Sorting through the Warwickshire and Stratford section book by book
Last week was our first ‘Closed week’ in several years and it has been a great opportunity to make some improvements, both in the Reading Room and behind the scenes. Our main project has been to begin the process of reviewing and ‘revamping’ the open access book area. This has remained largely unchanged since the collections came together four years ago. We want to make it easier for readers to find what they need and to get more ‘key’ books into the Reading Room. It was also very useful for us to become more familiar with the books we hold.
We have created a new pamphlet section and have gone through every single Warwickshire and Stratford book, removing duplicates and those which are fragile, contain letters (some over a hundred years old!) or which don’t seem of key relevance (e.g. the book on “Worcestershire Privies”!!). Most of these have been relocated in our basement book stacks. Some books which are now outdated have been removed from the collections and along with other weeded books will be sold through Betterworld Books for charity and for our funds. This new streamlined local history section is much easier to browse and the real ‘gems’ can now be found.
We’ve listened to comments from readers and have brought up books on Gloucestershire and expanded our section on Elizabethan/ Jacobean London. We’ve also returned the Complete Peerage to the Reading Room so those wanting to look up an individual don’t have to order a hefty volume up from the basement.
New books on their way to the Reading Room
We’ve rectified anomalies – moving theatre bibliographies into the main theatre section from their hiding place in between local biographies and agriculture ! We’ve also brought up a large microfilm cabinet from the basement and got rid of some old furniture. This means that microfilm copies of the Bram Stoker Collection, early prompt books and prompt books in the Folger and various university libraries are now on open access. The periodicals have also been rearranged to create a clear local and Shakespeare periodical sections and to allow room for expansion. These changes have allowed us to see the potential for future new sections on open access and the spaces you can currently see on the shelves will soon be filled with exciting new books. We will also be revising and updating our Quick Reference section. Watch this space!
As if all this exercise wasn’t enough, we had some light relief from book moving during our lunchbreak on Valentine’s Day, when we took part in the mass Zumba dance for One Billion Rising.
Dancing for One Billion Rising
In addition to the Reading Room moves, we’ve tidied and cleaned the Reading Room, basement stacks and office spaces, filling several recycling bins. Staff have also worked hard to free up vital space in basement storage areas and to audit parts of the collection, as well as getting on with cataloguing. In amongst all these projects we’ve also had training on time management and kept up with group bookings, enquiries and provided a stack tour for a new trustee.
Closed week also coincided with our annual Collections Away Day. This year we had a special tour of the Bodleian Library, thanks to Jim Shaw of the Radcliffe Science Library (and formerly of the SBT and Shakespeare Institute) and then spent the afternoon at the Ashmolean Museum.
We saw the Divinity School, which dates back to medieval times and was used as the infirmary at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter films, and then took the winding wooden staircase up to the amazing Duke Humfrey’s Library (built in 1488), with its painted ceilings and wooden galleries (this is now also famous as the Hogwarts Library). It originally had books chained up and we spotted a number of early printed books we have in our collections on the shelves. Later on we visited the Radcliffe Camera and some of the more modern reader spaces. It was obviously the day for excursions from Stratford – we bumped into Greg Doran and Ewan Fernie on our travels!
Outside the Radcliffe Camera
We saw every floor of the Ashmolean – staff favourites ranged from a pre-Raphaelite painting of Hamlet and Ophelia to a sculpture of Satan(!) It was a rare chance for the whole team to spend the day together and to talk to colleagues we don’t directly work with on a day to day basis. It is always refreshing to visit other reading rooms and museums and to see them from a visitor point of view and to come back and apply this new perspective to our own workplace.
A big thank you to our volunteers Helen Williams, Ashley Pettifer and Phil Tromans for their help with book moving last week, as well as to Paul and Bob from the Works Team who did our furniture moves. Thanks too to Mareike and her volunteers for all their work changing catalogue records so readers can find the books in their new homes and to Paula for her help with labelling and listing.