DACH

Anglo-Saxons in Sachsen-Anhalt - GSLG Conference 2011

In past years we’ve blogged about joint Wesline conferences in Durham and Manchester. This year, however, the German Studies Library Group celebrated its 25th anniversary independently with a conference in Halle as guests of the University and State Library.

Halle's quite a small city, and not terribly well known to Brits if the reactions of friends and colleagues were anything to go by. But it's an attractive place, relatively undamaged by the ravages of the 20th century, and culturally it punches above its weight. It was the birthplace of the composer Handel (or Händel to the Germans), and was a major centre of German Pietism. This movement influenced not only the foundation of Halle university but also that of August Hermann Francke's influential and, for its time, progressive orphanage and school. We visited this marvellous complex of 18th-century buildings and its historic library during the conference, and  I almost envied the orphans – until I heard about the busy schedule and strict supervision…

As well as Pietism, Halle University was influenced by enlightenment ideas, and was among the pioneers of teaching and research methods that made German scholarship hugely influential in the later 18th and 19th centuries. Such an 'enlightened' university naturally recognised the importance of a strong library, but it was not until the late 19th century that the main collections were brought together in a designated (and again pioneering) building – we were lucky enough to be allowed up into its flat roof for stunning views over  Halle! Even now there are several departmental libraries – although far fewer than the 92 which the current director discovered when he arrived in 1997.

As well as climbing about on rooftops, we enjoyed a fascinating programme of talks and visits. It was interesting to learn about others' experiences with projects and systems the BL is currently involved with, particularly Google Books, new catalogue searching software, and the proposed new cataloguing rules, RDA. The fact that colleagues from both countries were involved in the same projects and using the same systems shows how international librarianship is becoming. We encountered another sign of the times on a visit to the very modern law library when one of our group asked if there was a laptop-free zone in the building and two students working nearby laughed incredulously at the very idea.

On our last day we visited the German National Library (DNB) in Leipzig. Founded in 1912 as the Deutsche Bücherei, it has just completed a new extension which will be fully open in time for the centenary celebrations next year. It was interesting to compare the history and practices of the German and British national libraries. The two major differences are that the DNB collects only material published in or relating to Germany, and that there is a charge for reading room use, an idea greeted with outrage whenever suggested here! 

We ended our day in Leipzig and our 25th anniversary conference with a concert of Mendelssohn and Bach at the Gewandhaus. As ever it had been a stimulating few days of formal and informal exchanges, making new contacts, renewing old ones, and getting a glimpse of the wider library world in both the UK and Germany.

[SR - who also took the photos]

Keeping Calm and Carrying On …

The 2010 WESLINE (West European Studies Library and Information Network) annual conference  took place at the beginning of September at the University of Manchester, organised by Helen Dobson, Rachel Kirkwood and Glynis Platt – all staff members of the wonderful John Rylands University Library. I flew in to Britain from the stormy beaches of the German North Sea coast, thrilled once again to be attending the annual gathering of librarians and academics with professional (and personal) interests in all things West European. WESLINE is now well-established: it was particularly pleasing to be meeting up with so many friends and colleagues from previous conferences, and also a wonderful opportunity to network with these and with new conference attendees and more recently-joined GSLG (German Studies Library Group) members.

The GSLG and WESLINE have, over the years, taken us up and down the country to a wide range of citi es and towns that are home to various research and university libraries. Manchester is a buzzing, cosmopolitan city, with one of the busiest bus routes in Europe operating along its Oxford  Road, where both the University and the Royal Northern College of Music are situated. The library visits were for me one of the highlights of a thoroughly enjoyable conference. The  neo-gothic John Rylands Library itself, constructed according to the directions of the formidable  and visionary Mrs Enriqueta Rylands, contains Manchester University's outstanding special collections.

Historic Reading Room, John Rylands Library. Photograph by Mike Peel from Wikimedia Commons

Chetham's Library is the oldest public library in the English-speaking world, housed within superb mediaeval college buildings that date from 1421, nucleus of the 'Hospital School and Library' founded in 1653, and now occupied by both the Library and the world-famous Chetham's School of Music. 

