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Annual Report of the Library Syndicate for the year 2000-2001

Highlights

Newton papers

The last Annual Report recorded the offer, by the Heritage Lottery Fund in July 2000, of a generous grant of £4,792,000 towards the cost of purchasing the Macclesfield Collection, one of the most important collections of scientific papers still in private hands, and including about 500 manuscript notebooks and a further 500 or so unbound documents written by Sir Isaac Newton. The total cost of the collection was £6,374,000, which meant that the Library was faced with the task of finding the remaining £1,582,000. The appeal, launched in August 2000, was spectacularly successful and the full amount of the partnership funding was raised by the end of the calendar year, thus ensuring that the collection will remain in Cambridge and be made available to scholars. Within a few weeks of the launch of the appeal, a most timely gift of $250,000 was received from the Dibner Fund. This encouraged further support: a very generous private benefactor offered a million-dollar challenge grant, which the Library was able to call upon, thanks to donations from Trinity, Newton's own college, of £300,000, a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of $500,000, together with a number of private gifts of sums ranging up to $100,000. The purchase grant from the Mellon Foundation was augmented by a further $174,000 towards the costs of cataloguing the collection, carrying out the necessary conservation work and preparing a major exhibition, which will be mounted in the Library's exhibition centre in the coming autumn. Parts of the collection will also be digitized and made available via the web to scholars and the general public. The Library is grateful to the many benefactors who helped to secure this collection, one of the most important to have been acquired during the six hundred years of its existence, and to the University's Development Office, both in Cambridge and in New York, for their help and support with this successful campaign.

The Betty and Gordon Moore Library

The construction of the Betty and Gordon Moore Library was completed at the end of June 2001. Located alongside the Centre for Mathematical Sciences and the Isaac Newton Institute at Wilberforce Road in West Cambridge, the Moore Library is the newest dependent library of the University Library, housing the University's main working collections supporting research in the physical sciences, mathematics, and technology, and bringing under one roof print material from four separate locations (the Scientific Periodicals Library, the main University Library, and the former Departmental libraries for Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics). The Library, therefore, is a cornerstone of the University's strategy to concentrate teaching and research in the physical sciences and technology within the West Cambridge development.

Construction of the Library, to a design by Edward Cullinan Architects, was made possible by a gift of £7.5 million from Dr Gordon E. Moore, founder and Chairman Emeritus of the Intel Corporation. The Library has been designed as a working science library for the twenty-first century, meeting the needs of both present and future generations of students and researchers. It will stand as a benchmark 'hybrid' library, combining high levels of service and access to both print and electronic information. There are several key requirements to delivering quality services within this hybrid model and these have been consciously built in to the design. First was the need to accommodate growing conventional print collections. Despite the growth of electronic journals, paper-based scientific publishing still shows little sign of slowing. More than 7,000 metres of open-access shelving on four floors provide an initial capacity for over 156,000 volumes. A second requirement was the provision of over 70 public computer workstations, with, in addition, power and data connections to all seats within the building, so that the Library can respond quickly and flexibly to future changes in the balance of print/electronic library use. Finally, the most important factor in the success of any library, is that the building should offer pleasing yet functional spaces to visit, work, and interact within.

On the upper three floors, shelving radiates from the centre of the building towards the natural light at the perimeter, where the majority of reader places are located. Natural light also passes through the core of the library, initially from the lantern on the second floor and then around the central lift shaft between floors. In response to the original brief, the architects have ensured that lighting and other services have been installed in such a way that, in the future, seats may be replaced with shelving or vice-versa. The upper two floors house the main book collection, a current periodicals display, and the Stephen Hawking Archive. The ground floor accommodates the print and electronic reference collections, a new-acquisitions display area, library staff work areas, and the service functions of user registration, circulation, reference, and general assistance, behind a single service desk. The lower-ground floor extends beyond the circular footprint of the upper floors, providing space for over 5,000 metres of shelving for bound periodical volumes and 50 computer workstations.

North-west corner extension

The end of the year also saw the new Munby Rare Books Reading Room and Manuscripts Reading Room, on the first and third floor respectively of the north-west corner of the main University Library building, almost ready for occupation. The architects for this rebuilt and much enlarged section of the Library were the Harry Faulkner-Brown Howe Partnership, which is responsible for the ongoing extension of Giles Gilbert Scott's 1934 building. Part-funding for the new building was provided by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Seating capacity was substantially increased to eighty-four spaces in the Munby Rare Books Room and sixty-six in the Manuscripts Room, while both rooms have greatly enhanced facilities for readers. Each has an area devoted to PCs for public use, giving readers easy access through their menus to relevant databases and electronic services. The handsome new furniture incorporates power points and ethernet connections. The rooms contain microform reading areas, and the Manuscripts Room has an adjoining teaching room. At the north end, behind a glass partition, is a Quiet Area for readers wishing to work undisturbed by human voices and electrical equipment. These areas will be occupied for some eighteen months by staff and readers from other parts of the building during the equivalent reconstruction of the south-west corner. Enhanced security measures and a range of new book supports have been provided to ensure the protection and safe handling of the collections.

New library management system

By the beginning of the year the selection process for the new library management system was almost complete. The work had been undertaken by task groups responsible for the seven functional areas of the system, reporting to a Project Team; at each of these levels there were representatives of both the University Library and the other libraries in the University. In the end, the recommendation from all the task forces and the Project Team was unanimous - that the most appropriate system was the Voyager Integrated Library Management System from Endeavor Information Systems. This recommendation was accepted by the Library Syndicate and the General Board's Committee on Libraries and the contract was signed in December 2000. The original plan had been to spend the academic year 2000-01 implementing the new system, with the intention that it should go live in time for the beginning of the academic year in October 2001. However, once detailed planning work began, the Endeavor team began to appreciate fully the complexity of the Cambridge system, not just in terms of the number of databases and range of contributors to the Union Catalogue, but also the fact that any one person could well be a user of three or four libraries in the system and have different borrowing privileges in each, all using the same library card. It was agreed, therefore, that, rather than trying to rush the implementation, it would be staged over a longer period, and would be introduced in phases during the first half of 2002.

