Women's Library and Book Preservation

We started Tuesday at Saint Anne's college, which was originally founded as a women's college but is now coeducational. The building housing the library looks like a small castle.



The library itself houses some one hundred and ten thousand volumes, which must be difficult to take care of with only two librarians and a few student assistants. The librarians at Saint Anne's were exactly what I imagine British librarians to be like, very accommodating, friendly, interesting to talk with, and they even served tea.



An interesting feature of the library are the subject-specific stained glass windows representing various aspects of the Dewey classification system. This photo is a collage of some of the windows, but in reality they are spread throughout the library.



Leaving Saint Anne's, we headed for the Oxford Conservation Consortium, the entity that repairs and preserves books, manuscripts, documents and other materials. We learned about the facility's approach to repair and conservation, with a goal of efficient, long-lasting repairs that disturb materials the least. There were books with broken covers under repair, including a printed incunabulum, the Book of Josephus. (Incunaubula are books from before 1501 AD.) The Book of Josephus had been repaired once before sometime in it's past. Unfortunately, over the years, many of the illuminated pages were removed from the book, so only a few are left.



The conservationists use various techniques to reattach book covers, including boardslotting, which you can read about in more detail on the boardslotting blog. For incunabula, however, the conservationists prefer to make as few changes to the book's structure as possible. In the case of the the Book of Josephus, the bookboards will be relaced to the binding with fine braids threaded through the original holes. The leather on the cover will be replaced with Algerian goat leather stained to match the original color.



Attached to the same building as the O.C.C. is the Chantry library, a collection of documents including books and periodicals on the subjects of materials conservation and repair covering not only books but textiles, furniture and even wallpaper. You can find more information on materials preservation at the ICON website.

The highlight of the day was our tour of the Bodleian Library. I completely geeked out over this, and can't put into words the importance of this place or the feeling I got from actually standing in the middle of Oxford's first real library. The Bodleian represents a depth of human scholarship and current learning missing from most U.S. libraries. Bonus: there's even an underground vault! At one point, a fellow teacher (who isn't a librarian) turned and asked if I was enjoying the tour. I said, "I'm in an underground library...this is heaven."

I don't think I can top today, but will try on Wednesday.