Library Annual Report 2022-2023 by St John's College, Cambridge

Annual Report ST JOHN’S COLLEGE LIBRARY

2022-23

St John’s College Library Annual Report 2022-23 Contents

Page

The Sub-Librarian’s Annual Report

Staff Reports

Staff Training

The Working Library

Library Usage

Annual Circulation

The Old Library

The College Archive

Environmental Monitoring and Control

Projects

Feedback

Appendix – Regular Donors

Annual Report 2022-23

The Sub-Librarian’s Annual Report Our Departmental Aim is to provide a modern, efficient and welcoming Library service for all members of the College, and for all others with valid reasons to make use of the College’s library and archival collections and facilities, so enabling the College to fulfil its statutory and strategic aims. Fulfilling Our Strategic Aims Many of the measures of our success are qualitative rather than quantitative, as illustrated by the comments in the feedback section of this report. I still thought it might be informative to start off with a few key stats from the past year.       

Number of entries to the Working Library: 108,691 Average time spent by a reader in the Working Library over the course of the year: 510 hours and 45 minutes. Number of items added to the Working Library catalogue: 1459 Number of reader sessions to consult Special Collections and Archives: 382 Number of glass plate negatives catalogued and digitised: 738 Number of medieval manuscripts conserved, catalogued, and digitised: 8 Number of visitors to the Old Library for Open Cambridge: 1025 (in 9 hours) Behind every number lies the work of staff. Without the dedicated attention of our cleaning staff the Library would not be the safe and pleasant working environment so appreciated by students. Without each book being catalogued and processed our students would not be able to access the materials needed for their studies. Scholars can only consult world class research collections thanks to the meticulous descriptions created by staff, timely conservation, appropriate storage, diligent supervision, and knowledgeable assistance. Projects to make unique materials available online to a world-wide audience take planning and liaison with external bodies. Displays which attract over 1000 visitors take expert curation, and the visitor experience can only be delivered thanks to the readiness of staff to give up their weekend to spend long hours standing and welcoming people to the Library.

Just some of the new books in processing

Annual Report 2022-23 Staffing We’ve had several departures and arrivals this year. The annual changeover of trainees took place in August. Caroline Ball has now headed north to take up a post as a Library Assistant at Durham University. Her successor is Harriet Edwards, a Cambridge music graduate. Rebecca Le Marchand, whose achievements in teaching we celebrated last year, has been appointed as Deputy Librarian at Homerton: a lovely promotion for her. We were sorry to lose her. Although her post was briefly filled during the Easter Term, our new Assistant, Matt Whitehead, sadly had to move on for personal reasons, so August saw the post advertised again. A new appointee should be in post by the middle of the Michaelmas Term. While the post is vacant Katie Hannawin is working additional hours, though we are still a body down. A proposal to make the part-time Library Assistant post full-time on a permanent basis unfortunately fell victim to budget cuts, so the Working Library team remains stretched. Rebecca Watts has been filling in on a casual basis, first after Rebecca Le Marchand’s departure, and latterly as a project cataloguer, helping to catalogue a substantial addition to the Maxwell Collection, supported by funding from the donor. Last year I reported that the Biographical Office staff had been transferred to the Development Office. Since then, a reassessment by the College Council of strategic priorities for alumni records has seen both Fiona Colbert and Paul Everest made redundant, after 22 and 19 years’ loyal service respectively. They contributed significantly to the work of the Library over much of that time, curated the records of thousands of Johnians, helped countless enquirers, and supported the operational needs of many College departments. I would like to put on record our thanks to them for their dedicated service, and our regret that their work at the College has ended. Their expertise and knowledge will be sorely missed by researchers, colleagues, and the Johnian community. Teaching and Learning

Fiona Colbert and Paul Everest in 2019

The dissertation support group continued to meet weekly from summer through to Easter, led by Rebecca Le Marchand up to her departure in February, and thereafter by Adam Crothers and Katie Hannawin. Weekly palaeography classes also continued to be delivered by the Archivist. All new undergraduates received in-person induction tours at the start of the Michaelmas Term, as part of their wider College induction timetable, and take-up was very high. The Old Library very recently proved a hit with attendees at a ‘Women in Mathematics’ summer school, who were fascinated by some of the mathematical treasures of the collections. Events and Exhibitions Exhibitions are now fully up and running again post-pandemic, with the Upper Library participating in the two big University festivals of the year and attracting hundreds of visitors, a termly programme of exhibitions in the Library Exhibition Area, and the student Art and Photography Competition entrants once again dazzling us with their talent and creativity. The

Annual Report 2022-23 Archives have joined in, with two new exhibitions on women at St John’s and early benefactors of the College showing on display screens around the College. Thanks to a grant from the College’s Annual Fund, new portable pop-up banners have been produced, attractive and informative for use at events. Online versions of exhibitions are routinely made available via the Library’s website, so that those who cannot attend in person can still enjoy them, and the work involved in curation can continue to have an impact when the physical exhibition has finished. A Transitional Year This has been a year of acclimatising to new management and committee structures. I would like to record my personal thanks to Meg Norman for her work on the papers and minutes for the Working Library and Historical Collections Committees. A doubling of the administrative workload has been a challenge, but one which she has tackled very effectively, despite working only part-time. Thanks are due to Meg for compiling this Annual Report, and to all of the team for their contributions. Various departmental policies have been revised to reflect the new organisational structures, and opportunities have been taken to assess content more fully to check that all is still fit for purpose and aligns closely with College priorities. A new strategic plan is undergoing further refinement following feedback from the College Council. Challenges and Opportunities Ahead This department has a central role to play in fulfilling the College’s aims to create an outstanding and complete educational experience for undergraduates and graduates, to support research of international importance, and to introduce students to the nature and excitement of original research. The research collections held by the Library and Archives offer unique opportunities to engage and inspire St John’s students, whilst raising the profile of the College within the international academic community.

Image from medical manuscript (D.3) digitised as part of the Curious Cures project

Digitisation brings fantastic opportunities to widen access to collections and enable researchers worldwide to study material in new and collaborative ways, but it comes at significant cost in online storage and staff time. Active management and preservation of digital content is required. Digitisation is not a magic bullet to solve issues of storage space, as scholars continue to need to consult the original materials, particularly if studying their materiality. Thus far the Library has taken advantage of external projects and occasional donations to digitise its unique material. This reduces costs significantly and is a good way to make material available, but relying on a piecemeal approach means that the priorities are set by others and the most fragile, precious items or those most used by researchers may not be included. Investment in a more strategic and systematic approach will be needed if St

Annual Report 2022-23 John’s is to keep pace with comparable world-class research services. The preservation and management of ‘born digital’ material is an issue facing both special collections and archives. It is an immediate focus for the archives, as the renewal of our Archives Accreditation falls due in 2024 and accreditation requires sustainable and effective digital preservation practice and policies to be in place. Maintaining accredited status benchmarks services against national professional standards, demonstrates that the College takes its responsibilities as custodian of unique historical collections seriously, and ensures ongoing eligibility for various funding opportunities. Cataloguing is another area where progress is a priority for both the special collections and archives. To be useful, collections must be readily discoverable. High quality, comprehensive descriptions can contribute significantly to effective research. Completion of the new catalogue of medieval manuscripts (so ably begun by Dr Sarah Gilbert in 2021-22 thanks to a grant from the College’s Annual Fund), should be high on the agenda, though funding will be required to employ the right level of expertise for the 2-3 years needed to complete the project. Much of our focus is on providing the best learning environment and facilities for our students, and this report highlights the Working Library team’s consistent drive to innovate and improve services over the past year. In a constantly changing information landscape, Library staff are perfectly placed in terms of their professional knowledge and their trusted position to guide students in navigating their way through a complex online world, to develop the information literacy and practical study skills they need to excel in their chosen fields. Building upon the success of the dissertation support group, in the coming year it would be good to work ever more closely with College teaching staff to provide targeted guidance and training. Staff are constantly updating their skills and knowledge to keep pace with the information environment. Artificial Intelligence will bring new challenges with potential for enhanced methods of information retrieval and new ways of Just a few of our study skills titles interacting with learning and research resources. I wonder what the next year will bring? Kathryn McKee Sub-Librarian

Annual Report 2022-23

Staff Reports

The Library Team (plus) From left to right: Kathryn McKee; Rebecca Watts (part-time project cataloguer); Adam Crothers; Matt Whitehead (Library Assistant April-August 2023); Paul Everest; Fiona Colbert; Katie Hannawin; Meg Norman; Lynsey Darby; Janet Chow; Catherine Shanahan; and seated on the floor - Caroline Ball; Nancy Cleaver. – Photograph by Angela McKenzie taken on Fiona Colbert’s last day, June 2023.