Scholarly communication

The decision made last year that Cambridge, in common with some other leading university research libraries, would not accept the subscription terms then offered by Elsevier and Academic Press to their electronic journal packages, has remained in force in the absence of any significant improvement in the offer from the publishers. The broader problems of the unsustainability of the current pattern of commercial scientific publishing, whether in print or electronic form, were discussed at length by the Library Syndicate and its scientific and medical sub-syndicates. The continuing transition to electronic publishing has only served to intensify the problems faced by large academic libraries, and the Syndicate supported a continuing strong line in the face of all-inclusive electronic journal packages at extremely high cost based on historical print expenditure. The University Library has actively supported the attempts by CURL (Consorium of University research Libraries) to negotiate a better deal for the large research libraries and is encouraging alternative approaches such as those endorsed by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), a world-wide alliance of research institutions, libraries, and other organizations. A number of expensive journals were cancelled and replaced by cheaper SPARC alternatives. Further activities will be undertaken in the current year to encourage academic scientists to challenge the pricing policies of journals with whom they deal as editors, authors, or referees, or by more radical approaches such as founding new journals or publishing papers through open archiving.

Collections

Modern collections

The drawing up and publication in 1999 of the Library's collection development policy was intended both to inform users of what the Library aims to acquire and to assist staff in ensuring a greater balance in collecting. This was combined with a reassignment of staff responsibility for making recommendations and maintaining liaison with a number of academic departments. In one respect this has been successful, in that two hitherto under-represented areas, French- and Spanish-language books, are now being recommended much more assiduously, to the delight of the academic departments concerned. However, it has led to a significant increase in the overall number of recommendations being made. The Accessions Department has made sterling efforts to keep up with an increase of around 30% in the number of new books ordered and received, but the absence of any additional staff either in Accessions or in the Cataloguing Department means inevitably that there will be ever greater delays before many of these books are available to readers.

The transfer of resources from buying books to paying for staff to process those books is a very emotive issue, but the time is now approaching when the Library Syndicate will have to give serious attention to whether resources are to be switched to try and achieve a better balance between these two activities. Once the new Voyager system has been fully implemented, a review of the whole acquisition/cataloguing process will be undertaken and these issues will be considered in the light of the benefits offered by the new system.

The number of books received under legal deposit showed a decline, though this is less likely to have been due to a reduction in the number of books being published than to fluctuations in the deliveries from the Copyright Agency, which collects books for the five legal deposit libraries other than the British Library. It is intended that the Agency should move out of central London, in order to ease the difficulties of staffing and space, as soon as suitable premises have been found.

The creation of a shared post for Commonwealth Studies between the University Library and the Centre of South Asian Studies has led to the initiation of a number of innovative projects. Periodicals still received as donations for the Royal Commonwealth Society collections have been rationalized with those obtained by other Library departments, and a project plan has been drawn up to increase the awareness of and access to the Royal Commonwealth Society collection of photographs, using a combination of online cataloguing and digitization of selected images.

Special collections

The campaign to purchase the Macclesfield Collection of Newton papers is described elsewhere. Work on the conservation of the collection has begun, preparation of an exhibition and associated catalogue is under way, and a digitization plan has been submitted to the Heritage Lottery Fund for its approval.

Using external funding, significant progress has been made with the cataloguing of a number of manuscript collections. The archive of the Austrian writer, Arthur Schnitzler, is divided between Cambridge and the Deutsches Literatur-Archiv, Marbach; thanks to a grant from the Volkswagen-Stiftung, the Cambridge papers have now been catalogued and added to the database which will eventually provide access to both sets of papers via a single catalogue. Work on the cataloguing of the medieval illuminated manuscripts continued, with funding from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the appointment of a Chinese native-speaker to the post of Jardine Matheson archivist means that the Chinese-language material can now be tackled; this is little known and promises to be of considerable historical value. The papers of Meyer Fortes (1906-83), a major figure in twentieth-century social anthropology, were acquired by the Library at his death and now, thanks to a donation from Dr Susan Drucker Brown, a former pupil, it has been possible to prepare a catalogue of the correspondence, which - together with his field notes - constitutes the most important part of the archive.

Major purchases

Manuscripts

Macclesfield Collection of scientific papers of Sir Isaac Newton and others

Michael Holroyd's papers concerning the novelist William Gerhardie (whose papers are already in the Library)

Letter of Captain C. E. Blackett to his parents from the Crimea, 1854-6

Household accounts of the First Duke of Buckingham, 1616

A fifteenth-century manuscript containing sermons of St Bernard and other texts from the Celestinian monastery of Marcoussis in France

Maps

Viêt Nam, atlas qu'ôc gia [National atlas of Vietnam]

Plan de la ville capitale de S^t Petersbourg (1820)

Isaac Johnson, A terrier of the estates, lands, messuages & houses etc… belonging to the town of Woodbridge in the county of Suffolk… (manuscript, 1825)

Historical & topographical map of the eruptions of Etna from the era of the Sicani to the present time, intended to show the origin, the duration & the age of each eruption (1828)

Music

Full score of Balfe, Le puits d'amour: opéra comique en trois actes (Paris 1843)

Rameau, Les festes de l'Hymen et de l'Amour, ou, Les dieux d'Egypte (Paris 1748?)

