End of the line = On to new things

It is the end of my one-year internship as a Library Graduate Trainee at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. I literally remember it as if it was yesterday when I was led on a tour around the library and the herbarium by the previous graduate trainee, Marc Muller. Fast forward a year, I have spent two days doing the same thing. I am definitely excited for next year's trainees and coming back to Kew to see how they are getting on.

I have definitely grown as a person since being at Kew and achieved a long list of different things since being a Kew. From my projects:

• Completely retro-catalogued approx. 500 journals from Japan, China and South America and sections on Bryophytes and Ferns.
• Approximately 300 newly catalogued books and journals titles.
• Completed updating the master list in Excel for exchange partners.
• Completed updating the bookseller list.
• Completed my conservation and book-binding project to make my first ever journal.
• Completed the Kew Gardens at War project which has garnered 300+ people.
• Survived three shelf shifts for the Gardens Library, Studies Office, Diplomatic and Consular reports and pre-1867 journals.

Wednesday: Typical day as a Library Graduate Trainee

It is mid-week and I am having a busy morning doing a little bit of administrative work. I have my first meeting with someone outside of my library team :- our main source/ go-to-guy/ researcher for our large end of year exhibition to comemorate Kew Gardens involvement during World War One in terms of stories of plant science, research and plant-based products from the Library,, Art & Archives and Economic Botany collection. So, the first thing for me to do is to gather together my research in an organised fashion and set up a meeting to view some materials from the Economic Botany collection for our display.

One thing I learnt from having this meeting is that organisation of research and a planned agenda key. Being able to be in a place like the pub/restaurant also helps encourage individuals to be relaxed enough to actually get involved and contribute to the discussion.

Tuesday: Typical day as a Library Graduate Trainee

Every alternative Tuesday, I work with the Illustrations team and today was another one of those days. After checking through some the work I did the day before, I was tasked with the challenge of finding a number of listed illustrations and taking photographs of them. On a normal day this would be the simple case of searching on the catalogue for the location of the rare books in which the illustrations are in. However, the whole entire library catalogue down. So I have been left with searching through rows and rows of rolling stacks with different call numbers.

I have to say at the end of the day, I was more appreciative of the opportunity to get to know the rare books titles and locations little bit better, so it wasn’t complete a waste of a few hours. I think a number of things I learnt with this task were patience and the importance of natural light. Discolouration of paper from the reaction of light means that in fluorescent light, all the illustrations had this mustard yellow background. Finding a natural light source in a building that is designed to keep light away from books was difficult but thank god for our nice display tables facing some narrow vertical planes in the wall and a bit of spring sunshine.

After work, it was time for me to go to my Japanese language evening course. Once again, I am thrown into a topic that I don't really know much about. However, learning more kanji is always helpful in my job when cataloguing.

Monday: Typical start to my week as a Library Graduate Trainee

So it has been about a solid 6 months into my traineeship and I have been making good progress into all my duties. So, I thought it would a good idea to document a typical week in my traineeship at Kew.
Bright and early into the office this morning and first on the agenda is changing the book display. This gets done about every two weeks but considering the fact that I have been cataloguing so many new books and now it is the end of the financial year, the inflow of new books is scarce. Nonetheless, there is still a pretty good variety of books and journals present.

Next on the list of my many duties is retro-cataloguing some serials from the South American region. The majority so far have been completely in Portuguese or Spanish with a few in English. Not being a native speaker when cataloguing can sometimes be problematic. Especially when identifying if the publisher is an important institute, government body or society, which should be named as corporate author responsibility in the 710 MARC21 field.

Disposal of Special Collections

It was thoroughly invigorating being able to attend the Historic Libraries Forum Annual conference on Tuesday. It is not every day you can attend a conference on the topic of “guarding against the disposal of collections” with a long list of guest speakers from special collections.

We had a Pressi presentation from Katie Flanagan (who was ill and couldn’t attend but still sent a copy of her speech) setting the scene about the need to build awareness of inappropriate disposal of special collections and the need for libraries to become watchdogs of this active through increasing social media campaigns. Also highlighting the idea about having a more pragmatic approach to ensure that there are less secretive sales of books and keep collections together in the public domain, if they do indeed need to change hands. 

After such an introduction I just knew I was in for a good debate. A lot of problems that libraries face is the need for more storage and space and the lack of money to invest in core library collections. I was therefore completed enthralled by the following speech from David McKitterick, keynote speaker on this topic. After speaking at length about the University of London blunder to sell several Shakespeare’s folios to where public opinion through newspapers and social media mobilised to act on the provocation of such a valuable collection, David laid out some truths that some libraries try heavily to avoid or are in denial about.

Whether it is the story of Wigan Public Libraries or Birmingham Law Society, quite simply all libraries have to discards books! However, he pointed out that libraries change with each generation and it is important for collection policies to be updated to reflect this. Lastly, he pressed the matter that we as librarians should remember that libraries are not museums. Where museums have “one-off” special items that can never be duplicated or found anywhere else in the world; books have a contextual value in a holdings collection. Therefore, it is important to avoid bulk selling decisions without consultation as it is most likely result in wasteful mishandling by the library and antiquarian booksellers that acquire them or lead to auctioning in fear of scarcity of space which may only raise funds and create space for the short-term.