DACH

Networking for a network

Last Thursday evening I attended an event at the German Ambassador's Residence to introduce the German Resources in Britain (GRiB) project. The aim of this project is to create a website which will act as a "one-stop-shop" for those interested in the German-speaking countries, their language, cultures, societies and heritage, from school pupils to academic researchers and from the interested general public to professional writers and journalists.

Such a site will offer a search across the catalogues of all member libraries and advice as to which institutions are best for which type and level of research. We also hope to offer access to other material of interest – news articles, interviews, archive material and links – and to make use of social networking tools to encourage interaction between partners and users. The founding partners are all in London, but as the name suggests, the aim is eventually to include institutions from all over the UK.

This is a big challenge. I've been involved with the project since its inception, along with colleagues from the Goethe-Institut London (who gave the initial impetus), the London Library, London University's Germanic Studies Library and the Wiener Library. It had taken many months of discussion and planning to get to the point where we were ready to present the project to a public, and we were both honoured and delighted when the German Ambassador agreed to be patron of the project and to host our presentation at the Residence.

It was a really good evening – I was particularly pleased that our guest speaker was Simon Winder, whose book Germania I discussed in a post last year. In person and as a speaker he was every bit as informed, interesting and entertaining as the book suggests. And, despite my initial nerves, I found myself enjoying my role at the reception as one of the project partners, talking to different guests and explaining more about the project.

As yet GRiB still exists largely on paper. Indeed one of the aims of the event last week was to try and interest potential sponsors in funding the creation of the planned website. That's another big challenge! But there was certainly lots of enthusiasm for the project, and I'm sure that I can safely say: watch this space for more about GRiB in the future!

[SR]  

Welcome back

My title isn't a self-critical reference to the length of time since my last post, but a small celebration of the fact that I've recently been able to restore a book to the BL's collections after nearly 70 years.

The obvious question is, why did it need to be restored? Well, our original copy was one of over 200,000 volumes destroyed when a German bomb hit the British Museum in May 1941. One section of the bookstacks surrounding what was then the Library’s Reading Room took a direct hit. Books from many countries on many subjects were lost, but perhaps ironically, German publications were among the hardest hit as the area destroyed housed books in subject areas where German scholarship was particularly strong in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such as archaeology, theology and art history.

In the decades after the war, libraries worked together to provide each other with microfilm copies of items lost or destroyed in the conflict. Many of our books were replaced this way, but many others remain missing and are flagged in our catalogues as destroyed. So when I'm checking a secondhand or antiquarian bookseller’s catalogue I'm always pleased if I find a potential replacement for one of the titles still missing.

And that's what I've done here. The book in question Die Kunst, alle Arten Abgüsse und Abdrücke  ... &c. ... zu verfertigen, is a rather odd one, classed in the typewritten registers of destroyed books under the heading 'Useful Arts'. It's a guide to making casts and impressions from all kinds of originals – from coins to insects – using materials ranging from plaster to metal foil: the full title lists six types of originals and thirteen types of material, each list ending with '&c'.  Bernhardt Ringelhardt, about whom I can find no other information, is named on the title page as editor; he was presumably the author of the first two sections, but apparently adapted or translated other parts from the works of others ('Altmütter', 'Gill' and 'Nadau' are named). A fold-out plate at the back of the book shows the design of a machine for making impressions of coins and medals. It is apparently aimed at collectors who wish to supplement their collections with copies of items they don’t themselves possess.

Perhaps it's not the most exciting purchase or the most wanted title in our catalogue (and before anyone rushes to order it, I've not yet taken it up to our shelfmarking staff so it won’t be available quite yet!). Nonetheless it's good to have it back and to fill another small gap left by the ravages of war. And there’s a wonderful feeling of continuity in adding my own annotation to those of generations of previous library staff in the typewritten registers of destroyed books, stating when and in what form the item was replaced.

[SR]

The joys of German cataloguing, or, Why didn’t I learn Spanish?

I catalogue foreign language books at the British Library, it's Monday morning and I have a pile of German books on my desk waiting to be catalogued. The German books present us with the most problems because of the breadth of subject matter. This is a risky statement because our Hispanic collections are a complete mystery to me but I've never heard any of the Spanish or Portuguese cataloguers complaining of difficult technical stuff. And let's face it, German is not as straightforward as the Romance languages anyway. As Mark Twain said, "The Germans take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German".

I need to get through five or six of these books by lunchtime to maintain the required cataloguing rate. I notice one of them is conference proceedings. Anxiety levels rise noticeably. That will mean a decision about conference main entry which can be difficult. Hard thinking or coin? The former obviously, but one is sometimes tempted.

