Tuesday 15 July 2008

The National Art Library



Librarian Francis Warrel was our guide for this very quiet tour of the National Art Library, which is a part of the Victoria and Albert Museum. The library was founded in the 1830’s, predating the museum, and holds over two million items. In its current incarnation, the library space features only two public rooms, the first of which is a reading room, and the second of which is the computer center, where users can search the integrated catalog of the holdings of the library. The main counter service usually has two or three people staffing it, with one specifically for the special collections. They have an inquiry desk in the room with the more popular “ready reference” items, and their computers can access the entire database of the objects in the museum. There are also study rooms located around the building for the use of students and researchers. Books from 1930 or earlier and journals from the pre-1900’s must be photographed, but most other materials can be copied.

From the marshalling area behind the scenes, the retrieval team leader makes a retrieval run every hour on the half hour to get books from the stacks for the users. Almost all of the items in the library are located in stacks that are closed to the public except for the ready reference items, which are out and arranged according to the Dewey classification system. Patrons must fill out request slips in triplicate, and patrons may only view six items at a time (staff many borrow up to 20 items), with 45 minutes to an hour allowance for retrieval time. Everyone that enters the library must take a seat number, and it is to that seat that your items are delivered. This system has been in place since 1899.

The periodicals stacks of the Art library are shelved separately from the book stacks, and are shelved by title. They boast over 8000 titles, with 2000 of those titles still currently subscribed to, and the oldest periodicals dating back to the Victorian period. The periodicals are occasionally used for exhibitions throughout the museum, when reference for a specific era or time period is needed. The museum originally bound all of the journals but stopped because of this display use and individual research use, as well as due to budget constraints.

Three floors of the closed stacks used to be the gallery hub of the library’s special collections, which span back to medieval manuscripts. The art library also has a very large collection of artist’s books and book arts from the 20th century. The library was the recipient of the collection of John Foster, who was an eminent critic and historian from the civil war period, and this collection included a Shakespeare folio as well as some original proofs of Dickens’ novels. Apparently Mr. Foster was a great fan of Dickens. The west room of the library is now being converted into a 20th century gallery of book arts and artists’ books, and they are consciously keeping the surrounding floor to ceiling shelves of books, for the aesthetic effect as well as the issue of space and storage of the volumes. The library is in the process of acquiring the Gilbert collection of book arts, which will be featured in the individual book gallery.

The third floor of the library houses the exhibition and sale catalogs which are a notable feature of this library’s collection. They have all of the auction catalogs of all of the main auction houses of Britain, dating back to the eighteenth century. The catalogs are arranged according to country, gallery, and year, and the size of the collection reflects its goals to be the largest of its kind. About 60% of the material in this part of the collection is in foreign languages, with many of the catalogs in French, German, Japanese, and Chinese.

We were also privileged to see some of the items from the library’s special collections, including some really interesting book arts items, including a red-bound book called Murder, featuring furred animal-skin pages. Some of the sales catalogs in the library’s collection are all the more interesting because they actually feature the prices that the auction lots went for, and we were able to look at an example of this. Probably the two most interesting and popular books that we were able to look at were Jonathan Swift’s own annotated copies of Gulliver’s Travels, and one of Charles Dickens’ corrected proofs of David Copperfield featuring his own notes.

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