The year was a highly successful one, with a number of major initiatives that allowed the Library to improve the range of service it is able to offer its users in all disciplines.
For scientists, the development of the journals co-ordination scheme started to bear fruit. Following an extensive survey of users' needs, the scheme's Steering Committee took out subscriptions to a number of new, urgently needed journals, funded from savings made by the cancellation of titles for which there was no demand. Participants in the scheme now include the Schools of Biological Sciences and Clinical Medicine, as well as a majority of Departments in the School of Physical Sciences. Discussion took place during the year with all the Schools, with a view to extending the scheme to become a University-wide one.
The Library bought the digitized back-sets in the Elsevier ScienceDirect database and this, together with the Library's subscription to current ScienceDirect titles, means that the scientist now has on-line access at his or her desktop to the full content, from the first issue to the most recent, of more than 2,000 journals - some seven million articles - in a range of subjects. An award of about £900,000 from the HEFCE Science Research Infrastructure Fund (SRIF3) allowed major improvements to be made to the digital research infrastructure, including increased storage capacity for DSpace@Cambridge, wireless networking from reading rooms, and the replacement and expansion of the Library's public PC workstations.
The DSpace@Cambridge Project, which has created a digital repository for the University, moved into a new phase as a fully fledged service. The Department of Chemistry has been a particularly enthusiastic user of the service, and it is thanks to the input of data from that Department that Cambridge's DSpace installation is now the largest in the world in terms of the number of items deposited. Material from a range of subject areas is now included in the repository, including the Clinical School, the Faculties of Economics, Law, and Music, the Departments of Archaeology and Social Anthropology, the Fitzwilliam Museum, and the University Library. The University Library has been a national leader in the development of an institutional repository for the digital information being held by and created in the University; advice on the establishment of such a repository has been sought by a number of institutions, and Mr Peter Morgan, the Project Director, has spoken at many meetings and conferences on several continents.
The purchase of the Hengrave Hall papers, with the help of a grant of nearly £285,000 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, secured access in perpetuity to this important collection that had been on deposit in the Library since the 1950s but had been removed for sale by the owners in 2003. A long-term deposit of over 5,000 Genizah fragments, currently in private ownership, made those manuscripts accessible to the scholarly public for the first time in their history. Research work on the Genizah Collection was facilitated through a grant of £475,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and that on Darwin's correspondence by several donations, including a private one of over £100,000.
As part of its support for the members of CURL (Consortium of Research Libraries in the British Isles), the Wolfson Foundation offered the Library a grant of £350,000 towards the refurbishment of the Map Department, which will improve the facilities for readers using both traditional and digital mapping.
The Greensleeves Project, to convert the three million printed slips in the guardbook catalogue, was successfully completed, and all the records can now be searched online via the Newton catalogue. The next stage of making the Library's collections more widely accessible was begun with the help of a grant of $1m from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which will allow improved catalogue records to be created for the books received by legal deposit in the nineteenth century which, though regarded as of secondary importance at the time, are now primary research material available in only a handful of libraries in the world.
The 'Cambridge Illuminations' exhibition, held jointly at the University Library and the Fitzwilliam Museum, was a great success, attracting about 100,000 visitors to the two venues.
Dr Leonel Fernández Reyna, President of the Dominican Republic, visited the Library in March 2006 as part of his official visit to the United Kingdom. He toured the building and was shown a selection of manuscripts, rare books, and maps before attending a meeting with Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Assessment, and other representatives of the University. His visit was the occasion for the signing of a co-operation agreement between the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo and Cambridge University Library which will facilitate the exchange of information and expertise.
For the last decade or so, the Library's development campaign has been concentrated on raising support for the building programme, approved by the University in 1993, which aimed to meet the space needs of readers, staff, and the collections until about 2025. That programme has progressed steadily, and the completion of the penultimate phase in May 2005 led to a review of priorities for Library fund-raising, particularly in the context of the University's 800th Anniversary Campaign. One of the four strands of that campaign is 'Collections'. It was agreed that this, rather than building needs, would also be the focus of the Library's part in the campaign, and that the funding needed to complete the last phase of the building would be sought elsewhere. A small external advisory group has been established to help build a strong case for support, with a bold vision for the Library's future that will appeal to potential supporters.
The Library lent 23 Darwin manuscripts to the 'Darwin' exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and this presented an opportunity for a private viewing of the exhibition for invited guests with a particular interest in the Darwin Correspondence Project and the Library more generally. The event was a positive one and a number of useful contacts were made. Closer to home, the annual dinner for benefactors and supporters of the Library followed last year's practice of being 'themed'. It was held in November 2005 at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and took the form of a private view of some of the Library's Genizah fragments of pharmacological interest, with related plant specimens from the Royal Botanic Gardens. Talks were given by Professor Stefan Reif, Dr Ephraim Lev of Haifa University, and the Director of the Botanic Gardens, Sir Peter Crane.
Cambridge University Library: a journey around the world mind (Cambridge 2005)
Visible language: Dante in text & image: [catalogue of] an exhibition in Cambridge University Library, 17 January-1 July 2006 (Cambridge 2006)
Avihai Shivtiel and Friedrich Niessen, Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts in the Cambridge Genizah collections, volume 2 (Cambridge 2006)
The correspondence of Charles Darwin, volume 15: 1867 (Cambridge 2005)
The final phase of restructuring of the processing departments took place over the year, with the incorporation of the Periodicals Department into the Collection Development and Description division and the assimilation of a number of staff from the Official Publications Department into departments of the same division. The reader service aspects of both Periodicals and Official Publications were transferred to the Reader Services division.
The number of European-language books processed rose again this year, and the backlog of cataloguing, that has caused so much frustration among readers in the past, is steadily being eroded. A concern now is the general level of acquisition of books in continental European languages. Harvard, Stanford, and Cambridge jockey for top position in the various rankings of universities, but in terms of the amount of money spent on European acquisitions, Cambridge ranks nowhere near its competitors. The Library's budget has remained effectively static for many years, and the growing demand for electronic resources, coupled with the inordinate rise in the cost of journals, has meant that the budget for foreign books has been constantly squeezed. It is still possible to meet all reasonable requests from readers, but the 'gap-filling' and building of the collection to meet future demand is certainly suffering.
The upgrade of the Voyager system in July 2005 offered the possibility of displaying catalogue records in vernacular script for a range of languages. New records for Greek, Chinese, and Japanese books are being added to the Newton catalogue in both romanized and vernacular script, and older records in romanized form only are gradually being replaced, using records derived from the RLIN and OCLC databases.
With the retirement of Professor Reif, as head of the division of Oriental Languages, the Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and Middle Eastern departments, and the Genizah Research Unit became part of the Special Collections division.
The Library's manuscript holdings were augmented by the purchase of three important collections: the Hengrave Papers, the archive of the Rampant Lions Press, and papers of Siegfried Sassoon.