Manuscript full score of two duets from an unidentified opera by Farinelli. 'Che dolce contento' and 'Assai vezzosa e amabile' [180-?]

Manuscript of Lully, Receuil des plus beaux endroits des opéra [sic.] (Paris 170-)

Rare books

Francisco López de Villalobos, Los problemas (Zamora 1543)

Erasmus, Paraphrasis in evangelium secundum Joannem (Alcalá de Henares 1525), with censored passages and a manuscript certificate of expurgation dated 1565

Hermann von dem Busche, Ain schöner newer Passion (Augsburg 1521)

G.C. Glorioso, De cometis dissertatio astronomico-physica (Venice 1624)

Le décorateur parisien (Paris c.1860)

Donations

Law books for the Squire Law Library

Blackstone Press: all titles from the current catalogue

Butterworths: law books from the current catalogue

Cambridge University Press: CUP law books to the value of £6,000

Cambridge Law Journal: approximately 250 books

Professor P. G. Stein: rare books on Roman Law

Mr J. G. Collier: books on Conflict of Laws and Public International Law

Manuscripts

Photograph albums of Sir Francis Younghusband's expedition to Tibet, 1902-4 (Mr H. P. Durie)

Photographs and correspondence relating to the Wolseley Tool and Motor Car Company, an addition to the Vickers Archive (Mr L. J. Thorpe)

Letters, poems and papers of Paul Claudel (Mrs L. Jack)

Photographic and paper records relating to the Falkland Islands (1840-1953) (Mrs S. Chorley)

Music

Viola d'amore music from the library of Violet Brough and John Yewe Dyer (Ms M. Howlett-Jones)

Typescript of, and copyright in, Susan Lund's novel Raptus; notes, correspondence with Beethoven scholars (Ms Lund)

Transfers

Records of the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union and the papers of H. C. G. Moule, Bishop of Durham, on permanent loan from Tyndale House

University Archives: authors' correspondence from Cambridge University Press; files from the Board of Graduate studies, the School of the Physical Sciences and the Faculty of Oriental Studies; records of the Archimedeans and their precursor, the Mathematical Club (1920-2000).

Books and periodicals from the Department of Anatomy

A great deal of planning went into the preparation of 'Janus', a University-wide archive server that will shortly facilitate access to the catalogues of the University Archives and those of many of the Colleges. The Janus database will be hosted by the University Library and, as well as catalogue data, it will contain important supporting material such as a searchable list of the University Officers from the thirteenth century up to 1900 (13,000 entries), incorporating a significant number of corrections to printed sources such as the Historical Register and its Supplements. In a related area, the online enhanced version of Venn's Alumni Cantabrigienses is now well advanced. Although a good deal of work remains to be done, there are now electronic files for all the components: Emden's Biographical Register, both parts of Venn, the Newnham and Girton registers to 1900, and the Index to Tripos Lists.

The music from two manuscripts recently acquired by the Library (both purchased with the help of the Friends of the Library) - a late-seventeenth-century manuscript of harpsichord music from Lyon and a composite volume containing a newly discovered piece by Couperin - featured in a concert given to the Friends by Giula Nuti in the Long Gallery of Queens' College in November 2000.

The programme to augment the Library's holdings of Soviet military mapping, especially for areas of the world where accurate maps have in the past been al-most impossible to obtain, continued with purchases including over 5,000 sheets of China at 1:100,000 scale. This is the only publicly available set in the United Kingdom and is already being well used. With the help of financial contributions from a number of Departments in the University, the Library is now providing access to EDINA Digimap, an exciting new online service that allows users to view and create maps of any location in the United Kingdom using Ordnance Survey data.

A number of rare books transferred from the Department of Anatomy and including those from the West Suffolk General Hospital collection, relocated with the approval of the hospital authorities, have been assimilated into the Library's collections and cataloguing of them is almost completed. The cataloguing of the foreign books in the Waddleton collection of books with colour-printed illustratios has also been completed.

Three areas of special collections are the subject of projects funded by the higher education funding councils under the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP). Each of them involves the conversion of manual records in different formats into machine readable form and the incorporation of them into online databases which will make the records accessible to scholars anywhere in the world.

'Mapping the World', a collaborative project involving seven universities, will convert the Library's card catalogue of post-1850 overseas mapping. Spain and the countries of South and Central America have been completed and the records are available in the University Library's online catalogue and through the CURL database with its associated online catalogue (COPAC).

The 'Ensemble' consortium, led by Birmingham University, includes Oxford, London, Edinburgh, and Cambridge Universities, and the Royal Academy, Royal College and Royal Northern College of Music. The first stage of the project will add about 200,000 records for printed music to national databases (available through CURL and Music On Line), of which 25,000 will be from Cambridge. Each library has chosen different areas of music in order to bring the maximum number of different new records to the co-operative databases; Cambridge is contributing records for miniature scores. As an additional part of the project Oxford and Cambridge are co-ordinating an approach to Victorian and Edwardian popular song; Cambridge covering the earlier period from 1850 to 1890, and Oxford from 1890 to 1914. In order to help sociologists, historians, and a host of others interested in the subject content of the material, wherever it has been easy to identify the topic a subject heading has been provided as well as entries for composer, performer, and lyrics and, where appropriate cover illustrations have also been described and the names of the illustrators and lithographers indexed. To date over 12,000 records have been created.

The largest of the three projects is concerned with pamphlets published in the United Kingdom between 1800 and 1914. These are an important research resource for a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and, when completed, the project will have added records for 177,000 titles to the online databases of member libraries and the CURL COPAC service. In Cambridge, most of the pre-1850 pamphlets in class 'Pam.' have now been catalogued. The subject matter of these is general, with some bias towards theological and legal material; other classes of pamphlet material are now being tackled, with a more political and sociological theme.