Janet Chow | Academic Services Librarian Last year I helped organise and host the Oxford and Cambridge Librarians’ Conference which was held in the Old Divinity School on 4th April 2023. The programme included plenaries, workshops, library tours and lightning talks and was available in-person and online. Organising as well as hosting such a conference involved a lot of planning. In addition, as Treasurer of the Cambridge College Libraries Forum (CCLF), I also had responsibility for managing the conference budget. It was a good opportunity to show our wonderful College to other librarians in the Oxbridge College network. Nearly a hundred delegates attended the conference in person. Overall, the feedback was very positive. The quadrennial Working Library User Survey was originally planned for Lent term 2023, but it coincided with the large student survey run by the University. Consequently, the survey was postponed until Lent Term 2024. In its place an Audio-Visual (AV) Room User Survey was undertaken in Lent term 2023 following a suggestion from the then JCR to convert the AV Room to a dual-purpose space for both the AV collection and a Common Room. Despite many students favouring a dual-purpose AV Room, respondents expressed strong concern about the excessive noise this might pose. Consequently, it was decided that the AV Room should continue for single-purpose film watching. A fuller report of the key findings from the survey can be found in ‘The Working Library’ section later in this report.

Annual Report 2022-23 Nancy Cleaver | Library Cleaner (part time) 2022-2023 was my second year with the College and things have been good: back to normal and not wearing masks any more. The Working Library was much busier this year which means we must be doing something right. Just hope the new labels for the bins encourage the students to put their recycling in the right place (thanks to Rebecca for doing the labels). In early summer we cleaned the closed-access basement and when we were dusting the documents, I was surprised to see a picture of my husband from when he first joined St. John's College as a student back in the 00s! I enjoyed going to the manuscript room to do the training with Kathryn. I am looking forward to another year of doing my best in the library with my colleague Catherine. It will be nice when the new windows on the 3rd floor are installed - we hope they will be easier to close!

Adam Crothers | Special Collections Assistant My mind’s been on exhibitions, this last year. It was hugely surprising and encouraging to see my 2021 slavery-and-abolition effort praised in the University’s Legacies of Enslavement report (2022) for its ‘ironies and complexities’. I’m still unconvinced that I’m somebody who ought to be talking about that sort of thing (as I discussed in a paper for this year’s OxCam conference); but I’m glad I can manage something respectable and respectful nonetheless. 2022’s Open Cambridge saw me curate an event on the book as communications technology; 1 April 2023 brought a Cambridge Festival exhibition on fools, hoaxes, pranks and jokes. The latter saw me experimenting a bit with the online accompaniment, trying, in the wake of November’s fantastic Historic Libraries Forum conference, not to reproduce the physical exhibition online but to complement it. And for a few intense weeks in the winter I arranged hundreds of hi-res scans of material from the Douglas Adams (1971) collection for Unbound’s book 42 (ed. by Kevin Jon Davies); we marked the launch in September 2023 (technically outside the remit of this report, I think, but oh well) with an Open Cambridge exhibition called Improbabilities. 1025 visitors in nine hours; just peanuts to space, et cetera, but still, good stuff, and I’m grateful as ever for my excellent colleagues and all the work they put in. Mark Wells (1981), erstwhile Domestic Bursar, took the photo of me and my tally sheet and my knitted tie and my little pencil. In personal news, the marriage has made it past the one-year mark, we have two fantastic kittens named after literary detectives, and while demand for a third book of poems or whatever remains low, the occasional commission still comes in and writing remains a joy. Life – he unwisely said, writing a few days before flying to California, home of earthquakes and wildfires and hungry bears – sometimes feels better than I deserve.

Annual Report 2022-23 Lynsey Darby | College Archivist Looking back at this academic year, I’m struck more than ever by the chronological range of the documents managed by the archivist at St John’s. The last few months have been rather dominated by modern records, as I’ve recommenced in earnest the work started by my predecessor on a Collegewide retention schedule, which will have a ‘functional’ rather than departmental structure. I’m not underestimating the scale of the task, and time is already getting on, particularly as arranging meetings with representatives of every department in College during term-time isn’t always easy. Some people are passionate about records management, and though I confess that I’m not quite one of them – I’m still more interested in mediaeval monasticism, for which I blame Ellis Peters – it’s indisputably necessary, in order to streamline recordkeeping, avoid duplication, make sure gaps in archival holdings don’t develop, and remove uncertainty about what to do with the less easily-categorised record types once they’re no longer needed for current business purposes. My ‘fix’ of earlier records includes, of course, cataloguing, identifying suitable documents for palaeography sessions, answering enquiries, and being nosey about the research visitors to the archives are doing! We have such a wealth of early modern records, such as the rentals and the letters of early Masters such as Owen Gwyn, and of mediaeval deeds generated by St John’s Hospital and by the estates across the country which were granted to the College in its first few decades of existence, that I count myself fortunate to be able to work with material that covers such a timespan.

Harriet Edwards | Library Graduate Trainee It feels quite strange to be contributing to an annual report when, at the time of writing, I have only been here for a month-and-a-half, but here goes! Before starting at John’s, I was a music student at Robinson College, making this my first ‘proper’ job. How very adult. Since changing College allegiance I’ve been in awe of the sheer size of the Library (as well as the college in general – I think the only places I can say with confidence I know the locations of are the Library and the Buttery!) and am thoroughly enjoying getting to know all of the various books and resources we have on offer. My experience so far has been characterised by gradually learning how a library operates from the other side of the desk as well as preparing for the almost apocalyptic-sounding event known as ‘the arrival of students’. The former has involved me being introduced to the wonderful world of the Library of Congress classification scheme, learning the difference between classifying and cataloguing, and becoming familiar with the multi-stage operation that is book processing. The final stage of putting books on shelves has taught me that I do not know the alphabet as well as I thought I did. The latter has included a lot of printing of signs and subject guides, planning for the military operation that is induction tours, and checking the many, many reading lists which have been coming in. I have also been giving myself a crash course in how to use Instagram as, apparently, being the ‘token young person’ in the department means that the library social media falls to me, despite the fact that I have been referred to as an 87-year-old in a 22-year-old body. Wish me luck.

Annual Report 2022-23 Katie Hannawin | Library Assistant (part-time) Another year, another Annual Report! As usual, I have absolutely no idea where the last year has gone, and cannot quite believe I am still here writing contributions for my fourth one of these. I am trying to think about all the various things that have happened since the last Annual Report, but there has been so much going on that it is impossible to write it all down (or even think about it properly!) I’ve managed to pick out a few highlights though, which will hopefully give a reasonable summary of what I’ve been up to for the past 12 months. The biggest part of my year has been focused on finishing off my Master’s in Library and Information Studies at UCL. May-September were very much consumed with my dissertation which examined the representation of marginalised communities in standard library cataloguing language, and the relief/sleep-deprived delirium that I felt after submitting on the 4th September 2023 was a very welcome (if slightly bizarre) feeling. There were definitely moments throughout this whole process when the task at hand seemed rather impossible, and I am incredibly grateful for the endless support from my wonderful colleagues over the last few months – thank you all so much for your unwavering belief in me, I only hope I have managed to do you all justice! I still have a little while to wait for my final results, but I’m really proud to have completed my MA, and am excited for the next steps ahead. Outside of my studies and back in the Library, things have been moving at a pretty steady pace. I have been working away on various longer-term projects as usual, such as finishing off the stock check that was started in summer 2022, as well as undertaking a reclassification project for our local Cambridge Collection - more in-depth information for those interested in both of these can be found later in the Report! Because of the different fluctuations in staffing across the year, at times I have also had the chance to mix up my daily routine by helping take on tasks normally covered by the full-time Library Assistant. There is something uniquely satisfying about spending an afternoon processing new books to get them ready for the shelves, and I have very much enjoyed the chance to become reacquainted with our label printer, Troy! It has been a whirlwind of a year, so here’s to hoping the next 12 months are a little bit calmer now that I have finished studying and can breathe again!