The Hengrave Hall manuscripts represent a treasure trove of family, household, and estate papers from the twelfth to the twentieth century. The collection comprises papers accumulated by various families whose main home was the celebrated Tudor mansion Hengrave Hall in Suffolk, built in the 1520s. They include correspondence from King Henry VIII, Queen Mary, Sir Philip Sidney, and Thomas Washington (ancestor of George Washington) and many other prominent figures of the sixteenth century. The papers had been on deposit in the Library for over fifty years, but had been recently removed by the owners for sale. They were valued at £840,000, but the Library was able to secure them through the 'Acceptance in Lieu' scheme for about £450,000, a sum that was raised with the assistance of a grant of nearly £285,000 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund as well as generous support from other organizations and individual benefactors and the Library's own contribution.
The Library acquired the archive of the Rampant Lions Press, covering the period from its beginnings to the present. The press, now based at Over, near Cambridge, was founded in 1924 by Will Carter, initially as a 'fine jobbing' press, and many of its early productions were printed for other publishers. The press produced its first book in 1936 and now prints books by the traditional method of letterpress, with the texts printed from metal type set by hand from the collection of historic types in the workshop.
The Sassoon papers consist of personal notebooks, which were formerly housed in the Library as part of the Hart-Davis collection and which have now been acquired from Siegfried Sassoon's son George.
The University's Janus archives web-server was upgraded and this provided a more user-friendly interface. The existing hard-copy catalogues of manuscripts and archive collections are being converted into machine-readable form and added to Janus as resources permit. Good progress was made with the Royal Greenwich Observatory Archives, and records for the papers of all the Astronomers Royal from Flamsteed to Woolley (1675-1971) are now available via Janus, as are the Board of Longitude papers (1737-1828). There has been a sharp increase in demand for these papers, probably attributable to the fact that catalogue descriptions are now more accessible. The records for the Macclesfield and Portsmouth collections of papers of Sir Isaac Newton and his contemporaries were also transferred onto Janus during the year, and, of the 173 University Archives classes, 163 are now accessible via Janus.
As part of her contribution to the work of the Information Strategy Task Force, the Deputy Keeper of the Archives produced a taxonomy of the University's departments, divisions, and committees based on function, as part of a project to rationalize digital records management by administrators across the University. The aim is to provide a structured environment in which, for example, the minutes of committees can be electronically stored, retrieved, and ultimately transferred to DSpace for long-term preservation. Templates of metadata required for different types of digital material were drawn up as part of the project, and the records of the General Board of the Faculties are being used as a pilot to test the methodology.
The number of books fetched for readers to the Rare Books Reading Room rose by nearly 9% to 45,527. This was undoubtedly a result of the Syndicate's decision last year to transfer the use of books published between 1850 and 1899 from the West Room and Reading Room, in order to give these increasingly fragile materials greater protection.
Two significant volumes in the Bible Society's library, which had been uncatalogued hitherto, were added to the Library catalogue. The first, an Encheiridion or devotional handbook of the Use of Sarum, printed in Paris in 1528, was found amongst uncatalogued manuscripts and added to the main printed collection. It is one of only four copies known in this country, and is the most sumptuous, since it is handsomely bound in red velvet and its woodcuts are coloured by hand for an unknown owner. The second was a copy of Christian von Mechel's edition of Lucas Cranach's Stammbuch (Berlin 1814), a series of portraits of Protestant Reformers, with a red leather binding, tooled and gilt, and specially hand-coloured plates, presented to the Bible Society by King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia in 1821, in return for the gift of translations of the Bible into several oriental languages. With the retirement of Mr Hall, the title of Bible Society Librarian passed to Mr Peter Meadows of the Department of Manuscripts and University Archives.
The Darwin Correspondence Project commissioned a dramatization of the letters between Darwin and his close friend Joseph Hooker. This was presented at the Royal Society in London and proved to be so successful that it is due to be repeated. After fifteen years of service, Professor Duncan Porter retired as Director of the Project and was succeeded by Professor James Secord of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science.
Four large and important photograph collections in the Royal Commonwealth Society (RCS) Library were sorted, catalogued, and conserved, with the assistance of grant funding from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and the Smuts Memorial Fund. A total of 488 photograph collections have now been catalogued, totalling 28,442 catalogue records, and 432 of the collections are now accessible via Janus. The cataloguing of books and pamphlets relating to Cyprus in the main RCS collection and the special RCS Cobham collection on Cyprus, has now been completed; these represent an important resource for the study of that country.
A major boost to the work on the RCS Library was provided by the release of the residue from the original appeal to save the library for the nation. This sum, now amounting to about £600,000, was transferred to the University Library in 1997 to buy books to add to the RCS Library. However, with the agreement of the trustees, these funds have now been committed to three projects to improve access to the RCS collections and to provide online links between the Royal Commonwealth Society's premises in London and the collections in Cambridge. The three projects cover the cataloguing of official publications in the RCS, concentrating on the rare runs of Blue Books, and monographs and serials published in Africa, Malaysia, and Hong Kong, as well as runs of frequently requested directories and yearbooks; completion of the sorting and cataloguing of manuscripts and photograph collections; and the sorting and cataloguing of the administrative records and archives of the RCS. It was also agreed that the room currently known as the Official Publications Reading Room would be renamed The Commonwealth Room, to denote the importance of the RCS Library within the University Library and also to recognize that the OP Reading Room was no longer exclusively used by readers working on official publications.
The archive of the composer William Alwyn was presented to the Library in 2004. In March 2006 the Music Department organized a William Alwyn evening, which took the form of a lecture on Alwyn to the Friends of the Library by the Head of the Department, Mr Richard Andrewes, and an introduction to the exhibition in the North Front gallery, followed by a reception and concert, including the performance of Alwyn's First String Quartet, by the Endellion String Quartet at the West Road Concert Hall.
The work of the Genizah Research Unit received a significant boost with the award of two major new grants, £475,000 over three years from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and £62,000 over eighteen months from the Lisbet Rausing Charitable Fund (Endangered Archives Programme) administered by the British Library, together with continuation of support from the Friedberg Genizah Project (amounting to £70,000), and the receipt of private donations totalling £50,000. After lengthy and complex negotiations, probably the most significant collection of Genizah material in private hands, the estimated 5,000 Genizah fragments of the Jacques Mosseri Genizah Collection, was placed on deposit in the Library for a minimum of 25 years. Since their arrival, a detailed assessment has shown that there are in fact in excess of 7,000 items. Hitherto locked away in an undisclosed location, the collection will, following conservation, be made generally available to readers for the first time in its history. Mr Claude Mosseri-Marlio, one of the owners of the collection, also provided financial support for its management, description, and conservation, and the lengthy process of conserving, digitizing, and describing the material began in March 2006.
The results of the preservation assessment survey carried out last year in collaboration with the National Preservation Office demonstrated that, although 90% of the collections fell within acceptable limits for preservation needs, some parts of the collections were exposed to unacceptable risk because of their storage conditions. This applied particularly to the Map Department and the books stored in the tower. The grant from the Wolfson Foundation for refurbishment of the Map Department, announced in June 2006, provided a welcome opportunity to create better storage for part of the map collection. Similarly, the Mellon grant towards the Tower Project, described elsewhere, will provide an opportunity to improve the storage conditions in the tower, and to clean and replace books into acid-free boxes as they are removed from the shelves for that project.