Oriental collections

The change of staff in the Near and Middle Eastern section has led to a number of policy changes. All acquisitions are now catalogued in original script (Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian); although the records are currently displayed in transliterated form, the script records should become available soon after the introduction of Voyager. At the same time, local transliteration schemes have been abandoned in favour of the standard Library of Congress schemes. A major drive to build up the collections was also undertaken, with the result that significantly more books were acquired this year than in the recent past.

At a ceremony in the Library in April 2001, attended by Mrs Anne Lonsdale, Pro-Vice-Chancellor, and members of the Faculty of Oriental Studies, Dr Carl Ching Men-Ky, President of the United World Chinese Association presented the Library with a set of the Treasury of Chinese Classics (Ch'uan shih ts'ang shu). This set of 123 volumes includes the twenty-six dynastic histories of China recording the period from prehistory to the Revolution of 1911, 50,000 poems and 20,000 prose pieces written during the T'ang Dynasty, works of traditional Chinese medicine, as well as all the most significant philosophical, scientific, and literary writings produced in China in the last 2,000 years.

The first phase of the RSLP UK Database of Chinese Research Materials Project was successfully completed, with the entire Cambridge database of records being sent to Oxford for inclusion in the UK database.

The year marked the publication of a further volume in the Genizah Series, C. F. Baker and M. Polliack's Arabic and Judeo-Arabic manuscripts (Cambridge 2001) as well as an expanded version of Professor Reif's inaugural lecture Why medieval Hebrew studies? (Cambridge 2001). The Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit is involved in several major collaborative projects:

with Ben-Gurion University, Israel, to describe some 2,000 liturgical fragments in the Cambridge Genizah Collection

with the Friedberg Genizah Project at New York University to provide descriptions of Genizah material

with Princeton University to mount one hundred digitized images, with annotated transcriptions and translations

with the University of Pennsylvania for a joint cataloguing, transcription, and digitization project.

Digital library

For an increasing number of users, the web not only acts as their first point of contact with the Library but often, through the wide range of electronic resources now offered, provides them with the information they need without their having to visit the Library or even leave their office or laboratory. The total number of requests to the Library's website during the year was 7,580,867, which, given that the service is available twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week, represents over 20,000 requests a day.

The Library subscribes to almost 200 online databases, which are available within the Library buildings and on the University network. The usage statistics are impressive and the service clearly meets the needs of scholars: Cambridge use of Web of Science, for example, is five times the national average for a large university.

Important new databases added this year included:

SourceOECD (including over 700 books)

Literature Online

Digimap

New Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians

Justis collection of eight major law databases

Macmillan Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics

Macmillan Encyclopedia of Life Sciences

The most heavily used services for which figures can be obtained were (in descending order):

Web of Science

Medline

Psycinfo

OCLC FirstSearch

Georef

MLA Bibliography

Justis Law Reports

Justis Weekly Law Reports

Justis Times Law Reports

Justis Lloyds Law Reports

The networking of many CD-ROMs remains problematical and the move away from networked CD-ROMs towards online databases continued. Some services are, however, available only on CD-ROM, but the time and cost involved in mounting some of these products is so large that the Library Syndicate will be asked to consider how the Library's collection development policy should reflect this.

The Greensleeves Project, to convert records from the guardbook catalogue and add them to the online catalogue, which has been under way since 1995, continued. Negotiations were undertaken during the year to try and obtain major new sources of funding to accelerate the project; as part of this process the Isaac Newton Trust made a generous offer of £200,000, subject to the Library being able to raise matching funding, and strenuous efforts will be made over the coming year to achieve this.

Services

The new user education programme, launched in September 2000, has been a tremendous success and has already become an established part of the Library's service and one that is valued across the University. Miss Holowaty is to be congratulated on creating this programme virtually out of nothing and almost single-handed. The various sessions over the year have attracted more than 1,600 participants; they have covered general induction to the Library, use of subject resources, both print and electronic, and practical sessions on making the best use of the Library's catalogues.

Increasing concern at the lack of consideration being shown by some readers towards their fellow Library users and to the materials they were using was the impetus for a poster and bookmark campaign. As a result, the fashion accessories of water bottle and mobile telephone (not to mention Coke can and sandwiches), which had been reaching epidemic proportions, have been all but eliminated, at least for the time being.

Items in the Reading Room's collection of quick reference material (class Ref.) are appearing in increasing numbers in both paper and electronic form or only electronically. The Reading Room staff are developing a web-based guide to the 'e-Ref collection' which is being piloted on the Library's intranet prior to being made publicly available.

Policy changes at the British Library's Document Supply Centre have had a serious impact on the Library's Inter-Library Loans department, which acts as the principal 'back-up' to DSC. From October 2000, libraries wishing to borrow an item that could not be supplied directly by DSC were charged an additional fee. Inevitably this has led to a decrease in demand for the Cambridge service. Given that this service makes a modest surplus which is used to support inter-library loan requests by Cambridge readers, the Library Syndicate approved a plan whereby the Library could offer an inter-library loan service independent of DSC and at charges set by the Syndicate. The Syndicate also approved new charges for inter-library loans requested by Cambridge readers, with a flat rate of £3 for all members of the University, including non-resident Cambridge B.A.s and M.A.s, and £6 for all external, users.