Even the beautifully illustrated Die Bayernfenster des Kölner Domes 1844-1848 (The Bayern windows of Cologne Cathedral 1844-1848), which I take up first, is potentially a problem because of the troublesome looking subtitle Kirchenausstattung zwischen Kunst, Theologie und Politik (the art, theology and politics of church décor). It's going to need looking at quite closely. We are sometimes helped by existing records created by other libraries and I'm using one for this book where a German cataloguer has detailed 140 illustrations, 42 of which are colour. Obviously someone with too much time on their hands.  

I glance at another book in the pile. Waldburg-Capustigall: ein ostpreußisches Schloß im Schnittpunkt von Gutsherrschaft und europäischer Geschichte (Waldburg-Capustigall: an East Prussian castle: the squire, his family and European history). One of my duties is to propose new subject headings to the Library of Congress in the United States and this is the kind of work which may require them. Once approved by the Library of Congress the new subjects will appear on the British Library's catalogue. So, more extra work with this one.

Meanwhile, the French, Spanish and Italian cataloguers are having the time of their life.  Knock a few books off sharpish – no problem! – and then down to the canteen for coffee. I do French myself so I know this for a fact.

We also have to catalogue a series called Fortschritt-Berichte VDI, which unlike most of the foreign language books require a Dewey Decimal Classification number. Even a German would find these a challenge. Their subjects range from fuel injection systems in cars to mathematical models for biological treatment in sewage purification. When you're struggling to keep up your cataloguing rate, you don't want to meet one of these.

My desk is next to our "Urgents" trolley. German books always outnumber other languages here. The hated Fortschritt-Berichte VDI are placed here, too. Because of this geography, reader requested books are sometimes plonked straight on my desk rather than being more democratically placed on the trolley itself. They have to be catalogued asap, and definitely no time for cherry picking. The readers are waiting for their German books.

German is a wonderful language and a good knowledge of it opens the door to a wealth of great literature. I have also learned so much about German history, culture and arts while cataloguing German books. But I certainly found it more of a challenge to learn than French for example, and cataloguing it is generally more demanding than French, too. Which brings me to the point about Spanish. I have heard it said that Spanish is the easiest foreign language for a British person to learn. I don't have any evidence to back this up except for the less stressed faces of my colleagues. So maybe if I'd opted for that in my education rather than German my life would be a little easier now. In spite of all this though, German is not my major problem.That honour goes to Finnish with its fifteen cases and painfully difficult vocabulary. I wonder what Mark Twain would have made of that.

Trevor Willimott

 

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]

Document Supply Centre Requests – revisited

Back in August I wrote a post titled Document Supply Centre requests and the ‘r-word’. Now that this year’s budget for German-speaking Switzerland is used up, I have time to revisit the volume of requests for inter-library loans. Due to the number of requests, and to the need to consider whether a requested item provides “value for money”, I have been rejecting more “borderline” items (i.e. items which do not 100% fit our German Collections Development Policy).

As an example, an item costing 80 Euros or more, in a subject area we don’t normally cover, and with a very narrow or specific focus is not necessarily good value for money because, apart from the actual price of the book, we need to consider the overheads of ordering, processing, cataloguing and long-term storage. In the case of DSC requests, as the book is to be sent out on loan, there is also the extra potential for damage or loss.

But back to the statistics. Statistics can of course, give a skewed idea of what’s happening; for example: when did the academic year start, or when was Christmas or Easter. These external changes at institutes’ “working times” influence how many requests we get. Also, the number of German departments in the UK will affect it. However, looking back at the spreadsheets for the last year, two non-numerical observations are clear:

1. the number of diverse institutions asking for German language publications was much higher then, compared to now.
2. Recently we have received more requests which are out-of-scope, and these are also areas which English-speaking academia should cover well.

In one view I can show you some statistics graphically:

The horizontal lines 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 represent the financial years 2005-2006, up to 2009-2010. So the most obvious observation one can make with regard to my previous post is: for this financial year’s April, May and June the number of requests was extraordinarily high. And even though October is – surprisingly– a time when we get loads of requests, October 2009 was maybe slightly down from October 2008, but still higher than the other three years. December 2009 and January 2010 were not extremely busy, but it is worthwhile bearing in mind that libraries and institutions nationwide have probably started to feel the crunch now, and that interlibrary loan requests are not enjoying the same level of budgets any more as in these institutions last academic year.

However, all this is a bit more complex. I only see the requests for items we do not hold, and therefore there might well be many more requests for German Collections items (those which we already have). So I’d like to conclude with: it’s too early to monitor the recession on the basis of DSC requests at the British Library’s German Collections.
[CG]

Discoveries 4

Sometimes the way I discovered an item is more interesting than the item itself. In this case it is at least worth mentioning briefly. I have been asked to catalogue items of the so-called Collins Collection (books primarily selected by the book dealer John Collins for their bindings; there's more information in the newsletter of the Friends of the British Library, Issue 56 Spring 2007, p. 5). Some of the bindings look to me – as a layperson – extremely boring or standard, for other books even I can see that the binding is extraordinary, or at least “something special”.