The Mellon Foundation also provided a grant of $695,000 for two collaborative projects for research into the impact of environmental conditions on book preservation. These are being led by the British Library, and Cambridge University Library is participating, along with the other legal deposit libraries, the National Archives, and the National Archives of Scotland. The first project will examine copies of the same books held by the various libraries and compare how differences in their storage conditions and usage have affected their state of preservation. The research will allow predictions to be made about changes in their future condition based on the knowledge of how they are being stored. Knowing which materials will be at highest risk in a given set of storage conditions will enable conservators to target these for closer monitoring and allow them to act before the books are seriously damaged. The second project will analyse the volatile organic compounds given off by books, in order to enable libraries to design stores to minimize the rate of paper degradation and provide an early warning of when the level of acid in books is reaching levels that would be detrimental to their preservation.
Hengrave Hall manuscripts
Archive of the Rampant Lions Press
Siegfried Sassoon papers
Letter of Charles Darwin to the Reverend J. M. Rodwell, referring to Darwin's work on speciation and natural selection, 1860
Papers of Sir George Murray Humphry, Professor of Anatomy and first Professor of Surgery in the University, c.1860-1940
Logbook of HMS Elk, 1858-9
Papers of Oliver Baldwin, 2nd Earl Baldwin of Bewdley
Current maps of Brazil (1:100,000 and 1:50,000), Finland (1:200,000 and 1:50,000), Portugal (1:25,000), and Thailand (1:250,000 and 1:50,000)
A volume of detailed plans of estates in the vicinity of Framlingham, Suffolk, mainly 1704-25 (bought with the assistance of the Friends of the Library)
An actual survey of the Parish of St Leonard in Shoreditch, Middlesex (1745) (bought with the assistance of the Friends of the Library)
Comitatus Nottinghamiensis sive the countie of Nottingam [Amsterdam: J. Jansson, 1644]; first state, with a large decorative cartouche and mileage scale shown on a distinctive obelisk
A survey of an estate in Rendham belong:g to Will:m Woods gent: (1777); manuscript map on vellum, bound with accompanying table 'Number of the Timber, Timberlike, Spire Trees, & Pollards, in each field &c. belong:g to this Estate'
Two rare early editions of music for clarinet: Armand Vanderhagen's Six duos concertants pour deux clarinettes, 3e livre (Paris [1788]), and J.C. Vogel's Six duos concertants pour deux clarinettes oeuvre V (Paris [1798])
Full score of Citizen Domenico Della Maria's one-act revolutionary opera Le prisonnier, ou, La ressemblance (Paris 1798)
Lithographed vocal score of Bernard Crusell's opera Lilla slafvinnan (Stockholm [1824])
Lithographed score of Lehar's Zigeunerliebe (Wien 1910)
Conductor's score of Little me, with music by Cy Coleman, book by Neil Simon, lyrics by Carolyn Leigh [1962]
Manuscript collection of verse anthems, compiled c.1720; an unusual manuscript with a voice score, often omitting the continuo/organ line, probably used by a precentor attached to a cathedral or collegiate establishment (bought with the assistance of the Friends of the Library)
Johann Schöner, Coniectur odder ab nemliche Auszlegung Joannis Schöners uber de[n] Cometen so im Augstmonat, des M. D. XXXj. Jars. erschinen ist (Nurmberg [1531]), one of the few accounts of the appearance of the comet of 1531 (Halley's comet), with details of daily observations
Le premier livre de l'histoire & ancienne cronique de Gerard d'Euphrate… (Paris 1549), the first edition of this illustrated romance with forty-six fine woodcuts
Johann Ardüser, Geometriae, theoricae et practicae… (Zurich 1627), the rare first edition of one of the fullest old German works on surveying, including a highly detailed account of how to make Galileo's geometrical compass
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Der gesellschaftliche Vertrag… (Marburg 1763), the very rare first German translation of Rousseau's Contrat social
Pflanzen und Gebirgsarten von Marienbad (Prague 1837), which includes the first printing of Goethe's catalogue of minerals collected at Marienbad
Additions to the Anne Stevenson archive (given by Miss Anne Stevenson and the Elvin family)
Correspondence and papers of the Hungarian scholar George Gömöri, c.1950-2000 (given by Dr Gömöri)
Letters of the anthropologist Bernard Deacon (Professor Martin Bernal)
The artistic archive of Henry M. Brock and Charles E. Brock, illustrators, c.1880-1960 ( B.H. Brock)
Letters of Sir Francis Younghusband and E. H. C. Walsh, 1910 (Sir David Durie)
Additional papers of the Altham family, 16th-20th centuries (Dr J. E. J. Altham, on deposit)
Cambridge University Press books for the Central Science Library, Medical Library, Moore Library, and Squire Law Library (CUP)
250 monographs on plant breeding and related topics (Dr C. Polge)
A selection of books on musical instruments and rare music for clarinet and piano, including several unique and unrecorded 18th-century publications of French dance music for two violins, and collections of music composed by the 19th-century clarinet virtuosi Carl Baermann and H. Klosé (Professor Sir Nicholas Shackleton bequest)
2,700 books for the Waddleton Collection (Mr Norman Waddleton)
40 books from the bequest of the classicist David Vessey, including an edition of Perrault's Contes des fées (Paris 1866) with hand-coloured illustrations, and a very rare edition of Robert Wild's collection Iter boreale: together with some other select poems, not heretofore printed (London [1665])
H. Grattan, Select speeches (Dublin 1845), D. Defoe, Life and adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London 1808), British almanack … for 1805 … (Edinburgh, [1804]), L. Sterne, A sentimental journey (London [c.1798]) (Dr John Hall)
Cambridge University Boat Club minutes and race photographs, 1829-2005, including the earliest minute book, beginning in 1829, and Boat Race photographs from 1859
Archives of the Bursars' Committee, 1928-2000
Minutes and papers produced over the lifetime of the Department of Applied Economics, 1945-2003
Papers relating to the acquisition and management of Kettle's Yard house and art gallery, 1966-84
Further papers of the Board of Graduate Studies, Academic Division, Personnel Division, and English Faculty
Further records of the Footlights Dramatic Club, and Cambridge University Opera Society.
Over the last few years there has been a rapid expansion of the University's access to electronic journals, both in terms of numbers of current titles and in depth, with the availability of extensive electronic back-files. This year saw the purchase of the complete back-set of Elsevier's ScienceDirect content totalling some seven million articles and equivalent to four kilometres of shelf space for print volumes. Key journals include The Lancet, back to the first issue in 1823, Physics Reports, Analytica Chimica Acta, Topology, Behaviour Research and Therapy, Neuroscience, Research in Microbiology, and Cell. Another notable back-file purchase this year, made via the journal co-ordination scheme, was from the American Chemical Society, making accessible from the desk-top early classic work in key titles such as the Journal of the American Chemical Society back to 1879. The Oxford Journals Online Archive has also been made freely available to staff and students of the University through an agreement between Oxford Journals and JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee of the higher education funding councils). The archive provides access to all content from volume one, issue one, up to the end of 1995, for around 140 journals. Many titles are available electronically for the first time in Cambridge while others complement current subscriptions to provide access to complete back runs. As well as making existing peer-reviewed titles held within the University more readily accessible, the electronic back-files widen the range of titles immediately available in Cambridge, obviating the need to acquire articles through document delivery and inter-library loan. This initiative moves the University Library a step closer to meeting demands for as many journals as possible to be available on-line through the Library's ejournals@cambridge portal.