Kathryn McKee | Sub-Librarian and Special Collections Librarian I spent quite a bit of time this year in the company of John Couch Adams, discoverer of Neptune, (pictured here) as I prepared an exhibition on Johnian mathematics to celebrate the centenary of the Adams Society. Aside from this, it has been a year of memorable and thoroughly likeable readers. Visiting scholar Paul Murray practically moved into the Reading Room to commune with our Colenso papers. His enthusiasm for his research was utterly inspiring, as was that of a Cambridge PhD student who, having studied one gloriously illustrated manuscript in forensic detail (beginning with a scanned copy during lockdown), embarked on an ambitious attempt to compare all the other thirteenth-century manuscripts in the collection before her submission deadline. She did it! Thirteenth-century manuscripts were popular this year, as another doctoral student painstakingly measured the thickness of each page of thirteenth-century bibles, seeking clues to a better understanding of the manufacturing process of ultra-thin vellum. Along with a conservator from the Cambridge Colleges Conservation Consortium she also took non-invasive samples for DNA analysis. Interest in the Heberden materia medica cabinet has prompted vital conservation work on the fragile volumes of botanical samples it contains: often less used than the extraordinary assortment of animal, vegetable, and mineral extracts in the drawers, but readers were keen to consult both this year. We witnessed a happy coincidence of students from far-flung locations happening to come to consult Cecil Beaton’s papers on the same days, seizing the unexpected opportunity to discuss and compare research, and ending up swapping contact details and offering to read each

Annual Report 2022-23 other’s chapters. Facilitating all these varied research journeys makes working with special collections so rewarding.

Meg Norman | Library Administrator It’s exactly one year on from starting my ‘new job’ at St John’s, although as I work part-time it only feels like about 6 months. I’ve begun to get to know the city and the College: I’ve wandered the Backs, photographed urban cows (as you do), put some names to faces, and figured out where the Pythagoras building is. This past year has been a bit of a busy one! Along with compiling and editing Annual Reports (It’s nice to be putting an s on the end of that!) and facilitating meetings, I’ve had the pleasure of organising two art/photography competitions and curating exhibitions there-of. My main take away, apart from wishing for more hours in the day and that I had written more legible notes last year, is that John’s staff, Fellows and students are incredible multi-faceted people, who are wonderfully creative and kind. I look forward to meeting more of you soon!

Catherine Shanahan | Library Cleaner (part time) Gosh I can’t believe this is my sixth year of working in the Library! Myself and my lovely colleague Nancy are putting the finishing touches to our summer (spring) clean so our wonderful Library should all be shipshape for our new and returning users. The computer room on the third floor is looking particularly nice! All the worktops have been replaced and the old desk dividers have been removed, in my opinion giving a much more light and airy feeling to the space. Happily the new worktops are not so much of a dust magnet so that’s a bonus. Sadly some of my colleagues, Fiona Colbert, Paul Everest and Rebecca Le Marchand have moved on from St John’s this year. It’s lovely to have been able to form such great friendships with people you work with! The Library department recently took part in Disaster Training, everything crossed we never have to put this into practice! It was very informative and I enjoyed being able to enter the manuscripts room again. It is an amazing feeling to have all that history so close. To also have so many incunabula above on the next floor of the Old Library is very exciting. We are very fortunate to be surrounded by such a wealth of history and it certainly makes for a very interesting place to work.

Annual Report 2022-23

Staff Training All staff have participated in training this year. Some essential courses (health and safety, cybersecurity, and Prevent) are arranged centrally by the College. All of the Library team also participated in a very useful day of onsite training in disaster planning, salvage, and recovery, delivered by Harwell Restoration, the leading UK experts in the field. Since that training, all staff have also had walk-throughs in both the Old Library and the Archives to ensure that in the event of an emergency everyone knows the locations of keys, switches, exits, disaster equipment, and the priority collections for evacuation. While every possible measure is taken to ensure that a disaster does not occur, preparedness is essential. Training relating to legal compliance has also been undertaken by relevant staff (Data Protection for the Archivist, while she continues to cover this role temporarily, and offpayroll worker compliance training for those with budgetary responsibility). The majority of training relating to staff’s daily areas of responsibility has been free, with modest fees being payable for professional conferences. Online and hybrid events have given excellent value for money and reduced the time away from normal duties while providing staff with highly relevant information on the latest developments in the library and information field and examples of best practice. St John’s Library staff have contributed to wider professional training across Cambridge too. Janet Chow was one of the organisers of the biennial OxCam Librarians Conference, which was hosted in College. This highly successful hybrid event was attended by 87 library staff from Oxford and Cambridge, and provided a valuable exchange of best practice across a range of professional themes. Adam Crothers was a speaker on one of the panel discussions. Staff member Sub-Librarian/Special Collections Librarian

Academic Services Librarian Administrator

Archivist

Graduate Trainee

Training DCDC22 UCL Rare Books Club Claire Bolton talk: ‘Incunable excavations’ Panizzi lectures ‘Maps of the mind: diagrams medieval and modern’ Off-payroll worker compliance training First Aid OxCam Librarians Conference Off-payroll worker compliance training Minute Taking: An Introduction Active Listening: The Secret to Effective Communication Data Protection Toolkit Data Protection and Health Records panel discussion Information Asset Registers

Provider TNA/RLUK UCL OBS

Using the PDIR (data breach) reporting app Fire Awareness OxCam Librarians Conference Introduction to Rare Books Cataloguing Cataloguing CaTaLOG website training HTML

Cost £54.00 Free Free Free

SJC Sellwood OxCam SJC UC LL

£40.00 Free Free

TNA/NKA OIS

Free Free

OIS

Free

OIS

Free

iHASCO OxCam LiT

Free Free Free

L@C CH LL

Free Free Free

Annual Report 2022-23

Library Assistant (RLM) Library Assistant (MW) Part-Time Library Assistant

Special Collections Assistant Part-time Cleaner (CS) Part-time Cleaner (NC) ALL staff

Palaeography HR Compliance and Wellbeing Manual Handling Camguides In-house training circulation & issue desk routines Introduction to Rare Books Cataloguing CALC in Cambs OxCam Librarians Conference Reading the Room

SJCL iHASCO iHASCO LiT SJCL

Free Free Free Free -

LiT

Free

CALC OxCam HLF

£30.00 £40.00 £50.00

Data Protection Health & Safety essentials Prevent Cybersecurity awareness Disaster response and salvage ‘Away Day’ half-day meeting

UC iHASCO SJC MyC Harwell SJCL

Free £1080.00 Free £1294.00

TOTAL BL CALC CH Harwell HLF iHASCO L@C LiT LL MyC NKA OBS OIS OxCam RLUK Sellwood SJC SJCL TNA UCL UC

British Library Critical Approaches to Libraries Colin Higgins Harwell Restoration Historic Libraries Forum Health and Safety & Compliance Online Libraries@Cambridge Librarians in Training LinkedIn Learning MyCompliance e-learning platform Naomi Korn Associates Oxford Bibliographical Society Office of Intercollegiate Services Oxford and Cambridge Librarians Research Libraries UK Sellwood Training St John’s College St John’s College Library The National Archives University College London University of Cambridge PPD Prepared for disaster

Kathryn McKee Sub-Librarian

Annual Report 2022-23

The Working Library Impressive improvements to the fabric of the Library providing a better learning environment for users were achieved during 2022-23.

searched within collections. Items can be sorted by date and author for easy browsing. Additional collections will be added over the course of time.

During summer 2023, new carpet was laid in both Chapel and Garden wings on the Second Floor. New blinds were also fitted in the Seminar Room. With the support from the Maintenance Department, the programme of replacing the remaining old desk bench tops on the main floors was also completed. Spotlights at the end of the bookcases have been replaced with warm, eco-friendly and energysaving bulbs.

Following a suggestion from the then JCR to convert the Audio-Visual (AV) Room into a dual-purpose space – for accessing AV materials and for providing a small Common Room – the Audio-Visual Room User Survey was conducted in the Lent Term 2023. The survey was to gauge students’ views on this possible change. A total of 1,005 survey invitations were sent to all junior members. Of the total respondents, 373 (37%) students completed the survey.

Old computers found on all Library floors have been replaced. In response to students’ needs, four second screens have been installed, so that students can connect their laptops to larger screens. We’re indebted to our IT colleagues who installed these facilities. A two-seater silent pod has been installed in the Periodicals Area on the Library Ground Floor. The silent pod can be booked for Zoom calls, study space for up to two users, or oneto-one supervision. The silent pod enables space to be freed up in the Library Seminar Room which can now be used for group work and meetings.

