UCL announced on 17^th November 2016 that UCL Library Services moved from UCL Professional Services to report to the Vice-Provost (Research), Prof David Price. Dr Paul Ayris, Director of UCL Library Services, has been appointed Pro-Vice-Provost.

As Pro-Vice-Provost, Dr Ayris will develop UCL’s scholarly communications offering, building on the current successes of the Open Access activity, UCL Press and research data management; and continue the Library’s activity in collection management and collection building, in both paper and digital formats, while seeking out collaborations with other collections, both in UCL and further afield in London. Dr Ayris will continue to be an ex officio member of the UCL Senior Management Team.

The Library Strategy lays down that our Mission is to ‘Provide an information infrastructure to enable UCL’s research and education to be world class’. The new reporting line better reflects the Library’s mission as an academic support division.

Recently, Dr Ayris has served as President of LIBER, the Association of European Research Libraries. He also chairs the UK Negotiation Team for JISC Collections which has struck a multi-million pound deal with the publisher Elsevier for access to Science Direct.

Dr Ayris said:

“These changes reflect the success of the Library Strategy and the great visibility that our facilities and services have across the whole of UCL. They underline the strong, historic links between the Library and UCL’s activity in teaching, learning and research. We will continue to enjoy collegial links with UCL Professional Services. I have been asked, for example, to carry on as co-chair of the Organising Committee for the UCL Professional Services Conference in February 2017.”

Professor Price commented:

“Since his appointment in 1997, Paul’s service as Director of UCL Library Services has been as model of how Professional Services can work to support the university’s core academic and research mission. He is a true leader – and internationally recognised as one – in such areas as scholarly communication, open access, research data management and innovation in collections management. Paul’s appointment as Pro-Vice-Provost in my office is a welcome recognition of his outstanding service and, more importantly, his team’s potential to make an even greater contribution to UCL’s research and academic performance.”

Update on the delivery of the Library Services Strategy

The Library Leadership Team met in November to review progress against the objectives set in the Library Strategy 2015-18, halfway into the lifecycle of the strategy.

The Implementation Plans, which underpin the Strategy, contain 90 Action Lines which are regularly reviewed by the Leadership Team.

At our last meeting, we recorded that 27 of the Actions had been completed, 55 were healthy and ongoing (and so marked Green), 8 were awaiting development (Amber) and none had failed (Red). These figures are good, and in the remaining 18-24 months of the Strategy period the emphasis will be on turning more Green Actions into Completed Actions. The table above provides a sense of the achievements of Library Services over the past two years, which have been underpinned by some outstanding work by Library Services staff who have been working to complete the ambitious goals set out in the strategy and consistently delivering excellent services to our users.

by Benjamin Meunier, Assistant Director (Public Services) & Martin Moyle Assistant Director (Support Services)

Current Disruption & Works

UCL Special Collections has joined forces with three other groups in UCL Library Services:

• the Records Office,
• the IOE’s Archives and Special Collections,
• and the Retrospective Cataloguing Team.

Watch this space for reports from the new amalgamated group!

The amalgamated collections have been used to support students’ learning as actively as ever this term, with over 600 students due to have worked with original material before the term is up. This activity ranges from in-depth sessions teaching research skills, to 180 first-year undergraduate maths and physical-sciences students seeing Newton’s Principia in one of their introductory lectures. Training the conservators of the future continues, with training sessions on historic paper and bindings, and paper- and book-conservation students due to start placements very soon alongside our other volunteers from UCL and beyond.

New reading room

The new reading room for Special Collections and Records materials is now open near the South Junction on the lower ground floor of UCL’s Wilkins Building, and provides a specially equipped, secure space for accommodating both readers and small groups for academic support and outreach.