There was a sharp rise in demand for full text titles, both e-journal and databases, more widespread take-up across subjects of e-journal use, and a reduction in the use of abstracting and indexing databases. The latter is in line with general trends amongst users at virtually all levels according to recent research on changing patterns of user behaviour. The collection development staff took note of the findings of studies into overlap between databases and this led to a review of the provision of abstracting and indexing titles in the light of changing demands.
Among the other new on-line databases for which subscriptions were begun was the Parliament Rolls of Medieval England on-line. This collection contains the full text and translation of the meetings of the English parliament from Edward I to Henry VII, covering the years from 1272 to 1504. All surviving records of the parliaments, including many texts never before published, are given in full, with new scholarly introductions to each parliament. The parliament rolls themselves are transcribed from the original documents.
The library home page was re-designed, to incorporate pull-down menus, from which most information about services, collections, and departments can be reached quickly. All departmental and service information is being reformatted and, in most cases re-written, to replace the printed Readers' Handbook, which has been discontinued, and an on-line book recommendation form is now available.
The Darwin Correspondence Project has now mounted the full texts of Darwin's letters from 1837 to 1859, a total of 2,261 letters, on its website. These letters chart Darwin's life from his return to England after the Beagle voyage until immediately after the publication of On the origin of species. Additional improvements to the Project's website include the incorporation of illustrated material contained in the letters.
The Greensleeves Project was completed successfully and on time. With the exception of a small number of records for some languages in Arabic and Indic scripts, all the records in the green volumes of the Guardbook Catalogue have now been transferred to the on-line Newton catalogue. There is still a good deal of editorial work to be carried out, to ensure consistency of headings, etc., but the completion of the project represents an addition of 800,000 records since the start of the Greensleeves Project in 2002, as well as the records for new books that are constantly being added. Readers are being encouraged to report errors that they find, so that they can be corrected, and an on-line form is available for this purpose. While the printed guardbook volumes will continue to be available in the Catalogue Room for those who prefer to use them, for other readers the addition to Newton of records for guardbook entries will significantly improve their experience of using the University Library. It is now no longer necessary to visit the Library in order to establish whether a guardbook title is held. The Newton catalogue now includes 3,600,000 entries for books and journals published between 1501 and 2006 and offers far more retrieval opportunities than a printed catalogue, with a wide range of searches. Lists of titles can be sorted by date of publication or location, then printed into bibliographies or reading lists. Access to the 'Greensleeves' material has been made easier by offering subject keyword searches, and in addition subject headings have been added to over 50% of the material previously catalogued in the guardbook.
Preparations for the next phase of work to make the Library's catalogues fully searchable on-line began in summer 2006 after the award of a grant of $1m from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This undertaking, to be known as the Tower Project, involves the recataloguing of about 200,000 volumes of nineteenth-century legal-deposit material that was regarded at the time of its acquisition as being too populist, low-brow, or otherwise unsuitable for inclusion in the primary catalogues of an academic library; it was given minimal cataloguing and relegated to a handwritten slip catalogue. The definition of 'academic' in the nineteenth century was very restricted, excluding translations of foreign and classical literature and authors not studied by Cambridge undergraduates. The collection therefore also includes materials such as first editions of novels by Dickens, Conan Doyle, the Bronte family, Henry James, and Sir Walter Scott, as well as trade catalogues, popular handbooks, guidebooks, etc. The project attracted enormous publicity, resulting in over 200 enquiries in the week following the press release. Several University staff were involved in television and radio broadcasts, and articles appeared in a variety of newspapers. There has been great enthusiasm and support for the project from academic staff in a wide range of universities and organizations.
The DSpace@Cambridge project, a collaboration between MIT Libraries, Cambridge University Library, and the University Computing Service, was funded by the Cambridge-MIT Institute from 2003 to 2006. Its core objective was to implement the digital-repository software platform, DSpace, at the University of Cambridge, and launch two research initiatives to develop the software further with a focus on digital preservation and course management systems. The project was a response to growing recognition of the fact that the University of Cambridge, like all such academic institutions, was faced with the problem of how to manage the increasing amount of its digital assets - valued material generated in the course of research, teaching, or administration, or similar material acquired from external sources. Preserving and distributing this content posed a time-consuming challenge which it was difficult for individual academics and their departments to manage for themselves.
In July 2006 the Planning and Resources Committee approved the funding of the full service and development costs for five years as part of the University's information management infrastructure. At that point 20 communities, containing 36 separate collections of digital material, had been set up, and the collection contained almost 180,000 items (the majority of them from a single collection of chemistry data files, alongside other significant collections of images and digital video). A market survey of researchers in the University of Cambridge established that, for most, the main benefits they wished to obtain from use of DSpace@Cambridge as an institutional repository were the preservation of digital files over time, and the ability to archive material in a closed-access environment. These and other survey findings guided the project team in formulating the development strategy for the repository.
The final report of the Project Team noted that the impact of DSpace@Cambridge on access to University of Cambridge research materials could be seen to best effect in the experience of one of the first of the project's 'early adopters' in the Department of Social Anthropology. The research groups in the department maintain a number of related websites, and since the archival material began to be deposited in DSpace@Cambridge, with pointers to the current websites, there has been a marked increase in use of these sites, to the extent that the international 'Webstats4U' website statistics system now ranks the Social Anthropology sites fifth in their list of the top 1,000 UK higher education sites.
In the past few years, Cambridge University Library has established itself as a leader in issues related to digital repositories. Fourteen UK universities have now implemented live DSpace production systems and another twelve are at various stages of installation. The adoption process has been aided, first by the initial credibility DSpace acquired in the UK through the University of Cambridge's early decision to use it, and then by the DSpace@Cambridge outreach programme which included regular conference presentations, advice, and training given by members of the project team to colleagues in other UK universities, and project members' participation in the CMI-funded LEADIRS ('LEarning About Digital Institutional Repositories Seminars') project, which played an important part in raising UK awareness of the issues involved in planning an institutional repository. The project has spawned other research projects, most notably the recent grant under the JISC Digital Repositories Programme, for SPECTRa (Submission, Preservation, and Exposure of Chemistry Teaching and Research datA), a joint Cambridge-Imperial College London project that will build on the work already in progress with DSpace@Cambridge's Chemistry community.