One item for which this is true, is:

Muret. Muret-Sanders Encyclopaedic English-German and German-English Dictionary : giving the pronunciation according to the phonetic system employed in the method of Toussaint-Langenscheidt / [smaller edition for Home and School.]
(Berlin : Langenscheidtsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1905.)
Wq6/9979
Collins 831 [not yet fully processed and orderable]

As you can see it is a reference work of 1905, but there are at least two features I should mention here. First the cover has this interesting depiction of a friendly world where England, France and Germany would help and support each other (in case you can’t see it from the scan to the right: the three hands shaking have each a kind of shirt sleeve which features each countries’ name!).

The other notable feature is the explanation of signs within the introduction. Whereas some similar, helpful advice re usage of words is common, I have so far not seen a dictionary which advised that a word

• is a Masonic terminology (symbolised by a rectangle)
• was part of the “lang. of the criminal classes” (symbolised by a small gallows)
or even
• was part of the “language of the uneducated people” (the letter “P” is used)

I won’t comment on these, of course, but will simply give you the visual proof that I’m not making this up:

[CG]

A (non)typical day in a life of a Curator

There are no typical work days for most Curators at the British Library (also compare to Susan's previous post, covering this from a different angle: see http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/dach/2009/07/counting-the-days.html). Of course, there are recurring tasks, such as checking the incoming post. In 2009 we received 349 donated items via post. All need to be considered, and either forwarded for processing, returned, or disposed of in accordance with BL policy. Today it’s only a Swiss local almanac which has used an image from one of our books – I will pass this on to Permissions, as they will need to see it first.

Another daily task is to look at the German-Enquiries inbox (german-enquiries[atsign]bl.uk): there’s a note of a new book published in Germany, which I forward to Susan and Dorothea who select from Germany. I then briefly discuss with my colleague Barbara what has been happening with Dutch Collections in the last few days, as Barbara is taking over checking incoming communications from me today.

My own inbox includes a follow-up email about requesting digital scans; this is part of Imaging Services so I will need to refer the requester to their web order form.

As I’m scheduled later to supervise a historian being interviewed for a radio programme on a book about German prisoners of war in the UK, I check my background information on the book and topic; often curators get asked about something relating to our books. Indeed, they wanted to know why access to this book is “restricted”, which it isn’t: it can be ordered by anyone, but must be read in the Rare Books Reading Room.

After lunch, I deal with German DSC requests. But as often, one request is not straightforward: it is a book in a set of volumes, and the catalogue record doesn’t make it clear which we have already received. When I check the shelf, the volume in question is there.

I return a couple of books and collect a book for Susan; it’s something which also fits in with one of my research projects. I briefly inspect this book’s features against my checklist, and pass it on to Susan.

Although the library offers many talks by internal or external speakers, I don’t manage to go to many of these. But today’s was about Digital Research and how libraries could facilitate this, as digitising material is only the beginning. This will be relevant for the British Library in the near future. I hope that we will get a chance to work as curators in this field.

Back at the desk, I’m going through a duplicates list from one of our German Exchange partners, some of which are of interest to our collections. After this, I look at a draft for a blog post by Susan, and send out another version. I now also have time to follow up an email which indicates that one of the web pages where I changed a broken link hasn’t been loaded to the live server properly (I edit web pages for all Western European languages.) I also just spotted a new broken link, reported on a French page.

For the remainder of the time in the office today I will look into a presentation I’m scheduled to give to some postgraduate students in a couple of weeks’ time. Unfortunately, I don’t get very far, something for another (non)typical day in the life of curator.
[CG]

To e- or not to e- ?

Another request for statistics, this time about the speed at which electronic publishing is developing in Germany. In fact, I was asked for ‘impressions’ rather than hard statistics, which was a relief as reliable figures are difficult to find. Thankfully, due to the introduction of a law which demands the legal deposit of e-books, the catalogue of the German National Library (DNB) can be taken as reasonably representative for total output. It lists 16,114 electronic publications issued in 2009. Perhaps not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of these e-publications are in the natural sciences; a sample of 400 titles revealed only 18 which would conceivably have been in scope for the BL’s Humanities and Social Sciences collection.

The largest non-science presence in the DNB catalogue list is made up of 'on demand' publishing, which accounts for some 4,726 titles. I deliberately left these out of the sample described above since, we were really being asked about research-level material, and although some ‘on-demand’ material fits this category, most of it is more lightweight and popular, or a form of vanity publishing.

