The London Library AGM | 26 November 2024
Director of Collections and Library Services Speech Notes
Good evening and it is a pleasure to speak to members present in the room and online this evening, and to many familiar faces.
I would just like to start by saying a bit about myself and my role – as this is a new format for the AGM as Simon said.
I joined the Library in January 2019 taking the newly established role of Director of Collections and Library Services – the first such role on the executive dedicated to the development and management of the Library’s collections and services alone.
I previously worked at Royal Holloway University of London for many years, earlier as a subject librarian, and in my final role as Acting Director overseeing the Library, Archives and the College’s Picture Gallery, and playing a leading role on the development of the £60m Library and Student Services Centre – now known as the Emily Wilding Davison Building.
Having done all that I was particularly attracted to this role by the collections and membership of the Library. The London Library and the vast collections it holds on browsable open access is well known in professional library circles, and having lived through a lot of changes to the way universities were providing access to content for students, and the way collections were being managed and used, I was particularly keen to come to a library where the collections are central to and so highly valued by its users.
Looking at the strategy at the time, I was keen to help the Library thrive and respond to its challenges – particularly in continuing to develop collections, including the excellent online library, and also in managing the Library’s space challenges – a remarkable 17 miles of shelving but nevertheless almost completely full. It is the more recent books that see the highest borrowing figures, with the last decade’s worth of publishing accounting for 6% of shelf space but 25% of loans. Continuing the Library’s strong acquisitions is essential to serve existing and future members. However, the more historical books being available for browsing and borrowing remain a strong part of the Library’s uniqueness and appeal. Therefore, managing the tensions of curating and growing the collection, maintaining access to the historical material and managing the space constraints is a challenge we have to tackle in order to keep the new material coming onto the shelves. Alongside print acquisition is the equally important online provision which sees very high levels of usage and which we are committed to expanding with resources that appeal to the broader membership.
Members may have noticed that the last three Member Surveys have included a number of detailed questions about the collections, both in print and online. Member satisfaction with the Library’s collection is very high, and those surveys have also highlighted areas where members perceive gaps in the collection and areas which need updating. This has provided useful data as to how you would like us to develop and extend our collections, while continuing to build on existing ones.
With regard to continuing acquisitions, you may have read in recent newsletters that our Head of Acquisitions, Gill Turner, retired after 20 years in that role and more years’ service at the Library before that. I have restructured the acquisitions and cataloguing areas to create roles of Acquisitions and Discovery Librarians who have shared responsibility for developing collections, taking specific subject areas each. The staff in this team, who are nearly all qualified librarians, have a combined 89 years of experience cataloguing at the Library, and could not be better placed to take over from Gill. You will see more about this team in forthcoming newsletters. They, working with me and Fay Harris, Head of Collections and Discovery, will begin exploring the areas identified by members as being gaps or needing updating – you may already have come across the graphic novel collection in The Art Reading Room. We are also building a bigger screenplay collection and exploring how to expand the Art, Fiction and Literature collections – making these more globally representative, and strengthening contemporary fiction. The financial headroom to extend into new areas and consolidate existing ones is further supported by the Refresh and Restore fund which many of you gave generously to last year.
To continue to provide space for new acquisitions, as I said earlier – we need to manage the existing holdings. During the six years since I joined, we have consulted with members over the removal of government publications from our shelves, the careful reduction of the Bibliography collection, and the removal to offsite store of periodicals available online to allow the creation of The Art Reading Room as part of our response to the pandemic’s social distancing measures which reduced seating capacity. These steps, all focused on lower use holdings, were all part of the Collection Capacity Management Strategy I developed with the Collections Committee’s approval in 2019, and which we now need to review and update for ongoing space management.
As the final part of delivering the 2019 Collections strategy we are focusing on a deduplication project of books on the open shelves which we hope will bring around 3 years’ growth space. And in fact Gill Turner has come back to help us with this as her deep collection knowledge makes her ideal for this rather painstaking work.
Remaining on the theme of space, thank you to all members who gave feedback during the consultation this summer over the foreign language material and closed runs of periodicals held in the basement. As we have reported in the newsletter, we will be retaining all of the Russian periodicals and society publications on-site, together with all other titles that members expressed a desire to see kept here in St James’s Square. The remainder will be moved off-site to a facility in Chatham, from where items can be retrieved in 1-2 working days, digital scans of articles can be delivered within 4 hours, and which also has a reading room if members wish to consult items there. Part of the space freed up by this work will allow for a greater area to securely house our archive and rare books currently on the open shelves. We will also create an area for invigilated use of archives and rare books, and hopefully a better service to members who use this material than through the rather awkward arrangements we have currently.
And, although this feels a little like old news now, within the 23/24 year we also saw the conclusion of the project to place security tags inside every item on the open shelves, thus securing our stock with in-book security for the first time in the Library’s history. The self-service kiosks which utilise the same technology were also introduced in the Issue Hall providing a further option for members to borrow and return their own books.
Finally, one area that members ask about in survey feedback is around digitisation of our collection. I am pleased to say that we are in a partnership with Find My Past who are digitising name-rich content from our shelves, as well as rarer older periodicals, for inclusion in products such as the British Newspaper Archive and Find My Past itself. We will also be contributing content to Cengage for inclusion in a Women’s Studies Archive alongside material from other significant collections held in London. In both cases we gain an income from the digital platforms as they are licensed to libraries and organisations around the world. It also helps promote the Library and its collection as users see where the digitised versions originate from.
Additionally, I am very pleased to announce that following work by our fundraising team to secure a significant donation, we are digitising our own archive of membership forms which will be made available in a publicly accessible database next year. This will create a rich source of information through seeing who has been in membership, who nominated whom into membership, occupations given and so on. The database will cover the period from the Library’s beginnings up to 1949.