Halt die Ohren steif! We are all operating within difficult economic conditions currently, and the theme of this year's conference was designed to address this with the theme of 'Keeping Calm and Carrying On: Level-headed librarians in a time of financial trouble'. I, for one though, felt extremely calm and relaxed, not having the responsibility, as I did at last year's WESLINE conference in Durham, of organising the event! Libraries, universities, and the public sector are being challenged and tested by the drive for financial savings, and attendance figures at this year's conference may have been, in part, the victim of cuts to organisations' training budgets. There were, however, many excellent sessions at the conference, and those who were able to come along were clearly stimulated and entertained by what they heard. We were treated to an inspiring introduction to the conference from Phil Sykes, current chair of RLUK (Research Libraries UK, formerly CURL), a fascinating accounts of the British Library's newspaper strategy by Ed King of the BL's Newspaper Library, and, for Germanists in particular, an absorbing paper by Manchester University's Dr Matthew Philpotts on the famous and ground-breaking, East German-founded  periodical Sinn und Form and on periodical studies as an interdisciplinary field of growing prominence and renown.

Networking with colleagues from different institutions is always a refreshing experience that enables you to pick brains, pick up new ideas, and pick yourself up. As ever, after a GSLG or WESLINE event, I returned to my institution brimming with ideas, invigorated by the professional exchanges and debates and the personal camaraderie, and yet more determined to 'keep my ears pricked'!

[DM]

A frightful hobgoblin…

This week the BL (in association with Jewish Book Week) held a lecture to celebrate our acquisition of the first edition of the Communist Manifesto – or Manifest der Kommunitsischen Partei – published in 1848. Acquiring a copy of this rare item was a long-held ambition for me, but even more so for our head of 19th-century British collections. British? Yes, because although the work was written and published in German by Germans, the actual place of publication was London: the ‘Office der “Bildungs-Gesellschaft für Arbeiter”’ to be exact. It’s not certain where precisely that was, but it may have been not far from today’s BL, in Warren Street where a radical German newspaper was also published; there were links between the two ventures. It’s often claimed that the Manifesto’s Fraktur type had to be rushed over from Germany, but since the Bildungs-Gesellschaft had already had a sample issue of a Kommunistische Zeitschrift printed in 1847, and the Manifesto’s printer, J. Burghard of Liverpool Street, was already working for Germans in London, there would no doubt have been plenty of type already to hand.

The complex printing history of the Manifesto has been throroughly described by Thomas Kuczynski (BL shelfmark X.0702/426(49)). Monday night’s excellent speaker, Professor Gareth Stedman Jones focused instead on the Manifesto’s intellectual origins and its influence. He described how the communist groups which began to form in early 19th century were influenced by radical Christian ideas or rational utopianism. Marx broke new ground by largely writing this intellectual background out of the story and associating communism instead with the growing industrial proletariat.

However, the Manifesto and its ideas initially attracted little attention. This was partly due to Marx himself: when European revolutions broke out in 1848, he saw this as the beginning of a ‘bourgeois revolution’ which must be completed before the rise of the proletariat could follow, so he devoted himself to supporting this first revolution and, as it were, put communism on hold. This explained something that had surprised me in my own recent 1848 research: I’d found no obvious references to the Manifesto in the material I’ve been studying, and even the term ‘communist’ hardly appears. But if the standard-bearers of communism were playing down their ideas, it was unlikely that others would pick them up. It was only in the 1870s that the Manifesto began to receive serious attention, gradually gaining influence among socialist and communist groups until it achieved canonical status after the Russian Revolution of 1917.

And the frightful hobgoblin? That comes from the first English translation of the Manifesto, by Helen MacFarlane, published in the magazine The Red Republican in 1850 (BL Shelfmark: RB.23.b.6333). Instead of the now-familiar translation, ‘A spectre haunts Europe’, MacFarlane translated Marx’s ‘Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa’ as ‘A frightful hobgoblin stalks through Europe’. Evocative, certainly, but I think English readers are better off with the spectre.
[SR]

WESLINE 09 – The Organiser’s Tale

What else do we do?

