St John’s College Library Newsletter L
EASTER 2021
VOLUME 4, ISSUE 3
How the Library ‘breathed life’ into the College during the pandemic: student perspectives It has been an extraordinary year in College. Periodically, the Library has been completely closed, partially open with click and collect services available, and partially open with one, two and three study sessions each day. Perhaps the most significant closure came in March 2020 – the first lockdown – when no access was possible for any College members, including Library staff. Access to learning and teaching resources was moved wholly online. It was not until June that Library staff were afforded access to the Library. In August, students were welcomed back to the Library, albeit under strictly controlled conditions in line with a stringent risk management strategy. In January 2021, the Working Library was once again closed to College members due to high infection rates in the general community. However, this period of closure proved only temporary and short-lived. By February 2021, the Library was gradually opening up once more, but still with adherence to a risk management system.
Throughout the pandemic, Library services kept running – if only in skeletal form – such as fetching and depositing books ordered online for collection at Forecourt Lodge. Other services included – providing digital scans of book chapters for distance users; hosting ‘Virtual Library’ study sessions, enabling students to connect with each other; using an online booking system to book study spaces; and recruiting students to invigilate outside staffed hours during term. The pandemic has inexorably changed the ways both Library staff and students work. Disruption to students’ lives has been immeasurable – whether they stayed at home or resided in College. This Issue of the Newsletter is therefore devoted to how the Library has changed during the period of Covid-19 – from a student perspective. Accordingly, we have invited three students to write about their perspectives and experiences of the Library during the pandemic: they are firstly, Jordan Virtue, an MPhil student of American History; John Stowell, who is studying for a PhD in English; and Yasmin Homer, a first year undergraduate studying History. Janet Chow, Academic Services Librarian Photo: Paul Everest
I love libraries, and books, and reading. I love exploring dusty shelves and turning up hidden treasures. But never, ever, have I been as thrilled to go to the library as this year. I arrived at St John’s this past fall, so I have never seen the College in non-Covid times, with its usual bustling vibrance. During this strange and secluded year, the Library has breathed life into the College when little else was open, giving me a taste of what St John’s can and should be. In the dark days of winter, when just leaving my room felt like an adventure, I leapt at the chance to book Library slots and restore some semblance of structure to my work day. Even that small gesture of committing to a time slot gave my day a sense of purpose. But, more surprisingly, I found that the Library offered spontaneity, in a Zoom world where everything is pre-planned over emails and Google Calendars. I could bump into a friend in the courtyard outside, strike up a conversation with them, and arrange a walk. I could come in and browse for yet another DVD and know that Katie Hannawin would be there, waiting to exchange film reviews. Even under the mask, I can tell she’s always smiling, and she always wants to hear about your weekend plans, no matter how mundane, or jokingly complain about the snowflakes drifting in through the propped-open windows. The Library was not a dead space to study; instead, it provided a sense of the dynamism and community that I have come to love about St John’s. And for that I am very grateful. Jordan Virtue Even at the best of times a PhD in the humanities can prove an atomising pursuit. There is no laboratory life that offers a readymade social environment and collaborative workspace, and no routine set by the temporal patterns of experimental labour. We all, of course, eventually find our way, sharing our time between departments, colleges, libraries and homes, settling upon the balance we need to work, and, hopefully, thrive. Yet in the age of Covid, when departments and libraries have been shut and the sense of academic solidarity rendered more tenuous than ever, the often fine negotiations of time and place we have previously made no longer apply. Understandably then, after months working from within the same four walls, the reopening of the Library has meant a great deal. Just the simplest aspects of a return to a work environment outside of the domestic – a friendly face behind the Library desk, a kind word and a sense of routine – have taken on a renewed significance. Quite aside from being able to access the Library collections once more (strangely rather helpful for the PhD…) I have been most struck by what was missing in lockdown but only felt inchoate and intangible at the time: community. We shouldn’t take it, or St John’s Library and the hard