AV Room

Some of the key findings were the following: Despite 61% (n=223) of the respondents being in favour of using the AV Room for dual purpose, one-third of respondents (35%, n=169) thought the greatest concern would be excessive noise, both in the Common Room and immediately outside the Room. Other concerns included:

Improvements have also been made to the Cambridge Collection. Katie Hannawin (Library Assistant) has re-classified the Cambridge Collection located in Chapel Basement, making the Collection easier for browsing and retrieving. Library users have been able to search for books or journals on iDiscover; now they can also view some of our Library collections on iDiscover. Library staff have created Library collections, including New Books, Audio-Visual Material, Graphic Novels, Academic Skills, Language Learning Material, Health & Wellbeing, Kenneth Maxwell Collection and Guy Lee Collection. Individual titles can also be

The ability to watch films could be restricted (23%, n=108). Using the room as a study/work space could be restricted (21%, n=99). Borrowing the AV collection could be restricted (15%, n=71).

Annual Report 2022-23 Respondents also raised concerns that, if the AV Room was converted to a Common Room, it would send a message that the AV collection is regarded as less academically important than the other (book) collection. Due to the Library layout and its fixtures, excessive noise in the AV Room could not be easily contained. Consequently, it was decided that the AV Room should remain as a single purpose room for accessing AV materials. The full report is available to view online https://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/library

undergraduates when they arrived in Cambridge. Library tours were arranged for all new undergraduates over a three-day period, from Monday to Wednesday during the first week of term. A total of 176 new undergraduates were organised by subject group, with Library staff each taking four or five groups of students at staggered times. The 30-minute induction sessions focused on demonstrating how to search the Library catalogue and locate a book from the search results; how to access e-resources, for example, ejournals and ebooks, and how to check Library borrowing accounts. Students were afforded opportunities to familiarise themselves with the facilities and resources available, and particularly, the location of materials related to their subjects. Library staff also demonstrated how to borrow and renew items using the self-issue machine, and explained fire procedures and the security system.

I am delighted that the Working Library has once again been awarded accreditation for 2023-2024 by Book Industry Communication. The accreditation scheme is awarded only to libraries who meet the highest standards of providing beneficial technologies to library services. Renewal of accreditation provides an incentive to seek continued improvement and acknowledges that College users are receiving the best possible provision of Library services. As in previous years, the Library continued to offer induction support to all the first-year

Janet Chow Academic Services Librarian

Silent Pod

Annual Report 2022-23

Library usage The number of Library users and visitors accessing the Library is recorded throughout the year by the infrared sensor positioned next to the Library entrance. Statistics show that there has been an overall increase in visits to the Library from 83,478 visits in 2021-22 to 108,691 in 2022-23, indicating a normal return to the Library after COVID. The chart below (Figure 1) illustrates the total number of visits to the Library annually over the last three years.

16,683

83,478

2022-23

108,691

2021-22

2020-21

Figure 1. Library entries in the last three years, 2020-23

Table 1 below shows the pattern of Library visits in the last three years. As expected, Table 1 shows that users frequent the Library more during term time, and that of all three terms, Easter term stands out as the busiest. Michaelmas Term

Christmas vacation

Lent Term

Easter vacation

Easter term Summer vacation

2022-23

23,504

5,913

24,312

9,032

32,602

13,328

2021-22

17,020

1,729

17,954

7,953

26,939

11,883

2020-21

11,097

1,420

4,166

Table 1. Three-year comparison of entries to the Library by term

In order to gather a snapshot of Library usage during the busiest period of a term, statistics are collected in week five (Monday to Friday) during term time to provide a typical picture of Library usage. Examples of such statistics include Library entries, and number of books issued by staff/self-check machine. Figure 2 shows the number of entries during week five across the three terms. There were significant high numbers of entries during Easter Term compared with the other two terms. Understandably, Easter Term was the busiest, with examinations, and students revising in the Library until quite late.

Annual Report 2022-23

5,000

4,461

4,500 4,000 3,500 3,000

2,394

2,445

Michaelmas 2022

Lent 2023

2,500 2,000 1,500 1,000 500 0

Easter 2023

Figure 2. Week 5 Library entries by term 2022-23

The self-issue machine continues to be popular among College members. As shown in Figure 3 below, an overwhelming majority of items were issued/renewed and returned through the self-issue machine during week five. The self-issue machine is particularly convenient to College members outside staffed hours. Understandably, the machine was slightly less used during Easter Term, when most students were preparing for exams.

Figure 3. Items issued in Week 5 by term, 2022-23

Janet Chow Academic Services Librarian

Annual Report 2022-23

Annual Circulation Library borrowing levels, based on frequency counts of items borrowed, have increased nearly 15% to 13,127 in 2022-23 compared with 11,442 in 2021-22 (see Figure 1). It is also worth noting that Library borrowing levels in 2022-23 were higher than pre-COVID in 2018-19 (12,510). The increase in borrowing indicated that print books remain a popular reading format despite trends having shifted towards electronic books during COVID.

Figure 1. Library borrowing – annual circulation

Since the overall borrowing figures have increased, it is not surprising that borrowing figures increased for most terms, except for the Easter vacation and summer vacation. With the exception of 2021-22, Michaelmas term has the highest borrowing rate (Table 1), closely followed by Lent Term, reflecting the fact that courses are in full swing.

Michaelmas Term Christmas vacation Lent Term Easter vacation Easter Term Summer vacation Total

2022-23

2021-22

2020-21

2019-20

2018-19

3890

2788

3617

3975

4607

697 3814 798 3275

638 3406 841 3104

290 1612 238 2065

374 3754 483 35

482 3721 475 2457

653 13127

665 11442

415 8237

225 8846

768 12510

Table 1. Borrowing figures for the last five academic years by term

As shown in Figure 2 below, the three most borrowed subjects for 2022-23 were History (1,148), followed by English (1,042) and MML (1,022), although the borrowing figures for both English and MML dropped compared to the previous year (2021-22). However, there is a significant increase in borrowing in Archaeology, from 81 to 201 (2022-23); Natural Science Physical and Natural Science

Annual Report 2022-23 Biological also saw a noticeable increase in borrowing – from 545 to 776 (2022-23) and 507 to 754 (2022-23), respectively. Other subjects which saw an increase in borrowing include AMES, Education, Vet Medicine, Law, HPS, Linguistics, Geography, Music, Theology, Classics, Philosophy, HSPS and Economics.

Figure 2. Circulation of books by subject area in 2021-22 and 2022-23

In the last academic year (2022-23), Library staff recorded the numbers of books belonging to different subject groupings which were cleared from desks each morning. It was hoped that this information would reveal more about which sections of the Library collection experience particularly heavy usage for reference purposes exclusively - without necessarily being borrowed. Figure 3 below shows that a total of 1,498 books were cleared from desks last year. In descending order, the books used for reference were Classics (244), followed by English (193), History (159) and Law (113). Of all four subjects, English and History were also two of the most borrowed subjects, indicating that English and History books are the most heavily used by students.

Annual Report 2022-23

Figure 3. Total books cleared by subject area in 2022-23

Janet Chow Academic Services Librarian

Annual Report 2022-23

The Old Library Statistics Figures from 2018-19 are provided to give a comparison with pre-pandemic activity levels.