Professor Melissa Terras, Director of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities and Professor of Digital Humanities said about the space:-

“Having such a quiet, flexible space for consulting UCL Special Collections’ material in the heart of the Bloomsbury campus will mean improved access for researchers, as well as further opportunities to give students hands-on experience of object-based learning. In this digital age it is imperative that we encourage the next generation to understand the physical items that digitised collections are based on. The new reading room will allow us to further build our teaching around UCL collections, as well as providing a safe and congenial place for staff, students, and visitors to conduct research on this world-leading library resource“.

Research support continues apace and Special Collections are currently working with with UCL Digital Humanities to explore how humidifying printed material can enable multi-spectral imaging to reveal formerly hidden text, and UCL’s Centre For Editing Lives And Letters to produce digital editions of books owned by or annotated by John Dee. We’re also collaborating with Durham University on developing software for Optical Character Recognition of early print fonts, whose irregularities and page layout make current OCR techniques unsuccessful, and workshops were provided over the summer for an international conference on treatments of paper used for early printed books, particularly substances used to make sizing.

The Orwell Lecture 2016 was delivered at UCL on Tuesday 15 November by Ian Hislop, and the team that runs the Orwell Prize has now moved to UCL’s Institute of Advanced Studies. This unites it with the Orwell Archive held at Special Collections, which includes a Christmas card made by Richard Blair for his father in the month before the author died of tuberculosis at University College Hospital on 21st January 1950.

Archivist Gill Furlong was interviewed by BBC Radio 4 for an article on George Orwell, which aired on Sunday 20 November on Broadcasting House.

Exhibitions Featuring Material from Special Collections

• Main Library until December 2016: Fair Play And Foul: Connecting With Shakespeare at UCL as part of the Shakespeare400 anniversary celebrations,  including some of UCL’s well-known Shakespeare forgeries by William Henry Ireland. From 21 November 2016 posters and banners with images from the exhibition will be on display in the foyer of Stratford Library, The Grove, London E15 1EL as part of the joint public engagement/outreach programme of activities between UCL Libraries and the London Borough of Newham.
• UCL Senate House Hub  from mid-November 2016: What Is Paper? What Is A Book? How Do Physical and E-Books Differ? Displays put together by teams of UCL students working at Special Collections alongside Camberwell College Of The Arts conservation interns.
• Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona, Spain until 19 March 2017: 1,000 m2 Of Desire: Architecture And Sexuality including exhibits from UCL’s Bentham Archive.
• The Globe Theatre, until 4 September 2016: Shakespeare Rediscovered in Saint-Omer. An exhibition shining a light on the wider theatrical story of Bankside in 1616 and its significant legacy in South London and beyond. STOP-PRESS: this exhibition has now finished, and attracted a remarkable 64,010 visitors.
• Queen Square Library is delighted to announce its new exhibition: Sir Victor Horsley: commemorating the centenary of Horsley’s death. This exhibition, which will run in Queen Square Library until February 2017, features photographs, objects, and documents from Queen Square Archives and UCL Special Collections.  The exhibition was launched to coincide with the national Explore Your Archives campaign.

Sir Victor Horsley and colleagues

Events

• Staff from Special Collections and various UCL libraries were on hand with information on a wide range of relevant collections at this year’s History Day for researchers, held at Senate House on 15 November.
• Special Collections material was displayed at this year’s Graduate Open Day on 23 November.
• A public concert of music related to Shakespeare, combined with tours of the Shakespeare exhibition, was held this term in collaboration with UCL Chamber Music Club.

Dr. Tabitha Tuckett, Rare-Books Librarian, & The Team at Queen Square Library, with thanks to Melissa Terras

In my role as Head of Customer Service I am responsible for the strategic development and delivery of excellent customer service across UCL Library Services. I lead the Customer Service Teams for the Main and Science Libraries and I also work closely with the Head of Site Library Services, the Head of Liaison and Support Services, plus the Librarians at the Institute of Education and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies.