Preservation

The pencil and water-colour sketches made by Conrad Martens on board HMS Beagle in 1833-34 are among the Library's most heavily consulted manuscripts, particularly by picture researchers seeking images to illustrate books on Darwin. Thanks to a grant from the Pilgrim Trust, these fragile drawings have now been conserved and digitized and the images will shortly be available on the Library's website, so that most users can be referred to that source and thus avoid excessive handling of the originals. Conservation work on parts of the massive collection of Taylor-Schechter Genizah fragments was also completed, with the replacement of many of the PVC folders in which the fragments were housed, and which are now breaking down through heavy use. This work was funded by grants from the Lauffer Family Charitable Trust and the National Manuscripts Conservation Trust. Funding provided by the Heritage Lottery Fund to the Dean and Chapter of Ely, whose archive is deposited in the Library, allowed a large collection of medieval parchment rolls to be made usable after many years when they were deemed to be too fragile and brittle and when an attempt to unroll them would have destroyed them. The Conservation Department developed a new technique to relax the parchment and allow it to be unrolled safely for consultation.

Support services and Accommodation

Staff of the Automation Division have been heavily involved in the planning for the introduction of the Endeavor system. Migration of the records in the very large series of databases, created at various stages over the last twenty or so years, has been a major preoccupation. At the same time, a programme for upgrading PCs and for replacing dumb terminals with PCs has been under way, so that, when Voyager goes live next year, all staff will have the hardware they need and will have become familiar with it.

Throughout the year the Library appeared at times to be overrun by contractors of various sorts. In addition to the two main building projects, which inevitably led to disruption in the existing building as services were connected, the University's Estate Management and Building Service is undertaking an ambitious fire precautions exercise to enable the 1930s building to meet current fire regulations for the safeguarding of both people and contents; a major electrical rewiring of certain staff working areas was undertaken; and all portable electrical appliances were tested for safety. Despite continuing serious problems of recruitment, Miss Webster and the staff of the Technical and General Maintenance sections coped with the resulting disruption - both in normal working hours and outside them, with frequent activations of the alarms - with amazing good humour and a high level of commitment to the maintenance of services and the protection of the building, even when this led to considerable inconvenience to themselves.

A major (and long-overdue) upgrading of the physical environment in the Cataloguing Department took place, with the provision of new desks and chairs to meet current health and safety requirements as well as to provide a more satisfactory working environment.

The Morison Room was greatly enhanced by the arrival of a series of eight slates inscribed by the Cardozo Kindersley Workshop. Each slate has a text relating to books, libraries, or reading, reflecting some 2,500 years of writing and letter form.

Exhibitions

Exhibition Centre

Keeping time: a celebration of the year 2000 To September 2000

The journey to Hogwarts: women writing for children, 1750-2000
October 2000 to March 2001 Prepared by Ms Thwaite and sponsored by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Fantasy to Federation: European maps of Australia to 1901
April to September 2001 Prepared by Ms Taylor and opened by HE Michael L'Estrange, Australian High Commissioner

All the exhibitions were co-ordinated by the Exhibitions Officers, Ms Thwaite and Ms Robinson. The reception for the Australian exhibition was sponsored by Cambridge University Press.

Short-term exhibitions in the North Front corridor

Travel and topography
A selection of books on travel
June to October 2000
Geoffrey Chaucer 1343-1400
To mark the 600th anniversary of his death on 25 October 1400
October 2000 to January 2001

A world of birds
Bird illustrations from the Library's collections
January to March 2001

A selection of Australian maps
To complement 'Fantasy to Federation' in the main Exhibition Centre
April to May 2001

My back pages
A celebration of the 60th birthday of Bob Dylan
May to June 2001

Clothing the book
Victorian publishers' bindings
June to September 2001

Items from the Library's collections were loaned to the following exhibitions: Japan Bible Society, Kobe: Bible exhibition
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge: 'Town and gown: Cambridge on parade'
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge: 'The ingenious Mr Stubbs'
Tyndale House, Cambridge: Visit by HRH The Duke of Edinburgh

Medical Library

The Medical Library is at the forefront of the continuing move towards the provision of networked information resources and the resulting independence of users from physical library resources. This is an inevitable and desirable development but, specifically in the context of the services to users at Addenbrooke's, raises a number of problems. In particular, the licensing restrictions imposed by the suppliers are leading to a two-tier Medical Library community: those in the academic sector are able to embrace electronic resources wholeheartedly, because they have convenient access to networked computers at their workplace and at home, they qualify for access to specific resources and these are frequently tailored to their needs; many of the NHS users, on the other hand have access to networked computers only in the Library and are prevented by licensing restrictions from having access to certain resources. The NHS has recently begun to seek ways of improving its information provision, but close liaison between the Library and the hospital service will be needed to avoid the dangers of parallel developments and expensive duplication.

In this context, the plans by the Addenbrooke's NHS Trust to establish a learning centre were noted with concern. In discussions with the Trust's representatives, the Library registered the view that these plans ran the risk of duplicating facilities already available at the Medical Library, which would be both wasteful and divisive at a time when the emphasis of NHS workforce development is towards an integrated multidisciplinary approach.

The Medical Library conducted a major cancellation exercise for journal subscriptions, primarily to reduce over-expenditure on its budget but also to release funds for additional electronic subscriptions. Seventy-eight titles were cancelled, following extensive consultation with departments.

Scientific Periodicals Library

For the Scientific Periodicals Library two issues dominated the year: planning for the move into the Moore Library and the continuing problem of the cost of scientific journals, both discussed elsewhere in this report.

Little progress was made on the hoped-for refurbishment of the Arts School building to provide a more user-friendly facility for those subjects that will remain on the central site after the opening of the Moore Library. A proposal by the Cambridge Philosophical Society to refurbish the large lecture theatre in that building was welcomed, but any improvement to the rest of the building is contingent upon the availability of funding.