Readers consulting special collections material Letters filed E-mail responses to enquiries Reproductions of special collections material processed outside College Onsite professional photography Reproductions of special collections material processed in house Permissions granted to reproduce special collections material in published works Use of special collections material in connection with biographical work

2022-23 302

2021-22 168

2020-21 6

2018-19 288

1 606 738 glass plate negatives; 8 medieval manuscripts 0 1065

5 1291 0

1 987 0

11 1360 4

½ day 2342

2 days 1700

3 days 1483

N/A

It is encouraging to see that reader numbers have now returned to pre-pandemic figures, in part helped by a couple of Cambridge readers with long-term projects requiring regular visits. The following graph illustrates the pattern of reader sessions over the last decade. Reader sessions to consult special collections by the geographical region in which the reader is based 400 350 300 250 200 150 100 50 0 2013-14 2014-15 2015-16 2016-17 2017-18 2018-19 2019-20 2020-21 2021-22 2022-23

Americas

Europe

Rest of world

The statistics show a mixed picture this year. Figures for reproductions have fallen significantly. More readers were able to access the collections in person this year, whereas in the previous two years we

Annual Report 2022-23 received more requests for copies from scholars who were unable to visit. This does not entirely account for the drop in requests. It is, however, to be expected that as digital copies of more of the collections are created, far more requests will be fulfilled from existing stock and fewer new reproductions will be needed. Numbers of visitors to the Upper Library were not collected, as the Upper Library is now open on a regular drop-in basis for College members and their guests on Wednesday afternoons in Full Term. Visits at other times are arranged by appointment. Purchases This year the Noël Marshall Fund has enabled us to buy a selection of books which complement existing collections, including a particularly significant letter from William Wilberforce. While we cannot buy every item brought to our attention, we are very grateful to those Johnians who alert us when material of potential College interest comes up for sale in odd places – the Wilberforce letter was a brilliant spot, and thanks to help from Quaritch we were able to get it despite it being auctioned in the USA in the wee small hours. Thomas à Kempis, De imitatio Christi. Paris, 1530. Purchased from W.S. Cotter Rare Books, £4750. Candler, John, Brief notices of Hayti : with its condition, resources and prospects, 1842. Purchased from Samuel Gedge, £450. Thomas Stackhouse, Lehrbegriff der ganzen christlichen Religion, 1772. 7 volume set. Purchased from Simon Beattie, £150. William Wilberforce, autograph letter to Lord Henry Petty soliciting his support for the appointment of Thomas Clarkson to the Professorship of Modern History at the University of Cambridge. 19 February 1807. Purchased from RR Auction/ Bernard Quaritch, £1762.53. A new guide to London: or, directions to strangers; shewing the chief things of curiosity and note in the city and the suburbs, 1726. Purchased from Bernard Quaritch, £750. Robert Morden, Geography rectified: or, a description of the world, in all its kingdoms, provinces, countries, islands, cities, towns, seas, rivers, bayes, capes, ports…, 1680. Purchased from Bernard Quaritch, £6500. Letter from William Wilberforce to Lord Petty

Annual Report 2022-23 Donations We are grateful to all our donors for their generosity. The papers of Sir Vivian Fuchs and Mervyn Parkinson have the potential to provide a particularly rich resource for outreach and educational work with schools once the collections are fully catalogued. Professor David McMullen (gifts in honour of Dr Joseph McDermott) The general history of China translated from the French of P. du Halde (1736). 4 volumes Thomas Taylor Meadows Desultory notes on the government and people of China (1847) Sir John Francis Davis The poetry of the Chinese (1870) Sir George Thomas Staunton Ta tsing leu; being the fundamental laws … of the penal code of China (1810) Peter Fuchs The papers of Sir Vivian Fuchs

Material on the Lake Rudolf Rift Valley Expedition from the papers of Sir Vivian Fuchs

Christopher Fletcher Financial donation to enable the digitization of the glass plate negatives together with some key documents from the papers of Richard Yapp. Robin Bunce Shooting scripts for all six episodes of the BBC TV adaptation of The hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy, on which his late father worked as a cameraman.

Annual Report 2022-23 Michael Finnissy Original scores of compositions commissioned by St John’s College Choir with the support of the College’s Annual Fund. The estate of Dr Adam Kendon A small number of books, poems and letters by Frank Kendon. Chris Parkinson Diaries and photographs of M. M. L. Parkinson relating to the Cambridge East Greenland Expedition, in which J. M. Wordie and Vivian Fuchs also participated. Visits and Classes 40 delegates from the General 35th International Congress on Genealogical and Heraldic Sciences – 2 groups Aug. 2022 Sixth-form students from the UCL Academy Oct. 2022 Tour for staff from the Development Office Oct. 2022 First year English literature students manuscripts class Nov. 2022 Exchange students from Bonn University Nov. 2022 MML MPhil students manuscripts class Jan. 2023 Sans Frontières programme ghost tour with Mark Nicholls incl. Upper Library Jan. 2023 Margaret Beaufort Institute exhibition of LMB material Feb. 2023 MPhils visit with Scott Mandelbrote Feb. 2023 Two ASNC classes studying the Southampton Psalter. Feb. 2023 Sans Frontières programme Upper Library visit Feb. 2023 Privacy Laws conference July 2023. Students from Hong Kong with Matthias Dörrzapf July 2023 Events For the Cambridge Festival 2023 a display ‘What strange tricks’: fools, hoaxes, pranks and jokes was staged for April Fools’ Day. 449 visitors enjoyed themselves tremendously trying to spot which item in the exhibition was itself an April fool. William Morgan’s Welsh Bible was used in the College Chapel on St David’s Day. The Upper Library was open with a display of treasures for graduands and their families following General Admission, though take-up was disappointingly small. What strange tricks indeed – the Bookfish

For Open Cambridge in September 2023, an exhibition on Douglas Adams was staged in conjunction with other events to mark the publication of 42: the wildly improbable ideas of Douglas Adams, edited by Kevin Jon Davies, and based

Annual Report 2022-23 on the papers held at St John’s. Over the course of just 9 hours, 1025 people visited, including several friends of Douglas Adams who were featured in some way in the exhibition material. Preservation During the course of this year the Cambridge Colleges Conservation Consortium has repaired and conserved four early printed volumes, the Khamsa of Nizami, a sixteenth-century Persian manuscript, and carried out extensive work on two Herbarium volumes containing fragile plant samples from the Materia Medica cabinet of William Heberden. The work on the Herbarium volumes will be completed in 2023-24. Tristram Bainbridge, a specialist furniture restorer recommended by the Fitzwilliam Museum, repaired one of the wooden drawers of the Heberden cabinet after the original eighteenth-century glue gave way under the weight of the 44 glass bottles it contained. It is thought that historic leakage of an acidic substance may have weakened the structure.

Broken drawer of the Heberden Materia Medica Cabinet prior to repair

Seven of the eight manuscripts which were involved in the Curious Cures project underwent conservation at the University Library prior to their digitisation (one did not require attention having already been conserved). Parchment was cleaned, tears repaired, and loose gatherings resewn. The high summer temperatures of 2022 were not repeated, and the absence of any sustained period of combined heat and humidity meant that it was not necessary this summer to check for bread beetle in the Upper Library, as conditions were not suitable for hatching. Lower Library Environment A project is now in place to address the worsening conditions in the Lower Library, which resulted in the serious damage to collections reported last year. The aim is to provide more stable and predictable conditions for rare books and special collections, with safe fluctuations in temperature and humidity

Annual Report 2022-23 within reasonable and anticipated parameters. It is recognised that passive measures alone cannot fully address the issues and that a mechanical air-handling system will form part of the solution. A working group consisting of representatives from Caroe Architecture, the Maintenance Department and the Sub-Librarian has met throughout the year. Going forward the new Domestic Bursar, Alison Cox, will be included as her building expertise will be of benefit to the project. A project brief has now been drafted. Site surveys have been carried out, and the scope of the project broadly defined. Logistics for a potential complete decant of the Lower Library are under consideration, noting that the University Library’s new offsite storage facility at Ely might prove an appropriate, local, and reliable option for storage. A timescale has not yet been set, as the final design of the solution remains to be decided, and will require listed building consent. Exhibitions Michaelmas 2022 – Time and Space, curated by Jess Hollerton Lent 2023 – Mathematics and Mathematicians at St John’s. An exhibition to mark the centenary of the Adams Society curated by the Sub-Librarian Easter 2023 – Student Art and Photography Competition entries were displayed Summer 2023 – LookBook: fashions and fads in historical book design curated by Caroline Ball, 202223 Graduate Trainee Loans The newly restored portrait of Lady Margaret Beaufort by Meynnart Wewyck was loaned to the National Portrait Gallery for their grand re-opening in June 2023. It will be displayed there for three years. An eighteenth-century sextant from the scientific instruments collection in the care of the Whipple Museum has been loaned to the Fitzwilliam Museum for the first phase of their three-part exhibition Black Atlantic. Scientific Research This year has seen scientific analysis of several medieval manuscripts. Manuscript D.6, the Psalter of Robert de Lindsey, underwent a range of techniques for pigment analysis as part of an AHRC-funded research project, carried out on site by the team from the Fitzwilliam Museum. Precise results are not yet available, but research of this sort can reveal fascinating information about the range of materials used in manuscript manufacture, and potential links between different manuscripts, giving greater insight into their history. Manuscripts K.15 and E.37, both thirteenth-century Bibles from France, underwent non-intrusive DNA analysis on site, under the supervision of a colleague from the Conservation Consortium to inform doctoral research into the manufacture of ultra-thin vellum.

