Bodleian Library ~ 19 July 2007

The Bodleian Library of Oxford University is divided between the Old Library and the New Library. The Old Library was established in 1488. We saw its stacking system where the stacks are suspended from the ceiling in order to be moved easily. These stacks are able to hold 2 million books (mostly the smaller books of the collection). We also visited some of the reading rooms, where I noticed local catalogs and annotated booklists.

Next we moved on to the New Library, which was built in 1938. The facility contains 8 floors of stacks that are open to readers only and several specialist rooms (for example, Indian Institute Library, Geography and Map Reading Room, etc.). The stacks are climate-controlled for preservation purposes, and they are designed in order to fit the items that are being stored. Our tour guide emphasized the idea that the library is made by its smaller collections, as evident when it was named after Thomas Bodley, whose collection was added in 1602. Some examples from the general collection include a high concentration of literature from the Far East and theses, which are popular and highly frequented.

The library currently holds 12 million items, yet it continues to grow since it is a deposit library. Therefore, it has record of the history of printing and publishing in England from 1610 until today. Because of the constantly increasing holdings, the curators face the challenge of deciding what to keep, sell, or exchange, when working on acquisition. The Bodleian Library has a similar conveyor system as the British Library, and it connects 15 reading rooms, one for each subject area. A few differences are that the Bodleian's system is not yet operated electronically, and the students are able to hold books in a reading room for as long as they need them. The task of locating books to retrieve them for readers seems like a daunting one, but there is a whole culture of people, endearingly called the Troglodites, who "live in the stacks" and know where everything is. How fascinating!

I was surprised by the organization of the Bodleian's collection. The books are partially organized by the Dewey Decimal System, but primarily according to size. As we wandered through the dimly-lit, musty stacks, I got the impression that I was walking through the old basement of an avid book collector. Our tour guide admitted to us that certain items are not easy to find unless a Troglodite happens to know where they are. Although the intrinsic historical value of the Bodleian collection is incomparable, I felt like the operation and organization are not up-to-date in the areas of technology and access. The catalog is now on CD, but students can only search by author, not by subject. This seems like it would make research very difficult, since students must consult a catalog elsewhere to find resources within a certain subject, then return to the Bodleian to search its catalog by the resulting authors.