‘Favourite fictional librarian? Batgirl!’

With over 1500 staff covering areas from security to events management, the British Library is a multi-professional team – and this includes, of course, librarians. Library Lives is our new series celebrating and profiling librarians across the British Library and the UK. And what better time to launch it than Libraries Week, the annual showcase of the best that libraries have to offer.

Today we meet Stella Wisdom, qualified librarian and Digital Curator in our Digital Scholarship team.

Where was your local library growing up?

Bedworth in Warwickshire.

Why did you want to become a librarian?

When I was at secondary school I did my work experience at Bedworth Library. They encouraged me to curate a part of the teenage section, and I did it on rock music and heavy metal: I put all these posters up and organised displays of CDs. I also organised a Beatrix Potter themed children’s event. I just had such an amazing time and couldn’t believe this was a job that I could do.

What does your current job involve?

That’s a very good question! I promote innovative and creative reuse, and also computational and data-driven research using the Library’s data and digital collections – both the digitised analogue collections and born-digital material.

Do you have a favourite item in the Library’s collection?

This is a difficult one, but I’m going to pick 80 Days by a small studio in Cambridge called inkle. It’s a retelling of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days but it’s an interactive app. You read the story by going on different journeys as you go round the world, unlocking different parts of the journey narrative as you progress. Here at the Library we have been investigating complex digital publications, which we call emerging formats, and collecting 80 Days has been an experiment for us.

What's your favourite thing that you can do in a library?

For me, it’s to attend and to organise events. I love events in libraries, from game jams to Wikipedia edit-a-thons – even raves. We had an algorave at the British Library in 2019 and it was such a fun evening.

Where's your favourite library, or one you would most like to visit?

The library I’d most like to visit is the public library in Seattle. It’s a big glass building – it looks super impressive. And Seattle’s not too far away from Washington State University, Vancouver and they’ve got the Electronic Literature Lab there.

What do you think makes a good librarian?

Being adaptable and willing to change and learn, and helping others to learn.

If you weren't doing your current job, what would you be?

I’d like to be a lawyer – I’ve got quite interested in copyright and trademark law. I think that kind of attention to detail, looking up sources – there are some similar skills.

What one thing do you wish people knew about libraries or being a librarian that you suspect they don’t?

How much collecting of digital material we do. People may know we collect e-books and e-journals, but they may not be aware of the annual crawl of websites we do for the UK web archive, or the emerging formats collecting we’re doing.

How have things changed in libraries since you qualified?

When I did my Information and Library Studies degree at Aberystwyth in the late 90s, the World Wide Web was quite a new thing. I didn’t ever imagine that there would be roles like Digital Curators and departments like Digital Scholarship when I was studying to be a librarian.  

Tell us something about yourself that has nothing to do with your job

When I’m not being a librarian, I’m a volunteer roadie and driver for the UK goth band Inkubus Sukkubus.

Stella photographed by Candia McKormack

Favourite fictional librarian

Batgirl! A superhero and a librarian. Very cool.

Can you give us a book recommendation?

Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch. Modern urban fantasy set in London.

Interview by Ellen Morgan

We spoke to people who have professional registration status as a librarian via the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals or who have an academic qualification such as a first degree, a postgraduate diploma or a Master’s degree in library and information studies or librarianship.

Is this you? If you’d like to feature in Library Lives, get in touch with [email protected]

Would you like this to be you? Find out more about becoming a librarian on the CILIP website

We go behind the scenes to introduce you to our people and the many ways they work to open up our collection for everyone. This month we meet Senior Imaging Technician, Isabelle Reynolds-Logue.

Isabelle Portrait

Tell me about your role?

Isabelle joined the Library in January 2020 as a photographer on the International Dunhuang Project, working on the Lotus Sutra Manuscript Digitisation Project. She has since worked on a number of other projects including Heritage Made Digital, medieval manuscripts and the Bollinger Javanese manuscripts, as well as exhibition photography and commercial orders.

How did you get into this field?

Isabelle first encountered cultural heritage photography at university during her course in Arts and Sciences. However, it was after university, working front of house at the Postal Museum, where she discovered her passion.

‘I love photography and cultural heritage, so seeing the two combined was a dream! In my spare time, I went to the studio and was trained on the equipment. I knew this was the path I wanted to follow so I set about looking for more experience.’

She embarked on a digital archiving traineeship with the National Archives, learning on the job, which then led her to her current role as a Senior Imaging Technician at the British Library working on the International Dunhuang Project.

Isabelle working on the Lotus Sutra scrolls

What do you love about the Library?

Isabelle is passionate about the collection and also enjoys the diversity of her work.