Annual Report 2022-23

Researcher and conservator examining manuscripts prior to taking non-invasive samples for DNA analysis

Staffing Jess Hollerton continued to volunteer to undertake conservation cleaning one day a week, which was particularly appreciated during the period when our regular book-binder and conservation cleaner was unable to work due to a broken wrist. She also helped to staff the Cambridge Festival and Open Cambridge events. Media Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta was filmed in the Upper Library in connection with his being named as a United Nations ‘Champion of the Earth’ for his transformative work to halt ecosystem damage. October 2022. Professor Eske Willeslev was filmed in the Upper Library in connection with his discovery of twomillion-year-old DNA. December 2022. He was filmed again in June 2023. Professor Graeme Barker was filmed by the BBC in the Upper Library for a documentary about Neanderthals. January 2023. Alumna Carmen-Palacios-Berraquero, CEO of Nu Quantum, was filmed in the Upper Library as part of a project about young innovators for the Judge Institute. February 2023. Kathryn McKee Sub-Librarian and Special Collections Librarian

Annual Report 2022-23

The College Archive Reading Room and Enquiries 203 enquiries were received and answered in the year beginning 1 October 2022, covering a range of topics which this year included research for enquiries from within College about parts of the College site such as the Buttery, the gardens, and the Bin Brook. Enquiries from external researchers covered a range of topics such as properties and estates once owned by St John’s and former students at St John’s, including for research into casualties of World War I. The 2012 archaeological report of the Old Divinity School / St John’s Hospital dig was supplied twice (Cambridge Archaeological Unit having kindly given permission for it to be sent to interested researchers on request), following enquiries about the excavation of mediaeval skeletal remains and of 18th-century ceramics. It is a reminder of just how much history we’re ‘sitting on’ at St John’s. 50 responses included the supply of lowresolution digital images provided for personal research use only. So long as the items are in a stable condition and can easily be scanned or photographed, this is a simple way of helping researchers access archives, in cases where it is not feasible (or cost- and energy-efficient) to travel some distance to look at a small number of documents or entries in a register. We are not, of course, able to supply images of items such as photographs that are still in copyright, without the copyright holder’s permission, and are always very happy to welcome visitors in person at our regular advertised opening times. In the Reading Room, 302 files and items were produced over the course of 71 visits by 39 individuals. A further 31 items were produced for curated displays for 4 visiting groups, in addition to the display created in July for the reading room display cases by our Graduate Trainee for 2022-23, Caroline Ball. One visiting group, from Anglia Ruskin University, was interested in food and rationing during World War II, as part of work on food and sustainability in the present day. Research interests of those booking into the archives centre included individual pieces of land or property formerly owned by St John’s; gifts to the College; the Adams Mathematical Society, and the Cricket Club. Lady Margaret’s account books and inventories continue to be one of the mostly frequently consulted collections. Cataloguing Individual files from the first half of the 1950s which had been recorded as ‘missing’ on the online catalogue were located and have been suitably packaged and fed into the existing series of files, which required some movement of existing files, and entered onto the online catalogue. Work has continued on student files from the second half of the 20th century, which have been considered as ‘semi-current’ records and housed in non-archival storage, arranging them by year (rather than decade as at present), boxing them up and moving them across the College site into the archive centre, where relevant information is entered into the records management database.

Annual Report 2022-23

Student files Work on the very large ‘estate records’ section continues, focussing on the old monastic estate of Broomhall and its estates including Windsor, Chawridge, Windlesham, Winkfield and Egham, with hundreds more records added to the online catalogue. Work has been completed on this section up to the transfer of Broomhall to St John’s, and later manorial records such as court rolls and rentals added, but parts of this large estate remain in College ownership to the present day, including at Sunningdale, so publication of this section of the catalogue will take place once arrangements of archival material up to the 20th century has been completed. Concurrently, work is ongoing on cataloguing Governing Body minutes, necessitating some rearrangement of the existing section on ‘College statutes’ with regards to the University Commissions of the 19th century. The May Ball photographs area of the catalogue has been tidied up, a small but satisfying job. Our Graduate Trainee Assistant for 2023-24, Harriet Edwards, has started work on integrating the photographs taken down from the old Bar / Buttery into the archives. Conservation The following items have been treated by the Cambridge Conservation Consortium:   

Photographs of LMBC boats and crews 1925 and 1926 Old Buildings Committee minutes vol 1 Summary of accounts (rentals), 1621-1630

The Consortium is currently conserving court rolls of Ramerick manor, 1552-1618, consisting of several parchment rolls, of different sizes and of varying degrees of disrepair but including some tears and rodent damage, rolled together. In their current condition, handling is not only difficult but would cause existing damage to worsen, so intervention is required to stabilise and repair the membranes.

Annual Report 2022-23 Other Activities Weekly palaeography sessions have been held all year until the long vacation, via Zoom so that students can attend from anywhere and using digital images of documents in the archives which can be zoomed in on to study the script more closely. So as not to disadvantage students who are unfamiliar with Latin, sessions focus on documents in English, the earliest of which identified to date was written in 1470 (although it is possible this is the only document in the archives in English predating 1500), but by agreement with the group we looked at a small number of earlier and therefore Latin documents in order to appreciate the difference between Anglicana and Secretary hands. More difficult, but interesting, documents looked at this year were pages of recipes found within a book of accounts, for the manufacture of aqua vitae, of a cold remedy, and of ink.

Recipe for making ink, c 1510, ref. D102.3 Online exhibitions on ‘Lady Margaret Beaufort’ and ‘Food at St John’s’ have been created by the Archivist and the Graduate Trainee Assistant respectively, the latter to accompany the aforementioned exhibition in the Reading Room display cases. The PowerPoint presentation referred to in last year’s report has been running at the Library issue desk and is available online on the College archive webpage, with some minor alterations for data protection purposes. A display in the Archives Centre strong room was created by the Archivist for a group visit and will remain in situ until the end of October. Water ingress into an underground store where modern paper records are held by certain departments in the period for which they must be retained prior to destruction or transfer to the archives, but which is not subject to environmental monitoring or control, has meant that those records are being disposed of now. The majority of those records were intended for destruction, but

Annual Report 2022-23 some meeting minutes either would have been transferred to the archives or would have been reviewed for retention or disposal. Secure disposal of documents which have been standing in water, so are stuck together and infected with mould, cannot be achieved through shredding, so we have been advised by Harwell Restoration that they should be buried in a secure location and we have commissioned Harwell’s to undertake that work. This is of course substantially more expensive than confidential shredding would have been, and involves Harwell’s coming to the area to remove the material. With records creation in certain areas of College life now entirely digital, this type of threat to storage areas is reduced, but it is important not to be complacent, and to recognise that there are digital equivalents to flooded cellars and guard against them accordingly. In the area of records management, the Archivist has begun consultations with representatives of departments on the types of documents they create and store, retention periods, and final actions to be taken on those records, with an ‘owner’ identified for each record type so that at the end of their in-department retention period, one role holder is responsible for destroying the master copy of a document or transferring it to the archives. This work is time-consuming, but it is important that the work is completed and once achieved it will be a good example of collaboration across the College. The Archivist has continued her duties as acting Data Protection Lead for the College, a role she took on in 2020, and has begun reporting on this and on records management issues to the recently-formed Records and Data Committee. Gifts The following items have been received, with grateful thanks to their donors:          

c. 1930s General Athletics Club jacket Photograph of Paddocks as tennis courts Gown, hood, and bonnet, 1958 (MD degree) Photograph of May Bumps, 1910 Theological Society accounts, 1983-2011 Photograph of St John’s bakery, 1887 Kentish Town deeds, 1878 (two items) May Ball accounts books, 1991-2002 Photographs of Lady Margaret Boat Club Lent Boat, 1890 British Empire Games blazer, 1938, belonging to Rhodes Hambridge, winner of the gold medal in the rowing eights

Items of clothing are not routinely acquired for the archives, and now that we have a representative selection of historic blazers, and due to the necessity for managing the available storage space, henceforth larger items will only be considered for incorporation into the College archives when they are of particular historic significance. A significant number of electronic copies of committee minutes have been transferred to the archives this year as ‘born-digital’ records. These are being held on a College drive until a digital preservation system is acquired and workflow developed accordingly. Lynsey Darby College Archivist

Annual Report 2022-23

Environmental Monitoring and Control Working Library Environment

Old Library Environment

In order to monitor the environmental conditions, the Working Library uses a collection of small sensors called ‘TinyTags’. These tags measure the temperature and relative humidity, and are located in the Closed Access Basement, Garden Basement, Chapel Basement, First Floor, and Third Floor. There is also a tag located in the Old Divinity School Basement. Recommended conditions for the storage of archival materials are a temperature range of 16-19°C and a relative humidity of 4560%, however, the temperature should ideally be higher than this in order to maintain a comfortable working environment in the Library.