Following the Syndicate's decision in June 2005 to move the cut-off date for 'rare books' from 1850 to 1899, almost all books from that period are now read in the Rare Books Reading Room. This was a decision taken partly to create more space on the open shelves - which, as any current reader will know, are hugely overcrowded - but more importantly to give greater protection to books that often have fragile bindings and are generally printed on very acidic paper, which is becoming increasingly brittle.
The book-fetching service has been hindered by building works, most notably the replacement of the pneumatic mobile cases with hand-cranked ones, and the consequent major book-moves, including the temporary relocation of certain sequences. Against this background the average fetching time of eighteen minutes, a reduction from 23 minutes in 2004-05, represents a splendid effort and one that is greatly appreciated by readers. These impediments, however, are temporary. The longer-term gains, in terms of cases which are easier to operate, safer, and less prone to breakdown, and of coherent, logical shelving sequences with space for expansion, will be very considerable. Indeed they are already being felt as the books are returned to the new cases.
Attendances at the user-education programme increased markedly, to about 1,400. The basic library induction sessions continued to prove popular and for the first time, by way of a trial which proved successful, a session was arranged during the Easter Vacation for the benefit of visitors. In contrast, numbers for Newton hands-on training declined markedly, a gratifying indication of the growing familiarity of readers with the on-line catalogue. In the area of electronic resources, the programme continued to evolve and expand, with sessions including Web of Knowledge, Google and Google Scholar, and ebooks@Cambridge. A number of Faculty librarians generously gave of their time and expertise, giving sessions on more specialized resources, and the trend towards including in the programme presentations by trainers from commercial publishers on their products continued. Conversely the outreach element of the user education programme continued to develop, with sessions given by University Library staff in Faculty buildings.
The move of the exit control in the Entrance Hall led to improved security, because the staff can now concentrate on that one task, and readers can clearly see what is expected and present their bags to the desk. The bar-code reader at the entry point, which had been a source of frustration to many readers, was replaced by a new system that has proved to be virtually 100% reliable in scanning and recording cards for entry.
'The Cambridge illuminations: ten centuries of book production in the medieval West'
July - December 2005 (jointly with the Fitzwilliam Museum)
Prepared by an organizing committee and opened (at the Fitzwilliam Museum) by Dr David Starkey
'Visible language: Dante in text and image'
January - July 2006
Prepared by Dr Whitelock and opened by His Excellency The Italian Ambassador
'Unregulated printing: modern private press books'
July - December 2006
Prepared by Mr Miller and Mr Smith, and opened by Mr Sebastian Carter
The receptions for the opening ceremonies were generously sponsored by Cambridge University Press.
'Rare books of the Spanish Golden Age'
July - September 2005 (to coincide with the annual conference of the Asociacíon Internacional Siglo de Oro at Robinson College)
Prepared by Dr Anthony Close (Department of Spanish and Portuguese), Ms Morcillo-García and Dr Mitchell
'60th Anniversary of the foundation of the UN, 24 November 1945'
September - November 2005
Prepared by Mr Noblett
''Miscellaneous verdicts': the work of Anthony Powell (1905-2000)'
November 2005 - January 2006 (to mark the centenary of the birth of Anthony Powell on 21 December 1905)
Prepared by Dr Mitchell
'An artistic life: the work of William Alwyn (1905-1985)'
February - March
Prepared by Ms Jones
''I can't go on. I'll go on.': a selection from the Library's holdings of Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)'
March - May 2006 (to mark the centenary of the birth of Samuel Beckett on 13 April 1906)
Prepared by Mr Hills
'Expensive, beautiful, and incorrect: John Baskerville (?1706-1775)'
June - July 2006 (to mark the tercentenary of the birth of John Baskerville in ?1706)
Prepared by Mr Smith
''... a glimpse of something eternal': the life and work of John Betjeman (1906-1984)'
July - September 2006 (to mark the centenary of the birth of John Betjeman on 28 April 1906)
Prepared by Miss Johnson
Items from the Library's collections were loaned to the following exhibitions:
American Museum of Natural History, New York: 'Darwin'
Osaka Museum of History and Waseda University, Tokyo: 'Kabuki Heroes on the Osaka Stage 1780-1850'
Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen, Mannheim: 'Saladin und die Kreuzfahrer'
Galeries Poirel, Nancy: 'La lumière au siècle des lumières et aujourd'hui'
British Museum, London: 'Kabuki Heroes on the Osaka Stage 1780-1850'
St Bride Printing Library, London: 'The distaff side: women as printers from the fifteenth century to the present day
The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh: 'Dada's boys: identity and play in contemporary art'
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford: 'Pilgrimage: the sacred journey'
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge: 'The Cambridge Illuminations: ten centuries of book production in the medieval West'
Pembroke College Cambridge: display in the Old Library
The new wheelchair access via the front of the West Road building was finally completed. This work took much longer than had been expected, because of the need to carry out remedial works on both sides of the revolving door, following the discovery of corrosion in the steel frame to the bronze screen forming the main entrance to the Library. The new access facility consists of a lift in the external pavilion, which allows not only wheelchair users but other categories of reader, including parents with pushchairs and the more elderly and infirm, to reach the Entrance Hall level. Alterations to the admission arrangements in the Entrance Hall itself were also made, but more convenient wheelchair access to the rest of the building is still provided through the specially designed entrance at the side of the building, which leads to a large lift providing access straight to the main floor of the building.
The Inter-Library Loans Department moved to the third floor reading room to join Official Publications, and the Periodicals Department staff moved out of the West Room and into the offices previously occupied by Inter-Library Loans.
Moves of stock into the five new floors of the Phase 5 extension continued through much of the year, and those floors are now filled at about 95% capacity (the expansion space left free for the few classes still being added to). The major collections housed on the various floors include the Acton Library, rare books, the University Archives, and several manuscript collections.
The project for the replacement of the 1970s mobile cases began in October 2005, and by July 2006 the first two phases, involving the replacement of the shelving on the western side of the ground floor, had been completed. The project is due for completion in autumn 2008, but is currently running ahead of schedule. By that time approximately two million items will have been moved at least once, and because at least one large section of shelving will always unavailable throughout the time span of the project the Library's overall capacity will be reduced for up to three years.
The open part of the main West Road building is now full to capacity; many floors have overflows on tables and some extend to the floors. Where stacks still contain monographs published between 1850 and 1899, these are being moved to closed-access shelving; pre-1900 volumes of periodicals are likewise being withdrawn, and in some areas it has been necessary to remove to closed-access more modern books. This is a very labour-intensive process, as all sets, series, and periodical runs which straddle the date lines have to be examined, users' needs have to be considered in decisions as to whether material should stay or be relocated, and the location data of records on Newton have to be amended. Extra free space in the West Road building will be created by the transfer of many sets of scientific periodicals to new shelving in the Moore Library, which became available in July.
It is important to stress that the medium-term planning for open access is not all a matter of withdrawals. The crucial need is for the funding and completion of Phase 6 of the Library's current building programme, an adjunct to which is the conversion of part of the closed bookstack into a new and very sizeable open-access floor, providing new space equivalent to two floors of the wings or fronts. When that plan is completed, re-organization and re-spacing of the open library should result in an arrangement which will last until 2020 or 2025.
