Letter from Cambridge |
 |
Oxford
I have been unfaithful. The second weekend of March I went to visit "The Other University" for an archaeology conference. Train ride into London, taxi from Kings Cross to Paddington station, train ride to Oxford. Three hours, not bad. The weather cooperated spectacularly, and I had a warm sunny weekend. The conference itself was both good and productive, as I learned the field a bit better and heard about some new digs in Bulgaria, the Pyrenees, and the Balkans. Hearing other academics talk about their obsessions is comforting, as it reminds you that your own are maybe not all that bizarre after all.
The trip gave me a chance to compare the two cities a bit more. Oxford is larger, and while both universities dominate their towns (less so than in medieval times – back in the early 1500's Cambridge had about 1500 masters and students, the town only about twice that number of residents) Oxford’s size in both area and population, and diversity of industry give it a much more worldly center of gravity. Nonetheless, you cannot escape the amazing architecture, which greets you around every corner in a blaze of spires and turretry. My hotel was a couple miles south of town on Abingdon Road but I discovered a river walk from it that took me along the Thames, only about 40 yards wide at that stage (although swollen with spring water) up to the city center, by the back door, as it were.
There were lots of river fowl in action, and the trees, especially the willows, were budding, so the bare branches had the faintest green cast to them, very appealing from a distance. The male swans were tussling over the females, with dramatic results. Apparently when annoyed as a swan, you fluff your wing feathers up so you look three times your normal size, open your beak and make hissing noises, then take a bead on your rival, lower your head and launch a furious menacing charge through the water, spray flying everywhere. There is no mistaking the hostile intent. Hopefully somebody turns tail and flees before serious damage results. I never saw a direct collision. Between that and watching the male pigeons try to impress their potential dates back in the city center, probably due to the spring weather, puffing up their ridiculous chest feathers and trying to plant themselves in front of the objects of their desire, who typically try to get as far away as possible, it is hard not having the thought “is there anything in the world sillier looking than avian courtship?” But then human mating conventions suggest themselves to the imagination, and it is time to move on to other topics.
I had appointments at three college libraries, but was able to visit the upper floor library of only one of them, at Corpus Christi College. I talked with each of the librarians at length and the folks at Merton College were kind enough to take some photos for me with my camera to study.
While at Corpus Christi I asked the librarian if they had been “inventoried” yet by paleographer Rodney Thomson, who is in charge of an Oxford University Press series that is printing the early catalogs of the colleges. The librarian chuckled and said “He’s right behind you” and sure enough, as I turned around, there he was in one of the stalls, three feet away, laptop out, card catalogue records in hand, going through the collection. I had to restrain a yelp. He and I had been on the same speakers’ panel at the University of Auckland, New Zealand at a conference in 2005, and if I had known then what a heavyweight in the field he was, I would have been considerably more nervous about being in the same lecture cluster as he. He has written a number of books (five in the San Francisco State University collection) and articles, mostly about the 12th century, and talks easily about a Carolingian hand vs. a Merovingian miniscule and has printed an early monastery catalog from the monastery at Bury St. Edmunds. I sure don’t think he remembered me but he at least smiled in my direction.
Libraries
Some features of the Oxford/Cambridge Dyad take some getting used to. I have issued some complaints about the Cambridge catalog, Newton (who names these things anyway?) which turns out not to be homegrown, as I initially suspected, but an Ex Libris/Endeavor product. This is perhaps worse, since one can excuse some idiosyncrasies with a home grown product that are less tolerable in a commercial product. Quite possibly poor record standardization (as viewed in the catalog) caused my inaccurate deduction, and in any event it is a very unfriendly article. Library of Congress subject headings coexist with other unidentifiable schema and the searching capacity is an embarrassment.
I attended a meeting of a subgroup of the British equivalent of the American Library Association. Their professional agency is awkwardly labeled CILIP [pronounced SEE-LIP] (the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) and is an outgrowth of an older association that expanded a few years ago to include the newer job description of “information professional.” The History of Libraries Special Interest group was meeting in Norwich, so I took the train up and sat in on what normally would have been a fairly tedious committee meeting that discussed membership, finances, conferences and the like. But I was meeting everyone new for the first time, had no responsibilities (or need to be suddenly articulate) so it was fun. Two of the ten were Scottish, so I heard a little bit about librarianship “in the North.” Another member is co-editor of the Library History journal, and all seemed to fit the academic librarian pattern – cultured, pragmatic, hardworking and dedicated. Afterwards was a public lecture on the history of a local, now deceased, subscription library that flourished around the turn of the century (the one awhile ago, it is getting harder to use that phrase properly.) Norwich itself was hilly but another good walking town with lots of handsome old buildings and an amazing, dominating cathedral.