Monitoring is in place throughout the Old Library, with three sensors in the Upper Library, three in the Lower Library, one in the Manuscripts Store and one in the Reading Room. The control system in the Manuscripts Store is set to maintain the temperature at 15 degrees and the relative humidity at 50%. While the RH has remained steady throughout the year, there have been several occasions when the temperature control has failed and wandered, requiring resets, repairs, or replacement of parts. Fortunately relatively moderate temperature conditions outside at the times of the failures meant that the temperature did not fluctuate too far.

As with previous years, the First Floor was the coldest area in the Library, recording a minimum temperature of 12°C in February. The minimum temperatures of both the First Floor and the Chapel Basement repeatedly fell below recommended levels in the winter months, recording regular lows of 14 or 15°C. On the other end of the scale, the Third Floor often reached maximum temperatures above recommended levels during the summer, with the records showing repeated readings of 2931°C, and a high of 38°C in August. The relative humidity has also frequently fallen outside of the recommended levels. The First and Third Floor recorded minimum levels in the 20s and 30s and, more worryingly, all six locations recorded maximum relative humidity levels of above 70%. The Closed Access Basement, Garden Basement, and First Floor all reached 75% and the Old Divinity School Basement reached a high of 76% in September. This is particularly concerning due to the amount of older materials and special collections stored in the Basement and Old Divinity School. So, as with last year, it is clear that the Working Library and Old Divinity School humidity levels are an urgent issue which needs to be addressed.

Temporary air handling unit in Lower Library

There is currently no environmental control system in the Upper or Lower Library, although a temporary air-handling unit was installed in the Lower Library for the critical months of June-September to control high humidity: something which has led to serious mould outbreaks in the past. Monitoring has revealed that while the unit was capable of reducing the RH, it was not sufficiently controllable, reducing levels too far downstairs, and even

Harriet Edwards Library Graduate Trainee

Annual Report 2022-23 adversely affecting the conditions at the river end of the Upper Library. A perforated tube laid down the central aisle assisted air circulation, improving the effectiveness compared with the previous year’s trial where air was very poorly dispersed. Conditions in the Reading Room remained cold throughout the year, with temperatures remaining between 12 and 19 degrees from 15 September 2022 to 10 June 2023. We look forward to having a control system for the Old Library environment in due course, but in the meantime careful monitoring continues to inform the plans for a permanent solution, and to alert us to any situation needing more immediate attention.

these technical failures were of short duration. A recent steady drip from dehumidification unit pipes which run through a service cupboard in the kitchen was detected thanks to the ‘leak alarm’. The water ingress was low and confined to the cupboard floor and the source of the problem was traced by our maintenance team and dealt with, although this included the use of a ‘wet vac’ in the roof space where the unit is housed. The roof, as visitors to the College will have noticed, is currently being repaired and tiles replaced, but this is not impacting on the work of the archives centre: by good luck, no researchers had booked in on days when the hammering was at its loudest. This essential work has mostly taken place over the summer vacation but due to being more complicated than first thought will take longer than planned to complete.

Kathryn McKee Sub-Librarian and Special Collections Librarian School of Pythagoras Environment The environmental conditions in the School of Pythagoras have again been mostly stable, despite the air conditioning being pushed to its limits in the heatwave. On two occasions in November and January, heating failures in the maintenance building and School of Pythagoras (the two are linked) led to temperatures as low as 12 degrees centigrade being recorded over a weekend, and on one or two days in March and April there were temperatures as high as 23 degrees. Obviously temperature and relative humidity ought to be maintained at stable levels, but fortunately

Lynsey Darby College Archivist

Annual Report 2022-23

Projects There have been many projects undertaken across the different Library departments over the last year, including improvement projects in the Working Library; the digitisation of important materials in our special collections; and significant support for the publication of a new book on Douglas Adams (1971). Stock Check Every two years, the Working Library conducts a stock check as part of helping to manage our collections. We had originally been due to do one in summer 2021, but this had to be postponed due to the pandemic. Consequently, this was the first stock check that had been done in three years. The main purpose of the stock check is to identify missing books, but in addition to this it can also help us find previously missing books, as well as tidying up our shelves. This is done using an RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) scanner which reads tags attached to each item to collect their barcode information. Barcodes are collected in batches of maximum 3,000 (which is about an hour’s worth of scanning!), in order to break the data into manageable chunks to process, whilst still working through the Library shelves as quickly as possible. Once the barcodes have been collected in their batches, they are then cross-referenced by location with our online catalogue, using the analytics capabilities of our library management system, Alma. For this stock check, a total of 89,592 items were scanned over the span of three months. This included every item in the Library except for the Garden Basement ‘P’ section and the equivalent Oversize section in the Chapel Basement, as the classification system used for these items does not work properly in Alma Analytics, and any check of this section must therefore be done manually. The results from this stock check are discussed in more detail below. Overall, the initial scan of all the shelves reported 3,439 as missing. Because of the proximity of the RFID tags on the shelves, many barcodes are often missed in the first scan, and so once this list has been generated, staff go back to the shelves and manually search for the books that weren’t scanned. After multiple staff checks, of the 3,439 items initially reported as missing, there are only 87 items that have not been found, and are therefore ‘actually’ missing. These have all been updated on Alma to reflect this, and the cost of replacing these items is currently being researched. The graph below shows the number of initial and actual missing books from each floor/collection.

Annual Report 2022-23

Missing Items 800 700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0

No. of items thought to be missing

No. of items actually missing

Comparison of the number of items initially thought to be missing vs. the number of items actually missing

During the course of this stock check, we were also able to find and recover 148 previously missing items. This meant that the number of items found was far greater than the number of items lost, which is an excellent outcome. A final point of interest to raise with this stock check is the overall volume of items missing in comparison to previous years. This was the first stock check conducted post-COVID, and the number of missing books was significantly lower than any stock check since 2015. The most recent check prior to this one in 2019 revealed 287 missing items, and the one in 2015 had 348. It is interesting that this check found such a massive decrease in missing items, despite the fact that it was conducted a year later than it should have been. It is highly likely that the pandemic had a large part to play in this, since the shelves were off-limits to everyone except staff for over a year, which meant less material was mis-shelved and also that staff had more opportunities to tidy up the shelves and put books back where they belong. Cambridge Collection Reclassification During this year, the Working Library undertook a project to reclassify the Cambridge Collection to make it more user-friendly and browsable. The Cambridge Collection is a small, local collection of just under 700 books that the Library holds containing items related to Cambridge and its surrounding areas. It is a fascinating and varied collection, with all sorts of weird and wonderful books covering every subject related to Cambridge, both Town and Gown, that can be thought of. It was initially organised using an in-house classification system based on size, which is a great way of helping to save space, but is not particularly user-friendly or browsable. In addition, over time the distinctions of the size categories had become somewhat blurred: there were books classed as ‘a’ (small) and ‘b’ (medium), and ‘b’ and ‘c’ (large), and even in some cases, ‘a’ and ‘c’ that were actually the same size! There is so much wonderful material in this collection that was unfindable, that it was felt worthwhile to devise and instigate a new in-house classification system which would help the collection to shine.

Annual Report 2022-23 Over the course of several months, a new system was designed which grouped material by subject. Three initial broad categories were created: ‘C’, to indicate material about Cambridge City and Cambridgeshire more widely; ‘CA’ to indicate material related to art and architecture; and finally ‘CU’ for material related to the University. Subcategories were then devised for each of these, based on the topics of the material already in existence in the collection. For example, the subcategory ‘CU.Col’ was developed for books about the University Colleges, which can be further subcategorised for each individual college e.g. ‘CU.Col.Joh’ for St John’s. Once this system was fully established, the collection was then reclassified and relabelled during an intense four days in August 2023 by Katie Hannawin (part-time Library Assistant), with the help of our lovely Graduate Trainee, Harriet, and an excellent work experience student who came in specially to help with the project. We fell slightly short of our goal to reclassify the full collection within the initial time frame, but the project has now been completed, with all items reclassified and sporting brand new labels.