‘I love how the Library holds such a wide range of material that anyone can access. From a great Philatelic collection to the Sound Archive, and all the incredible manuscripts, there is something for everyone here. I also love the variety of exhibitions the Library puts on. Women’s Rights followed by Paddington Bear? Excellent!’

What are some of your favourite projects you have been a part of recently?

In almost two years at the Library, Isabelle has worked on a number of diverse projects and a variety of medieval manuscripts, requiring different types of digitisation and photography techniques.

Her favourite project so far has been the medieval manuscripts project where she discovered the incredible and fascinating illustrations of armed hares found in Yates Thompson MS 8 during the digitisation process.

‘They are as weird as they sound,’ she says. However there is no doubting the beauty of the illustrations.

Examples of the hare illustration on the Yates Thompson manuscripts

For the upcoming Elizabeth and Mary: Royal Cousins, Rival Queens exhibition, Isabelle digitised the Elizabeth I funeral procession scrolls. This manuscript is unique in being ‘the first ever visual record of the funeral of an English monarch’.

The panels of the scroll had been cut and bound into a large volume, and for the exhibition Isabelle was asked to generate a stitched image of all the panels so that the item could be viewed in its original state.

[Left hand of drawing]: The horse trapped with velvet, led by two attendants; the Sergeant of the Vestry and Children of the Chapel Royal

She captured each panel of the item individually, straightened and cropped the images using Capture One and then pieced these files together to generate a stitched image in Photoshop. As it wasn’t a continuous scroll and has been cut into pieces, Isabelle had to manually stitch each panel together, making sure they aligned properly and making the join line invisible.

This step by step guide, based on the Lotus Sutra scrolls for the International Dunhuang Project, shows you how she did it.

Overhead camera set up capturing the funeral procession drawings

What is your favourite object in the collection?

Currently her favourite is the manuscript containing a lock of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s hair and ashes, alongside a lock of Mary Shelley’s hair. She found it while working at home on the metadata of images in the Library storage system, Portfolio.

‘However, there is so much to discover at the Library that my favourite object in the collection is bound to change!’

Any book recommendations for our readers?

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist by Adrian Tomine. ‘I’m a huge fan of graphic novels and this cartoonist in particular, and this is the last one I read. It is so well put together, it really made me laugh and cringe. It is such an honest depiction of the artist’s life.’

Find out more about our Digitisation Services.

As our building in St Pancras fully opened up this summer, we were excited to welcome back friends and neighbours on our doorstep after well over a year, thanks to the Holiday Activities Fund (HAF) programme.

The brilliant group from KCBNA including youth workers Kamil, Ali and Nathan

In partnership with Young Camden Foundation and Camden Council, young people from the King’s Cross Brunswick Neighbourhood Association (KCBNA) community enjoyed fun learning activities, gained new skills and were inspired by stories of local start-up successes across two weeks of the holidays here at the Library.

In the first week our curators shared all kinds of items from our collection with the youngest children in the group, covering the origins of the Olympics, football fanzines and the first-ever published comics.

For most of the group it was their first time coming through the doors of our St Pancras building. And once inside they got a full behind-the-scenes tour including some of the most important books, maps and manuscripts in our collection on display in the Treasures Gallery, plus a first-hand experience of campaigning for change in our exhibition Unfinished Business: The Fight for Women's Rights. Local art teacher Annabel Levin also ran a workshop where the children got stuck into a tie-dying session.

Annabel with cotton that the group had tie-died with colourful ink, pebbles and string

In the second week local teenagers met with Matt Judkins MBA,  inventor of the world’s flattest international charger. Matt introduced the group to the world of start-up businesses from budgeting to branding. He told us how to sell a product or service and challenged the group to invent something new and original to take to market.

The enthusiastic group pitched their brilliant ideas in front of an audience and panel of our Business & IP Centre users who had previously benefitted from our start-up business support services. Among them was local entrepreneur, Ije Ene, who runs a sustainable fashion business.

'The young people learned a huge amount over the course of the week and were really inspired. I’ve had several young people telling me they want to be entrepreneurs and the parents asking what we did to get them so motivated!' Shofi Muhammod, Senior Youth Worker said.

Nigel Spencer, our Research and Business Manager, sharing advice on starting up a business in the Poet’s Circle

The HAF programme is just one of a range of activities we run to engage local people, many of which would not bepossible without our partners. A big thank you to Camden Council's Young Camden Foundation and King’s Cross Brunswick Neighbourhood Association, as well as our own curators, for making this happen. With the help of all our partners and supporters, we’ll keep opening up a world of ideas and inspiration for everyone, both in our own neighbourhood, and across the UK.