Quite by accident, one of the members was also the chair of a Cambridge College Librarians group, and indicated they were meeting the following morning, and would I be interested in sitting in? Timing is a vastly underrated feature of scholarship. So the next morning back in Cambridge I ended up meeting several dozen different librarians and staff of the colleges of Cambridge who meet once a term to talk about common issues and solve problems. They have an uneasy relationship with the university library, a wholly separate entity. Some are in charge of very small collections, in effect one-person shows, but all share issues familiar to librarians in the CSU of consortial or other shared resources, merging data, staying in communication with the larger entity. I got invited to visit a couple of the college libraries, which I eagerly accepted.
Jesus College owes its existence to the appropriation by the university, on possibly trumped up circumstances, of a nunnery in town back in the 16th century, and the grounds are extensive and typically gorgeous. They count Samuel Coleridge as a former student, who by all accounts was extraordinarily dissolute, discovering opium while in residence. Their new library was in honor of the 500 year anniversary of their founding, and manages to be both handsome and functional, and not a glaring contrast to the older buildings that surround it. Among its interesting features is the use of the Bliss classification system, which I had heard of but never seen in practice. This is a faceted scheme, allowing for dramatic customization by any given library. A half dozen colleges libraries at both Cambridge and Oxford use Bliss, others (St. John's at Cambridge for one) use the Library of Congress and a surprising number use Dewey.
St. John’s College , like Jesus and most of the older colleges, has both a new and an old library, and I was able to get to both of them, the older one not without some doing, as I had to migrate through a rabbits’warren of hidden passages, fellows’ dining rooms and such. Built in the early 17th century, it provided a fascinating contrast to some of the older libraries I have seen, even though modeled on the same sort of floor plan. Much larger and airier, the shelves were fabulous works of art, and well designed for both browsing and usage by the masters and students.
Their new library, like Jesus’, was tacked on tastefully. It seems almost all the college libraries are available for use 24 hours a day, one of the advantages of being in heavily fortified quads that make it pretty difficult for an outsider to intrude once the main gate closes in the evening. Students enter the locked library with their college ID cards to study or use the library and can self-check out books with their cards. Some of the study areas at St. Johns had jaw-dropping views of the college and countryside, and I am not sure I would have been able to get much work done if situated in front of one of their panoramic vistas.
I also visited the old library of Christ’s College, home to Milton and Darwin, which I had seen on my last visit here. Another old beautiful library, with an attentive, energetic librarian, who happens to be the chair of the Cambridge Library Group, which I have joined for the spring. With monthly meetings and lectures, it has been another avenue to meet local librarians and learn more of library matters in town.
Unlike American academic library culture, the profession here is overwhelmingly female (in the college meeting I attended, only 8 of the 50 odd librarians/staff were male, whereas in the US, at least in the academic sector, males may not be a majority but constitute a much larger percentage.) Like at home, the librarians are underpaid, usually cannot afford to live in town, and have varied situations. Many colleges give the title of “Librarian” to a fellow (one of the senior faculty members attached to the college) so often the folks I met would have the title “sub librarian” even though they basically ran the place. Obviously the kind of relationship you had with your “fellow” would make a big difference in both how the library got managed and your own professional life.
Small World: Chapter 437
I was on my way home from a lecture at the Cambridge University library (on the history of cartography) one night and took my usual shortcut from the bike path through the physics department complex. On the way I noticed some signs that said “Lee Smolin Physics Lecture” with an arrow pointing to a lecture hall. This caused me a start since I went to college with a Lee Smolin, who has achieved a considerable degree of fame for his books explaining cosmology (Life in the Cosmos, and a new work out The Trouble with Physics.) There was no date attached to the sign so I had no way of knowing whether the lecture was for that evening, the day before, last week, etc. I got home and rummaged around the university website, finding nothing in the public lecture section. Ten minutes of beating around the bush brought me to the Cavendish Students’ Physics Club where there was news of the lecture. It was happening right that moment.
I dropped everything and headed over to hear what ended up being about 2/3 of the talk. There he was, the same guy I knew in college, a bunch older, no longer slender, a bit rumpled. Looked like a comfortable, garrulous Jewish uncle. And still very, very smart. I heard about supersymmetry, string theory, multiple dimensions, quantum gravity, the uncertainty principle, understanding almost enough to be confused. He was articulate, thorough, completely in his element. A wonderful treat.
Afterwards, in the gaggle of worshipers around him, sandwiched in between questions of quantum mechanics and gravity, I shook his hand, gave him my card and told him we were in college together. He squinted at me, the gears turning. It was an awfully small college. He didn’t remember me, not surprisingly, since we probably talked only a couple of times. He said to send an email, which I did, but have not heard back, but his agenda is a trifle fuller than mine. He gets to think about the universe, while I content myself with university libraries.
Best from abroad,
Ned