The proposal to rationalize duplicate holdings of scientific journals between Departmental and central libraries was pursued. These proposals were implemented with nearly all the Departments in the School of Biological Sciences. Although the funds generated at this stage were modest (about £5,000), greater participation next year should significantly increase the fund to levels at which co-operative collection development can be implemented.

Squire Law Library

The new Freshfields Legal IT Course was launched by the Faculty of Law in the Lent Term. The programme, which was taught by a member of the Faculty, with the Squire staff making a important contribution, proved to be a great success. The course was designed to ensure that Cambridge graduates meet the new requirements of the Bar Council and the Law Society by being able to use paper and electronic resources to find up-to-date information, and to present that information in an appropriate form.

The Squire is a major partner in the RSLP Project FLAG (Foreign LAw Guide), which is being run from the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies at the University of London, in conjunction principally with the Squire, the Bodleian Law Library, the School of Oriental and African Studies Library, and the British Library. This project will create a web directory to research collections in the areas of foreign, comparative, and international law, in order to facilitate collaborative collection management and to serve as a guide for researchers. The web directory will contain an inventory of collections by jurisdiction, form of legal literature, and subject where relevant, with an indication of strength of collections

Staff

Mrs Jill Butterworth took early retirement after a total of twenty-eight years' service as the Library's specialist in Near Eastern languages. Mrs Isobel Wilson, Library Assistant in the Official Publications Department also retired, and Miss Terry Barringer left her post with the Royal Commonwealth Society collections. Miss Jill Alexander retired from her full-time role as deputy head of the Legal Deposit Department, after no less than forty-three years' service in the Library, and took on a newly-created half-time role with responsibility for staff training. Mr Mark Muehlhaeusler was appointed as the Near Eastern specialist, and Mr Michael Wilson was promoted to Senior Under-Librarian, with a wider range of responsibilities, including both the Scientific Periodicals Library and the Moore Library. The death of Mr Arthur Tillotson, at the age of 92, is recorded with great regret. Mr Tillotson is believed to have been the last surviving member of the Library staff who had worked in the old University Library when it was still in the Old Schools; he retired as Secretary of the Library in 1975.

The staff training programme continued to develop, with an extensive range of in-house courses on new electronic resources, presentations on various aspects of the new Voyager system, and a new course in reference work (using both printed and electronic resources) for junior staff. Staff from a number of service areas took part in a one-day workshop led by an external expert on 'Understanding disability' and disability awareness courses run by the University's Disability Resource Centre. Courses offered by the University's Staff Development Office, and Computing Service were also well attended. Three staff obtained their City and Guilds Library and Information Assistant's Certificate, and three staff from Departmental and College libraries, supervised by Mr Noblett, received their Library Association chartership. Mrs Roberts successfully completed an online distance-learning course in 'Virtual Collection Management' run by the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The occasional series of lunchtime talks, open to all, continued with presentations by Mr Ellis Weinberger on digital preservation and by the Reverend Professor Owen Chadwick on Lord Acton and his library.

Finally, in this section, the great generosity of two long-term Library users must be recorded. In order to recognize and thank the many members of staff who had helped him over the years, Professor Norman Pounds, Emeritus Professor of Geography and History at Indiana University, gave £10,000 to establish a new 'Library Staff Development and Welfare Fund' to assist staff involved in professional training or who face hardship. Colleagues were also saddened by the sudden death of Dr Mark Kaplanoff, University Lecturer in History and a long-standing member of the Library Syndicate, who had been a generous supporter of the Library.

Munby Fellow

Dr Paul Botley: 'Learning Greek in western Europe, 1471-1529'.

Calendar 2000-01

Major financial donations, grants and research grants (£5,000 and over) received 2000-01

Other projects

Research Support Libraries Programme

The statistics normally refer to the main University Library building only; where indicated* they include the dependent libraries.

Library staff - Professional activities

Publications, papers presented, membership of committees

R. M. Andrewes

'Cambridge' in The new Grove dictionary of music and musicians. (London 2001)

Committee membership

Bliss Trust (Trustee)

Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale, Commission Mixte (IAML Representative)

RISM (UK) Trust (Trustee and Treasurer)

William Alwyn Foundation (Trustee)

C. A. Aylmer

'Cataloguing in Chinese', Cambridge University Libraries Information Bulletin, N.S. 47 (2000)

'News from Beijing', Newsletter of the Oriental Numismatic Society, No 165 (2000)

Papers presented

'Chinese Students in Europe - past, present and future', Annual Conference of the European Association for International Education, Leipzig, December 2000

'Caveat emptor: buying and selling antiquarian books in Beijing', Chinese Print Circle, London, March 2001

Committee membership

China Library Group, Periodicals Sub-committee

T. A. Barringer

'Quarterly bibliography of new publications on Africa', African Affairs

Reviews Editor: African Research and Documentation

Editor: Missionary Periodical Database

Committee membership

Standing Conference on Library Materials on Africa (Secretary)

Cambridge Commonwealth Group (Secretary)

Editorial Sub-Committee, African Research and Documentation

J. Butterworth

Committee membership

Centre of Middle Eastern Studies, Management Committee

Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies, Management Committee

Oriental Faculty Library Committee

G. D. Bye

Papers presented

'Here today, here tomorrow?', Society of Archivists' Annual Meeting

'British Standards in micrographics', DAA Training Day

Committee membership

British Standards Institute IDT/1/2 Committee 'Micrographics and Digital Imaging'

Data Archiving Association Committee

National Preservation Office, Micrographic Technical Committee

S. H. M. Cameron

Joint editor: Cambridge University Libraries Information Bulletin

Committee membership

Copyright Libraries Shared Cataloguing Programme, Steering Committee

Library Committee, Henry Martyn Centre for Mission and World Christianity, Cambridge

