsized\u00a0in recent years, due to restructuring, merging or closure\u00a0of departments.<\/p>\n

Of course it’s important that libraries provide useful services in an efficient manner, but the inevitable consequence of rapid organisational change is the loss of many items\u00a0of real historical interest.<\/p>\n

This kind of loss is a global phenomenon. In 2014\u00a0it was<\/a> reported\u00a0<\/a>that<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Scientists in Canada are up in arms over the recent closure of more than a dozen federal science libraries …\u00a0Scientists fear that valuable archival information is being lost.\u00a0Of most concern is the so-called grey literature \u2014 information such as conference proceedings and internal departmental reports.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We have a worldwide librarygeddon – loss or destruction of many specialist collections. Does it matter? Maybe, but probably not enough that we can do anything to change it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n

Empty shelves in the NIMR Library gallery<\/p><\/div><\/td>\n

\n

They’re all empty now<\/p><\/div><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

NIMR Library heritage<\/strong><\/p>\n

My interest in this topic began in 2003, when I first learnt of plans for my Institute to be moved. The plans changed over time, but it has been blindingly evident to me right from 2003 that if the Institute\u00a0moved from Mill Hill it would spell the end for our Library collections. I have got used to the idea and I can think of no valid argument\u00a0why things should be any different, but I still regret that things have to be this way.<\/p>\n

The NIMR library began in 1920 when the Institute moved\u00a0into its Hampstead<\/a> home. The aim of the library was to support scientific medical research\u00a0at the Institute\u00a0and to be a resource for the nation’s medical researchers. Work to assemble the collection had begun prior to 1920, collecting materials from around the world. Many items were received as donations, or through exchange programs. The MRC published\u00a0Medical Science: abstracts and reviews<\/i><\/em>\u00a0and its highly-regarded\u00a0Special Report Series<\/em>, so it had valuable publications to offer in return for free journals and reports from other organisations. In those colonial days, reports (grey literature) were received from research organisations across the British Empire and the rest of the world. \u00a0We even used to receive The Lancet<\/em>\u00a0free of charge (though this changed when Elsevier bought the journal). As well as books, journals and reports, the Library has an extensive\u00a0collection of pamphlets and reprints. The collection\u00a0represents a unique period of British medical research, when Hampstead and later Mill Hill\u00a0were at its centre.<\/p>\n

The reprints were largely collected by individual scientists, I believe, and periodically deposited in the Library. They were all carefully catalogued and subject indexed – we have a vast rank of filing drawers filled with index cards. I think of the reprint collection as the intellectual encrustation of the Institute’s research, from the 1920s to the 1960s. Reprints have become unfashionable and few libraries are interested in taking large collections of reprints. But I think much of the value of the reprint collection is in the catalogue rather than the reprints themselves. It\u00a0is a unique historical document of 20th century biomedical science.<\/p>\n

It’s a strange thing, but when scientific records\/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. Therein lies the problem I faced. Looking back, I can see many ways that I could have handled it better but I did\u00a0as best as I could at the time.<\/p>\n

It’s a big project<\/strong><\/p>\n

The simplest thing to do would have been\u00a0to just throw everything away, and for a while I was afraid that was exactly what I would have to do. Happily, I gained approval (and resources) from on high to undertake a few projects to help ensure that those parts of the collection with most value could\u00a0be dispersed responsibly.<\/p>\n

There were about 3km of shelving filled with printed materials that needed to be disposed of.\u00a0Printed journal volumes accounted for much of the shelf space. \u00a0The pace of digitisation of journals is such that it is very hard to find homes for printed journals. We did find homes in other libraries for a small quantity of journals, but most of the journals were sent for recycling.<\/p>\n

Preliminary enquiries made it very clear that few libraries had\u00a0an interest in more than a small proportion of the other items. That is not surprising – libraries can only collect what matches their strategic needs, and their collection policies (vide supra)<\/em>. The lists that we prepared of the most desirable\u00a0groups of items – the pamphlets, reports and older books – have helped us to find homes for quite a few items. The 5,000 pamphlets in particular have gone as a single block to a major library. I tweeted pictures of quite a few of the books that have been transferred to other libraries, under the hashtag #nimrlibrarybyebye<\/a>. A few hundred have found homes in\u00a0libraries, mostly in London but some further afield.<\/p>\n

A few hundred books have been retained to form a historical collection in the new institute – more of this in a later post. 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. But several thousand items will go to the secondhand trade – I hope they will eventually make their way to collectors’ shelves.<\/p>\n

I should emphasise that most\u00a0items in the NIMR Library collection are 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.<\/p>\n

It is not so much the items themselves that I am mourning here, but the\u00a0collection<\/em> of all the items. \u00a0It’s the whole collection that is greater than the sum of its parts, the connections between all the different documents\u00a0and the context of the Institute\u00a0. This notion (value of the collection versus value of individual items)\u00a0is a bit intangible, and unquantifiable; perhaps not a thing at all. That’s why when it is all gone (quite soon now), probably no-one will notice, or remember that it was there, apart from me. \u00a0I will remember.<\/p>\n

You can look right through the empty shelves in our store<\/p><\/div>\n

Empty stacks in the library store<\/p><\/div>\n

There’s about 3km of empty shelves now<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Library, the collection When it’s done right it is a wonderful thing. The\u00a0collection dedicated to meeting a specific need: carefully selected, sensibly arranged, appropriately indexed, comprehensive in its coverage and range of formats. It\u00a0is precisely calibrated to meet a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,34,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-collections","category-libraries-and-librarians"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1192\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}