work of its staff, for granted. John Stowell Any romantic vision of Cambridge has the 24-hour library at the heart of it: surrounded by empty, browning coffee cups, a student hunched over, frantically typing at a beaming laptop at 4 in the morning is the vision all prospective students have; I still cannot decide whether being deprived of this has been a blessing or a curse. A first year at Cambridge without the library has felt uncertain. The communality of work on shared tables and quiet griping about the state of your essay was replaced by tables in the corners of the room inhabited by masks and headphones. The closure in Lent term was particularly gruelling: I was stuck in the Groundhog Day of my room, desk, and window. But this year was not all doom and gloom. Facing New Court in Cripps meant everyday (well, some days), I had the full beam of the sun, tinging everything with a lovely golden hue that made up some part of the atmospheric academia of this year. More frequently, though, on the days when the sky was grey and my brain was foggy, the short trek to the Library, to a different environment and real books, was missed. Opening in Easter has eased this somewhat, though the short sharp shifts do jar with my rhythm of work. I am still acclimating to it. A silver lining has been my discovery of the Third Floor: with its natural light and skyline view I feel it has a lighter air than the others, and I try and engineer my arrival time to ensure a spot there, to some success. With Covid behind us next year (all my fingers are crossed), I want to see the Library in its fullest, trekking every morning, coffee in hand, up to the Third Floor for the view and the day ahead – though, hopefully that day will not still be going 4 am the next morning. Yasmin Homer
Birds and snakes and aeroplanes I don't know what, in late June 2016, had put me in need of consolation. Probably nothing dreadful or with generations-long repercussions. But I found myself, on my lunchtime wanders around Heffers – you used to be able to do that sort of thing without much physical or psychological preparation – drifting ever more into the Science Fiction & Fantasy section, and reflecting that a decade of focus upon poetry and criticism mightn’t have driven other literary interests out of my head entirely, but had certainly nudged them out of my timetable. Redress seemed in order. Doubtless some escapism – into fantastic ideas, and into nostalgia – was at work. Also, I became involved, that summer, in cataloguing the Douglas Adams papers, and I imagine my new professional commitments were prompting my reading habits to move further into territory only accessible via spaceship. Still, I’m confident – in the midst of trying to write a novel that includes a spaceship or two – that the last five years of revisiting old favourites (plus filling in many a shameful gap), and feeling galvanised thereby, have been a tiny testament to genre’s capacity to reimagine and reframe a supposedly immutable reality. I’m
persuaded by Angela Carter and Ursula K. Le Guin, to name two favourites, of the political value of a literature that encourages the conception of alternative worlds; further, I’m on board with the idea that the fantastic accesses emotional truths that are not the domain of the mimetic. (And, yes, vice versa, but everybody already thinks that). The online mini-exhibition Visions of the End: Selected Apocalypses from the Library is not part of our regular schedule, and is far from exhaustive. A brief suggestion of links between the Biblical apocalypse and the work of the Johnian authors Douglas Adams, Hugh Sykes Davies and Fred Hoyle, it’s a note towards something larger-scale that could someday be exhibited in the Old Library once visitors have an appetite for such topics. This might take a while, but the relevance will not dissipate: the Covid-19 pandemic swiftly made reality feel shaky, high-contrast, mercurial, but did so through being a microcosmic convergence of anxieties and threats and injustices that had long been in operation. I shouldn’t have been surprised when the exhibition’s focus kept returning to animals and weather. Thinking about alternative worlds should, in part, speak to our responsibilities, shirked or fulfilled, towards this one. Visit Visions of the End: Selected Apocalypses from the Library on the website at https://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/visions-end-selectedapocalypses-library Adam Crothers, Special Collections Assistant Image: MS S.30 f.9v
The Working Library Ground Floor – where sofas and ‘relaxing’ books meet In Michaelmas term the Library received an email from a student who wondered if we had any novels they could read for relaxation. We replied that we have at least a hundred in the General Interest section! We also have some excellent non-fiction, a growing collection of health and wellbeing titles, plus some lovely poetry books, collections of short stories and graphic novels. It was great to help (that is the best bit of the job!) – but I was slightly concerned that she seemed unaware of our General Interest collection.
