Meeting my mentor

At the Stationer's New Members Evening late last year, I finally met my mentor for the first time. Sarah Mahurter, is the current Manager of University Archives & Special Collections Centre (ASCC) at University Arts London (UAL) and she invited me on a tour of her workplace.

It was interesting to learn that the Centre were created around 2007 with the Stanley Kubrick Archives as one focal point of the collections. As a mainly film and design archives and special collections, the layout of centre is a futuristic glass reading room and office space with red chairs, modelled after a clip in the movie Odyssey. The centre does not hold any university records (as they are located elsewhere) but the collections are embedded into the university courses curriculum. Furthermore, half of all users are students and the other half are external users such as film historians and actual film companies which is an exciting prospect.

In my opinion, the major strength of these collections is that they truly support academic teaching and foster learning development, as the student has physical resources to use as reference. The academic staff and library staff also understand the need for these resources and support their use. However, one downside is that there is usually only one copy of each resource and if damaged the chances of it being replaced is slim. Conversely, this explains the importance of the collections and why trained archivists work with the collections and supervise their use.

Being a Subject Librarian

I am currently on a long road towards my dream of being a Subject Librarian for East Asian collections. During my last few months as a Library Graduate Trainee at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, I thought it would a good opportunity to meet and talk with individuals within this field as a form of CPD. Last week, I interviewed Fujiko Kobayashi, the Subject Librarian for Japan and Korea at SOAS. The questions below formed the basis of my talk with her about her role and its importance within the university.

How did you come into your role? How do you spend most of your day? How do you see your career progressing?

Fujiko like many other librarians simply fell into the role. First from teaching in Japan, to volunteering as a teacher in Malaysia before moving to America and studying Librarianship as a random interest. She greatly credits that participating in a Masters degree around the time were the internet really took off, allowed her new skills in cataloguing and programming with HTML and CSS to assist in landing a job as Library Assistant in London. Before progressing to become a Subject Librarian at SOAS. I expected to hear that as a Subject Librarian she would be getting involved in projects (e.g. preparing reading lists for programmes and research courses) but the majority of her time is spent split 50/50 between cataloguing and classification and dealing with enquiries. Every so often she provides one-one training seminars for research PhD students. Due to her previous experience in teaching she would like to continue to assist students and complete the mammoth task of cataloguing the 60% of the collections that is not online.

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.