One on the minor pleasures of reading in the Old Bodleian in the 1960s was the sight on the gold-on-blue inscription 'Protobibliothecarius Bodleianus' above a door off the Upper Reading Room. Behind that door, with its magisterial, slightly joky message, sat Bodley's librarian, one of a succession of scholars who had looked after and built up the Library since the first one took office in 1602. The historian J. L. N. Myres, Librarian from 1948 to 1966 (to whom we owe the initial restoration of the frieze of portrait heads all round the room), relished his Greco-Latinate title to the extent of encouraging colleagues to call him 'Proto'. Yet, Myres's resignation, over the threatened abolition of the Indian Institute, now seems only one of the pinpoint-sized tragedies which have punctuated the history of all great scholarly institutions.
Nearly forty years later, the Indian Institute Library is finally for the chop. Its move, since Myres's time, to purpose-built premises at the top of the New Bodleian building, with comprehensive open-shelf access and helpful, knowledgeable staff, does not prevent it from being considered 'too small to be viable'.
The History Faculty Library, in the former Indian Institute premises, is similarly condemned. So are the Oriental Institute Library, the Taylorian Slavonic Library, and Rhodes House Library, with its unique, country-house-like setting and its archive, book and periodical collections relating to Commonwealth history. The Geography and Physiology libraries are to go. Other departmental libraries have already gone. Even the main Taylorian Library, once a proudly independent modern languages stronghold, may lose its magnificent home in the Cockerell building in St Giles, because the high shelves in the main reading room demand long ladders and there is limited disabled access.
The abolition of small, specialist university libraries is one of two main economy measures which the Oxford University Library Services propose in their Establishment Review, released to members of the University in late March 2005. For ordinary Bodleian readers, this is available (only) on the Library's computers at http://www.lib.ox.ac.uk/users/news. The report states that many arts and humanities libraries (just how many, or which ones, is left unclear) are to be united in a few years' time on the present Radcliffe Infirmary site. Books belonging to these will be housed in a giant store at Osney Mead, from which they will be ordered through OLIS and retrieved by robots. Surplus books, including the vital duplicate copies that one can now find in (say) the History Faculty Library if they happen to be in use or mislaid in the Camera, will be rationalized in the process, and many pulped.
Serendipitous browsing of specialized open-shelf collections will be at an end. So, too, will the peacefully concentrated atmosphere of small libraries in which most readers are working within or around a particular discipline, knowing that they can easily follow references from one open-shelf book to another, and that scholarly, friendly librarians are on hand to guide them round the collections, explain obscure points of cataloguing or discuss their particular needs.
For these, too, will soon become a thing of the past, replaced by 'Subject Area Consultants' in offices remote from any reader's desk. The authorities have found the Library staffing structure top-heavy, with too many high-grade senior staff and not enough low-grade juniors. Some librarians even have contracts that allow them to continue working to 67 and take 52 days' leave a year. Since their presence as hands-on reading-room administrators is considered 'inappropriate', those who cannot be persuaded into early retirement will be diverted into managerial paper-pushing, leaving junior clerical staff, working by the rule-book, in charge of the reading rooms.
Oxford University libraries are now run from the top by a professional bureaucracy, with little direct consultation between the ranks and none at all between managers and readers. Alarming developments have been afoot for the past several years, chief among them the present director's (as yet unfulfilled) commitment to create a visitors' centre inside the Old Bodleian [The Observer, 18/3/01].
Guided tours, however, are increasingly impinging on readers' peace and quiet. A Daily Telegraph story on 31 March, about rumoured plans to turn the historic Radcliffe Camera into a visitors' centre, provoked denials from the deputy director, but a guarded admission by the acting director, in a letter to the Telegraph on 4 April, that 'the university' was, indeed, discussing new uses for the buildlng.
Meanwhile the fifteenth-century Duke Humfrey's Library, which has a high concentration of scholarly readers helped by readily accessible scholar-librarians, seems the most likely candidate to become a tourist museum, once staff members have been pensioned off and the consultation of special collections (early manuscripts and pre-1801 books) has been transferred to fussy conditions in some artificially-lit, airless bubble.
Queue up here for the Bodleian Library Experience, in which Oxford dispenses souvenirs of what it has itself, once again, destroyed.
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