Possibly Better...

I didn't think anything could top Tuesday with the Bodleian tour, but we visited Merton college today, which is arguably the oldest library at Oxford and possesses 327 medieval manuscripts housed in a 14th century building. Imagine studying for your finals there!

First year students at Merton receive training in the care and handling of the special collections, a lesson that Julia describes as, "speed dating with manuscripts." The students get three minutes with a manuscript and have to write down everything they can learn about it. The goal of the exercise is to understand a book even if you can't read the language in which it is written.



Julia shared several middle English and Latin manuscripts, pointing out peculiarities such as the way scribes would write around flaws in the parchment, sometimes leaving gaps on the pages where you can see through to the next page. Sadly, many of the manuscripts at Merton suffer from the same problem as the Book of Josephus we saw at the O.C.C. yesterday, people at some time in the past cut many of the illuminations out of the manuscripts. Julia informed us that there was a trend in the Victorian era for men and women to do this in order to put together scrapbooks, although there were other motivations such as protecting the manuscripts from overzealous religious visitors who might want manuscripts with controversial illuminations removed from the library.

Due to restrictions, I am not allowed to post photos from Merton's manuscript collection, so you'll have to take my word that it was an amazing experience to be surrounded by so much history.

In a fit of meta-irony, we went straight from the medieval collection at Merton to a Krispy Kreme operating out of the Oxford castle.



From the sublime to the banal. Sigh. Even librarians succumb to the siren call of Krispy Kreme.

The "castle" isn't even a real castle but a former prison that has been turned into a luxury hotel where guests can pay for the privilege of sleeping in cells where thieves and robbers were once incarcerated.

After getting our sugar fix we traveled across the street to Nuffield college, which was founded in 1937 and funded by Lord Nuffield, William Morris (of automobile fame), however the college wasn't built until the mid 1950s, so the library is not very old. It does have a unique claim as the only tower library in Oxford, and the view from the top is exceptional.

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.

A Packed Monday

Our Monday schedule was packed. We started off with a visit to the Oxford University Press, and from the outside view of the neo-classical building on Great Clarendon, I expected to find giant iron and steel machinery grinding out sheets of black and white print. I was disappointed to learn that the University no longer prints their own books and periodicals but outsources that work to save costs. Still, we spoke with Bev, an OUP archivist, who educated us on the history of the press. Did you know that the press was given a charter to print books by King Charles I? We did get to see a hand-operated Victorian press. Here's Liz showing us how it works.



The type on this press was set by putting individual letters into a frame, which meant that you had better make sure you print enough pages the first time around or you have to re-load all the letters back into the frame if you want to print another run.

Bev also told us about the history of the Oxford English Dictionary. The editors who took on the daunting task of collating examples of every English word realized it would be impossible to do all the work themselves, so they relied on readers who would find quotations that included the words, write them onto slips of paper and return them to the scriptorium where they were sorted and put into the dictionary. Here's a box containing some of the original entry slips.



It seems that Wikipedia cannot claim to be the first collaborative reference work to harvest the vast body of human knowledge using volunteers to submit entries.

We were also treated to a copy of a letter from J.K. Rowling to the OED regarding her use of the word muggle in reference to non-magic aware human beings in her book Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. I was also unaware that the word had connections to drug slang; perhaps it gives the book a new layer of meaning.



After our visit to the OUP we trekked over to Linacre College, a graduate school in Oxford University, to look at their private library. The school on has about 400 students, so their library is relatively small and comprised of the basics; literature classics, basic science, history and reference. According to the librarian, the computers are their most popular resource. The library is open 24 hours with self-service circulation. I was surprised to discover that the majority of the spine labels were hand-written.



The library occupies what was once the chapel in a large house, so it has an inspirational feel, however the books have been stuffed into whatever spaces available, including this very narrow passageway.



We broke for lunch, after which we convened to hear former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion read some of his new poems to us. It was a great chance to talk with the man who agreed to take the Laureate position with the goal of creating a public archive of audio recordings of poets reading their work--accessible through poetryarchive.org .



Tuesday is shaping up to be another full schedule. More on that later.

Arrival

Multi-hour flights that start on one day and end on the next day are not my idea of entertainment. William Gibson suggests in Pattern Recognition that jet-lag is caused because your body travels too fast for your mortal soul to keep up, so you have to wait for it like lost luggage. I'm inclined to agree with his description. On the other hand, the bus ride from Heathrow to Oxford was certainly exciting; the driver felt it necessary to point out with flashing lights, bleating horn and finger gestures exactly which cars were going too slow on the M40.

The Oxbridge Program was kind enough to put us in dorms on the Mansfield college campus, which gives us a sense of history and a nice view.



It's also convenient, if a little quirky. Here's a picture of my door.



Seriously. I am staying in the Coco Lounge. I feel like I'm in a Barry Manilow song.

The weather greeted me with pleasantly cool and breezy temperatures, but topped everything with rain--welcome to England. I won't complain since I'm not sweating. The first item on our agenda was a garden party, but the rain forced everyone indoors. I managed to get a tour of the garden before the rain got too bad.



I was told there was supposed to have been a bouncy castle in the middle of that garden, but it was shut down by the local authorities due to safety issues with the rain. I'm not sure if I believe that or not. In any case, our garden party took place in what looked like a medieval mead hall, complete with timber beamed ceilings. I half expected knights in armor to come in singing about Camelot.



Tomorrow our study group begins.

What is this all about?

I received a generous fellowship from the Oxbridge Academic Program to attend the Oxford Teacher Seminar on The Library and the Academy. The seminar is in Mansfield College, and, in addition to the amazing cultural riches of Oxford University, I will meet Rhodes Scholars, visit libraries and historic sites, and explore Oxford's deeper resources.

According to the introductory materials, the seminar focuses on "how libraries contribute to the intellectual and cultural life of the academy. The study group draws on select resources from more than 60 libraries that constitute the Oxford University library system. Given the great wealth, as well as the antiquity, of library resources in Oxford, participants visit medieval libraries that still have chained books, see exhibits drawn from rare collections, and visit the Bodleian Library, looking at it not only historically, but in relation to a wide range of current issues."

It may not sound like a thrilling way to spend your summer, but I've already got a list of questions for which I want to find answers--and several of these questions came from Marist students.