J. Cox

Committee membership

Cambridge Archivists' Group (Secretary)

Society for the Study of the History of the University (Secretary)

Janus Steering Group (member)

A. G. Farrant

Committee membership

British Standards Institute Panel for Conservation Standards

P. K. Fox

Committee membership

Wellcome Trust Library Advisory Committee (Chairman)

British Library/Wellcome Trust Research Resources in Medical History Panel (Chairman)

Brotherton Collection Advisory Committee (Chairman)

CEDARS Advisory Board (Chairman)

Joint Committee on Voluntary Deposit

National Preservation Office Management Committee

Lambeth Palace Library Committee

Research Support Libraries Programme Steering Group

Executive Board, Friends of the National Libraries

Lord Chancellor's Advisory Council on Public records

Charles Darwin Trust (Trustee)

D. J. Hall

'The study of eighteenth-century English Quakerism from Rufus Jones to Larry Ingle', Quaker Studies, 5 (2001)

Associate Editor, New Dictionary of National Biography

Paper presented

'Libraries for Quakers' at 'Professional Readers: Libraries for the Church and the Professions to 1850', University of London, October 2000.

Committee membership

Friends of the National Libraries, Executive Committee

National Preservation Office, National Committee for Preservation Surrogates

National Preservation Office, Preservation Administrators Panel

Dr Williams's Trust, adviser to Library Committee

Cambridge Bibliographical Society Committee

Friends of Cambridge University Library (Treasurer)

J. E. Hoare

Committee membership

British Association for American Studies, Library and Resources Sub-Committee

E. C. D. Hunter

'Incantation bowls from Babylon and Borsippa in the British Museum', ISIMU (Revista sobre Oriente Proximo y Egipto en la antiguedad), II (1999)

[with F Niessen] 'Trousseau list tells only half a story', Genizah Fragments, 41 (2001)

Contribution to Catalogue of the Aramaic and Mandaic incantation bowls in the British Museum, ed. by J. B. Segal (London 2000)

Papers presented

Conferences in Italy, USA and London.

R. C. Jamieson

Nagarjuna's Twenty Verses on the Great Vehicle and the Heart of Dependent Origination (New Delhi 2000)

Die vervolmaking van de wijsheid (Baarn 2001)

Papers presented

At meetings in London and Leicester

Committee membership

National Council on Orientalist Library Resources, Automation Working Party

Union Handlist of Manuscripts in North Indian Languages (committee member)

Faculty of Divinity, Working Group on Online Resources for Indic Studies (Chairman)

P. Killiard

Committee membership

CEDARS Management Group

V. H. King

Led discussion group on the acquisition of foreign books, National Acquisitions Group Conference, Cambridge September 2000

Committee membership

Italian Studies Library Group (committee member)

N. Koyama

'Rhoda Watson's Journal of Tour in Japan in 1892' in Japan Reiseland, ed. by H. Dressler-Wormit (Berlin 2000)

Paper presented

'The opening of Japan and tours around the world: an English travel diary (1873) and photographs', Annual Conference of the European Association of Japanese Resource Specialists, Prague, October 2000

Committee membership

Japan Library Group (Chair)

European Association of Japanese Resource Specialists (board member)

E. S. Leedham-Green

'Seventeenth-century Cambridge pyxides' in For the love of binding: studies presented to Mirjam Foot, ed. by D. Pearson (London 2000)

'Booksellers and libraries in sixteenth-century Cambridge', in Libraries and the book trade, ed. by R. Myers etc. (New Castle, Del. 2000)

Committee membership

Bibliographical Society of London (Vice-President)

Panizzi Selection Committee, British Library (member)

Cambridgeshire County Archives Advisory Group (Chairman)

Cambridgeshire Records Society (committee member and Technical Editor)

Cambridge Bibliographical Society (Hon. Editor)

Cambridge Antiquarian Society (Council member)

Senate House, Societies and Theatre Syndicates (member)

S. M. Lees

Committee membership

Copyright Libraries Agency Advisory Committee

Standing Committee on Legal Deposit

D. St J Marner

Paper presented

'Museums and their publications', University of East Anglia, Norwich, February 2001

S. Morcillo-García

Committee membership

Advisory Council on Latin American and Iberian Information Resources

P. B. Morgan

Book reviews in Health Information and Libraries Journal

Book reviews editor: Health Information and Libraries Journal

Paper presented

'Getting organised: a history of the NHS Regional Librarians Group and the University Medical Librarians Group. Part 2: a history of UMSLG', 2000 Bishop & LeFanu Memorial Lecture, November 2000

Committee membership

Eighth European Conference of Medical and Health Libraries (Cologne 2002), International Programme Committee

Wellcome Library 'Mapping Medicine' Project Advisory Board

BMJ Publishing Group Library Advisory Committee

European Association for Health Information and Libraries Council, UK representative

Health Care Librarians of Anglia Group

Clinical School/Addenbrooke's Hospital SIFT Liaison Group

West Suffolk Hospitals NHS Trust Library Committee

Fulbourn Hospital PME Library Committee

University Medical School Librarians' Group (Webmaster)

Cambridgeshire Health Librarians' Group

Eastern Region Health Care Librarians' Group

A. E. Murray

Paper presented

'Byting books: The e-world and Cambridge University Library', Library Association of Ireland Academic and Special Libraries Seminar, Dublin, March 2001.