Highlights from the Cambridge Collection

This new classification system has helped to group similar items together, and made the collection much more user-friendly. Adventure-seekers can now browse all of our Cambridge guides books in one place; literary critics can examine a wide range of poetry, novels, memoirs and jokes all about Cambridge; and fashionistas can browse through quaint old books full of illustrations of old University Costumes. It has made the collection much more accessible, and hopefully will help people discover all of the fantastic treasures hidden within it.

Annual Report 2022-23 Diversifying the Library Shelves In Lent Term 2023, the Library launched its ‘Diversifying the Library Shelves’ project as part of the wider university decolonisation movement. This project was inspired by a similar project undertaken at Worcester College, Oxford, and was aimed at diversifying the collection of material held by the Library. In order to achieve this, we asked College members for recommendations of books by scholars and authors of colour who are often missing from reading lists, but whom they thought should be included. In addition to their recommendations, we also asked College members to include the reasons why they were recommending the item, and what its inclusion in the Library collections would mean. So far we have had some amazing recommendations in a wide range of subjects, and have been able to buy every recommendation we received that is currently available in print. The form for the project is going to remain open indefinitely, and we are hoping to reinvigorate recommendations with the start of the new academic year and our intake of new students. AV Room Reorganisation Before leaving back in January 2023, Library Assistant Rebecca Le Marchand undertook a small project to reorganise the AV Room. This included a minor change to the way in which DVDs were classified, as well as a significant tidy-up of our CD collection. The CDs have always been organised alphabetically by composer, but over time the collection had become very mixed up on the shelves and it was difficult to find what you were looking for. These have now been completely tidied up, with new shelf labels separating the individual composers to make navigation of the collection much easier. The DVDs also underwent a small change, and our main film collection is now organised entirely by the original language of the film. This change helped to remove some of the previously ambiguous sections of the collection (such as the generic ‘World Cinema’), and highlighted the impressive range of 36 languages currently present. Other than the ‘Films in English’ section, the languages are now arranged alphabetically, in order to not prioritise one language over another.

Annual Report 2022-23 Maxwell Cataloguing Earlier this year, the Library received a very kind donation of about 200 additional books from Dr Kenneth Maxwell (1960) for the Maxwell Collection. This collection was originally donated in 2010, and consisted of just over 2,000 items focused on Brazilian, Latin American, and Portuguese history. It is one of the richest collections in Cambridge on these topics, and it has been fantastic to be able to expand its coverage even further with these additional books. As part of this additional donation, a significant sum of money was also given to the Library in order to cover the costs of cataloguing and processing the new books. This enabled us to offer Rebecca Watts (previous Projects Assistant) and Katie Hannawin (current part-time Library Assistant) extra working hours on a casual basis specifically to catalogue and classify the additional Maxwell books. Rebecca has undertaken the majority of the work, and is very close to completing the project. Currently all the finished books are being shelved separately from the main Maxwell Collection because integrating them into the shelves will require a significant rearranging of the current books. This will therefore be the final stage in the project which will be done once all the books are ready. Katie Hannawin Library Assistant Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries

MS K.49 medical recipes. This page includes a charm to make flies flee from a house

Eight medieval manuscripts from the College’s collections have been conserved, digitised, and catalogued as part of the Curious Cures project, based at Cambridge University Library and funded by the Wellcome Trust. 186 manuscripts were involved in the project which has enabled high-resolution digital images, detailed descriptions of the manuscripts, and full-text transcriptions of more than 8000 medical recipes contained in them to be made freely available online on the Cambridge Digital Library (https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/). This has opened up these collections to researchers around the world. Conservation guarantees continued physical access to the manuscripts for future generations of researchers. Cataloguing provides the material, intellectual, and historical contexts of the recipes. Digitisation gives access to examine materials in the closest detail and to appreciate how they were written and added to over the years. Transcription allows researchers to search and analyse multiple texts in new ways. We are thrilled to have the

Annual Report 2022-23 opportunity to broaden access to these key resources, making them available to the world-wide research community and interested audiences. Digitisation of R.H. Yapp’s glass plate negatives The papers of R.H. (Harry) Yapp, professor of botany, who studied at St John’s in the 1890s, which were donated to the College over the period 2019-22, contained over 700 photographs taken on glass plate negatives. Such negatives are physically fragile and the quality of image degrades over time. Preservation was therefore a priority. Thanks to a generous donation from Yapp’s grandson, it has proved possible not only to digitise the negatives, ensuring that the images are preserved for future consultation, but to make these images available online via the Cambridge Digital Library (https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/). The subjects of the photographs include Yapp’s student years at St John’s, his botanical research (focusing on fens and salt marshes), and several overseas trips. It is planned that diaries and letters from his South African trip will also be digitised when time permits and will be loaded to CUDL alongside transcriptions to provide a fuller research resource for Ravenala madagascariensis in Singapore Botanic those viewing the images. Gardens, November 1899 Kathryn McKee Sub-Librarian and Special Collections Librarian

42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams We don’t often consider external publications that make use of Library material ‘our’ projects. But our involvement in this handsome book was, we believe, enough to warrant its inclusion in this section of the Report. Once experiments and reshoots are taken out of consideration, we provided the book’s publishers, Unbound, with a total of 368 high-resolution scans from the papers of Douglas Adams (1971), such that every fold, wrinkle and coffee stain can be seen in fine detail in the reproductions. And the editor, Kevin Jon Davies, wouldn’t have known what to request – wouldn’t have been able to put the book together in the first place – without the full catalogue of the papers (with all its ‘detective work’, as he’s put it) and without our accommodating him on multiple research trips. We promoted the book’s launch event at Heffers and in turn had our Open Cambridge exhibition of the papers, Improbabilities, advertised in the bookshop’s window. The book is a celebration of Adams’s life and work; we like to think, with all due modesty, that it’s also a celebration of libraries and the work we do to conserve and catalogue such material. Adam Crothers Special Collections Assistant

Annual Report 2022-23

Feedback Special Collections I wanted to write to you to thank you for allowing me to consult Beaton’s archives. I found it to be a very rewarding experience that has markedly informed the focus of my dissertation.

The little Plat book proved to be exceptionally useful yesterday. As I come to the end of my Beaufort Fellowship I would like you to know that I am very grateful indeed for all of your assistance during my time at College.

Adam has been so incredibly kind and helpful that paying promptly was the least I could do. It is so rare to get instant service and it deserves to be recognised. Long live St John’s.

1000 thanks! It was a great treat to find your email first thing, and the scans are perfect for my purposes (the manuscript’s also quite a lovely thing to look at). I really can’t thank you enough.

Working Library

Thank you so much for a very warm welcome to your lovely library.

Thank you so much for your professional support on our research!

Annual Report 2022-23 Archives

You have made my week!

Exhibitions

Was it Adam who put together the delightful April Fools’ display earlier in the year? I've not chuckled so much in a library in years!

History Subject Review Meeting Minutes The students had very positive feedback on the College Library, and unanimously consider the Library staff ‘absolutely lovely’. The students reported being pleasantly surprised by the breadth of titles available, and the availability of books which are very new to market. They appreciate the value of the dissertation support staff within the College Library

Annual Report 2022-23

Appendix – Regular Donors We are most grateful to the following donors for their generous and ongoing financial support in 2022 and 2023. This list includes those who contribute through the Sponsor a Shelf scheme to support the acquisition of new books in specific subject areas. Bill Ball FIMechE (Mechanical Engineering) Ian and Fumiyo Boulton (Chemistry) Paul Cockerham FSA (Art History) Dr John Crompton Alan Daniels, in memoriam Reginald W. Daniels (Economics and Social Sciences) Patrick Field (Linguistics and Languages) Barbara Goodman, in memoriam Henry Goodman (Computer Science) Elizabeth Goodman, in memoriam Henry and Barbara Goodman (Computer Science) Simon Holmes David Hughes Christopher Joseph (Historical and Human Geography) Professor Edmund King Garth Lindrup (Private International Law) Greg Lowden (Modern History) John R. Morris (Engineering) Michael O’Hara Professor Stefan Reif Christine Schoenzart David Shilston Dr John H. W. Shaw (Victorian Poetry) Irene Vest, in memoriam Michael John Vest A full list of donors to the Library is published annually in The Eagle.

THE LIBRARY, ST JOHN’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, CB2 1TP TEL: 01223 338669

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EMAIL: LIBRARY@JOH.CAM.AC.UK