The appointment of a new Buildings Officer with specific responsibility for health and safety matters, as well as having qualifications in that subject, led to a review of the Library's Health and Safety Policy and related procedures. The Safety Committee meets once a term, and the Buildings Officer, in the role of Departmental Safety Officer, also attends the dependent libraries' health and safety meetings with the respective faculties. A series of manual-handing workshops has been introduced, and additional first-aiders and fire-wardens have been appointed and trained.
The imminent return of Mr Peter Morgan, the Medical Librarian, after three years' secondment as Director of the DSpace@Cambridge Project provided the impetus for a strategic review of the Medical Library and its future, and the results of this review will become a revised strategic plan for the Library in the next academical year. The physical environment of the Medical Library, both in terms of a working environment for readers and staff, and as a repository of books and journals, will require some significant re-planning. Major surgery is necessary to rectify the more substantial problems and re-equip the Library for the radically changing expectations and needs of its clientele, but a number of improvements were implemented during the year with minimal expenditure.
Further questions about the use of space within the Library were prompted by collection development discussions. A basic assumption is that users will become increasingly dependent on e-resources, and thus increasingly unlikely to use the accumulation of printed materials, especially back-sets of journals, that currently occupy much of the Library's space. This has been borne out in recent years by the observation that while reader registrations continue to rise, the number of physical visits has declined - evidence that many readers are using networked resources from remote locations. An initial survey of journal back-sets, prompted in part by the possibility of a co-operative disposal and retention agreement with the Library Services at University College London, identified a group of titles that, if removed, would begin to release significant shelf space. It is possible to anticipate that within the next five years - and certainly within ten - the upper floor of the Medical Library, which currently houses all its journal back-sets, will not be needed for this purpose, and that services (however they may be defined in future) and the remaining stock might be concentrated on the lower floor. Any removal of material would either have to be carried out in conjunction with a national 'research reserve' scheme or could cause storage problems for the main West Road building.
As part of the successful University Library bid for funding from the HEFCE Science Research Infrastructure Fund (SRIF3), additional mobile shelving units were installed in the Moore Library. These units, which had been part of the original layout, had been omitted at a late stage of the original construction programme due to cost constraint. They add almost 2,000 linear metres to the capacity of the Library, but care has been taken so that the installation does not overwhelm the sense of space in the study areas and complements the existing décor. This additional capacity has enabled existing bound journals to be re-spaced, and almost 500 titles of printed journals within the subject coverage of the Moore Library will be moved from the West Road building over the summer of 2006.
Legal deposit monographs in the relevant subject areas are now being selected for location at the Central Science Library. New legal deposit books are routinely checked on arrival, and the CSL staff have also identified books received in 2004 and 2005 for transfer, in order to strengthen the collections further. Space, and the need to manage it, is no less of a priority for the CSL than at the Moore Library, especially as so small a percentage of the CSL's total collections are on open access to readers. With the expected growth of the Library's monographic holdings an increasing proportion of open-access shelving will be allocated to this material with a greater proportion of the print journals, particularly if also available electronically, relegated to closed access and fetched on demand.
The Squire continued to receive support towards its Centenary Appeal Fund, and the major donations are listed elsewhere in this report. A fund-raising reception took place at a firm of London solicitors and further events of this nature are planned. In addition to general support for the appeal, the Squire also received funding for specific purposes, such as the provision of extra copies of key textbooks and monographs, legal periodicals and electronic services to support undergraduate teaching in law, as well as continuing support for the Freshfields Legal IT Research Skills course.
The Squire, along with the Bodleian Law Library and the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies library were granted Associate Membership of NELLCO, the New England Law Library Consortium. NELLCO is keen to initiate a series of colloquia between the law librarians in the three jurisdictions of Canada, the UK, and the USA, and to develop an 'International Fellows Program' that would provide professional development opportunities for member librarians by spending a period visiting a law library, or libraries, outside their home country.
The retirement of five members of the senior staff during the year deprived the Library of 200 years of accumulated experience. September 2005 marked the retirements of Mr David Hall and his deputy, Ms Cynthia Webster. As head of the administration and latterly Deputy Librarian, Mr Hall had managed the Library's financial and administrative affairs for almost 30 years, and Ms Webster, who joined the Library in 1956, worked for many years in the Rare Books Department until she moved to become responsible for the staff looking after the general maintenance of the building. Dr John Hall retired as deputy head of the Rare Books Department at the end of January 2006, after over 30 years' service in the Library, and Mr Barry Eaden left in April 2006 after an even more remarkable 51 years' service in a range of departments. The departure of Professor Stefan Reif from the directorship of the Genizah Research Unit in March 2006 also marked the end of an era, during which his drive and dedication had brought the Unit an international reputation. To mark Professor Reif's contribution to the work of the Genizah Unit, the University Development Office organized the establishment of a fund in his honour, which will support activities in the Unit.
Mr Richard Hardy and Ms Maureen Dann joined the staff in two new posts of Buildings Officer and Personnel Officer respectively. Dr Ben Outhwaite was appointed as head of the Genizah Unit, Mr William Hale moved from Corpus Christi College to become one of the Rare Books specialists, Ms Celine Carty moved from the Seeley Historical Library to become one of the team leaders in English Cataloguing, and Ms Isla Kuhn joined the Medical Library from the NHS in Leicester as Reader Services Librarian
Congratulations are due to Ms Yvonne Nobis, who was awarded a Postgraduate Diploma in Library and Information Studies by City University; and to Ms Angela Pittock and Mrs Julia Smith, who gained their City and Guilds of London Award in Library and Information Services.
During the course of the year, staff of the Library have been assimilated to the University's new pay and grading structure. This was a complex and difficult process, requiring close collaboration between the Library and the Personnel Division in order to achieve appropriate outcomes.
The Munby Fellow for 2005-06 was Dr Giuliano di Bacco from the Università di Bologna, whose research topic was 'Music and music theory manuscripts in Cambridge libraries'.
