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Staff Reports

Caroline Ball | Library Graduate Trainee

If you’ll allow me a cliché as creaky as the Library lift, no two days are the same in this job. In the past few weeks I’ve found myself: a) in a packed-out Freshers’ Fair, yelling enthusiastically about study skills resources; b) crouched Gollum-like underneath a radiator, trying to contain a small flood; and c) in the tranquillity of the Archives, holding a 14th century piece of royal legalese, feeling positively giddy that I get to pore over medieval parchment and have the immense good fortune to call it ‘work’. Needless to say, the past two months have absolutely flown by.

Before coming to John’s, I read Classics at Oxford, graduated into the hellscape of 2020, and then worked in the University of York Library for a while. Since I came over from the dark (blue) side I’ve been enjoying getting to know Cambridge and its herds of cows and undergraduates! It’s lovely to be back in a college community and everyone in the Library has made me feel really welcome: the traineeship naturally involves being somewhat thrown in at the deep end, and it has undeniably been a challenge at times, but I truly couldn’t ask for more delightful colleagues. I’m very lucky, and very grateful.

Other than the daily bustle of the Working Library, my first project has been helping to reorganise some documents relating to benefactions made to the College by William Cecil. (Who I recently learned, in a rather bizarre twist, is in fact my very-very-distant great uncle!) It’s been a fascinating introduction to the Archives, as well as a useful lesson in indenture origami. At the other end of the chronological spectrum, I’ve been getting to grips with modern cataloguing – I wouldn’t say that the MARC21 coding language and I are exactly friends yet, but I’m working on it. I’m excited to get stuck into some more training soon, and hopefully a cataloguing project in the Old Library. In the meantime, I look forward to becoming an expert on the many, many foibles of the Library printers. Every day’s a small adventure!

Janet Chow | Academic Services Librarian

This last year saw a gradual return of the Working Library to normal operations since the COVID pandemic in 2020. With most of the COVID restrictions removed, I was able to focus more on my day-today work.

In November 2021, I attended a six-session ‘Leadership and management training course’ run by the College. I came away with useful tools and techniques in terms of building team cohesion, keeping team members engaged and maintaining their wellbeing.

Earlier this year, I worked with other Cambridge librarians to organise an online ‘Oxford and Cambridge (OxCam) Librarians Conference’. This online conference replaced the in-person one originally planned for March 2021, but which was cancelled due to the pandemic. The online conference spanned across three half-days so that people could attend either part or all of the conference. Topical issues, such as ‘decolonisation’ and ‘diversity and accessibility’, were central themes. In all, about 130 library staff from Oxford and Cambridge Libraries attended. This being the first such online conference we have organised, it was gratifyingly well received. Feedback was very positive. We have already started to plan the next OxCam conference (possibly adopting a hybrid in-person/online model) due to be held in early 2023.

I am delighted that the Working Library has been awarded accreditation for another year. The accreditation scheme offers an opportunity for library staff to demonstrate their expertise in

implementing beneficial technologies to improve library services. It provides an incentive to seek continuous improvement, and acknowledges that readers in College are receiving the best provision of Library services.

Nancy Cleaver | Library Cleaner (part time)

I joined the team in January 2022 from Housekeeping and so far, I’ve enjoyed the experience. Everyone’s been welcoming and helpful in different ways, especially my colleague Catherine. I like the arrangement of the Working Library and found the Old Library and Archives fascinating and very impressive.

There have been a few unusual events: after Easter we kept finding jelly babies all over the Library, and recently the radiator in the Old Library started leaking and we had to manage the ever-increasing flood for 20 minutes until it got fixed. I am looking forward to a ‘normal’ year in the Library hopefully with no COVID restrictions and increased busy-ness.

Fiona Colbert | Biographical Librarian

In this space last year I reported that I had been responsible for the biographical records of our alumni for over twenty years, first in the Johnian Office (now the Development Office), then in the Library. Little did I know that the biographical work would be moved again by the time I came to write my piece for this year’s Annual Report.

I have always liaised closely with the Library, and when we were moved here in 2007 it was described in the Annual Report as a beneficial restructuring which enabled both the Biographical and Development Offices to focus on our different areas of expertise. This year we were informed we would be reunited. Whilst remaining physically in the Library near the records we need to consult and maintain, organisationally we are now part of the Alumni Relations team of the Development Office. So this will be my last contribution to this publication.