Obtaining the Customer Service Excellence Standard is an objective of the current Library Strategy and we were fortunate to have a Graduate Trainee work with us from January to May this year which resulted in a comprehensive report covering Customer Service Excellence and User Experience in UCL Library Services. A Customer Service Audit was carried out at all of our 18 Libraries plus a small but innovative User Experience (UX) Project utilising ‘speaking boards’ as an alternative method to obtain feedback. Boards were placed in the Main and Science Libraries and Cruciform Hub asking users what they thought of 24/7 opening in the library. A3 posters were also used at LaSS, IOE, Bartlett and Royal Free for the same purpose. This project had an immediate impact and elicited much feedback, although not all related to 24/7 opening! Lessons have been learned from this Project such as the importance of linking the physical boards with social media (eg Twitter polls) and of responding to user feedback via ‘You said….We say’ notice boards.

We have recently launched a Service Charter which sets out our commitment to people who use our service and what we ask in return. This was produced after consultation with Library users and staff. The Charter can be read on our website and physical copies of are available at all of our Libraries.

Christmas Opening Hours

If you’re planning to use our libraries during the Christmas period please visit our website for full details of opening times.

Peter Dennison, Head of Customer Service

While tidying in the Institute of Education’s Special Collections I came across a letter relevant to the provenance of the Baines Collection. I thought I would share with you some of this information in terms of piecing together the existing information with the content of the letter and give you some idea of what is contained in this fascinating collection. Before I do this, however, I must acknowledge the work of my colleague Antony Daws did in researching the genealogy of Baines Family for I have used some of his findings below.

BAINES 28: Stories for children : chiefly confined to words of two syllables by William Darton (1822)

The donors

The Baines Collection of children’s books was donated to the Ministry of Education between 1955 and 1962 by Miss Margaret Eyre and her niece Alicia Constance Percival. Only the children’s books came to the Institute in 1992 from the Ministry (which had by this date, changed its name to the Department of Education) and other items in the Baines/Eyre/Percival collections are held by other archives and repositories. The two most notable collections of material are the Baines/Percival papers in the Bodleian Library, and Eyre Papers in the Pitt-Rivers Museum. The Victoria & Albert Museum also holds a Burmese wall hanging donated by Miss Eyre.

The majority of the books in this collection belonged to the children of the Reverend Edward Baines, Miss Eyre’s maternal grandfather and many of them have hand-written dedications or the names of their original owners, nineteen of whom are members of the family of Miss Eyre’s mother, Lucy Dorothea Eyre (née Baines) (whose father was Edward John Baines [1801-1881] vicar of Bluntisham in Huntingdonshire, and later of Yalding in Kent). Other books in the collection can be linked by dedication to members of the extended Eyre and Percival families.

Margaret Eyre (9/12/1874 – 11/8/1963) was the only child of Gervas Selwyn Eyre (1851 – 1920) and Lucy Dorothea Baines (1849 – 1938). Further information about Miss Eyre is contained in a book published by Alicia Percival which is entitled ‘Aunt Margaret : reminiscences of Margaret Eyre 1874-1963, compiled in 1974 by her niece, Alicia C. Percival’.  Copies are available in the British Library, Bodleian, and the Women’s Library (which also holds Alicia Percival’s personal papers). The biography includes material written by Miss Eyre.

The letter

Letter from Alicia C. Percival (June 1962)

Alicia Percival (1907-1987) was a trained teacher who, after the Second World War became the Vice Principal and then Principal of Forest Training College (1945-1950), and later Vice Principal and Principal Lecturer in Education at Trent Park Training College (1950-1966). She wrote several books on education as well as a study of the Victorian writer Charlotte M Yonge (London:  Harrap, 1948) which she co-authored with Margaret Mare. Some of her books are in the Institute’s Library. She was awarded a Ph.D. at the Institute of Education in 1968.

