Oxford blues
I’m in Oxford for the annual get-together of the heads of the six legal deposit libraries in the UK and Ireland. Our host this year is Sarah Thomas, Bodley’s Librarian – an American, incidentally, but with Welsh roots – and we meet in her room, overlooking the Sheldonian Theatre and Broad Street.
The main theme of our formal discussions, unsurprisingly, is electronic legal deposit: the effort to secure a legal Regulation to give effect to the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003. This will enable the libraries to collect, store and give in-building access to most websites, e-books, e-journals and other UK digital publications. As the prospect of a Regulation nears we pay more attention to how we’re going to put the new system into operation in the libraries: a big challenge in addition to our continuing duty to collect print publications.
Our informal conversations are dominated, again unsurprisingly, by the impending cuts in public spending, and how the individual libraries might respond. My impression is that the UK academic legal deposit libraries, Oxford and Cambridge, with their substantial private sources of income, may weather the storm better than the three national libraries – the British Library and the national libraries of Scotland and Wales – which are heavily dependent on direct funds from their three governments.
More positively, the meeting is a chance to exchange news and to learn about new developments in the other libraries – especially of course the Bodleian Libraries. We learn about exciting plans to transform the dour New Bodleian building in Broad Street: preserving the façade, gutting the inner core of antiquated bookstacks, and adapting the space to welcome the public in and introduce more facilities for creative hybrid (print and digital) scholarship. For me this is quite close to what we’ve tried to achieve in the National Library of Wales through the visitor centre and the renovation of the reading rooms.
We’re shown the results of the Bodleian’s JISC-funded project to catalogue and digitise parts of the unique John Johnson collection of printed ephemera. This is an amazingly large and diverse ‘museum of what is commonly thrown away’: 1.5m items from the sixteenth to the mid-twentieth century. My favourite is a print of ‘Toby the sapient pig’ (1817). We discuss a well-known digitisation problem, which exercises us here in Aberystwyth: how to reduce the substantial costs of creating the metadata required to retrieve images of ‘difficult material’ like ephemera.
Finally, after a visit to the Ashmolean Museum (newly modernised) and Modern Art Oxford (new Howard Hodgkin paintings), I head back on the train to Didcot and Swansea, physically tired but mentally refreshed.
Andrew Green