Occasionally we organise a conference …

I had been asked over a year ago to organise what would become the Fourth Annual WESLINE Conference (2nd to 5th September 2009) – in Durham. WESLINE stands for ‘West European Studies Library and Information Network’, and it is an active and dynamic professional studies interest group for librarians working with West European-language materials, highly-regarded by its membership, and an umbrella group for the individual French, German, Italian, and Hispanic/Latin American studies library groups. And the reason why I had been asked to organise this event in Durham has to do with the fact that whilst I work in the German Section of the BL in London, I happen to live in the beautiful cathedral city of Durham in the north of England. Yes, I am a regular long-distance commuter. (The background to this might be revealed to readers of this blog in a future posting...)

[Photo by Tim Packer]

What makes a good conference?

Already in the first planning stages, I decided to model this Durham conference on the tried and tested pattern of the numerous excellent German Studies Library Group conferences which I have been fortunate enough to attend during my time at the BL. Last year’s WESLINE conference had been organised by two BL colleagues, senior to me, and at their home institution, and I would be organising this conference largely alone and at an ‘away’ institution – so I knew I had my work cut out for me. This conference was to be run over three days, as a residential event in one of the Durham colleges (Van Mildert College, as it turned out). It seemed an excellent idea to have the conference in Durham, a fantastic location and home to one of the UK’s top universities, England’s third oldest – somewhere outside the ‘golden triangle’ (for a change!) The programme would incorporate visits to historical and modern library sites and include discussions on relevant library matters relating to West European language materials. But as its most significant component, it would include papers by members of the academic teaching staff in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University, one of the leading schools of its kind.

I aim to be a good organiser. However, as a part-time member of curatorial staff, organising an event away from my home institution, I needed for quite a while to work pretty much full-time (especially in the run up to the conference), and to liaise closely with colleagues at the host institution, Durham University Library.

I aimed to exploit to the full all that Durham has to offer: its wonderful, historic library buildings in a World Heritage site; its fabulous special collections; its buzzing Main Library (in the midst of refurbishments for a planned large extension, which added to the logistics I needed to juggle!); its world-renowned Cathedral and beautiful Cathedral Library; the very special ‘hidden treasure’ which is Ushaw College Library; but, above all perhaps, its expert and friendly academic and library staff, who provided presentations, tours, displays – and a really wide range of content for us all to chew over. I know Durham well – I was a visiting student there from Tübingen University (more years ago than I care to remember) at St Mary’s College, and I had my first library post in Durham immediately after qualifying as a librarian (from Aberystwyth). I knew what a wonderful place it is, but I knew that many delegates would have little or no acquaintance with it, so I was looking forward to their falling in love with it too. I hope that a few of the delegates really have …

Over forty delegates (and speakers) took part, from a wide range of university and research libraries, including the London Library, Senate House Library, the John Rylands, the Bodleian, Cambridge University Library and Cambridge’s Modern and Medieval Languages Faculty Library and its Murray Edwards College Library, UCL, King’s College, Glasgow, Aston, Leeds, Warwick, Westminster, and West of England university libraries, plus a contingent of seven from the BL. (It was good to have the moral support of BL and German Studies Library Group colleagues attending.)

The feedback I have received so far has been very positive and hugely encouraging. I know that librarians are nice people (!), but they have all said really, really nice things, so I think the conference has, genuinely, been much appreciated and has been enjoyable and profitable for all the delegates who attended. In short, I loved organising this conference, and now that I’ve just about recovered, would still, I think, say ‘yes’ the next time I’m asked – as long as that’s not too soon!
[DM]

WESLINE 09 – The Delegate’s Tale

Another week, another conference... The first few days of September saw the whole German Section in Durham for the annual meeting of WESLINE, the West European Studies Library and Information Network. Like many of those who attend, I’ve been a regular at these meetings (and in earlier days at those of one of its constituent groups, the German Studies Library Group) ever since I started at the BL, so the conference always involves meeting old friends, as well as welcoming new faces. This year we had an excellent programme of talks, discussions and visits, expertly organised by Dorothea and hosted by Durham University Library. Durham is my alma mater, and it was the first time I’d been back there in nearly twenty years! I was delighted to find the city as beautiful as ever and comparatively unchanged.