A quick survey of 35 academic German publishers’ websites proved that only ten offer some of their publications as e-books (I’ve since heard that an eleventh is due to start doing this imminently). In all cases this was in addition to an available hard copy version. Seven out of the ten offer the e-versions at a discount, generally between 10% and 20% but in one case 50%; two offer them at the same price (in one case with an additional download fee) and one actually charges more for their e-books, presumably due to the fact that they currently provide them only to libraries on a licence basis. But in all cases the e-books appeared to represent a relatively small proportion of the firm’s total output. This was even the case with a couple of more literary publishers which I checked out.

This slow progress is due in part to concerns about intellectual property issues, as demonstrated by the strong resistance to the Google books project from German academics and publishers. The German Publishers’ Association have established their own rival e-book service, ‘libreka’, but this has been seen in some quarters as an expensive flop).

So on the whole, my impression is that e-publishing, at least in Humanities and Social Sciences scholarship, is progressing slowly in Germany. In fact, I suspect progress is equally slow in most countries, despite the way in which e-books are currently being talked up in the media. But I saw another commuter reading an e-book on the tube this morning, so perhaps I’m just behind the times. Of course I can see advantages in e-books and e-readers, but I think (and hope) that they will continue to co-exist with the physical book, offering researchers the advantages of both without tying them to the disadvantages of either.
[SR]

The Day of Remembrance for the Victims of National Socialism

You might be a bit surprised about the title of this post. You might be asking yourself “didn't he mean to write 'Holocaust Memorial Day' back there?” In November 2005 the United Nations recommended that each member state commemorates today, the 27th January, 'as an annual International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust' (see http://www.un.org/holocaustremembrance/docs/res607.shtml).But there is a longer history of marking this day of the year as a day to reflect on the suffering of victims of the Holocaust. Unsurprisingly, in Israel the 27th January (the day of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet Troops) has been a day of mourning for more than half a century.

Photo by Timo Klimoff (granted as “in public domain”, see Wikimedia)

The Federal Republic of Germany , perhaps equally unsurprisingly, took a bit longer to address Germany's own past with an official day of commemoration. However, the anniversary of the brutal acts of the night of 9th November 1938 (Reichspogromnacht, for many historians the night which started the anti-Jewish pogrom) has since 1978 been a yearly occasion for Germans to think about the Holocaust, and specifically the systematic acts of violence against Jewish citizens living in the Deutsches Reich. Thus calling the 27th January 'The Day of Remembrance for Victims of National Socialism’ is a reminder not only of the overwhelming numbers of Jewish victims, but also of other groups persecuted by the Nazis: including homosexuals, Roma and Sinti people, and outspoken political opponents of the regime. The official UK Holocaust Memorial Day also seeks to remember all these and indeed victims of other genocides since 1945.

However, you choose to remember, may I invite you to commemorate this day? You could explore the BL Sound Archive's Voices of the Holocaust, visit your local library and search for works on the Holocaust and on victims of Nazism, or find out about the collections of the Wiener Library which is not only the 'World's oldest memorial institution', but is based on documents and books collected since the 1930s. Whatever you do, please remember, so that history teaches us something.
[CG]

Back in harness

If my weeks of study leave went quickly, my first weeks back have gone equally fast, helped by the fact that I’m still on a 3-day week with 2 regular days of study leave. Of course Dorothea and Clemens have managed everything smoothly in my absence – just as I expected, but it’s bizarrely comforting to know how dispensible I am! Everyone’s acquired some new experience, and we’ve also acquired some interesting new antiquarian books and an intern, Asha Riederer from Switzerland, who’s been helping out in the German and French sections. And I shouldn’t neglect to mention the new blog by our ‘Team America’ colleagues. As they have made such kind references to our own efforts, I hope to return the transatlantic favour in full at some point with some thoughts on the exiles from ‘my’ revolution who ended up in the USA, the ‘forty-eighters'.

It has been a bit hard to readjust. At least I was lucky to come back to only about 180 emails; this was partly because I’d been checking my work email address and deleting various circulars, invitations to meetings I couldn’t attend, spam and similar, and partly because I had temporarily removed myself from the various mailing lists I belong to. It’s actually quite liberating to be ‘off list’, and I’m almost tempted not to rejoin, but they do keep me in touch with the professional world. For example, if I’d still been getting postings from the excellent American list German-E (geddit?) I would have been better prepared for the news that the German National Bibliography will no longer be published in hard copy after the end of this year. This is a bit of a blow for us since the handy A4 sized issues are ideal for doing preliminary selection work while commuting, and probably easier on the eye than the online version will be. As it is, I feel as if I’ve had to re-learn how to do German selection in the last three weeks; looks as if I’ll have to start yet again in the new year.

Ah yes, the new year. After all, we’re on the threshhold of Christmas already. Good children in DACH will already have had their gifts from Nikolaus, and here in our small DACH corner of the BL it’s probably time to put up the German Section Christmas tree. Though with time rushing by as it does, our Christmas Dinner will take place in January again: Dreikönige, anyone?
[SR]