Further details of the work which has been done over the Biographical Office’s last year in the Library is recorded later in the pages of this publication. I hope that recording details of the lives of people who have been members of St John’s over the centuries, and answering requests for information about them, is something which will continue to be valued by the College going forward.

I must take the opportunity to thank the many excellent Library staff it has been a pleasure to work alongside over the years, especially those who have done research, data entry, or answered requests from researchers relating to the biographical records. Much work has been done, many friends have been made, and much cake has been eaten. Fortunately cake has already been enjoyed with staff in our new department!

Adam Crothers | Special Collections Assistant

Despite how ludicrously cold it is in the Rare Books Reading Room for most of the year – during the summer heatwave there was a cosmic irresistible-force-versus-immoveable-object thing going on at the external walls – warmish bodies have been, I assure you, here present! How fine to welcome humans back to the Old Library after its being too long the haunt of librarians and chairs. Research visits! Manuscript classes! Public exhibitions! A pleasure, too, to have got to know Sarah Gilbert during her manuscript-cataloguing project, and a relief that she managed to secure another Cambridge job and so hasn’t gone too far away; I understand the University Library expect to have her thawed out by 2026. It’s sad, though, losing colleagues, and one hopes the transfer of the Biographical Office to the Development Office will be undone swiftly so that we can count Fiona and Paul among the Library team once more. In the meantime, lucky old Development Office, says Adam.

Anyway: lots of classic Old Library business in the last year, and long may it continue. Nothing if not a failed academic, I also appreciated the opportunity to be Rebecca L’s backing band for the dissertation support group: it was a delight to work with students regarding study techniques and ace prose styles, and to see the experiment yielding rewards (and indeed awards).

For devoted Annual Report readers keeping track of the autobiographical stuff: no finished novel yet, but they do say that procrastination in the form of planning additional novels is half the battle. Sigh. Poetry ticks along, though, as it will insist upon doing, and I did get married; life post-wedding has been, as hoped, pretty much the same as before but more so. Hurrah. Our honeymoon was in Iceland, a tremendous country whose history largely involves natural disasters obliterating swathes of the populace. It was an appropriate venue for catching, at last, COVID. Which wasn’t terrific, but fortunately we were mightily vaxxed up and didn’t have the scarier symptoms.

The photograph I’ve chosen to represent my nice old face this year was taken at Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds: The Immersive Experience, which was one of the joys of my stag do and frankly my life. (I’m the one in the hat; my lovely wife is behind me. Ahahahaha. Remember the ’70s?) Highly recommended; and a lesson, if you focus on the Martians, in how an attempt to corrupt an established order, without nuance and in the name of conquest, will, because of your myopic lack of basic research, ultimately result in your embarrassing downfall. Come on, Thunder Child!

Lynsey Darby | College Archivist

This is the third start to a new academic year I’ve witnessed since coming to St John’s, but due to the COVID-related circumstances of the last two years, and having spent the previous seven working somewhere that didn’t keep academic terms, it’s the first time in nearly a decade when I’ve noticed the ‘buzz’. Perhaps by next year I’ll have got over the contrast of a new [academic] year beginning as an old [calendar] one is ending, and not want to use this space to whitter about falling leaves and migrating birds. (Though not only did I see a large flock of lapwings at the weekend, but a pair of stonechats, right on cue).

This year’s new departure for me has been running palaeography sessions, to which any student, or indeed staff member, who is interested can come along. These take place over Zoom, using digital images from the archives, and participants simply take turns to read a few lines, with me chipping in as-and-when with more-or-less useful comments or pointers. I am resisting calling them ‘classes’ as I don’t pretend to have the sort of expertise to talk about palaeography

as an academic subject; the intention is simply to give people the opportunity to practise a skill which will help them to read original source material. It also gives me an opportunity to find items in the archives which have some interesting content, although sometimes they lead to more questions than answers: what, for example, did the Princess Elizabeth in 1545 want to discuss with John Taylor (Master of St John’s) when she commanded William Bill to tell him to come to her the next time he was in London?

Otherwise, the year has involved the usual mixture of archives work, records management, and data protection. Amongst other things, I foolishly chose July to spend quite a lot of time sorting files in a cellar elsewhere on site and trundling them in batches across the Bridge of Sighs and into the Archives Centre on a sack barrow (pausing so as not to ruin too many tourist photos), which was hot and dusty but a change of scene and hopefully burned a few calories!

