Abstract
The Bodleian Library opened its doors in 1602, though its origins go back 150 years earlier. The building, which has been renovated several times over the centuries, is now undergoing a major restoration work. It sees its future as a ‘hybrid’ library, combining ink-on-paper and electronic materials to give a greatly enhanced service. The catalogue has been converted to machine-readable form, and a union catalogue of libraries in the university as a whole is in progress. A wide range of holdings, including important manuscripts and rare books has been digitized. In 1997 a new Director of University Library Services (a post combined with that of Bodley's Librarian) was appointed, and a new Libraries Committee was established, with a view to creating an integrated system that unites in a single library service the 22 libraries that are funded by it. As part of the process of change, the Bodleian Library itself is being restructured, and means have been sought to make the best use of subject-specialized staff in the system. In such ways the Bodleian is preparing to maintain its excellence over the next 400 years.
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References
1.
This phrase, which encapsulates Sir Thomas Bodley's ambitious vision for the Bodleian as much more than simply a library for the University of Oxford, is memorialized in its Latin form on the tablet placed above the entrance to the Proscholium in the Old Bodleian quadrangle.
2.
More than 60% of Bodleian readers' tickets in a typical year are issued to non-members of the University of Oxford. Of these 50% are readers from outside the UK.
3.
Bodley
Thomas
, in Oxford as a graduate of Magdalen and as a Fellow of Merton during many of those years, later remembered Duke Humfrey's abandoned library room as a ‘place … which in every part laye ruined and wast’.
4.
This agreement of 1610 is the origin of the Bodleian Library's present status as one of the six legal deposit libraries of the British Isles - a status which it has enjoyed far longer than any of the other five.
5.
From its relatively small beginnings - a few thousand books and manuscripts in Duke Hum-frey's library and Arts End by the time of Bodley's death in 1613 - the library now contains well over eight million items. These materials are housed in the Old Bodleian buildings, in the Radcliffe Camera, in the New Bodleian (with 11 floors and underground stacks), in ten dependent libraries, and in a large off-campus repository at Nuneham Courtenay. Each year the library adds over two miles of materials to its shelves.
6.
Bodleian visitors as disparate as King James I and Hilaire Belloc have sung the library's praises as a desirable and welcoming place of study. King James is recorded as saying: ‘Were I not King. I would be a University man; and if it were that I must be a prisoner, if I might have my wish, I would have no other prison than this library, and be chained together with these good authors’. Hilaire Belloc said, with untypical reverence: ‘There are few greater temptations on earth than to stay permanently at Oxford in meditation, and to read all the books in the Bodleian’.
7.
The remit for the post of the Pearson New Media Librarian was described in April 1990 in the following terms: ‘The role will be to research and monitor new and developing technologies in information storage and retrieval, and to plan and implement this provision alongside the traditional formats of printed books and manuscripts’. As early as 1992, when the Internet was still relatively unknown in the UK, the New Media Librarian was already introducing the first fully fledged public Internet service provided for users by any library in the UK (the BARD service), and an article on the service in the Times Higher Educational Supplement on 13 November 1992 (‘Virtual libraries’), proved to be the first piece on the Internet ever published in that journal.
8.
As a library of legal deposit, the Bodleian has a particular interest in the technical, economic and management issues surrounding the question of digital archiving and the long- term preservation of electronic materials. These issues are likely to come into even sharper focus for the library if and when the existing UK legal deposit legislation is extended to include the deposit of materials in electronic formats. For dais reason, the library was delighted last year to receive substantial funding from the Higher Education Funding Council's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to join with the libraries of the Universities of Cambridge and Leeds in a digital preservation research project under the umbrella of the Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL) - the CEDARS Projects (see http://www.curl.ac.uk/).
9.
Many of the facilities are described in detail, and can be accessed, through the Bodleian's extensive Website at http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk
10.
The Bodleian Shop can be accessed virtually by this means, bringing so-called e-com-merce into the activities of the ancient institution.
11.
The Working Party on Senior Library Posts, under the chairmanship of Sir Keith Thomas (President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford), was established by the University Council, to which it reported, in 1995 . Its principal recommendation, which built upon the basis of the 1987 Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Future of Library Services (die Nicholas Report), was that ‘there should be a post of University Librarian with responsibilities extending over all of the University's libraries, and a move towards a library organization with a more unified structure’.
12.
These 22 libraries are: the libraries of the Ashmolean Museum and of the Taylor Institution, the Classics Lending Library, the libraries of the Faculties of Economics, English, Clinical Medicine (Health Care Libraries Unit and Cairns Library), History, Modern Languages, Music, Social Studies and Theology, together with the 11 libraries of the Bodleian group (the Bodleian Japanese Library, the Bodleian Law Library, the Eastern Art Library, the Hooke Lending Library, the Indian Institute Library, the Institute for Chinese Studies Library, the Oriental Institute Library. the Philosophy Library, the Radcliffe Science Library, the Library of Rhodes House, and the Central Bodleian itself).
13.
The Directorate consists of the Director, a Deputy Director (a post filled by the successor to the recently retired Deputy Librarian of the Bodleian), the Director of the Libraries Automation Service (an existing post), and three new posts, responsible for the libraries-wide coordination of preservation, staff development and training, and service provision.
14.
What is envisaged is a broadly based team approach to subject work, with groups of staff crossing the boundaries of the departments or libraries within which they are based. Already, even in the period prior to integration, a number of Subject Groups have been set up, within which agendas of common interests are being developed and discussed by library staff from across the whole university.
15.
See the two summary charts attached as appendices to this article. They illustrate, first, the present (interim) committee structure of the Libraries Committee and its libraries and. Secondly, the committee structure envisaged for the integrated system.