MAIN SOURCES OF FUNDING
| A.D. CLIFF (Vice-Chancellor’s Deputy) | CATHERINE HILLS | D. J.McKITTERICK |
| RICHARD BEADLE | CHRISTOPHER HOWE | JOHN MORRILL |
| G. D. BYE | IAN HUTCHINGS | ROGER PARKER |
| E.DISLEY | PETER HUTCHINSON | J. R. SPENCER |
| R. C.GLEN | GORDON JOHNSON | MORAG STYLES |
| J. HEAD | PATRICIA KILLIARD | DIANA F.WOOD |
Publications, papers presented, membership of committees
M. C. Allen
Committee membership
Agency for the Legal Deposit Libraries, Management Committee
Legal Deposit Libraries Committee, Collection Development Subgroup
Cambridge University Women's Forum Steering Group
C. Ansorge
Committee membership
National Council on Orientalist Library Resources (Treasurer)
R. M. Andrewes
Paper presented
'William Alwyn', Friends of Cambridge University Library, March 2006
Committee membership
Bliss Trust (Trustee)
RISM (UK) Trust (Trustee and Treasurer)
RILM Technical Advisory Committee
William Alwyn Foundation (Trustee)
Cambridge University Musical Society (Vice President)
C. A. Aylmer
Paper presented
'Internet Resources for Chinese studies', NCOLR Seminar on Internet and Related Resources for Oriental Studies, Cambridge, September 2005
Committee membership
China Library Group, Periodicals Sub-committee
S. Bhayro
'Noah's Library: sources for 1 Enoch 6-11', Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha, 15 (2006)
J. Bloxham
Paper presented
'The study of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century girdle books', Institute of Paper Conservation/Institute of Conservation International Conference, Edinburgh, July 2006
Sub-editor, The Conservator
Committee membership
Institute of Conservation
I. M. Burke
Committee membership
IT Syndicate, Technical Sub-Committee
Cambridge University Libraries Automation Group Steering Committee
G. D. Bye
Committee membership
British Standards Institute, Committee for Micrographics and Digitisation
National Preservation Office, Micrographics Technical Committee
Library Syndicate (staff representative)
S. M. Cage
Editor: University Library Staff Bulletin
L. Chipman
'Syrups from the apothecary's shop: a Genizah fragment containing one of the earliest manuscripts of 'Minh**L370**aj Al-Dukk**L370**an'', Journal of Jewish Studies, 51 (2006) [with Efraim Lev]
C. T. Clarkson
Committee membership
University's Disability Forum
A. Collins
Committee membership
Clinical School Heads of Service Group
Clinical School Learning Resources Group
Higher Education Health Librarians in the Eastern Region
NHS Norfolk/Suffolk/Cambridgeshire Workforce Development Directorate Library and Knowledge Services Group
J. Cox
'Janus marks its third birthday', Cambridge University Library Readers' Newsletter (January 2006)
'Janus, the internet resource for catalogues of Cambridge archives, marks its third birthday', ARC Archives, Records Management and Conservation (February 2006)
Paper presented
'Searching Janus, the internet resource for catalogues of Cambridge archives', AGM of the EAD/Data Exchange Group of the Society of Archivists, May 2006.
Committee membership
Chair, Janus Steering Group
Chair, Cantab Developers' Group
Secretary, Cambridge Archivists Group
Secretary, Society for the History of the University
Information Strategy Task Force
L. Dingle
Committee membership
FLARE (Foreign Law Research Consortium)
Freshfields/Faculty of Law Liaison Committee
A. G. Farrant
Committee membership
Selection Committee for Institute of Paper Conservation/Institute of Conservation International Conference, Edinburgh, July 2006
P. K. Fox
'Changing LIBER', LIBER Quarterly, 16 (2006)
Committee membership
Wellcome Trust Library Advisory Committee (Chairman)
LIBER: Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche (General Secretary)
Lord Chancellor's Advisory Council on National Records and Archives
Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Legal Deposit Advisory Panel
Joint Committee on Legal Deposit
Friends of the National Libraries, Executive Committee
National Preservation Office Board
International Editorial Board, Journal of Library Administration
P. J. Girling
Committee membership
Cambridge University Libraries Automation Group Steering Committee
Union Catalogue Working Group for Bibliographic Standards
L. J. Gray
Committee membership
Endeavor User Group, EndUser Board
Endeavor User Group: Circulation Enhancements Committee (Chair)
Cambridge University Libraries Automation Group Steering Committee
W. A. Hale
Conducted seminar on rare books cataloguing, Historic Libraries Forum, London, May 2006
Committee membership
CILIP Rare Books and Special Collections Group Bibliographic Standards Committee
J. J. Hall
Committee membership
Cambridge Bibliographical Society (Treasurer)
S. J. Hills
Editor: University Library Readers' Newsletter
J. E. Hoare
Committee membership
British Association for American Studies, Library and Resources Sub-Committee (Secretary)
R. C. Jamieson
Committee membership
Faculty of Divinity, Working Group on Online Resources for Indic Studies (Chairman)
Union Handlist of Manuscripts in North Indian Languages
National Council on Orientalist Library Resources, Automation Working Party
R. Jefferson
'Genizah fragments at fifty', Genizah Fragments, 50 (2005)
'Piyyut', in Dictionary of Jewish-Christian relations, ed. by E. Kessler and N. Wenborn (Cambridge 2005)
Book review in Journal of Jewish Studies
Paper presented
'The Mosseri Collection: the challenges associated with acquiring a large manuscript archive', British Association of Jewish Studies conference, Cambridge, July 2006
B. Jenkins
Committee membership
English Short Title Catalogue, UK Committee
National Preservation Office, Preservation Advisory Panel
Legal Deposit Libraries Committee, Preservation Sub-Group
Brotherton Collection Advisory Committee
Cambridge Bibliographical Society
P. Killiard
Committee membership
Joint Committee on Legal Deposit, E-journals Working Group Legal Deposit Libraries Sub-Groups on Digital Infrastructure and Preservation
Information Strategy Task Force
Library Syndicate (staff representative)
N. Koyama
Kenburjjji Daigaku hizo Meiji koshashin: Makeza-go no Nihon ryoko (Early photographs of the University of Cambridge: the journey of the Marchesa in Japan), (Tokyo 2005)
Paper presented
'Usui Shuzaburo's early photographs of Japan from Cambridge University Library: in relation to a forthcoming publication of Makeza-go no Nihon ryoko, European Association of Japanese Resource Specialists' Annual Conference, Lund, Sweden, September 2005
Committee membership
Japan Library Group (Chair)
European Association of Japanese Resource Specialists (Board Member)
I. L. Kuhn
Committee membership
Clinical School CBCU Management Committee
NHS Norfolk/Suffolk/Cambridgeshire Workforce Development Directorate Library and Knowledge Services Group
S. V. Lambert
Assistant Editor, The Indexer
Committee membership
Joint Committee on Legal Deposit, Territoriality Working Group
Publications Committee, The Indexer
J. A. Leary
Committee membership
Clinical School Building Safety Committee
Clinical School Heads of Service Group
Higher Education Health Librarians in the Eastern Region
D. K. Lowe
Committee membership
French Studies Library Group (Annual Review editor)
P. M. Meadows
'A sixteenth-century devotional manual', Bulletin of the Friends of Cambridge University Library, 26 (2005)
Paper presented
'The Victorian stained glass of Ely Cathedral', Stained Glass Museum, Ely Cathedral, July 2006
Committee membership
Cambridgeshire County Archives Advisory Group
Degree Sub-committee for Master of Studies in Local and Regional History
S. Morcillo-García
Committee membership
Advisory Council on Latin American and Iberian Information Resources
P. B. Morgan
Papers presented
'Opening up access; or, The right to roam', Joint EEMLAC/NHS East of England 'Pathways to Health' Conference, Cambridge, November 2005
'Alive and kicking: an international progress report on Open Access, institutional repositories, and health information', CILIP Health Libraries Group Conference, Eastbourne, July 2006
Committee membership
BMJ Publishing Group, Library Advisory Panel
Clinical School/Addenbrooke's Hospital SIFT Liaison Group
Clinical School Heads of Service Group
Clinical School Learning Resources Group
European Association for Health Information and Libraries: UK representative, EAHIL Council
Higher Education Health Librarians in the Eastern Region
Information Strategy Task Force
NHS Norfolk/Suffolk/Cambridgeshire Workforce Development Directorate, Library and Knowledge Services Group
Research Information Network Consultative Group for Librarianship and Information Science
A. E. Murray
Vice-President of Wolfson College
Committee membership
Legal Deposit Libraries Agency Management Committee
Friedrich Niessen
Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts in the Cambridge Genizah collections (Cambridge 2006) [with A. Shivtiel]
'Genizah annual launched', Genizah Fragments, 51 (2006)
'Illustrated scene from 'Kalila wa-Dimna'' in Ibn Khaldun: the Mediterranean in the 14th century: rise and fall of empires [exhibition catalogue] (Sevilla 2006)
Papers presented
'A Karaite commentary on Hosea', British Association of Jewish Studies conference, Cambridge, July 2006
Course of lectures on Genesis at the Faculty of Oriental Studies
W. A. Noblett
Book reviews in CILIP Rare Books Group Newsletter
Committee membership
BOPCRIS Steering Committee
History of Parliament Trust Ad-hoc Committee on Digitisation
ESRC Population History Group, Advisory Committee
B. Outhwaite
'Establishing reliability of texts', Genizah Fragments, 50 (2005)
Book review in Journal of Semitic Studies
Papers presented
'From medieval Egypt to Cambridge University Library: the Cairo Genizah', Cambridge Library Group, June 2006
''Informal Tiberian': the vocalization of 'vulgar' Bible manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah', British Association of Jewish Studies conference, Cambridge, July 2006
A. J. Perkins
Committee membership
International Astronomical Union, Commission 41/Inter-Union Commission for History of Astronomy, Working Group on Astronomical Archives.