I realised that these books were somewhat ‘hidden away’ on the Mezzanine Floor and I wondered if it might be possible to move the entire section to the Ground Floor! This would make all our ‘relaxing’ books much more accessible. In better, non-Covid times, it might even be possible to grab a pile of books while sitting on the sofas to enjoy reading them. Before the Easter term began, all the General Interest books were brought to the Ground Floor. Although presently students are focused on exams, it’s to be hoped that many will seek more leisure-time reading once their exams are finished. Our sofas on the Ground Floor provide ample comfort for readers, and the Library staff are looking forward to welcoming more users ‘seeking’ the excellent selection of ‘relaxing reading’ now available on the Ground Floor. Rebecca Le Marchand, Library Assistant
For comments on this Issue, and contributions to future Issues, please contact Janet Chow. Email: jc614@cam.ac.uk; Tel: (3)38662
Virtual browsing on Pinterest Inspired by Churchill and Wolfson Libraries, Rebecca, our Library Assistant and I have been putting together our very own Pinterest account where we can recreate all our book displays online, so that everyone can enjoy them no matter where they happen to be. There are pictures of each book and DVD, links to iDiscover records so you can see where to find the book (or where to read it online), as well as links to the movie trailers and publisher blurbs so you can find out what each item is about. We will also be uploading pins of the books we buy each month, so don’t forget to keep any eye on our ‘New Acquisitions’ board for any new items you want to borrow! Happy (virtual) browsing! Katie Hannawin, Graduate Trainee
This Easter term we are excited to be launching a brand new student support scheme, Text the Library! This is a completely anonymous service running Mon-Fri, 9am-5pm*, where students can immediately get in contact with a member of our team to report any situation in the Library with which they feel uncomfortable. All conversations will
be completely private, and deleted once the issue has been resolved. The relevant phone number can be found on posters on all floors of the Library, and messages can be sent either via text or WhatsApp. *This service can also be used to report issues that occur outside of staffed hours, but for anything urgent please go to the Porters.
Katie Hannawin, Graduate Trainee It’s years since I read David McKay’s ‘Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air’. I returned to it because of the plan we’ve been putting together to realise St John’s ambition radically to cut our carbon impact. Sir David McKay FRS was Regius Professor of Engineering here in Cambridge, and Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change from 2009-2014. Tragically, David was just 48 when he died in 2016. ‘Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air’ takes a clear-headed look at the options for replacing fossil fuel, with renewable energy sources. Do renewable sources stack up? Might new technologies come to the rescue? Could we live on sustainable energy without changing national and individual lifestyles? McKay applies the laws of physics and mathematics to the sustainable energy debate. He uses numbers and facts to understand the possibilities, kill the myths, and – if we are motivated to break our dependency on fossil fuels – to identify the best options. The book alternates between supply- and demand-side contributions, building up a balance sheet of national energy consumption against potential renewable supply. Spoiler alert – they don’t balance. McKay then turns to what we can do to reduce energy demand, to increase sustainable supply, and options for a national energy plan. You might assume that a book written in 2009 would now be overshadowed by newer publications, given the acceleration in
research and technologies to deliver energy responses to the challenges of climate change. It would be a mistake to think that a dozen years on, this book is ‘old hat’. It was ground-breaking when published and continues to be highly influential. McKay designed his book to be perfectly accessible to the ordinarily numerate and those with passing scientific literacy. More advanced science and maths comes in optional expansion chapters. McKay was frustrated by ‘UK emissions of twaddle’ and set out to cut through the greenwash and hyperbole. He deliberately avoids the economics and politics, the ethics and emotion, to focus on the facts, allowing the reader to determine their own position. McKay finds a human scale to each concept that he explores. His writing is funny, frank and friendly, a scientific Malcolm Gladwell. I think that ‘Sustainable Energy’ exemplary in communicating complex science to the general public in a user friendly way, but without hiding the science. I love McKay’s honesty that it’s only by committing to some big, and difficult, actions that we will make the difference we need. He debunks the ‘every little helps’ myth – “if everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little”. We need big changes in energy supply and big changes in energy demand. We can’t address our carbon impact without making structural changes to our energy consumption and energy sources. This idea underpins the College action plan on climate change. As ever, the things that are really worth doing are difficult, demand time and investment, and if we wait for perfect, we’re likely to miss good. McKay said this loudly, clearly, and with lasting influence. Heather Hancock, Master