Paul Everest | Biographical Assistant

This is the eighteenth time I have written one of these. Eighteenth! Sadly, it is also likely to be the last, as in the summer of this year reorganisation moved the management of the Biographical Office under the auspices of the Development Office. We remain in our office in the Library, and will dutifully decorate it at Christmas for the festive wellbeing of all those who require, but we are now just in the Library, rather than of the Library. Aside from this, nothing major has changed – I have researched and processed a huge volume of information on our alumni – checking published sources, lists of awards and elections, scanning news items sent to us by our Communications Office, and dealing with updates sent in by Johnians themselves, and will continue to do so for our new department!

It is strange to be writing about no longer being part of the Library whilst still very much in it, and I’m sure I’ll still have to cobble together a cover for this publication and provide some photos here and there in future, but I’ve been part of this department for a long time. Eighteen years… Does that now qualify me as an honorary member of Library staff? I hope so; it is a lovely place full of lovely people.

Katie Hannawin | Library Assistant (part-time)

Here we are again, another year has flown by and I am not entirely sure where it went! So much has happened since the last Annual Report, from getting to grips with my new role as Library Assistant, to the library entering into a post-COVID era, as well as going back to university to obtain my Master’s in librarianship. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed every part of this year, and it’s lovely to get a chance to reflect on everything that’s happened. Settling into my new role of Library Assistant was luckily not too difficult – the most complex part of the transition was probably moving my multitude of post-it notes from one desk to another! It’s been really interesting taking on a different library role, as where the Graduate Trainee is a very people-facing role, I now find myself much more in the background; slowly chipping away at longer-term projects to help improve our services. These have included helping to weed currently over-crowded sections of the Main Collection, creating a new classification system for one of our basement collections, and helping with book donations that the Library receives. Over the course of this summer I have also conducted a stock check, which is normally done every two years but hasn’t been done since 2019 as a result of the pandemic. 93,000 books and many, many hours of scanning later, I am now in the phase of ‘hunt the “missing” book’ and hopefully will be able complete this by early Michaelmas

Term (I say “missing” because more often than not the books are actually where they should be, the scanner just didn’t register them…).

Alongside working in the Library, this year I have also been undertaking my MA in Library and Information Studies at UCL, and so have been travelling to London once a week for classes. Going back into education after a three-year gap was interesting at first, but I soon managed to get back into the swing of things. The course itself has been absolutely amazing, and I have especially loved the combination of working whilst studying – it’s been great to be able to take what I am learning at university and put it into a real-world context straight away. I definitely feel like I have come a long way in librarianship as a result, and am really looking forward to continuing this development when classes start again in October.

Rebecca Le Marchand | Library Assistant

This year has seen me stepping out of my comfort zone and taking on new challenges.

Over last summer, I decided to take the online study sessions that I set up during the pandemic and turn them into a dissertation support group for undergraduates. I set one up with the invaluable help and support of Adam and we ran it for the whole of last academic year. Running this group once a week saw me do my first ever bit of slightly formal teaching. The first presentation I gave scared me a LOT! However, the feedback was great and so I continued, getting slightly less nervous each time. These sessions quickly became the highlight of my week and I was really touched when it turned out that, for many of the students who came, they were a highlight of their week too. The feedback that Adam and I received from students about this group was overwhelmingly positive and lovely to read. I was nominated for a Student Led Teaching Award in April because of this work and I was extremely surprised to go on to win it! This was such a special thing to have happened and I am so grateful for it.

This year I also helped to set up and host the second ever Forum for Assistant Library Staff. This was an online forum and it involved a lot of work. I was the main host of the event and I have to say, it was terrifying! The technological challenges combined with trying to keep everything running to time was quite a stressful combination of things to manage. But we did somehow manage it and I felt very proud of myself afterwards. I was also asked this year to give a speech in person at the Cambridge Teaching Forum about libraries and students’ sense of belonging. This was the first time I had ever given any kind of speech! I made something very simple that only had two slides but it went down very well. Everyone very kindly ignored the fact my hands were so obviously shaking!

I feel that my experiences this year have definitely increased my confidence and given me a deeper understanding of the kind of librarian I would like to be.