A letter was found in one of the books in the Collection (Royal Reader No. 1) which provides evidence both of how the children were taught to read at home by family and confirms that the collection was deposited in parts  and not as a complete collection in 1955 as it was previously thought. Alicia Percival reminisces, “I learnt to read from this book, when I was 4 ½ years old. My grandmother, Constance Baines, taught me in her bedroom every morning. I remember the earlier lessons from a paper book called STEP BY STEP quite well, but these less vividly.” Unfortunately, I have not been able to find this book but I suspect she meant Pinnock’s 1859 First Steps to Knowledge.

The collection

The collection consists of 200 books which date from 1700 to 1920. There are both story books and books of general knowledge prepared for children’s recreation and instruction in the 18^th, 19th and the early part of the 20^th centuries. They include readers, geography and history books and books on the use of grammar. There are also many fiction books, many of which have a moral theme.

Some of the books were clearly used by adult members of the family to understand the philosophy and techniques of teaching and imparting moral instruction.  These include the 1762 edition of Rousseau’s Émile , Smith’s 1858 publication entitled The parents cabinet of amusement and instruction and the 1785 edition of The pleasing instructor, or Entertaining moralist : consisting of select essays, relations, visions and allegories collected from those eminent English authors to which are prefixed new thoughts on education edited with an introduction by A. Fisher. Although there are a few foreign language items, most of the books are in English.

This is a rich collection of primary sources for anyone researching the history of literacy, moral instruction and education in England from the 19th to the first two decades of the twentieth centuries. The books are listed in Explore and can be requested for viewing in the Archives Reading Room at the IOE.

The collection was featured in our Advent Calendar on December 2nd and we hope you’ll have a peep in the other windows too.

by Nazlin Bhimani, Research Support & Special Collections Librarian, UCL Institute of Education

Jes Cooban

This term we said goodbye to Jes after 23 years as Ancient World Librarian at UCL.

“I started as a library trainee at the Institute of Classical Studies Library in 1982 and one of my first tasks was to clear the reading room of ash trays as smoking had just been banned! After library school in Aberystwyth, where I acquired a husband-to-be as well as a qualification, I worked at the University of London Library for 7 years and whilst there one of my duties was to replace the many microfiche catalogues in ring binders with the monthly updates as well as discovering the joys of MARC (Machine-Readable Cataloguing)…

After a brief break to produce a son & heir I started at UCL in May 1993 and entered a world of yellow book order forms and an ever increasing range of e-resources. So many things have changed – I still have to remind myself that we do allow eating & drinking nowadays but thankfully smoking is a no-no. I have truly enjoyed my years at UCL working in such a wonderful library in one of the best universities in the world alongside so many fabulous colleagues.”

Jes will be much missed but she leaves a legacy of orderliness and some great stories like this fascinating history of our Yates Collection.

It was a hectic summer for us here in the UCL IOE Library. We have been transformed, with lots of new improvements and services introduced. We started the new academic year with some real post-merger achievements – notably the use of one card rather than two to access the Library, and one computing account for students rather than two, but here are some of the other highlights:

Our newly configured Welcome Point has modernised our entrance to make a much better impact on the view of the library from the IOE’s main foyer. Note the backlit UCL branding sign on the front panel of the desk as well as the easy identification of the Library by its full name “Newsam Library and Archives”.

Removal of the Issue Desk has really opened up the entrance space and allowed us to reconfigure our self-service machines in a cluster, and we also introduced self-service reservations based upon the model used in other UCL libraries.

As well as having only one computing account to contend with, we have been able to ditch our old troublesome photocopiers and have introduced ISD’s Multi Function Devices (MFDs), which students have taken to like ducks to water.

Yet another major project over the summer was the migration from SirsiDynix Symphony to the Aleph system. This also allowed us to embed our catalogue and resources within Explore, and means that we can now search across all UCL libraries, and our new Explore Access Points replaced our ageing and sluggish Mac catalogue terminals. Last but not least, like many other UCL libraries we now have laptop loans as well.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all those involved in these projects across UCL Library Services. If you are passing, do drop in and see the changes for yourself.

by Bernard Scaife