In this new series of posts Jo from our Digital Engagement team talks to our wonderful Library staff who work tirelessly to manage our collection and make it accessible for everyone. They discuss what they do, how they got into their role and unearth a few lesser known facts about the Library. This week she speaks to Nicole Ioffredi, Print Room Coordinator and Cataloguer.

Nicole is a Print Room Coordinator and Cataloguer working in the Visual Arts Department. She looks after South Asian prints, photos and drawings, as well as some British artworks.

Her job involves coordinating appointments for readers to access our collection items. She recently helped a reader find 19th century photos of a building in India to help gauge original designs and steer a preservation project.

The cataloguing aspect of her role involves documenting photos, prints and drawings, recording details to enable readers to search and find items or to help with the preparation of loans. She meticulously catalogues inscriptions, dates and the condition of collection items.

“Often albums have been catalogued but not individual photos. I manually review each photo and help place conservation bids for fragile items and put in digitisation requests to preserve them.”

How has Covid-19 changed the way you work?

During the pandemic Nicole has been working more from photos of items rather than handling the physical items themselves.

Her ‘business as normal’ routine sees her invigilating reader appointments in the reading room in the morning while the afternoon is spent mostly cataloguing and retrieving items for the following day.

With the reading room closure, due to Covid-19, she is spending most of her time cataloguing and helping readers source information online. She’s working on a detailed spreadsheet that can be ingested into the database with new location information of collection items. But after months of closure, Nicole is really missing meeting our readers:

“I really love observing readers’ emotional connection with specific items, especially when they’re researching their own family history.”

How did you get into this field?

Originally from Canada, Nicole has been living in the UK for five years and has been at the Library since October 2019. Following a Bachelor’s Degree in Art History and World Religions at McGill University in Montreal, Nicole went on to work in UK-based auction houses before completing an MA in Museums and Heritage Studies at SOAS.

“As an undergrad I became interested in South Asian arts, it was my dream to work with prints and drawings. I hope to travel to the region when I can.”

Her tip for those interested in this area of work is to get hands-on experience with collection items whilst studying and volunteering to get a foot in the door.

What is your favourite object in the collection?

A model of a lion, standing on a wooden base, a halter round his neck. Artist(s): Gangaram Cintamani Tambat (fl.1790s).

Nicole enjoys stumbling across unexpected items in the collection. She particularly remembers coming across a wax model of a lion (pictured above and available as a Sketchfab 3D model too). You can find out more about the lion on our Asian and African Studies blog. Her personal preference is for natural history drawings and has a particular soft spot for some Indian drawings of fish (pictured below). Dating from the 1790s, these are some of the earliest natural history drawings of Indian fish drawn from life in the collection. Browse the collection.

NHD36 18.5 by 12 inches. 72 ff. in water-colour depicting Indian fishes. 1794 watermark.

NHD36 18.5 by 12 inches. 72 ff. in water-colour depicting Indian fishes. 1794 watermark.

What do you love about the Library?

When she began working at the British Library in 2019, Nicole was surprised by the scale of our multiple basement stores and impressed by the mechanical system used to retrieve collection items, though she notes it has been eerily quiet in recent months. What she appreciates most is the accessibility of the Library.

“It’s so different to a museum where much of the artefacts are locked away. Here, anyone can visit and make appointments to see items from this incredible collection.”

What is your favourite British Library exhibition or project?

With her personal interest in South Asian art and religion, Nicole enjoyed our Buddhism exhibition which just happened to be on when she joined the Library. She’s also interested in the International Dunhuang Project, a multilingual resource and a ground-breaking international collaboration to make information and images of all manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from Dunhuang and archaeological sites of the Eastern Silk Road freely available online.

Do you have any book recommendations for our readers?

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion, a collection of personal essays from the 1960s - “One of the essays about going home really struck me when I first moved to London.”

It has been an extraordinary year so we wanted to take a moment to wish all of you a happy festive season. 

The British Library is a charity that opens up a world of ideas and inspiration for everyone. This birdsong (robin, recorded in Scotland on 26 April 1984 by Richard Margoschis, shelfmark WS2105 C1) is one of almost 250,000 rare recordings preserved for future generations through Unlocking Our Sound Heritage.

With thanks to The National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Foyle Foundation, the Garfield Weston Foundation and many other generous contributions from trusts and individuals.

Image from ‘The Sherborne Missal’, Illuminated manuscript, c.1399 – 1407, Add MS 74236 – acquired and digitised by the Library with generous support from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, The Headley Trust and Mercers’ Charitable Foundation.

As we come to the close of the year we look back at some of our highlights and what we've published that our readers have loved most.

We are always intrigued to know which of our collection items are most frequently viewed on our website. The top five from this year, in reverse order were: the stunning painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel, Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, artist Jean-Jacques-François Le Barbier's painting, The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and finally, the most popular – by a country mile – was Beowulf. 

Meanwhile, our blogs brought you a rich mix of highlights and news from our collection. Three of our most read posts included the astonishing possessions of King Henry VIII (bespoke wardrobe collections, jewels, books, munitions, ships), the sounds you might have been missing under lockdown and unsurprisingly our thrilling work to digitise our Kings Topographical collection of maps and make it freely available to a global audience on Flickr. Lastly, they say the old ones are the best, and that certainly seems true of our Digitised Manuscripts blog that still seems to delight audiences with this Knight vs. Snail post from 2013.

We’re very grateful for the staggering 1.9 million Twitter followers who enjoy the regular encounters with the collection we publish. Our most popular posts this year say a lot about you and what you value in us. At number one is our Leonardo Da Vinci gif in which we reflected on the incredible achievements the human mind has been capable of throughout history. A close second was our conservation-themed riff on the ‘how it’s going meme’ that circulated in October:

Our Instagram channel features some of our most visually stunning collection items, and unsurprisingly our most successful post was this miniature book made by Charlotte Bronte, part of our #collectionsunited campaign:

And as everyone knows the internet is just wild about cats – as were our followers who enjoyed the ever present cat at our re-opening operations this summer:

Our thank you post to those who visited us when we did re-open was another strong performer:

And we ran a caption competition for the covers of our new Crime classics series, which captured peoples’ imaginations and sometimes drew unrepeatable suggestions:

Jumping across to Facebook, the nature of our followers is reflected in the popularity of our International Kindness Day post in November:

Meanwhile this Axel Scheffler video, part of our Discovering Children's Books campaign, inspired families with imaginative activities for children during the first lockdown this summer.

It has been a busy year and we have dedicated it to bringing our collection to our readers, followers and users through all our digital channels while we've been apart from one another to stay safe. We hope you've enjoyed the fruits if our labour and we have so much more planned for 2021 - watch this space (or subscribe to our emails, follow us on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter).   

Hannah Gabrielle, Head of Digital Engagement