Diversifying the Library shelves

This term the Library has launched a new project aim ed at diversify ing our teaching collections as part of the wider university decolonisation movement. Decolonisation has become increasingly important across the Higher Education sector, as universities and institutions have been called upon by students, among others, to recognise and address the colonial legacies that underpin modern scholarship. In particular, there have been huge calls for universities to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ – a move essentially not about abandoning the white male voices from the global North that dominate current scholarship, but about dismantling the hierarchies that posit these voices as intellectually superior. It is about re-centring currently marginalised and misrepresented voices, especially those from the global South, and challenging universities to acknowledge, question and transform the current biases and inequalities which are prevalent in modern scholarship.

As the providers of many of the teaching and learning materials for university courses, libraries have a crucial role to play in this process: a key challenge is the recognised need to diversify collections and teaching materials available to students. Inspired by a similar project undertaken by Worcester College, Oxford, this is exactly what our ‘Diversifying the Library Shelves’ project aims to do. We are asking our students, Fellows, and academic teaching staff to recommend books for their subjects by scholars and authors of colour who are often missing from reading lists, but who they think should be included. We are also welcoming recommendations for more general books on decolonisation in different subjects. Since opening the recommendation form we have had some fantastic suggestions across a wide variety of subjects, including History, Spanish, Portuguese, and Economics, and we cannot wait to see what else is recommended to us. The form will remain open indefinitely, so if you are a current student, Fellow, or member of teaching staff, please get your thinking caps on and let us know which books you want to be included in our teaching collections!

Looking forwards, the archives will receive material about the planning and building of all elements of the new Community Hub, when they are no longer required for current business purposes. The display boards which hung in the old Buttery Dining Room about the building of its successor have already found a home in the archives!

The recommendation form can be accessed by scanning the QR code on posters in the Library, or the link can be sent to you by emailing Katie at kh695@cam.ac.uk.

Behind the scenes: modern book binding

The Working Library acquires many new books throughout the year. If the books are paperback, they need additional protection to prolong their life span. Behind the scenes, helping us to preserve Library books, is our bookbinder, Phil Bolton. In this article, we look at how Phil started his career as a bookbinder, and the binding methods he uses.

After first working in a garage in 1978, Phil left to train as a bookbinder joining his father, George, the manager of J.P.Gray & Sons, bookbinders in No.10 Green Street. Thereafter, he served an apprenticeship for three years. When J.P. Gray & Sons went into administration in the 1980s, George and Phil came to St John’s College.

George worked as a bookbinder in the Library, while Phil helped with cleaning books in the Old Library. George subsequently passed his bookbinding skills on to his son. For more than three decades since then, Phil has been serving our College Library. Aside from his wor k at St John’s, Phil also binds books in Caius and Girton College libraries.

In preserving and repairing paperback books, two main types of binding – ‘lyfguard’ and ‘drop-board’ – are used. Lyfguard uses one piece of transparent and permanent stick-on protector to cover the whole book. It is the less time-consuming and more cost-effective method. Library books which are regularly superseded by new editions, for example, medical and law books, are usually lyfguarded. Drop-board is a more complicated process. It involves the following steps: 1) removing the original book cover (front and back) and spine; 2) inserting pieces of blank paper on both the front and back of the book; 3) putting a mull (open weave cotton cloth) on the spine to strengthen it; 4) cutting two pieces of gray board to the size of the book and then gluing a book cloth on to both pieces; 5) sticking the blank paper to the inside of the hard