Most of the conference sessions were held in the main library building, which brought back memories, but we were also shown round the historic library, set in the UNESCO World Heritage site of Palace Green, and the Cathedral Library. The latter visit included a marvellous display of mediaeval manuscripts presented by Professor Richard Gameson of the history department, one of those rare speakers who combines vast knowledge with a real gift for communication.

Back in the main library we heard a wide range of papers: German photography, French manuscript illumination, Spanish theatre censorship and the appropriation of Italy as part of British culture were among the topics and, as is usual at these events, the speakers emphasised how they used library and other information resources in their work. In the context of professional issues there was a presentation on academic liaison in university libraries, which led to some interesting discussion. Although this isn’t of such direct relevance to the BL, it was interesting to hear how colleagues in the HE sector manage this aspect of their work, and how electronic resources are continually changing the ways in which university librarians communicate with academics and students.

Most of the people who attend WESLINE come from university libraries, and for us BL people one of the most sobering aspects of this annual get-together is to realise what pressure they are under. Many universities are cutting back on library staff, and since many are also cutting back on modern language courses, language specialists in university libraries are under particular threat. This year alone Queen’s University Belfast has closed its German department, and the University of the West of England is ceasing to offer modern language degree courses, and I returned to work to find a mailing list post with news of a similar threat to the German department at Leicester. It’s a sobering reflection at the end of a happy and productive few days.
[SR]

Gruß aus München!

“Deutschland schwitzt!” (Germany’s sweating!) proclaimed the popular tabloid Bild-Zeitung, and it was right: in Munich at the end of last week the temperature soared to the mid-30’s. A local paper which I read over breakfast one morning recommended ways to keep cool – head for the shade of the Englischer Garten, swim in an open air pool, or enjoy a long, cool Bavarian beer. Alas, quite apart from not being a beer drinker (though a well-chilled glass of Franconian white wine or a nice Apfelschorle would have been viable alternatives), I was in Munich for work and spent most of my three days in the Bavarian capital in a rather airless lecture theatre at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. But in all respects other than the heat there was no ‘alas’ about it as I was listening to some of the great and good of the bibliographical world discussing ‘Early printed books as material objects’ at a satellite meeting of the annual International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) conference.

So great and good were many of those present that, as someone pointed out, a bomb falling on the hall would have effectively decimated international bibliographical scholarship! I was there in a much lesser capacity, despite the location not as head of German but wearing my other ‘BL hat’ as support to the Curator of Incunabula. I felt that I was very much there to learn, and learn I did from papers on topics ranging from the smallest details of marginal notes or rubrication to online projects of ambitious international scope, e.g. http://www.cerl.org/web/en/resources/cerl_thesaurus/main

The emphasis on books as material objects brought some strong feelings to the fore, especially those of bindings experts for whom repairing a severely dilapidated binding was little more than vandalism, although it had brought to light some fascinating 15th-century documents used as binder’s waste and rendered the book usable again. Another speaker talked about books which had been made up of pages from different editions, and argued for treating them not as single books but as fragments of multiple copies. This is a vital distinction for expert bibliographers, but perhaps not for readers past or present: an example of how a book can be a material object in different ways to different people.

I was also introduced to a colleague from the Munich office of the ISTC project and found out more about its international aspects. And there was an opportunity to see the Staatsbibliothek’s accompanying exhibition, showcasing some of their amazing holdings of incunabula. Well worth a visit if you’re in Munich between now and the end of October – if you can tear yourself away from the Englischer Garten and the cool beer.
[SR]