Committee membership

SCONUL Advisory Committee on Staffing

CURL Staffing Task Force

ELISA (East of England Library and Information Services) Management Board

F. Niessen

'A Samaritan discovery', Genizah Fragments, 41 (2000)

[with E. Hunter] 'Trousseau list tells only half a story', Genizah Fragments, 41 (2001)

W. A. Noblett

Editor: Newsletter (Cambridge Bibliographical Society)

Papers presented

'British Official Publications', Berkshire Library Training Group seminar, September 2000

'United Nations publications', United Nations seminar, Vermont, October 2000

'Cambridge European Documentation Centre', East Anglian Regional European Group meeting, Cambridge, June 2001

'The documentation of the South African truth and Reconciliation Commission', London

Seven lectures to different Faculties on the bibliography of official publications

Committee membership

Cambridge Bibliographical Society Committee

A. J. Perkins

Paper presented

'Extraneous government business: the Astronomer Royal as Government Scientist. George Bidell Airy and his work on the commissions of state and other bodies, 1838-1880', Symposium organized by Goldsmiths' College and the National Maritime Museum, London, January 2001.

S. C. Reif

Why medieval Hebrew studies? (Cambridge 2001)

'A medieval Mediterranean deposit and a modern Cambridge archive', IFLA Journal, 27 (2001)

'A scholar's scholar: Naphtali Wieder, 1905-2001', Le'ela, 51 (2001)

Articles on 'Gebet: Judentum', 'Gebetbücher: Judentum', 'Geniza' and 'Gottesdienst: Judentum' in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. 3 (Tübingen 2001)

'Cairo Geniza', in Concise encyclopedia of language and religion, (Oxford 2001)

'Some recent developments in the study of medieval Jewish liturgy', in Hebrew scholarship and the medieval world, ed. by N. de Lange (Cambridge 2001)

'The role of Genizah texts in Jewish liturgical research' (Hebrew), in Kenishta, ed. by J. Tabory (Ramat Gan 2001)

'Writing for a popular audience', AJS Perspectives, 2 (2001)

Book reviews in Journal of Semitic Studies, Journal of Jewish Studies, SOTS Book List, TLS.

Papers presented

Twenty-seven papers at various conferences and seminars.

Committee membership

Jewish Historical Society of England (Council member)

Friedberg Genizah Project, Academic Committee

National Council on Orientalist Library Resources

Mrs F. W. Roberts

'Developing an electronic library: Open University', UKOLUG Newsletter, 12 (2001)

'Current trends in business information, UKOLUG Newsletter, 12 (2001)

Advisory Editorial Board member: Expert Reviews in Molecular Medicine

Committee membership

East Anglia Online Users Group (Co-ordinator)

OMNI/BioResearch Advisory Group

Clinical School Technical Infrastructure Management Sub-committee

G. J. Roper

Papers presented

Conferences in Istanbul and Edinburgh.

Committee membership

MELCOM UK, Middle East Libraries Committee

European Association of Middle Eastern Studies (Council member)

British Society for Middle Eastern Studies

UK Friends of the Alexandria Library (Executive Committee member)

R. Rowe

Paper presented

'Souvenirs of Empire: ephemera from the University's South Asian and Commonwealth collections', Cambridge Bibliographical Society, February 2001

R. Scrivens

Reviews Editor: Solanus: International Journal for Russian and East European Bibliographic, Library and Publishing Studies

Committee membership

Council for Slavonic and East European Libraries and Information Services

A. Shivtiel

'The image of the Jew in the Yemenite proverb', in Israel and Ishmael, ed. T. Parfitt (Richmond 2000)

'Arabisms in Hebrew', The Arabist, 19-20 (1998)

Reviews in Journal of Semitic Studies

Papers presented

Lectures in England, Spain, and Germany

Committee membership

British Association for Jewish Studies (President)

A. E. M. Taylor

Book review in Bulletin of the Society of Cartographers

Committee membership

British and Irish Committee for Map Information and Catalogue Systems (BRICMICS)

International Map Trade Association, Committee to Judge the 'Best Map' (Chair)

J. R. H. Taylor

Committee membership

Copyright Libraries Shared Cataloguing Programme, Steering Committee (Chairman)

CURL Resource Discovery and Description Committee

RLIN Database Advisory Group

Book Industry Communication, Bibliographic Standards Technical Subgroup

Program for Cooperating Cataloging, Standing Committee on Training, Task Group on NACO Continuing Education

N. Thwaite

Committee membership

Cambridge Bibliographical Society (Treasurer)

J. D. Wells

'A captain's difficulties on the Canton River', Matheson & Co. Christmas Letter (2000)

Committee membership

National Friends of Libraries Group (member of pre-steering group)

Friends of Cambridge University Library (Secretary)

D. F. Wills

Paper presented:

'International legal materials: an introduction', BIALL Professional Standards and Development Seminar, London, August 2000

Committee membership

British and Irish Association of Law Librarians, Conference Committee (Vice-Chair)

P. N. R. Zutshi

'The registers of common letters of Pope Urban V (1362-1370) and Pope Gregory XI (1370-1378)', Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 51 (1999)

Papers presented

'The first century of the University of Cambridge', Society for the History of the University of Cambridge, November 2000

'Henry Bradshaw and the Book of Deer', Cambridge Bibliographical Society, November 2000

'Pope Honorius III and the beginnings of the Dominican Order', Leeds International Medieval Congress, July 2001

Committee membership

Cambridgeshire County Archives Advisory Group (member)

Northamptonshire Record Office, Advisory and Technical Panel (member)

Friends of Cambridge University Library (Editor of Bulletin)

Abbreviations

CEDARS CURL Exemplars in Digital ARchiveS

CURL Consortium of University Research Libraries

HEFCE Higher Education Funding Council for England

JISC Joint Information Systems Committee (of the higher education funding councils)

NHS National Health Service

SPARC Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition

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