Kathryn McKee | Sub-Librarian and Special Collections Librarian (Acting Head of Department until 30 June 2022)

It’s been a strange year with some real highs and lows. Another year without Mark at the helm meant taking on a lot more management, which is time-consuming, but it has all gone fairly smoothly, and looks to continue for the foreseeable now that I’ll be reporting to the Senior Tutor. I’m conscious of just how lucky we are to have the current team, and am relieved that we have managed to fill the Administrator role after a long hunt for the right person. On the Special Collections front it has been lovely to see reader numbers increasing as the year progressed and readers enjoying being able to consult material in person again. Being in a vulnerable health category, and having to continue to take precautions and avoid face-to-face activities whilst so much of wider society was behaving as if COVID were no longer a threat, has presented challenges, but the support and understanding of my lovely colleagues has made it possible for me to work safely. I thank them so much.

It was a joy to have Sarah working on the medieval manuscripts over much of the past year, and seeing significant progress being made on the new catalogue after a long period in which the project had stalled. Although in theory she was just compiling physical descriptions, she discovered so much more in the course of that work: additional provenance, new information on contents, links between manuscripts, and that was a real bonus. I learned a great deal from her. I wish we could have kept her on for longer, but the Annual Fund isn’t set up to cover multi-year projects. It has given the catalogue a much-needed kick start though, and shown what it is possible to achieve. My next objective is to investigate alternative sources of funding to re-employ her at some future date if at all possible, as she has just the right combination of skills and knowledge to complete the project.

While I usually appreciate any excuse to handle the books, the rock-bottom low point of the year has to be packing and listing hundreds of mould-affected volumes. It’s disheartening still to have this problem after so many years of trialling different mitigation measures. I can only hope that now that we are testing the expensive and invasive measures that we had hoped not to need that a permanent solution is in prospect, and that I’ll never need to mention mould in an Annual Report again.

Meg Norman | Library Administrator

I type this on day four of my new job as Library Administrator, having come to the role after spending the past year providing care to a very small but demanding individual, so it’s exciting to be back in an office setting, speaking to grown-ups.

On taking up this new challenge, what better way to get to know the Library and those in it than to jump right in and compile an Annual Report? One small aspect of this task was to make sure that the spelling of COVID, Covid, and other versions there-of, was uniform throughout the report, and in doing so I learned a little bit, which is apt considering our setting. A quick internet search found an article from The Guardian, titled COVID or Covid? The comfort of pedantry at a time of national crisis, by Elisabeth Ribbans which touched on the fact that COVID-19 is an acronym and it is common practice for media to only capitalise the first letter of acronyms, causing much confusion for those (like myself) trying to get it right but finding consistently inconsistent examples at every turn. For the purposes of this report we have opted to use the World Health Organization’s formatting, but drop the ‘-19’. Pedants and grammar sticklers, please feel free to write in to point out any ‘Covids’ I’ve missed.

Moving from things cerebral to things physical, this week I was able to tag along on a student tour of the Working Library and also to pay an awed visit to the famed Old Library. My guilt-complex reared its head as I noticed multiple books in the Working Library’s general interest section which are in my own bookshelf at home, as yet unread. I have been in the past a compulsive book buyer but, regrettably, not much of a book reader of late, so I hope the Library won’t be rescinding my job-offer. It feels good to be in a place that reminds me what a privilege it is to have all this history, information and diversion at our fingertips and I look forward to seeing what further treasures it holds.

Catherine Shanahan | Library Cleaner (part time)

Dare I say it? I think we are pretty much back to normal after the ‘COVID years’! There are a few changes to our cleaning schedule that we will continue to implement, such as daily sanitizing of all work spaces. That may sound like it should be a given but unfortunately, pre-COVID, Library users didn’t always clear their work station in-between visits. Particularly during busy times work stations were treated as an extension of people’s own personal space, often being covered in copious amounts of paperwork, cuddly toys, plants, blankets, pillows, to name but a few objects. Library users are now strongly encouraged to remove all their belongings when they are leaving the premises, other than for a short break. This creates a fairer, cleaner and more respectful environment for all users! I imagine it must be very frustrating to walk up and down multiple flights of stairs and be unable to find a seat because someone has left their belongings behind for the day. Anyway, I thank everyone who has followed these guidelines, and I am happy to say this is very much the majority.

In January of this year I was joined by a new co-worker, Nancy Cleaver! Nancy is a welcome addition to our dedicated Library team. A very hot summer has encouraged us to tackle book cleaning in the basement, where it was mercifully cooler! We are now all ready to start another year maintaining a clean and welcoming Library.

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