Traineeship diary: First thoughts and cataloguing the Walford collection.
Post updated: 17 February 2022.
This post was originally written in December 2021.
Hello Everyone! For those of you who I haven’t yet met I’m Jake, the new graduate trainee in Libraries and Museums here at St Andrews. I thought a blog would be a good way to let people know about what I’m getting up to on my traineeship as well as putting down some thoughts about my work and libraries in a larger sense.
First, a little bit about myself. I’m from Halifax in West Yorkshire, a large town in the Pennines surrounded by rolling hills and distinctive towns and villages like Hebden Bridge. As charming as Yorkshire is, the big city called after sixth form and I moved to London to study French at UCL. After graduating, I decided I wanted to see some more of the world, so I did an English teaching qualification (CELTA) and moved to Qingdao in China where I taught for about eighteen months. At the start of this year, I was teaching in the south of Italy before deciding that a graduate traineeship in libraries would be an exciting next step. I had been thinking about doing a traineeship for a little while and this one seemed like a fantastic opportunity. It appealed to me for many reasons, but principally I was drawn to the variety of experiences I would be able to take from it, working not only in the library but also special collections and museums, a breadth that I think is unique to this traineeship at St Andrews.
Over the past couple of months, I have been working on cataloguing the David Walford collection. So far, I have catalogued about two thirds of the eight hundred or so books in the collection and those are now available to readers on the shelves at Walter Bower House Library. The collection would be of particular interest to students of philosophy or theology as well as those interested in 19th and 20th century European literature. The collection contains works by and about Heidegger, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Schelling, and Kant amongst others. Volumes new to the Library include German translations of many works by Knut Hamsun, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy as well as some beautiful early twentieth century editions of German writers such as Thomas Mann and Ricarda Huch. For those interested in Italian literature there are many titles new to the Library by Alberto Moravia and Dino Buzzati.
Having never done any cataloguing work before it’s been great to pick up a key skill in librarianship. I have learned the basics of Library of Congress subject headings, class marks and MARC formatting as well as getting used to doing the detective work that cataloguing entails. There is very little English language material in the collection, so I have learned to read German fraktur script and began to familiarise myself with various countries’ publishing standards – or lack thereof! It has been very satisfying to see the uncatalogued shelves slowly empty and the books make their way onto the shelves. I would be interested to know which books get the most use over the years!
I have also been doing some work as part of the Theses Digitisation Project, I have been enhancing the metadata of theses in the St Andrews Research Repository. This work will make the theses of hundreds of doctoral students more accessible to anyone who wishes to find them. Although it can be quite an unforgivingly repetitive task, I think my A-levels in chemistry and physics came in handy when I have had to allocate subject headings to work that is otherwise mostly incomprehensible to me!
Beyond my day to day work I have attended several online events by Research Libraries UK (RLUK) and the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIPS). As we come out of the pandemic, I hope industry events like these continue to be broadcast online as they have given me insight into the larger issues in the sector.
Recently I really enjoyed N. Katherine Hayles’ talk as part of the Digital Shift Forum, “Making the Digital Shift Visible: Postprint and Its Implications.” I was particularly struck by what she had to say about digital resources and obsolescence. Before hearing her talk I had presumed that preservation was implicit in the shift to digital, that digital media whether they be e-books or websites, would be around forever. This isn’t the case; we cannot presume that just because something is stored digitally it will remain accessible to us in perpetuum. A book, stored under the right conditions, can last centuries but what about digital file formats? This has obvious implications for libraries, how do they make sure the digital media of today are still around in one hundred years’ time? Equally how do libraries decide which digital materials are preserved? If you are interested, you can watch the whole discussion on the Research libraries UK YouTube channel.
Another insightful talk was by Caroline Bolton at Leeds University who discussed her work as an AHRC-RLUK professional practice fellow. Her work investigated Catalogues as Data, that is to say, the ways in which catalogue (meta)data can be used to visualise and enhance the library or archive users’ experience. I would highly recommend looking at her blog where she has written about her process as well as the various ways she has visualised and made collections accessible in new ways.
In the coming months, I’m going to be starting my work in special collections where I will be working with material from the Danchev collection as well as continuing to spend time in different sections of the Library.
My first months at St Andrews have been a fantastic experience. I would like to say thank you to everyone who has spent some time with me recently, whether that be training me in a specific skill or simply talking to me about what they do. I’m really looking forward to continuing with the traineeship and getting to know everyone better.