Royal Society Library Committee
S. C. Reif
'Genizah fragments of Hebrew prayer as a reflection of Jewish religious ideology', Twenty-Seventh Annual Feinberg Memorial Lecture (Cincinnati 2005)
'Approaches to sacrifice in early Jewish prayer' in Studies in Jewish Prayer, ed. by R. Hayward and B. Embry (Oxford 2005)
Seven contributions to the Dictionary of Jewish-Christian relations, ed. by E. Kessler and N. Wenborn (Cambridge 2005)
'Rabbi Isaac Cohen's 90th birthday celebration', The Edinburgh Star 52 (2005)
Editor: Genizah Series (Cambridge University Press) and Genizah Fragments (Cambridge University Library)
Book reviews in Journal of Theological Studies and SOTS Book List
Papers presented
Fifteen lectures and conference papers
Committee membership
National Council on Orientalist Library Resources (Chairman)
International Society for the Study of Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature, Advisory Committee
Friedberg Genizah Project, Academic Committee
K. Rose
Paper presented
'The conservation of a seventeenth-century Shahnama', Institute of Paper Conservation/Institute of Conservation International Conference, Edinburgh, July 2006
R. Rowe
'What you didn't expect to find in the Royal Commonwealth Society collections in Cambridge University Library', Cambridge University Libraries Information Bulletin (2005)
Papers presented
'Tales of the Unexpected: insights into three UL special collections', Alumni Weekend, Cambridge, September 2005
'Tasker Collection Bequest' (of Caribbean literature), English Faculty and Churchill College Cambridge, May 2006
Committee membership
South Asian Archives and Library Group, Steering Group
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
Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts in the Cambridge Genizah collections (Cambridge 2006) [with F. Niessen]
'A Judaeo-Armenian and Judaeo-Arabic word-list from the Cairo Genizah', in Studia Semitica, the Journal of Semitic Studies Jubilee Volume (Oxford 2005)
Papers presented
Lectures on the Genizah at the universities of Leipzig and Melbourne
N. A. Smith
Committee membership
Cambridge Bibliographical Society (Secretary)
C. Staufenbiel
Committee membership
German Studies Library Group (Treasurer)
A. E. M. Taylor
Editor, The Cartographic Journal, special issue, 42/3 (2005)
Editor, Bulletin of the Friends of Cambridge University Library
Book reviews in The Cartographic Journal and Society of Cartographers Bulletin
Committee membership
British and Irish Committee for Map Information and Catalogue Systems (BRICMICS)
Charles Close Society Archives Sub-committee
Groupe des Cartothécaires de LIBER (Board member)
MapForum (Editorial Board member)
Cambridge Library Group (Membership Secretary)
J. R. H. Taylor
Committee membership
Legal Deposit Libraries Committee, Metadata Group
RLG Union Catalog Advisory Group
Joint Steering Committee for Revision of Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules
SUNCAT Bibliographic Quality Advisory Group.
E.-M. Wagner
Paper presented
'Linguistic diversity in Judaeo-Arabic letters from the Genizah', British Association of Jewish Studies conference, Cambridge, July 2006
J. D. Wells
''Polemics, facts, the countryside, games, argument': the papers of John Harold Goodland', Bulletin of the Friends of Cambridge University Library, 26 (2005)
'In search of silkworm: Luigi Cigogna in Manchuria', Matheson & Co. Christmas Letter, 2005
Committee membership
Secretary, Friends of Cambridge University Library
J. Whitelock
The Seven Sages of Rome (Midland Version): edited from Cambridge, University Library, MS Dd.1.17, Early English Text Society, 324 (Oxford 2005)
Visible language: Dante in text & image: an exhibition in Cambridge University Library, 17 January-1 July 2006 [catalogue] (Cambridge 2006)
Editor: Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society and Monographs
Committee membership
Friends of Cambridge University Library
G. H. Wiedermann:
Committee membership
Coutts OASIS Advisory Group
D. F. Wills
'News from the Squire Law Library', Cambridge Lawlink, (Faculty of Law Newsletter), Issue 6.
Committee Membership
BIALL Awards and Bursaries Committee
BIALL Wallace Breem Memorial Award Committee
FLARE (Foreign Law Research Consortium)
Freshfields/Faculty of Law Liaison Committee
M. L. Wilson
Committee membership
Central European Science Journals, Library Advisory Board
P. Zawada
Committee membership
EU Databases User Group (EUDUG)
P. N. R. Zutshi
'Unpublished fragments of the registers of common letters of Urban VI', in Kurie und Region: Festschrift für Brigide Schwarz zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. by B. Flug, M. Matheus and A. Rehberg (Stuttgart 2005)
General Editor, The History of the University of Cambridge: Texts and Studies
Paper presented
'The provenance of the so-called Hours of Isabella of Aragon', Cambridge Illuminations Conference, December 2005
Committee membership
Oxford University Archives Committee
Advisory and Technical Panel, Northamptonshire Record Office
SCONUL and RLG representative, East of England Regional Archives Council
Charles Darwin Trust (Trustee)
Editorial Advisory Board, Journal of Ecclesiastical History