Thursday 17 July 2008

The Bodleian


Today we visited the historical Bodleian library, the main research library for Oxford University. Oxford is a collegiate university, which means that it is made up of the various colleges which constitute the Oxford system, and each college is nearly autonomous and almost totally independent. The University only owns the buildings that house each college. 125 libraries are part of the university system, and it has been a long and difficult process to get all of these libraries to be a part of an integrated cataloging network.

Oxford University has a long history of scholarship, going back to 750 A. D., as our excellent guide, Mr. John Cross, informed us. The university was officially founded in 1220, and all teaching was done by orders of friars, an ecclesiastical organization, until around 1400. The first college was built in Oxford in 1260, and New College was founded in the 1300’s—meaning that everything at Oxford called New College is at least 500 years old. The university was originally a school of theology, which included the arts and sciences under a common educational nominal.

The library facility there is now called Duke Humphrey’s Library, which serves as a research facility for manuscripts and early books. In 1480, Duke Humphrey donated his holdings to fill out the collection, and these books were chained to the desks and shelves. The manuscripts were displayed on the desks that were arranged throughout the reading room, which stretches around the top floor of the library building. During the Reformation, Oxford was a center of controversy (as centers of learning so often are), and when this movement split the faculty, a great deal of the collection was destroyed. Bodleian came back to Oxford and was horrified by the state of the library, so he asked for and was granted the responsibility of building “the finest research library in Great Britain.” All of the books in the library were chained and set on the shelves with the spines inward, and the contents of each bookcase were listed on the end of each shelf. Bodleian introduced the first catalog to this library, and went on to develop about 14 different types of catalogs for the materials in the library.

The old Humphrey’s library mainly contains the oldest books in the collection and is used for research purposes. We went from there into a much newer part of the library space, the IT hub of the library in the round kamera, a building which used to be the museum of natural history that is situated in front of Magdalene church on campus. The library now contains about twelve million volumes, searchable by author via an online catalog as well as by subject catalogs which are available locally. A huge part of the collection is due to the setup that Bodleian negotiated in 1610, whereby the printing guilds gave a copy of everything that they published to the library for free. This status has continued, so that the library has received a copy of everything published in Great Britain during that whole time! Unfortunately, they must be selective with what they actually keep, unlike the British Library, which has to keep everything. This leads to disastrous de-acquisition decisions, such as the decision to sell the library’s copy of one of Shakespeare’s first folios after the third edition of the folio was released, which led to decades of effort and much more money spent to re-acquire the volume.

The university constructed two sets of underground stacks in the 1890’s, and in the 1920’s had to expand again. The new library was built in 1938, and a subterranean passage, which we were lucky to get to traverse, was constructed to link the rotunda to the divinity school and the new library. Originally requests were transmitted from the libraries to the underground stacks via a series of pneumatic tubes that still exist; now, of course, these requests are transmitted via the internet, and request slips are printed out every half hour. The books themselves, however, are still transported via pulleys, carts, and chains by a system that was built with the help of the Rockefellers, also in 1938.

The library’s unique collection makes the Bodleian the renowned research facility that it remains. Their holdings include five copies of the Magna Carta, 2500 year old papyrus documents from Egypt, two copies of Shakespeare’s first folio, and countless other primary source documents, many of which cannot be retrieved any where else. And the Bodleian, like all other libraries, especially legal depository libraries, is grappling with the issue of digital publications, as well as with the book publishing boom of the past twenty years. To this end, the Bodleian is building another, newer facility on campus, to which much of their collection will be transferred.

No comments: