Orwell Day

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In celebration of Orwell Day and the new series of programmes beginning today on BBC Radio 4 I thought I’d repost a couple of Orwell essays this week.

From 1921 to 1991, the iconic British magazine, The Listener provided a platform for journalists, writers, artists and intellectuals to fling articles and essays into the national consciousness.Orwell wrote hundreds of them, perhaps more than anyone else. He treated The Listener as bloggers treat the web. The Collected Essays contain all of these short journalistic pieces.

In one, he deals with two questions, Tolstoy’s view of Shakespeare and art as propaganda. This short piece is in fact a precursor to one of Orwell’s major essays, Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool, on the same topics. In the essay, Orwell deftly defends Shakespeare from Tolstoy, not on the grounds of being a great thinker but on the grounds of being a great poet. Orwell ends by pointing out that in relation to Shakespeare’s work, Tolstoy’s essay would have been entirely forgotten had he himself not been the author of War and Peace and of Anna Karenina. It is fascinating to be able to follow Orwell’s concerns over periods of say, a few weeks. The articles in The Listener are published regularly so it is possible for example to look at the previous weeks’ article to discover an entire piece on art and propaganda.

Tolstoy was born with a mouth filled by silver spoons. He spent much of his life as a formidable member of the Russian nobility whilst at the same time developing ascetic ideals. One trip to Paris saw him witness to a public execution. This had a profound effect on him and he swore afterwards never to serve another government. His marriage, to Sonya Tolstoya was passionate, although she became increasingly frustrated when later in life he relinquished his title, lands and copyrights. He died only a few days after finally achieving his aim of turning himself into a peasant. Thousands of his newly joined class lined his funeral procession.

In 1903 Tolstoy wrote his vicious attack on Shakespeare. This essay allowed Orwell, some thirty years later to consider why Shakespeare was completely untouched by Tolstoy’s vitriol, despite the great Russian’s fame and literary influence. Tolstoy and Orwell shared many characteristics. They were both capable of plunging themselves into a poverty they could each easily have avoided. Tolstoy threw the silver spoons away. Orwell found himself down and out in Paris and London. Their views of the state were similarly wary, both being deeply affected by first hand experience of violence. Both writers too, had a Christian base to much of their work, at least in terms of their conviction in the existences of Good and Evil. Tolstoy took this to new heights of religious extremism, being regarded as a Christian Anarchist by the end of his life. He placed the words of Jesus above the propaganda of the State. Orwell, whilst hardly a practicing Christian asked to be buried by the Rights of the Church of England. The most powerful shared aspect of the two great writers was, however it is derived in their life and work, a searing honesty.

Tolstoy turned this on himself. He could not live with his wealth and construct a meaningful philosophy at the same time. Orwell, faced with hypocrisy and fascist aggression, used his integrity as a spider uses a web – it is instinctive, beautifully spun and deadly.

Where the two writers differ most acutely is on the relative worth or otherwise of William Shakespeare. The poet’s life, what we know of it, and his hastily produced plays were anathema to Tolstoy. He considers Shakespeare to be a poor writer because he was not a great thinker. Poetry has nothing to do with it. Orwell takes precisely the opposite view. For Orwell, who by creating the nightmares of ‘Room 101’ fully understood the dreadful authority of dreams, Prospero’s island and Puck’s forest are the creations he most admired. Orwell also could not help but notice that Tolstoy chose to attack Shakespeare through King Lear, an ageing aristocrat, casting away his wealth and descending into despair. Tolstoy was throwing stones at his mirror.

Tolstoy regards Shakespeare as unimpressive because he does not, in his opinion write anything ‘important to the life of mankind.’ That Tolstoy’s personal ambition was to die shivering in a shack whilst waiting for Jesus, it is hardly surprising that the sheer life-force bursting from Shakespeare’s plays offended him.

Orwell respects Tolstoy, even admitting that Shakespeare may not be considered the great philosopher others have claimed. He draws a line though at dismissing him. Tolstoy turns his not inconsiderable fire onto the English poet but it is as though Shakespeare himself is a dream. The shots go through him as they might a ghost.

Orwell understands why. There is something, if we are to be scrupulously fair with Tolstoy that may have been lost in translation. The Russian fails to recognise the beauty of Shakespeare’s language and in so doing misses his target. An inability to be moved by a foreign language does not provide enough evidence though, for the sustained assassination attempt on Shakespeare by Tolstoy. The root of Tolstoy’s anger is fear.

Orwell refers to Tolstoy’s relationship to Shakespeare as akin to a tired father being pestered by a noisy child. Shakespeare’s exuberance, both in his work and in what can be suggested by the chaos of London at the turn of the Seventeenth Century, is too much for Tolstoy. As an old man, his personal objective to narrow his consciousness as far as possible towards Calvary meant that Tolstoy was no longer capable of enjoyment. He could not suffer fools.

This is the business in which Shakespeare excelled, and is at the centre of Orwell’s case for his defence. In King Lear, the Fool, who, while telling jokes also speaks the truth, follows the King into his madness. His voice is playful but direct. This is the voice of Shakespeare and it must have intimidated and irritated Tolstoy almost to destruction that he could not destroy this voice, this poet who taunted him with success and art.

Orwell knew the Fool. He created it himself in Animal Farm. The tragic-comic character of the great Shire horse, Boxer, who is eventually murdered is a voice of honesty cut short by the growing power of the pigs. And in Nineteen eighty-four Winston Smith, although not cast as a Shakespearean fool is made foolish by the state and the rats. Winston spends most of the novel clinging on to his own honesty, his own sense of self. At the end he accepts the Truth of Big Brother. Winston is a fool twice, engineered by Orwell’s invention of doublespeak. It is a masterstroke from a writer who understood Shakespeare deeply. It is an echo in English literature and one that is directed at Russia.

Tolstoy had his own reasons, which were far less altruistic that he tried to portray for assaulting Shakespeare. Orwell had his reason too for defending him. It was not a coincidence that Tolstoy chose King Lear and no more a coincidence that Orwell selected Tolstoy in order to defend freedom.

Tolstoy emerges from the debate that he began as a great writer. Shakespeare remains entirely untouched by his attack and Orwell stands as the finest modern story-teller. He at least, could never be accused as not having written works ‘important to the life of mankind.’

Borges, in his miniature story staring Shakespeare called Everything and Nothing, describes how when Shakespeare meets God the poet says; ’I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and myself.’ The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: ‘Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one.’ In Borges’ last story, Shakespeare’s Memory, a man is given the entire mind of the poet. As it gradually overwhelms him he passes it on. Borges believed that the words of one man are the words of all men. We are all Shakespeare.

Orwell and Borges both discovered that art, even in the shape of a Fool is a powerful force. Both writers believed that books contain truth. That is why Tolstoy attacks these plays. It is why Orwell sought to defend them. It is why books were being burned in Nazi Germany. It is why Borges believed the library to be a labyrinth. It is why libraries remain linked to dreams, to memory, to political freedom, to educational opportunity and to truth.

 

 

SHLS Digital Profile

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I think the most overused word in our professional context is the word ‘digital.’ Our Associate Director for Digital Environments, Joe Honywill and myself recently held a daylong meeting to determine what the word digital might mean for the library. Just because a word is overused does not mean that it shouldn’t be reused.

Senate House Libraries is a critical mass organisation. In other words, we hold massive amounts of content. The spine of the library will remain its four million printed books and twelve million historic collections, not least because we are acquiring almost thirty thousand books per year. The technology change around these objects still concerns them, in terms of services, delivery and interaction. Technology in libraries is intended for a purpose but often appears little more than an after-thought. Many library websites do no more than reflect the physical organisation and its activities. Equally, many digital environments containing surrogate images of collections are merely an electronic version of the object.

Lastly, even where libraries have sustained good websites and enlightening online exhibitions they rarely draw on thinking and practice from beyond academia.

In the process of creating our Digital Profile, which I think is a more dynamic document and body of work than the usual phrase, ‘digital strategy,’ we have found an imaginative way of considering the presence and shape of SHL on the web.

In a typically astute blog post, Lorcan Dempsey noted the low profile given to the Library Management System in three senior library systems posts. The LMS did sit within those roles, but was not highlighted as an area of development or innovation. At SHL, our Digital Profile deliberately includes the LMS as an area of considerable change. We are the first major UK research library, alongside another RLUK library at SOAS and also Birkbeck College, to move from a proprietary to an open source system. Our thinking on this issue has been influenced by the broader strategy on digital environments in that we wish to create a research culture within the library itself which questions all that we do, rather than simply act in a supporting role to other researchers.

So, the Digital Profile will be focused in three areas; Services, Content and Futures. The LMS project falls into the Services strand and is its largest single area of work, although others include our Everyware programme, which has replaced desktop computing with mobile devices throughout the library. Services will also act as the ‘home’ strand for our ongoing discussions with Camden Borough Council. Content includes all digitisation projects and is principally engaged with historic and rare materials, although the strand will also interact closely with potential areas of mass digitisation in our modern collections. Most importantly, Content will be defined by the term and activities associated with the Digital Humanities. This will not only act as a direct response to the latest report on our libraries by HEFCE but also seek to mature much existing activity into a closer relationship with our key academic stakeholders.

Perhaps the most unprecedented of our strands is Futures. All large research libraries are involved in often innovative and important projects on content and services. Indeed, our devices loan service has actually brought us up to speed rather than pushed boundaries, although this will change with the Everyware II project. The Futures strand of our Digital Profile is concerned with presenting the library as a commercial, as well as a critical mass organisation. Its main themes are concerned with addressing the fact that, with the exception of private researchers, Senate House Libraries is invisible outside of Higher Education.

It is deliberate that the responsibility for ensuring a creative space (and creative spaces) lies within Digital Environments, even though all staff and researchers will benefit from this. Technology is at the core of our planning for the future. It is also crucial to how we engage with new audiences and with new debates. For example, the Digital Profile will enable us to bring fresh groups of people into contact with our collections and services and also allow the library and its staff to reach out corporately to other relevant platforms such as the wider cultural heritage sector, the BBC and the Guardian Online.

In all of these new arenas we will seek to become known as a producer of original content and as accessible to diverse audiences, and to do both of these things by the inventive implementation of digital practices and technologies. Overused the word digital may be, but in a context of calculated risk, experiment and openness I hope the Senate House Libraries Digital Profile can further transform our contribution to the experience of students, scholars and the public in their use of our great collections.

The Big Nine?

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The future of library consortia is a major question for libraries of all types and in all sectors. In the higher education sector, library consortia are long established and have provided real benefit to readers through access agreements and sharing of practice in statistical form. In the public library sector, the use of consortia is less common but, for example, in May 2012 an inaugural conference took place in Bath for colleagues from public libraries to discuss the potential benefits of consortial practice.

In universities the trend from the early 1980’s has been to follow a twin-track approach of both large and small consortial activity. The precursor to Research Libraries UK (RLUK), the Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL) was formed in 1983 from only Oxford, Cambridge, Senate House Libraries, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds and Manchester. I would also now include Trinity College Dublin and the LSE in such a list of ‘very large libraries.’ RLUK is now 33 members and likely to continue growing. SCONUL too has grown with changes to the UK higher education sector.

Our library at Senate House is a member of a number of consortia. Some of these are, as with SCONUL and RLUK relatively large groups with a variety of different associated tasks and activities. Others, such as SPARC-Europe are focused on particular areas of work, in that case Open Access to research. I do not want to publicise the total annual cost of these memberships but it is not insignificant for any large research library.

This post is concerned with consortia but also takes the opportunity to reflect on certain aspects of the 2012 SCONUL conference, which I attended in Liverpool a few weeks ago.

To date, I have had a varied career in terms of roles and types of institutional settings. I have worked in the country’s smallest institution at Dartington and in its largest at London. I have been in development agency roles at JISC and in comparatively traditional roles within large libraries. I have managed information services in China and Malaysia whilst at Nottingham University. I have shelved books as an undergraduate assistant at Queen’s University Belfast and written entire strategies at Senate House. In thirteen years since qualifying from Sheffield University I have moved, been moved and ensured movement happens.

I feel deeply privileged to be part of a profession that is at the forefront of the current dominant shift in human culture – the information age. I say this without self-aggrandisement – I have, in all these settings, known what libraries are for.

At the 2012 SCONUL conference there were two presentations I attended which fell some way short of real purpose.

The first was a presentation on information literacy (IL) and the library’s role by Megan Oakleaf, Associate Professor at Syracuse University. Oakleaf is a good speaker, although the seemingly endless, and I’m sorry to say rather weak jokes about the differences between US and British English did wear me down by the end of the presentation. This aside, I think it is important to reflect on the messages contained within her keynote. The principle one seemed to be that because of the Internet, librarians had lost their purpose in life. The answer, according to Oakleaf is to properly define our role in information literacy. As soon as she said this, my heart sank.

Professional librarianship comes in many forms. This is broadly reflected in the curricula of our departments of library and information science, or ‘library schools’ as some of us determinedly call them. As a profession we do tend to choose differing paths for our careers. This is clearly a good thing. If all librarians were the same where would the world be? However, it is not so much the skillsets that define us as the information that we hold.

I am not for one minute suggesting that there are more and less important members of the profession, but I am suggesting that such a distinction exists amongst our libraries.

Oakleaf’s proposal, that not only is information literacy at the heart of our profession but that it is also a ‘teaching practice’ seemed to me, despite the confident manner in which it was presented, a proposal formed on panic. This was the voice of a community overwhelmed by the web. A community of librarians and of libraries whose small collections were now redundant in the digital world and who are left struggling for definition by suggesting that they could ‘teach’ navigation to the users of that world.

Two problems: librarianship is rarely about teaching. That is a process of course design, student monitoring and assessment leading to formal awards, which is not our role in universities. Librarians do not teach. We train. I will no doubt receive examples to prove otherwise but in general, I think we should be honest about where our real purpose lies. Secondly, collections and their interpretation are the heart of the library profession and information literacy is not.

The National Forum on Information Literacy defines IL as ‘the ability to know when there is a need for information, to be able to identify, locate, evaluate, and effectively use that information for the issue or problem at hand.’ The important point here is that although IL is used as a term in libraries, it is actually a misuse and especially in academic libraries. Information literacy is regarded everywhere apart from the library community to be the ability of citizens to interact with the digital world. At the very least, this can be seen as part of the role of colleagues in public libraries. In the academic library environment we are not delivering information literacy, we are training academic skills such as search techniques, data management and web fluency.

Oakleaf has I think, mistaken these core information handling skills as information literacy and, perhaps because of her own background as a teacher applied this term incorrectly for our profession. The result was a presentation without real depth of purpose, despite the admitted energy of the presenter.

The real problem underlying Oakleaf’s presentation though was not of her own making. There were over one hundred libraries represented in the room at the SCONUL conference and not all of them were alike.

Chris Hale, from Universities UK gave the second session I would highlight as a problem. I have seen Chris present a number of times and he always strikes me as a thoughtful and well-considered contributor to discussion. This was no exception in the sense that Chris’ style was clear and his content logically delivered. The problem arose, and it jumped out at me like a hidden tiger, at the moment he used the word ‘generic’ to describe library activities.

UUK are starting a benchmarking initiative across all academic libraries to discern areas of library practice which are similar, or duplicated or perhaps both. The aim appears to be to produce a report for senior mangers in universities to enable them to have reassurances that their local library services are efficient. If we put the considerable risk of this data to those libraries aside, in that universities have a common ability to willfully misread benchmark data in order to justify damaging cuts, we can focus on the real difficulty here.

I looked around the table at Chris’ session and could see perhaps three other large research libraries represented. All other colleagues were, broadly speaking from smaller institutions or teaching-led environments. As is the case in much of the UK sector, and I have already mentioned my own time outside of RLUK, there is real excellence in many of those institutions. Some of my colleagues in post-1992 universities are running multi-award winning services with superb results in, for example, the National Student Survey.

My issue with the word ‘generic’ is not one based on elitism but rather on pragmatism. UUK’s survey as presented to us seemed to discuss libraries purely in terms of undergraduate throughput, whether that is measured by gate statistics or e-book usage or any other desperately simplistic description of what a library is in the early twenty-first century. There is no doubt that some slighter, less complex services, however excellent can be measured like this. However, for a comparably small number of world-class libraries this is a tactical error.

For around nine HE libraries, perhaps even the original seven in CURL, this kind of measurement is not only damaging locally but also nationally. Policy makers are almost always short-term junkies. Politics itself is fast-paced and trend driven. It is far easier to seek out new headlines than retrace collective steps to consider what has already been achieved. The fact is, and it is shown most clearly in the UK Inter-Library Loan system, that a small number of very large libraries are already an efficient way of providing world-class facilities to the whole sector with minimal duplication across all UK university libraries.

Efficiencies can of course always be made, but in some areas it needs to be understood that the academic library sector needs clarity and stability, not endless reinvention.

In the early part of the twentieth century the same nine libraries were, for the most part delivering the services now asked of them in the early part of the twenty-first century. There have of course been many more libraries built in the intervening years. There has more recently, been a seismic shift in knowledge availability through the Internet. Change will continue. The fact remains though, that the UK should not consider its university libraries either as primarily focused on training information handling skills, or as a generic activity. There remains a core of our national collections, which have also physically grown in the last one hundred years or so, and will continue to grow in printed form. This core needs to be absolutely clear as to its shared purpose and its contribution to the UK, and indeed Irish university sectors.

Oxford, Cambridge, Senate House Libraries, London School of Economics, Manchester, Leeds, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Trinity College Dublin remain the largest institutional collections in the UK and Ireland by any measure. These are broadly different though than the measures used by SCONUL and UUK and mean they too are centres of excellence making unique contributions to the national and international research effort. Might these be regarded as needing a further shared definition of purpose?

Considering the role of the past in the definition of a future is always roulette. What can be said though, is that for the UK to remain essential internationally we must speak with confidence about diversity. Very large libraries are not the same as smaller libraries. They hold collections on a different scale. They engage with the digital world in a more complex manner and they should be celebrated as a shared national resource, not judged in generic terms. This is I believe, a real challenge for both RLUK and SCONUL.

Designing Research 2: Infrastructure – The Inter(Nets)

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What are you looking at when you look at a computer that is not switched on? It is the world, black and promising, but what if that world were never switched off?

Sir Tim Berners Lee invented the first browser in 1990. It was called WorldWideWeb. Berners Lee wrote the code for what was then the only way to see an Internet on a NeXT computer, designed in California by Steve Jobs’ company of the same name. This computer was 12 inches wide and was supplied with 8MB of memory; the current iPhone is available with either 16GB or 32GB. Increasing speed and decreasing size dominate recent computing history.

It is hard to imagine life now without the Internet. It is less difficult to recall it. The important aspect of being aware of computing history, by which I mean remembering what we could not do before the web, is to consider what we might be able to do in the future.

There have been pitifully few times in our collective history when life has changed so fundamentally, and it could be said that never before has such a scale of change occurred so quickly as is happening now. As late as 1998 I was studying information science at Sheffield University, and we were still being taught how to request information in lines of code via the Dialog system from the US. This is no detriment to the department at Sheffield, which was and still is the UK’s leading research base in information science. Those bright green letters on a dull dialup screen provided, even then the best available resource discovery tool.

The future of the web is likely to be an entity that can no longer be switched off. In most of our homes there remains a desktop computer. This will very soon be regarded as a period piece, as wardrobes have replaced linen presses or enamel and then plastic replaced copper and tin in which to lie and dream of summer.

Eventually, the more beautiful and rarer desktop computers will appear on the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow – viewed on paper-thin screens around our wrists.

In the nearer future, something like a desktop computer is likely to remain in people’s sitting rooms. It will also be something like a television. The battle between TV and the Internet is likely to end in a single, powerful and most probably 3D device. I suspect that, like fireplaces, and the wartime wireless families will continue to enjoy gathering around a focal point. That the radio and the TV will be streamed over the web via vastly strengthened wireless signals is surely inevitable. The wireless wireless is only a matter of time. Just like the web-watch, most technologies will succumb to the dominance of the Internet, either through blurred lines or extinction. Devices will change. Content will adapt.

There have been very few positive global interventions into people’s homes. The first may well have been fire. Secondly, a great length of time passed before electricity blew out the gas. For many years, the rest were not infrastructural but content-driven; radio, television and even the early web. Already, we are experiencing the third in the form of wireless technology. This is delivered of course by cable or satellite but performs for us in our siting rooms like fire and voltage. It is alive and magical. And it is becoming omnipresent, or to use a term in common professional usage: ubiquitous.

Wireless technology appears advanced to us, but we are only at the beginning. It enables inconceivable amounts of content to be transmitted and it will soon remove the walls of homes and the rules of copyright. The structures, which we have built to protect a particular way of life, will inevitably become irrelevant to the dominant and all-pervasive Internet.

Currently, there are Wi-Fi spots in most homes, on trains, in public spaces, in coffee houses and of course, across universities. Although this seems obvious, the growth of wireless technology is advancing at remarkable speed. But what is its destination?

One of the most advanced countries in the world in terms of wireless penetration is South Korea. In 2009, Forbes produced a report on the country that still reads in 2012 as a relatively advanced state when compared with most of the US and much of Western Europe. There is strong vision in South Korea that is derived from the government’s insistence that the country will be a leading technology nation. It should be noted that such fervour is likely to be as linked to a real military threat as it is to business opportunity. Whatever the incentive, South Korea remains a step ahead of most developed economies in the technology race.

The cultural advance, if you wish to perceive it as that, made by South Korea is that its population expect, indeed embrace, all-pervasive technology. There is no sign of people complaining of a lack of downtime. No one wishes to switch his or her Blackberry off. No one seems to want to switch anything off. This combination of consumer demand and cultural acceptance has created both a market and a test base for all kinds of devices supported by wireless technology. Two of the country’s biggest tech firms, LG and Samsung have been locked in perpetual battle over the hands and minds of the consumer for a number of years. Touchscreens and wireless is a match made in heaven.

In 2009 in South Korea there were already smartphones being worn as wristwatches. Time will tell.

The two drivers for what must be seen as a fundamental technology shift in Korean society are a significant investment in broadband wireless and taking TV mobile nationally. This has provided an infrastructure upon which Internet usage can grow and also delivered popular content using the web. It is an attractive recipe and one that Western governments could easily follow. South Korea has a population of 48 million people in a country smaller than the State of Virginia. It is also a mixed economy, common in Asia of high-tech cities and low-tech rural areas. It is a nation of techies and fishermen. Or is it?

Another fascinating aspect of the growth of technology in this (a)typical society is the importance placed on design by those leading the way. Samsung are well-known to regard their company has having undergone two ‘design revolutions,’ one in 1996 and another in 2005. LG have taken the concept of design even further into the corporate psyche and now use the word ‘tesign’ to describe tech-savvy design. Both companies have development processes that bring ideas to product launches in around two years and include investment in evaluating design from other industries such as fashion, art, furniture and cars. This openness to enquire into the ideology of other sectors is, for example, almost absent from discussion about customer service and experience in most universities.

Academia has an unfortunate tendency to consider itself superior.

Since the early to mid-2000′s there has been considerable effort to deliver information in attractive ways. Priority has for some time been given to how websites look as opposed to how they might be used. This has produced some great work but it has also, when scaled up through national funding, resulted in huge amounts of content that are unsupported by leading-edge infrastructure. The growth of the web as an organism, separate to people’s lives, or at best as an addition to them has been the story of a lack of vision. The web in the future should not be an entity people have to go to. It should be there anyway. The words associated with web usage; ‘click here;’ ‘visit www…;’ ‘Surf;’ ‘site visitors,’ are all too submissive for the future. The web’s true prospect is pervasive almost to the point of invisibility. And in the design of research environments there is potential for intuition to be carried to new levels of service quality. Scholars should be presented with paths less travelled without having to grapple with metacartography. It is likely that such developments will occur outside of universities, as despite the achievements of great institutions there is no doubt that the current driving force of the information age is to be found in commerce. The key for those of us designing research environments in universities is partnership with leading design and technology companies.

Presented in the right way, this could be mutually beneficial. Universities have, in huge numbers, precisely what these companies want – a user base to develop products with. Additionally, in the best institutions there are genuinely innovative intra-departmental research teams at senior levels that only exist in the academic sector. We need to be far more confident about approaching potential colleagues in industry.

Infrastructure-first services are rarely developed without content. For example, fibre-optic cables are not laid in cities without reason. They themselves cannot be sold, but TV content can be. The reverse is often the case with content-first services. How many digitisation projects are completed regardless of the absence of a preservation infrastructure? How many websites are built for the short-term? How many decisions are taken on corporate IT provision without accurate predictions on bandwidth demand?

We are working now at a critical point in the information revolution. There is the possibility of a wireless world; indeed it is a reality in many places. So much of our thinking though, in designing research environments is formed of old technology models. The important aspect of wireless technology is not the absence of cables. It is the inevitable shift from providing institutional hardware to providing infrastructure to support personally owned hardware. Touchscreens and wireless is a match made in heaven.

At the present time, wireless infrastructure in most countries, (and in most libraries), is constantly playing catch-up with hardware innovation. Few libraries are prepared each September for the uplift in bandwidth demand as greater numbers of iPads and other devices arrive. This is no longer a trend. It is a certain future. Addressing this will not be successful by scrabbling for funds to upgrade campuses building-by-building, node-by-node. To work more cleverly with the global shift in computing away from static devices, will require national engagement with international companies.

In South Korea no one has been omitted from this change. The Korea Agency for Digital Opportunity and Promotion, (KADO) is the country’s national body with responsibility for Internet penetration. Unlike many other developed nations, Korea has placed an equal importance on rural and underdeveloped areas’ bandwidth as it has for the large cities. As far back as 2007 over 55% of rural fishermen were online. There is a large national programme for those with disabilities too. KADO has cost the Korean government hundreds of millions of dollars but it is believed to be a good investment. In Korea, access to the web is regarded as definitive of quality of life. This is an ongoing process and is one being pursued in parallel with UK, (for example), public library closures.

The West has an unfortunate tendency to consider itself superior.

The infrastructure under continual development in South Korea is indeed breathtaking. The country already has the world’s fastest broadband connections, integrated into the vast majority of its domestic properties. According to a recent report in The New York Times, by the end of 2012 the Korean government intends to provide every home with I gigabit per second broadband. That will be a tenfold increase on the already world-leading speeds and average 200 times faster than web connections in US homes.

The domestic web policy is of course strategically linked to wireless technology. The cabling may for many, be delivering access via desktops but for as many it is not, and the near future is being prepared for mobile devices. This is the case in people’s homes but also in public and corporate environments. The future for Korea is, eventually going to be echoed in Europe and the US. In December 2011, President Obama unveiled an $18billion dollar wireless broadband plan for the US.

The man in charge of South Korea’s broadband wireless expansion is a 28 year-old government engineer, Choi Gwang-gi. As the NYT report says, he is preparing the country for how the Internet is likely to behave over the next few years. The word ‘behave’ almost personifies the web, and this is the key. It is going to be more and more personal and less and less visible. It is never going to be switched off. “A lot of Koreans are early adopters,” Mr. Choi says, “and we thought we needed to be prepared for things like 3-D TV, Internet protocol TV, high-definition multimedia, gaming and videoconferencing, ultra-high-definition TV, cloud computing.”

Cloud computing only works if you are always connected. Cloud computing is at its most powerful when delivered to mobile devices. Mobile devices demand wireless connectivity. The future of the web will operate and develop in this circle.

In South Korea, one of the highest uses of the superfast bandwidth is multi-player gaming. This is a country that likes to work hard and play hard – each on computer screens. However, there are enormous business benefits too, particularly in high-end videoconferencing and perhaps too, in business practices that cannot yet even develop until I gigabit per second wireless becomes common.

The risk for us, as designers and providers of research environments through library and IT services is that we lose sight of how far ahead others are thinking. In common parlance, this really is not a threat but an opportunity. The poorly designed web interfaces to token-gesture digital collections frequently seen in universities and national libraries are at risk, not just from a lack of preservation infrastructure. Academic research in the West is in danger of trailing commercial development in Asia. This is a moment for honest, even humble requests for new partners.

Sir Tim Berners Lee created the web in 1990. Apple still dominate the mobile devices market, but it is in visionary and socially inclusive countries such as South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan that the real next stage of the Internet revolution is now happening – a serious and well-funded focus on wireless infrastructure. This is an urgent priority for all research libraries in the West. Presently, the great university and national libraries of Europe and America provide slower bandwidth to researchers than South Korea does to its isolated fishermen.

Designing Research 1: Software – The Holograph Hologram

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Much has been achieved in the attempt to bring the world’s manuscript and incunabula collections online. Millions of dollars have already been spent on digitisation projects and related activity, and for the most part, with considerable positive impact on public access, scholarship and research.

One of the earliest major initiatives was ‘Project Gutenberg’ in the US, which has continued to grow, releasing out of copyright, mainly canonical literature freely onto the web. Perhaps ironically, named for Gutenberg, not just the first movable type publisher but also a designer in his own time with a precursory ethos akin to William Morris, the digital service is itself very poorly designed. In the early days it was not possible to manipulate HTML much beyond the excitement of text on screen. In those days a spinning @ sign was the web at its most scintillating. Now though, the Internet has seeped into environments beyond <simply placing text online. /> We expect to interact with it on multiple devices anywhere, from 3” touchscreens to 60” flatscreens. We have become used to broadband speeds experienced on our sofas inconceivable to the military in the 1970’s and 1980’s. We play, we learn, we travel virtually.

There is not a great deal of point in predicting the future, as we never seem to remember that what we are experiencing at almost any given moment was itself rarely predicted. The only secure conjecture might be that the entity that is the wireless Internet is likely, in the future to be viewed on both smaller and larger screens at ever increasing speed and at greater levels of pervasiveness in terms of both society and individual psychology. Additionally, it might be possible to say that less and less data will be held personally. The Apple iCloud is a glimpse of how our devices are likely to use cloud computing. This is not a new concept of course. Corporations have used this kind of sharing technology for some years. iCloud though, is the first to propose using it for shopping lists.

So much has been accomplished. Two of the most important step changes in commercial computing are actually based on successful marketing and sales rather than principally on hard programming. The financial success of Microsoft Windows and Apple’s iPod, two very different business icons have each enabled their parent companies at key points in the development of the web to reinvest very considerable amounts of money in further research and development. In this sense, everyone who bought Windows in the 1990’s and every person who owns an iPod, iPhone or iPad is an active player in the information revolution, not merely a passive consumer. Our age is truly, as was the case with the industrial revolution, a collective effort.

Having placed us in our current (which is not a word with much long-term currency), context we should think of the inevitable. Computing will continue to transform our daily, personal and professional lives. It is the last of these that is at the heart of this sequence of blogs on what I will refer to as designing research. This first essay is concerned with digitisation and academic/commercial partnerships in the digital humanities. Senate House Library is hosting a series of seminars for the University of London over the coming months also called Designing Research, which myself and our Associate Director for Digital Environments and Partnerships, Joe Honywill will be leading. The series will culminate in a national event, the First London Designing Research Conference 2012. This series of blogs will support initial thinking for each session. Virtual made physical made virtual: the circle of modern life.

Project Gutenberg was important, and even now as a repository it remains useful, but its conception was not one based on clear design principles.

Following the success of Gutenberg, the second major leap in the field of digital texts and manuscripts is one that now, I would argue, represents something of a developmental plateau. It is has been the state of the art for many years. ‘Turning the Pages’ is now in use across universities, archives and museums around the world. The British Library was amongst the first to explore fully the possibilities of multi-layered digitisation to create movable images. The ability to, albeit awkwardly recast the experience of interacting with a codex (more commonly known as ‘reading a book’), has proved very fashionable with both funding agencies and scholars. Digital manuscripts are now more accessible and more visible online. Turning the Pages and its comparable technologies have only one paradox – we appear to have reached the last page and no one seems to know where to turn next.

In addressing problems of technology in research it is considered good practice to ask this question; what problem are we trying to solve? This can be a valid approach of course, but I do not think it is necessarily sufficient for a discussion led by design questions. To be blunt, this is the most pedantic, dry and functionalist way to approach the future. To view the future of digital research simply as a process of solving problems would be analogous to addressing climate change by debating the colour classification of wheelie bins.

In any case, in the field of digital manuscripts, ‘the problem’ has in effect already been solved. To begin with there was nothing wrong with the original objects. It has yet proved impossible to produce digital surrogates of the physical materials that also reproduce their sheer power and authority. I have seen autograph manuscripts of Virginia Woolf’s novels in both digital form and as the original; long, angled spider-drawn handwriting on rough yellowed paper, smelling of faded gardens, with aggressive crossings-out indenting the next page. These are objects of immense and indiscernible human weight. Holding a Woolf manuscript is to hold death and life at the same time.

As an aside, the most powerful physical object I have ever held followed a long journey deep underground beneath the British Library in London. My colleague drew from the shelf a large box, thin but rising past my waist from the floor. She lifted it carefully onto a table and opened it. Pulling back the acid free paper she lifted the volume out. It was a music manuscript. As she raised the front cover and pulled it open I could see, quite clearly, neat rows of staves. There were exactly forty of them dropping from the top of the pages to the bottom. The piece began with only one voice but quickly grew more complex. As we turned the sheets. I saw that this was the Forty Part Motet by Thomas Tallis, the great Elizabethan composer. My colleague said, ‘I want you to hold it before I tell you something.’ I took the item in my white-gloved hands and waited. She told me that in the original performance the forty singers surrounded Elizabeth I in a circle in order for her to experience the full splendour of Tallis’ masterpiece. ‘This,’ said my colleague, ‘is the copy that the Queen was holding during that performance.’ The circle of Elizabethan life.

How do we respond, when designing digital environments, in order to come close to replicating what it means to researchers, perhaps even emotionally as human beings, to be near objects with such power? What might we be able to design which moves beyond increased access by the digital surrogate or the frankly, second-rate experiences offered by touchscreen versions? What problem are we trying to solve, is not a question inspirational enough to meet the demands of researchers wishing to interact with, discover new ideas within and perhaps even be moved by historical materials.

A more engaging question might be – what might we not yet know? As this question is in essence unanswerable it seems to me to be a good place to start when considering how technology might intervene between a researcher and their object. Research in the humanities is concerned with unearthing. As in archaeology, our role in designing research environments is more than providing the appropriate tools, it is also about presenting an environment rich enough to offer up discoveries in the first place. Bare earth is useless, as are small libraries and underfunded digital projects.

There have been attempts at designing what amounts to virtual reality in the fields of cultural heritage and historic collections. Most recently, the bespoke but relatively flexible technology offered by Second Life allowed for a number of interesting bodies of work. In recent years, at King’s College London, a team of researchers have very successfully replicated some of the architecture of antiquity by rebuilding Roman theatres in considerable detail using innovative techniques in humanities computing. Some of these environments could only now exist in virtual worlds. In Rome only the bare skeletons of the stones lay forever whitening under unrelenting sun. In Second Life they are given new life and perhaps for the researcher a richer one, as it is possible to go inside the structure of ancient buildings in a way impossible previously. In other academic disciplines too the use of computing has at worst been intriguing, at best transformative in terms of opening new paths of investigation, or in some cases whole new sub-disciplines.

There have been many attempts over the last ten to fifteen years by the humanities research community and indeed by libraries, to engage with new communities and disciplines. Most consistently, there has been an active dialogue between librarians and archivists, often supported by academics working across many fields of enquiry. This has produced real content and it has helped to engage the public too in research materials and processes. The popular success of genealogical investigation on television is as much down to the availability of collections on the web as anything else.

Although there has been progress in the research community searching beyond itself for ideas and partnerships there has yet to be a meaningful engagement between academia and commerce in the field of digital humanities research.

In 2007 the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, (EPSRC) funded a potentially important network that was intended to develop links between academic computing and the games industry through work being carried out in Artificial Intelligence. Based at Imperial College London, the initial network of 24 academics and six gaming companies were certainly asking interesting questions. Unfortunately, this was a project conceived in academia rather than the industry. Its ambitions were, if I might be so bold, typically low and predictable. The primary outcome was to be a series of events bringing interested parties together. This was achieved but little else appears to have emerged. From the three years of funded work, only one principal research paper is currently available on the project website, published in 2007. One problem might be that this was the only nationally funded project of its kind between the gaming industry and computing academics in the UK during that period. The project was intended to bring together UK Higher Education, with its 6 million students and 300,000 academics and the commercial research and development departments. The project was awarded around £83k to engage with an industry worth, according to Reuters in 2011, and estimated $65 billion worldwide.

Reading through the project aims in relation to an industry second only in financial success to film in the creative arts, (and quickly catching it), gives the impression that not only was the ambition not matched by the funding, but that also there may have been a lack of real purpose to the discussion. It is not enough to simply nod sagely and agree that it might be important for universities to work with industry. There must be a reason to do so.

Such a reason is to be found not by asking the question, what problem are we trying to solve, but rather the question, what might we not know?

In 2007 the next phase of the information revolution was ushered in by the release of the first iPhone. This device brought touchscreen technology into daily life and should be recognised for doing so, despite other smaller scale initiatives. It was a leap beyond the iPod because it was pointing towards human connectivity via handheld devices, not purely the act of building personal collections. There will always be other companies involved in the unstoppable tide of product and service development but Apple are currently the most important and focused of the large corporations. A strategic lead towards personal devices and away from desktops, to communal collecting on iTunes and presumably shared handheld digital lives through the successors to iPad and iCloud are all notable not purely because of their invention, but also because of their scale. Where Apple have led most consumers and other companies have been keen to follow.

Where we are now is not the only place we can be. We have a unique ability to assess the past and build the future.

When a researcher looks at the original of, for instance, an illuminated manuscript, what are they looking for? The medieval age seems almost unbounded in its continued ability to surprise us. Presently, a researcher can search for the physical location of such a codex, visit it for an agreed and invigilated period of time, perhaps even touch it. As with the Woolf materials this experience is not currently possible to exceed through the use of computing. There is no problem to solve. The physical interaction is simply as good as it gets. However, if we ask what might we not know about this manuscript, we open up further research questions that might genuinely be transformed by technology.

An autograph in the professional world of special collections is a manuscript in the hand of the author, as in the case of Woolf’s novels or Tallis’ Motet. A holograph is an item in the hand of a person, such as a letter, or in extreme cases, death warrants, plots, adulterous notes and confessions – libraries are not generally records of happiness.

To engage new research questions we should begin to work on these kinds of documents with a significant industry, or at least through some of its technology in creative ways, beyond the textual replication of Project Gutenberg and even the more interactive surrogates of Turning the Pages. It should be possible to coordinate, through the large educational consortia available to us, initial discussions with commercial technology companies. We live in an age defined by information, perhaps even more so than science and yet it is science, technology, engineering and medicine disciplines that have dominated the interaction between commerce and academia.

The creative industries are net contributors to national GDPs in most European countries, North America and Japan. The same is the case for the pharmaceutical industries, yet it is those who have close working relationships with universities and academic researchers. Product and service development in the digital arts and humanities have consistently failed to attract inward investment from related industries for many years, despite being the principal training grounds for most of that industry’s workforce and possessing enormous potential as research bases for blue-sky technologies.

The past is a place of riches. We find ourselves, or at least versions of one another there. Museums are microscopes onto the activities of the lost. Libraries contain what they thought.

A holograph redefines the phrase ‘ghost written.’ Holographs are all that is left of most of us. The public interest in the supernatural has always fascinated me. Its nondisprovability provides the natural gathering place for a fundamentally agnostic society unable to fully disbelieve in God. The risk is too great for most. Regardless of belief systems, the combined profits of all those pseudo-documentaries shot by infra-red cameras in cellars and rural staircases could easily support the investigation of the living dead – those holographic materials held in libraries.

The most dynamic technology change now occurring across film, computing and television is the development of 3D. High Definition has for the most part arrived and analogue is dripping away. The 3D experience is set to filter down to lower-priced hardware over the next couple of years and research and development is advancing towards being able to trick the eye without the addition of glasses. The gaming industry too is a major player in the development of human-computer interaction.

If you lift a Woolf autograph up the indentions of a desperate pen can clearly be seen through the paper. Holding the Tallis manuscript at eye level it is possible to follow the notation in exact strikes of chords. I once watched a conservator raise red paint from a medieval illuminated manuscript with a knife so small it could only be performed under magnification. Beneath the paint he found unknown gilt and a reworked shape. It showed a 14th Century error and provided a 21st Century new understanding.

Project Gutenberg and Turning the Pages were important steps but if we ask what might we not know, then discoveries of our past could be made using technology such as 3D imaging. In order to make progress when designing research environments it is essential to think the unthinkable.  If we need hologram versions of holographic materials we will also need to create the partnerships between academia and the commercial companies capable of funding such work. These partnerships are essential in any case to a vibrant academic community. Science has already proved that theory.

We play, we learn, we travel virtually. We meet, we share, and we design in reality.

2011 Charles Holden Lecture

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I must apologise for the sorry lack of posts recently. I have been finishing a book on the Senate House LIbrary collections and also writing a lecture. In the previous week I wrote over 37,000 words. Either this is impressive or obsessive, or perhaps both. Anyway, thanks to so many people who came to the lecture and who’ve asked for the text. I thought it best to upload it here. The video will soon be available on iTunesU as well. Settle back…

Borges meets Orwell: The 21st Century Research Library

The 2011 Charles Holden Lecture

I would like to begin by thanking the Friends of Senate House Library for inviting me to give this year’s Charles Holden lecture. I would like to take this prestigious opportunity to offer some thoughts on where I believe the priorities and strengths lie for research libraries in the 21st Century. I will view the future of research libraries alongside the future of research universities as their fates are inextricably linked. For the most part in this lecture I am also considering collections in the humanities and social sciences, as this is my own professional field and also the principal role of our libraries at Senate House. Finally, I will view the world of knowledge through the eyes of two writers. At first glance, there may be little similarity between the works of Borges and of Orwell. From the perspective of a librarian however, I hope to explore how each man has constructed and investigated truth. And it is the elusive concept of truth that is at the heart of this year’s lecture, as it is also at the centre of how I believe, through the act of collecting, libraries find purpose and meaning.

Senate House Libraries and our research role

To elaborate on the essential contribution made by libraries to the research process, it is important to first provide a context. Most importantly it is critical to note what may be seen as the obvious, that all libraries are not the same. The context of libraries is defined by three areas; Coverage; Intensivity; Scale.

Coverage: Science libraries differ from humanities libraries.

It is possible to measure the value of science libraries by usage, either physically or online. Science and medical librarians rarely interpret their collections, their principal role being to provide access. Few people enter the library profession with higher science degrees. In the humanities, the partnership between librarians and their users is often deeper owing to shared academic experience. Usage is key to the humanities too, but what happens beyond the library gate is very different between science and humanities collections.

Intensivity: Teaching collections are not as complex as research collections.

Management processes drive teaching-intensive collections. The role of the library is to follow course tutors in the provision of multiple copies of books and online materials that support reading lists. Acquisition and disposal are repetitive and uncomplicated tasks. There are important training and information literacy contributions made by the library, but the collection development itself is not the key role. In research-intensive collections, the reverse is true, where some teaching support is provided, but the roots of expertise lie in knowledge of extensive holdings and in their coordinated growth.

Scale: Large libraries change in different ways to small libraries

Scale is definitive, in that the future of small libraries is likely to be fundamentally divergent to that of large libraries. The future of small libraries has already been transformed by the Internet age. In the next five years, a relatively small teaching collection will be effectively redundant due to mass digitisation programmes of texts and the greater availability and acceptance of eBooks. These libraries will focus on training and designing collaborative spaces. The large research library has a more complex future. Many millions of materials will remain in print and analogue form. Many more will continue to be produced in those forms, or with digital surrogates. The interpretation, management and expansion of research collections will become ever more multifaceted. This will be most acute in the arts, humanities and social sciences.

The three facets of the above context in which libraries operate within universities present themselves in a particular way at Senate House Libraries. These constitute very large research collections in the arts, humanities and social sciences. The librarian’s role is complex because of a higher degree of subject knowledge than is common in science. The collection is complex because it is based on expansion and depth, rather than relegation and recycling. The scale is important because it affects the libraries’ ratio between future print and digital collections, a ratio fast disappearing in smaller institutions.

Libraries in other research-intensive environments share these characteristics, such as in the larger members of the Russell Group. However, there are two additional factors that define the role of libraries in the process of research facilitation at Senate House Libraries. Firstly, many of the collections are not only large but are amongst the finest of their field in the world. Secondly, a considerable percentage of these collections are held on the open shelf in central London. This provides a unique provision of internationally important materials made easily accessible, and defines the role of Senate House in the sector and as a partner of the British Library, whose collections are closed access.

The nature of humanities, social science and arts research still requires engagement with and the development of, large physical collections. The principal research outputs in these fields are still in printed form. Research libraries in the broader humanities though, are not merely stores. A research project is a partnership between the researcher and the library from the earliest survey of current materials, through the interpretation of materials or digital environments, finally to the placement of that research in the setting of the library. Research is concerned with discovery. Libraries are the essential mode of travel.

Funds spent on libraries as a generic service are an entirely different matter to those spent on world-class, unique, rich collections in the heart of London. The remit of the School of Advanced Study, University of London is to act as a focus, as a symposium for research facilitation in the arts, humanities and social sciences in the United Kingdom. This is performed in central London for a reason: as part of the greatest concentration of libraries anywhere in the world. Nowhere else in the UK can offer this combination of access, intellectual importance and geographical setting.

In 1936, the architect of Senate House, Charles Holden began building this art deco masterpiece. The library is designed to be a building that would only stand naturally in London. There are echoes of the lives of other great universities, such as in the inclusion of cloisters, but Holden did not design faux-medieval or classical copies. The cloisters at Senate House are new ideas born of Elegance, Purity, Integrity and Coherence. As in all the vast spaces of Senate House, they are epic in every sense.

Senate House was designed to stand at the centre of the third great English university. It was to be a university rooted in the contemporary world, and only at home in the world’s capital.

Holden designed to a level of detail unusual amongst even the finest architects. There is a ‘Greek’ motif, variations on which decorate not only the architraves of the front elevation but also the backs of chairs, the staircases and railings, the moldings of doors and cornices and even some of the wood paneling in the Senate Chamber. Every single one of thousands of light fittings is an art deco original.

Perhaps the most striking infrastructural feature of the building is its least known. Senate House can only ever be a library. From Floor 7 to Floor 19, the supporting mechanism for this early skyscraper is bookshelves. They are welded into the skeleton girders and rise in perfect symmetry for about two hundred feet over London. If you ever want to sense what it is to have millions of books directly above your head, just stand in the foyer of Senate House.

The public floors of 4 to 7 are, particularly in the cases of floors 5 and 6, spaces of almost indescribable immensity. There are some views where it is almost possible to see roughly from the North to the South of the building. It is as though the great circle of The British Museum Reading Room had been rolled out flat. There are others, for instance when walking into the Goldsmiths’ Reading Room, where your breath will be removed for a short time before being dutifully replaced in order that you might continue researching.

Goldsmiths’ is a room built specifically for a collection of the same name, the Goldsmiths’ Collection of Economic Literature. Dating from the 15th Century to the 21st Century there are some exceptional items, and important strata, such as the history of slavery. The room itself has lines of bookshelves carved from English walnut and a ceiling in Canadian cedar. Resulting in a large stained glass version of the University arms, two rows of high windows provide extra height to a room that I believe to be the most beautiful academic library space in Britain. (For the record, the number two spot might be claimed by the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge and the number three by the John Ryland’s Library at Manchester.

There are many further examples of Holden’s genius and clarity of vision throughout his great white library. The essential thing to note though is that this is an epic building made of comparative microcosms.  Its architectural coherence means that when you close your fingers around a door-handle you are symbolically holding the entire tower.

In the next few weeks our long refurbishment will be one stage closer to completion. This has painstakingly recast Senate House in its original 1930’s élan. Every piece of furniture, all of which were also designed by Holden has been reconditioned. Light fittings have been removed and cleaned. It will give back to London its tallest art deco structure.

Following so much original care under Charles Holden’s pencil, and the enormous effort of the refurbishment project we must be equally thoughtful about how we create a research experience that is not only surrounded by art deco wonders, but is inspired by them. Senate House was born of clear design principles.

There are many projects to be undertaken at the library, but perhaps one of the most important now is to rethink our physical and web presence in terms that would meet with Holden’s agreement. For a man who designed almost every armchair in the building he could, I am sure, be guaranteed to have had an opinion.

There are many great, new library buildings but in general they are either driven by public or teaching agendas, which moreover means there are generally very few books, or there are thousands of similar ones. Senate House is a tower of research materials, millions of individual titles.

We should be clear concerning what we are aiming for. An EPIC library is not one solely defined by its collections, but one where its products and services, to appropriate terms from commerce, are recognised to be driven by principles not just profit, or in our case reader numbers.

This means that we intend to develop services around those four words; elegance, purity, integrity and coherence. This would be an aim that would sit easily with most large libraries but at Senate House we have an added incentive; Holden built the entire library and designed most of its contents on very similar principles. Our responsibility is not only to English Heritage to ensure that the light fittings are correct. Our accountability is to Charles Holden. We must, as far as is possible, place nothing in these spaces that wrestles with the original design. We must, again as far as possible, create services within the building and on our websites that are true to Holden’s ideas on simplicity and usability. In short, the Senate House Library design principles were written in 1936 but now need to be reinvigorated for the 21st Century.

For a research library of the intellectual depth of Senate House, no detail should be considered too small. That the collections are held in a building formed from design principles of modernist simplicity is an important opportunity. Senate House confirms its function and usability by adhering to those principles. Integrity is derived through clearly stating purpose. The purpose of Senate House was made physical by Holden and will be secured for the future by allowing the objects and designs of the contemporary world to integrate with their art deco surroundings. Every technology, every sight line, every website, every product and every service in such an important building needs to be considered in terms of design, as something people interact with. Everything we do in the library must have a rationale.

A word on the act of collecting

The library is not a new idea, in fact librarians may well lay claim to being one of the oldest professions – although I doubt we are the oldest.

The Latin author and grammarian, Aulus Gellius describes the birth of the library as both a concept and tactile collection like this in around 150AD:

The tyrant Pisistratus is said to have been the first to possess books of the liberal arts that were to be supplied for the public’s reading at Athens. Later the Athenians themselves augmented them in a learned and accurate manner; but after Xerxes had obtained the whole abundance of books and had burned the city apart from its citadel, he took them away and brought them to Persia. Then the Seleucid King, called Nicanor, took care that all the books were returned to Athens a long time later.

As an aside, this may be the first recorded case of that bain of the librarian’s life – the late return of books! The narrative, which is quoted in full in a recent book by Yun Lee Too, ‘The Idea of the Library in the Ancient World,’ is a description of the beginnings of the library in Greco-Roman antiquity. Not only is the description a clear attempt to claim the idea of the library as Greek, rather than Babylonian or Assyrian but it is also a clear picture of the library as a collection of texts that is passed down from ruler to ruler, from society to society, across cultures until it arrives in Alexandria – the great iconic library of the past. It crucially retains, as Yun Lee Too notes, the ‘identity of ‘library,’ indeed the library. In this sense the library of antiquity is also ‘global,’ being the only collection of its time. Smaller certainly than our own world collection, but then the world too was smaller and less known then.

What I believe we share with ancient culture in our understanding of the role of the library is a sense that knowledge can be passed from generation to generation. It may happen faster and in more ways now, but information was a shared, precious and powerful commodity in antiquity as it is for us. Texts were carried from past to present and it is this narrative, unbroken and incorruptible that gives the library its power and validity. In antiquity the very act of collecting, of bringing together many texts injects into each book an added command over the population. The early library is the material meaning of the phrase ‘safety in numbers.’

As the library is passed through the centuries it results in fascinating concepts that outlive anyone who cares for it – our lifetimes are nothing in comparison to the immortality of the collections we receive and add to and leave for others. This process of what might be called textual adoption creates canonicity and, as Xerxes and Hitler and many others knew, books mean power. So, the library, that has been passed to us in many forms and is most recently constituted as the Internet, is a trajectory of political power, of stories, of wealth, of failure and of the determination of human beings to record and collect and organise and preserve. The library of today is a continuum of the library recorded by Aulus Gellius – indeed, all research libraries prove that knowledge is not linear because of rediscovery. Libraries are labyrinths.

Borges

The writer perhaps most concerned with the power of books is Borges. This writer can be ‘read’ in as many ways as he wrote; as magical realist, as literary science fiction, as surrealist poet or as avant-garde essayist. Behind all of these epithets though there remains an extraordinarily honest mind. Borges’ ability to imagine mazes was in one sense the life-long achievement of the finest deception. It is a fiction made of lies in the strictest sense because the work proposes the existence of worlds that cannot be true. However, it is based on the reality of Borges’ own mind, his personal world view and I would be the last to call any great writer a liar simply because he could not prove the physical presence of one of his creations.

His profession defined Borges as much as politics and artistic antecedents influenced him. No writer has reimagined the entirety of human knowledge in such compellingly brief detail. (The only other notable attempt, although not a literary one was by Dewey). The ‘library’ for Borges, himself a librarian of international importance, became eternally associated with the concept of labyrinths. Within this construct we find the true Borges.

Borges’ heroes and heroines play out their lives in what, at first glance appear to be environments unknown to the laws of physics or the convictions of religion. Incidentally, it is this aspect of his work that makes him more than a writer of beautiful stories. It means his stories are also genuinely controversial in the challenges they set to our own understanding of what is possible in terms of science, or what may be possible in terms of religion.

Borges is important as an artist because he takes a position between the two great modern sides of the debate on human purpose, or its absence – on one side the apparently unassailable evidence found in atoms and on the other, the equally impregnable certainty held by billions of people, that they are in direct contact with a deity. Borges’ position though is not that of the agnostic, which would get him nowhere and would make his labyrinth nothing more than a mental toy. His writing is derived from a third truth; that art itself can offer an answer to the confusion of life.

In Borges’ labyrinth we find a place literally built on the entire measurement of human knowledge and experience. This is his literary vision. Additionally, we see an environment that most closely resembles the only atmosphere that could support such epic, discoverable life: the library itself.

When Borges achieved his long-held dream of becoming the Librarian of the National Library of Argentina it was a dream realised initially as a nightmare. He said, ‘God finally gave me all the books I had craved and then removed my sight.’ It was a cruelty akin to Beethoven’s deafness or Ravel’s apraxia, but it did not halt either Borges’ reading or his ability to conceive works of art.

In his short story, ‘The Library of Babel,’ Borges merges his professional understanding of libraries with his personal view of the ultimate authority of texts. The Library is endless, containing all the knowledge in the world. It is populated by people (acting here as eternal librarians), who move amongst the endless shelves and point-less spirals of books. They are searching for a way to comprehend this place of comprehensive knowledge.

In the hexagonal rooms of Babel, Borges created the most compelling description not only of libraries but also, it might be said of the Internet. Owing to the epic deception of his imagination we are also shown the truth about libraries from a rare perspective; that of a librarian who was also a writer of genius. Borges holds a view common to librarians that it is the knowledge itself, the books indeed, which are the real purpose. The act of collecting is its own religious fervour and its own scientific proof.

The purpose of libraries is not to reflect human knowledge or trends but to exist beyond these things. In imagining something from nothing, Borges uniquely describes an everything. It is a literary device no doubt, but also one envisioned by professional conviction, resulting in a Library containing all other lies and truths. This library needs to be understood for what it is, a precious and valuable resource. The Library of Babel is in that sense no different from any other. It is a construct owned by the public. Books form libraries and each book is created in private for public use.

A single book is a library of references, reflections and rediscoveries. When placed beside another it becomes a collection. As part of a group of millions it transforms towards Babel.

Borges perhaps could not have predicted that librarians who began practising in the last ten years have had the phrases, ‘the death of the book,’ and ‘the end of libraries’ ringing in our ears for much of our careers. Yet, relegate a book to the store and you invite letters to national publications. Reduce opening hours and be prepared to sit through aggressive student committees – and in both cases, sometimes rightly so. If libraries are dying, a lot of people haven’t noticed.

Libraries in all their forms are organisations managing the delivery and care of intellectual content to all disciplines and to all aspects of society. They are multi-million pound services, often with hundreds of staff serving tens of thousands of people, and they are linked across the world as the ‘global library.’ Individual libraries have never been the only source of information, but they have always been the most significant point of access.

One of the finest characteristics of humans is our ability to share. In the academic library context this has meant, and is still defined by libraries’ contribution to the archiving and rediscovery of human action. This has allowed us to provide access to quality research through the global library and to offer help, space and time to students and researchers in traditional reading rooms and collaborative learning centres.

At the heart of all universities, the library in its many facets continues to balance tensions between print and digital collections, between the demands of teaching and research, between the arts and sciences, and perhaps most importantly, between the commercial supply of research information and support for its creation in academic practice.

Libraries are present at the generation of ideas, in delivering content to the desktop and the desk top. They deliver in perpetuity for results and theories. Libraries bring people into contact with innovation, with innovators and with each other. They draw an inconceivably long line of thought in every discipline to the minds of current thinkers. Libraries are critical in our need to share and to discover. They are vital in allowing access to our recorded thoughts by those who follow us.

Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science are principles upon which the practice of librarianship still rests:

I. Books are for use.

II. Every reader his [or her] book.

III. Every book its reader.

IV. Save the time of the reader.

V. The library is a growing organism.

These typically succinct compressions of what it means to manage vast quantities of information for an immeasurable number of readers, have carried the world’s library services through some unsettling times. The question is, are they still relevant in a world where so much content is beyond the library walls?

The Internet is the railway of our generation. It has transformed life, at least in the western world. The library profession took a while to realise that it, unfavourably caricatured as it often is, had found itself in the midst of the greatest shift in human society for generations. Librarians, once guardians of knowledge had become its inertia. Or so it has been alleged by parts of academia.

I have heard keynote speakers at conferences challenging the profession to wake up (in the early years of the web) or give up (more recently). We have all read statements by people critical of libraries who are not themselves criticised for collection management decisions, (affectionately referred to as ‘the bin’). People who do not sit in student union meetings trying to find an answer as to why it’s no longer possible to read D.H. Lawrence at 3am in the library. People, in summary, that do not actually manage libraries, or perhaps people (and this includes many in government), who seem to think that all libraries are the same.

It is perhaps not fully comprehended that for the most part, the use of one library is in fact the use of all the world’s libraries. The systems of Inter-Library Loans and now, shared digital resources allows access to quantities of books and electronic content across countries and continents, halted only by licences and local laws. It is also not fully recognised that librarians have been at the forefront of challenging commercial practices that are detrimental to students and to the sharing of ideas, indeed to society.

Commentators, who use the term ‘the future of libraries,’ do imply an understanding that all libraries are in some way linked. What is missing, in defining the future of libraries in this way, is that not all libraries serve the same purpose. Even in higher education the differences are stark.

The twenty-five or so libraries which form Research Libraries UK hold data and physical collections on a scale not replicated in other parts of the sector. This is derived from age. Collecting takes time and enough time offers breadth and depth. In the UK sector this is most notable in Oxford and Cambridge, but other large print collections exist at Manchester, Leeds, Edinburgh, Senate House Libraries, SOAS and the LSE. In these cases a combination of investment, attraction to benefactors or even geographical location serves to increase the scale of collections.

In the past size has been important. Universities have used their libraries not only to appeal to students but also to researchers, who in turn have added depth to the collection. In this way, libraries have been major contributors to the formation of hierarchy in British universities, not only in themselves but also in what they support and whom they attract.

Google currently holds the cards to the ability of these institutions to continue to think of their libraries as special in this way. When Google extricates itself from the courts they will be able to release ten million (and counting) digitised books onto the Internet. In the UK this has the potential to level the playing the field between the Russell Group, those with important but smaller collections in the 1994 Group and those with very different libraries in the rest of the sector. Google will mean, if not immediately then certainly soon, that all universities will have similar library collections.

However, despite its current position, Google is only an example of how the world is changing around our libraries. Very few companies exist forever, or survive unchanged and unchallenged. Many of the materials in research libraries will outlive us and will need care long after Google itself becomes a footnote. The content of libraries teaches us much, but the most important lesson is that change is constant.

With or without Google, mass digitisation of books and journals will be a strong trend in combination with pervasive computing. The legal implications of these developments are yet to be resolved. Google’s mass digitisation programmes, now including languages and cultures beyond the English-speaking world, are the largest single transfer of knowledge from one format to another in human history. However, they are also only part of that history, not its conclusion.

Additionally, printed or digitised, Ranganathan’s laws remind us that the library is made up of more than books. A library is space – collections – readers – librarians. Google is focused on collections, as is the case with almost all technology. As an advertising company it is not surprising that it wishes to use content to attract advertisers to its services, in fact we could learn a lot from them. What might be learnt reciprocally is that the library as a space filled with people is part of Google’s future. It is not closed by it.

I remember two things most clearly as a trainee librarian: the unpredictability of questions at the Enquiry Desk: the demanding queues at the Issue Desk. I still see both in libraries. Even with many services available online and self-issue now ubiquitous, readers continue to visit the physical library and they still expect to find librarians inside it. This is especially so for subject specialists in large research libraries. The web has greatly improved our ability to communicate but, as with dating sites, it is a tool for actually meeting people rather than a substitute for human contact. Libraries in the future will continue to embrace technology but only to enhance existing services, not to replace them.

In the late 1990’s, as the Internet was beginning to impact on academia, we began to use the phrase ‘the hybrid library,’ to describe the emerging environment of print and digital collections. The term has been out-of-use for some time but may be appropriate now, not to describe the collections, as such a fusion is now common, but to describe the readers’ future experience of the physical library. A reader still wishes to work in the library but will increasingly work with greater access to digital collections via mobile devices. The library will continue to provide suitable environments for both solace and collaboration, but will be enhanced by the web. Reading rooms will increasingly merge with websites.

Of course, there are discipline variations for the academic library. Its physical use is less important to science than to the humanities, although content is still managed in both fields by the library.

There are also the differences in libraries. For most academic libraries, electronic resources have been transformative. ‘Early English Books Online’ put the Bodleian onto the shelves of universities that could never acquire the original materials. For the large research libraries, the opportunity to redefine historic and special collections as the heart of their service is the next iteration of the hybrid library. The web encourages physical meetings. Digitisation of manuscripts brings greater demand to see the original.

The near future for all libraries will depend on genuine innovation in their web presences. The distant future for research libraries will be defined by an acceptance that size is no longer everything, but that close collaboration between librarians and academics in exploiting the complex scientific research web, in parallel with dynamic access to historic collections (some of which are already born digital), will be what readers want. In the future the library will continue to be a ‘growing organism.’

 

Orwell

George Orwell was inspired to use the library at Senate House as the Ministry of Truth in his novel Nineteen eighty-four. His wife at the time was working in Senate House during WWII, as it had been commissioned by the government to provide accommodation for the Ministry of Information. On the roof of the library, there are still the disconnected phone lines direct to the Cabinet War Rooms. Senate House was the tallest building in London during the War, (apart from the crucifix atop St. Paul’s Cathedral), and the library acted as a viewing tower to watch for the Luftwaffe coming up the line of the Thames to bomb central London. The library played an important part in the defence of London. Orwell still plays an essential role in the defence of freedom.

‘The notion that you can somehow defeat violence by submitting to it is simply a flight from fact…Underneath this lies the hard fact, so difficult for many people to face, that individual salvation is not possible, that the choice before human beings is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils. You can let the Nazis rule the world; that is evil; or you can overthrow them by war, which is also evil. There is no other choice before you, and whichever you choose you will not come out with clean hands.’

George Orwell wrote this in his anti-pacifist essay ‘No, Not One.’ This seems to me a clear and realistic position to take on the matter of aggression and a viable response to it. I have struggled with an innate pacifism for many years, formed on the streets of late 20th Century Belfast. When you live amongst violence you quickly grow to hate it. Yet, I was aware that others, older and braver than myself stood between the bombers and me. Now these people are younger but they still stand between my life and those who, despite how distant this might seem to many in Britain, want to kill us.

Orwell authored hundreds of essays. These are often published alongside reviews of other people’s books, as it was often his habit to use a book review to discuss his own views of the novelist’s concerns. ‘No, Not One,’ is a famous dismissal of pacifism but it is in fact a book review, this time of Alex Comfort’s ‘No Such Liberty,’ which was published in 1941. Orwell thought most reviewers were idiots, forced by the need to be paid to say that all books were good, as the publishers were advertising in the Sunday papers.

The thrust behind ‘No, Not One,’ is that society is imperfect. It is faced with brutal decisions as a permanent state of being, and that any attempt to say otherwise is precious, unrealistic and dangerous. When Orwell writes as Nazism becomes dominant in Europe, it is too easy to reduce the authority of his voice to a particular time. He writes of his own desperate present, but also of ours and of the future. There will always be war. There will always be violence. There will always be conflict. There will forever be a need for some to stand between the armed and the unarmed.

Orwell believed that society depended ultimately on coercion. He adds a subtlety that the police officer does not hold this society together, but the common goodwill, which does sustain it, is powerless without the police to support it.

As one of the most important observers of English culture, (although it is hardly different from any other), Orwell makes two fairly blunt statements in this ‘book review.’ Firstly, that the working classes are never pacifists because they live so close to violence, or as Orwell puts it, ‘their life teaches them something different.’ Second, that those who are pacifist hold a fake moral superiority based only on the real sacrifices made by others. They conveniently forget about those who stand, between what Orwell calls ‘their research-lives,’ and the gun. The police are ignored or criticised by people who at that moment have no need of them.

To Orwell, pacifism was a sign of luxury. This is not to say that war is good. It isn’t. The question is how do we respond to violence? Orwell at least had the defence of western civilisation to call for, and he knew his enemy.

I did not think anything of seeing, on the walk to school in Belfast, a Landover with its rear doors open and soldiers with machine-guns hanging out of the back. I thought nothing of going to bed with the constant sound of helicopters, and the frequent, mostly distant sound of bombs or gunfire. I only experienced a bomb physically once, which was enough to shake me out of any real thought for pacifism that I may have otherwise tended towards.

This is not to say that violence is ever justified as an end to itself. Defence is one thing but peace is a greater aim. The problem is that many people do not want peace.

The choice between submitting to Nazism and fighting it was no choice at all, and Orwell knew it. He knew that it mattered who won, even as he was honest in criticising Britain’s own imperial aggression. The choice between simply praying for peace and supporting the police in Northern Ireland was also no choice at all. There were people trying to kill us when we were shopping. There was evil on both sides because both sides were violent, but a choice had to be made between which was lesser and which greater.

Orwell makes us face this choice just as he did his own readers during the Blitz. He balances this overt support for the state of course with vicious attacks on it. In his major essay, ‘Why I Write,’ he says, ‘Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’ This is not contradictory. It is reality. Orwell physically fought in Spain but his contribution was to write books. He stands for knowledge and stood for honesty. To stand against violence means to stand in the line of fire.

The Line of Fire

When the musket ball tore through the jacket it carried with it some of the gold braiding from the Admiral’s uniform. It drove through his shoulder and came to a halt inside one of his lungs. Nelson never stood a chance.

The surgeon steadied himself on the creaking boards of HMS Victory and cut into the dying man’s chest. He pulled out the musket ball and held it up to the light between his fingers for a few seconds. He made an historic decision. This was no ordinary musket ball. Not only had he just retrieved it from within Britain’s finest military hero but it also glittered as the gold braid had burned into the metal on entry. He handed it to a colleague who pocketed it. The surgeon heard the whisper of Nelson’s voice, ‘Kiss me, Hardy,’ before dying in front of his fellow sailors. He was lost but Britain was saved.

Over 200 years later a film crew arrive at Windsor Castle to make a documentary on the Royal Collections. The highlight of the entire programme is the camera slowly panning across a polished tabletop before halting over a gold locket. We only see how tiny it is when white-gloved fingers begin to open it. Inside is a musket ball with small pieces of gold braiding embedded in the rough sphere.

The UK cultural heritage sector is persistently under direct financial threat and being asked to justify its purpose. Simultaneously, billions of pounds are spent in the UK every month on placing contemporary soldiers and sailors in the line of fire. Britain has always been a fighting nation. It would be fair to say that it has probably started more wars than it has been drawn into. Only a few have genuinely been in self-defence but to be honest, that is not a concern on the whole. The debate for or against war usually ignores the fact that war will happen anyway.

What’s important is that there is an absence of balance in the national budget; our history is viewed as less important than our future. It begins in school, where the sciences, those great disciplines of discovery are plainly seen to be more significant than the other great disciplines of unearthing in the humanities. It continues in universities, where the humanities are always considered to be of less use to society because they cost less to teach and research. They only cost less because they do not receive enough money.

At the other end of the scale, the Large Hadron Collider, (whose purpose, if you’ll forgive me seems gravely pointless, as a need for God will still exist in people’s minds even if it is proved that two entities colliding resulted in the universe – where did those particles come from if they are responsible for everything?) is a machine that has cost almost enough to fund all historical research without limit in every university in the world for many, many years. What more could have been understood about humanity with that money?

Beyond education and into the world of government funding, the questions become more serious on a daily basis. I do not dismiss, for example the need for Britain to have global military reach. I do challenge the assumption that the present and future can be experienced without reference to the past. In other words, that any soldier can march in Afghanistan without knowing why he or she is there based on access to properly funded museums, libraries, universities and galleries which are developed through suitably funded research.

We are informed endlessly by the government that the country needs to ‘cut its cloth accordingly,’ or that ‘we cannot live beyond our means.’ These statements are irritating enough because they are so obvious. Every person in the UK does both each time they enter a supermarket.

The UK has enough money to fund defence and culture. Stop triggering sales in art galleries. Stop threatening museums. Stop closing libraries. Nelson took a bullet not for war itself but because he believed in what he was fighting for – the cultural significance and standing of Britain. That tiny gold-spattered shot represents our history. We can hold it only because the cultural sector exists.

The research library in the 21st Century has a secure future if we can confidently state its purpose. It is a role in support of education of course, but also, and perhaps nowhere more acutely than at Senate House, it is a role in collaboration with other cultural heritage organisations. Orwell shows us why sometimes we may need to fight. Borges weaves images of what we are fighting for.

Borges, in his miniature story staring Shakespeare called Everything and Nothing, describes how when Shakespeare meets God the poet says; ‘I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and myself.’ The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: ‘Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one.’ In Borges’ last story, Shakespeare’s Memory, a man is given the entire mind of the poet. As it gradually overwhelms him he passes it on. Borges believed that the words of one man are the words of all men, and that the construct of the library is where they are to be found. In the library, we are all Shakespeare.

The purpose of research libraries in the 21st Century is simply to exist. Without them we are lessened.

Orwell and Borges each discovered that art is an essential force. Both writers believed that books contain truth. It is why books were being burned in Nazi Germany. It is why Orwell sought to defend them. It is why Borges believed the library to be a labyrinth. It is why libraries remain linked to dreams, to memory, to political freedom, to educational opportunity and to truth.

Thank you.

Christopher Pressler, Cambridge

Line of Fire

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When the musket ball tore through the jacket it carried with it some of the gold braiding from the Admiral’s uniform. It drove through his shoulder and came to a halt inside one of his lungs. Nelson never stood a chance.

The surgeon steadied himself on the creaking boards of HMS Victory and cut into the dying man’s chest. He pulled out the musket ball and held it up to the light between his fingers for a few seconds. He made an historic decision. This was no ordinary musket ball. Not only had he just retrieved it from within Britain’s finest military hero but it also glittered as the gold braid had burned into the metal on entry. He handed it to a colleague who pocketed it. The surgeon heard the whisper of Nelson’s voice, ‘Kiss me, Hardy,’ before dying in front of his fellow sailors. He was lost but Britain was saved.

Over 200 years later a film crew arrive at Windsor Castle to make a documentary on the Royal Collections. The highlight of the entire programme is the camera slowly panning across a polished tabletop before halting over a gold locket. We only see how tiny it is when white-gloved fingers begin to open it. Inside is a musket ball with small pieces of gold braiding embedded in the rough sphere.

The UK cultural heritage sector is persistently under direct financial threat and being asked to justify its purpose. Simultaneously, billions of pounds are spent in the UK every month on placing contemporary soldiers and sailors in the line of fire. Britain has always been a fighting nation. It would be fair to say that it has probably started more wars than it has been drawn into. Only a few have genuinely been in self-defence but to be honest, that is not a concern on the whole. The debate for or against war usually ignores the fact that war will happen anyway.

What’s important is that there is an absence of balance in the national budget; our history is viewed as less important than our future. It begins in school, where the sciences, those great disciplines of discovery are plainly seen to be more significant than the other great disciplines of unearthing in the humanities. It continues in universities, where the humanities are always considered to be of less use to society because they cost less to teach and research. They only cost less because they do not receive enough money.

Humanities academics are regularly forced to acquire a skill rarely needed by their colleagues in pharmacy, medicine, engineering and physics – they make do. Save for a few rare opportunities, they tailor research questions down rather than up to the level of grants. Humanities research funding is usually directed at short-term, at best thematic projects and is rarely strategic.

At the other end of the scale, the Large Hadron Collider, (whose purpose, if you’ll forgive me seems gravely pointless, as a need for God will still exist in people’s minds even if it is proved that two entities colliding resulted in the universe – where did those particles come from if they are responsible for everything?) is a machine that has cost almost enough to fund all historical research without limit in every university in the world for many, many years. What more could have been understood about humanity with that money?

Beyond education and into the world of government funding, the questions become more serious on a daily basis. I do not dismiss, for example the need for Britain to have global military reach. I do challenge the assumption that the present and future can be experienced without reference to the past. In other words, that any soldier can march in Afghanistan without knowing why he or she is there based on access to properly funded museums, which are developed through suitably funded research.

We are informed endlessly by the government that the country needs to ‘cut its cloth accordingly,’ or that ‘we cannot live beyond our means.’ These statements are irritating enough because they are so obvious. Every person in the UK does both each time they enter a supermarket. They become more annoying when apparently empty coffers are pillaged to fund bank bailouts and knee-jerk solutions.

The UK has enough money to fund defence and culture. Stop closing libraries. Stop threatening museums. Stop triggering sales in art galleries. Nelson took a bullet not for war itself but because he believed in what he was fighting for – the cultural significance and standing of Britain. That tiny gold-spattered shot represents our history. We can hold it only because the cultural sector exists. Imagine the wealth of knowledge and understanding we could offer if that sector received matching funding to that of defence. Why should that not be the case?

It has not always been clear what Britain has fought against but a strong cultural heritage infrastructure reminds us what we may be called upon to fight for.

Upside-down Printers – Design at Senate House

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I made a decision this morning concerning my office.

In 1936, the architect of Senate House, Charles Holden began building his art deco masterpiece. The library is designed to be a building that would only stand naturally in London. There are echoes of the lives of other great universities, such as in the inclusion of cloisters, but Holden did not design faux-medieval or classical copies. The cloisters at Senate House are new ideas born of Elegance, Purity, Integrity and Coherence. As in all the vast spaces of Senate House, they are epic in every sense.

Senate House was designed to stand at the centre of the third great English university. It was to be a university rooted in the contemporary world, and only at home in the world’s capital.

Holden designed to a level of detail unusual amongst even the finest architects. There is a ‘Greek’ motif, variations on which decorate not only the architraves of the front elevation but also the backs of chairs, the staircases and railings, the moldings of doors and cornices and even some of the wood paneling in the Senate Chamber. Every single one of thousands of light fittings is an art deco original. They come in many different forms; although I particularly appreciate the up-lighters in the Chancellor’s Hall, which is a long, almost ball room ending in an original 30’s map of central London and the University’s Colleges.

Perhaps the most striking infrastructural feature of the building is its least known. Senate House can only ever be a library. From Floor 7 to Floor 19, the supporting mechanism for this early skyscraper is bookshelves. They are welded into the skeleton girders and rise in perfect symmetry for about two hundred feet over London. If you ever want to sense what it is to have millions of books directly above your head, just stand in the glistening marble foyer of Senate House. It is like taking a static shower beneath the world’s knowledge.

The public floors of 4 to 7 are, particularly in the cases of floors 5 and 6, spaces of almost indescribable immensity. There are some views where it is possible to see roughly from the North to the South of the building. It is as though the great circle of The British Museum Reading Room had been rolled out flat. There are others, for instance when walking into the Goldsmith’s Reading Room, where your breath will be removed for a short time before being dutifully replaced in order that you might continue researching.

Goldsmith’s is a room built specifically for a collection of the same name, the Goldsmith’s Collection of Economic Literature. This is perhaps the world’s greatest named collection in the history of economics. Dating from the 15th Century to the 21st Century there are some exceptional items, and important strata, such as the history of slavery. The room itself has lines of bookshelves carved from English walnut and a ceiling in Canadian cedar. Resulting in a large stained glass version of the University arms, two rows of high windows provide extra height to a room that I believe to be the most beautiful traditional library space in Britain. (For the record, the number two spot could be claimed by the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge and the number three by the John Ryland’s Library at Manchester – but the libraries of Britain are for another post).

There are many further examples of Holden’s genius and clarity of vision throughout his great white library. The essential thing to note though is that this is an epic building made of comparative microcosms.  Its architectural coherence means that when you close your fingers around a door-handle you are holding the entire tower.

In the next few weeks our five-year long refurbishment will be one stage closer to completion. This has painstakingly recast Senate House in its original 1930’s élan. Every piece of furniture, all of which were also designed by Holden has been reconditioned. Every light fitting has been removed, cleaned and rehung. It will give back to London its tallest art deco structure.

The questions for us now are ones of detail. Following so much original care under Charles Holden’s pencil, and the enormous respectful effort of the refurbishment project we must be equally thoughtful about how we create a research experience that is not only surrounded by art deco wonders, but is inspired by them. Senate House Library was born of clear design principles.

There are many projects to be undertaken at the library, but perhaps one of the most important now is to rethink our physical and web presence in terms that would meet with Holden’s agreement. For a man who designed every armchair in the building he could, I am sure, be guaranteed to have an opinion. We think that the collaboration required to fully deliver on Holden’s expectations may not be found in the world of libraries, or even in the education sector.

There are many great, new library buildings but in general they are either driven by public or teaching agendas, which moreover means there are generally very few books, or there are thousands of similar ones. Senate House is a tower of research materials, millions of individual titles. This fundamental difference means we must look elsewhere for our design principles.

In the UK there are only three or four research libraries of comparative size, and one of those; Oxford offers closed access collections. Cambridge and Manchester are both perhaps more similar to Senate House but are in very different settings than in London. Holden’s echoes are most recognisable in a rather surprising setting.

We should be clear concerning what we are aiming for. An EPIC library is not one solely defined by its collections, but also one where its products and services, to appropriate terms from commerce, are recognised to be driven by principles not just profit, or in our case reader numbers.

This means that we intend to develop services around those four words; elegance, purity, integrity and coherence. This would be an aim that would sit easily with most large libraries but at Senate House we have an added incentive; Holden built the entire library and designed most of its contents on very similar principles. Our responsibility is not only to English Heritage to ensure that the light fittings are correct. Our accountability is to Charles Holden. We must, as far as is possible, place nothing in these spaces that wrestles with the original design. We must, again as far as possible, create services within the building and on our websites that are true to Holden’s ideas on simplicity and usability. In short, the Senate House Library design principles were written in 1936 but now need to be reinvigorated for the 21st Century. Holden himself said that people must have the buildings required by the demands of their own time.

The great German designer, Dieter Rams, who was responsible for some of the most iconic products of the mid to late 20th Century whilst working at Braun, has said that only one company now working is led by design as an ethos or as a set of principles. This company is highly profitable, but the demands placed on its designers to innovate as well as deliver quality, working products is extraordinary. That one company, according to Rams is Apple.

I visited the Apple Store in Cambridge recently and it was interesting to note the level of care they display, not only in the computers themselves but also for the environment in which they are sold. For instance, the ceiling was made from the same brushed aluminium as the iMacs and MacBooks. There are no queues, as all the staff can carry out sales via their iPhones.  The displays of computers are symmetrical and on simple wooden tables. Lighting is carefully adapted to each store and is placed in wide strips of the walls as well as the ceiling so there are no shadows or reflections on the screens. In a final, brilliant detail the receipt for a purchase, (if you decline the email version), is printed by a small printer screwed upside-down under a table. It is invisible until used.

In at least two of the main Apple Stores, in London and in New York, glass is also used to great effect in street-level cubes and for internal staircases. The overall effect is an environment that frames the products but also one that has a coherence with them. An Apple Store looks and feels like an Apple Computer.

I am focusing here on the Apple service environment rather than its products, as it is in those stores that we can find an example of the clarity Holden brought to Senate House. The fact that the CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs designed the iPhone and the glass staircases has resonance with Holden’s design not only of Senate House, but even of the pencil-holders on people’s desks.

For a research library of the intellectual depth of Senate House, no detail should be considered too small when pursuing elegance, purity, integrity and coherence. That the collections are held in a building formed from design principles of modernist simplicity is an important opportunity. Senate House confirms its function and usability by adhering to those principles. Integrity is derived through clearly stating purpose. The purpose of Senate House was made physical by Holden and will be secured for the future by allowing the objects and designs of the contemporary world to integrate with their art deco surroundings. Every technology, every sight line, every website, every product and every service in such an important building needs to be considered in terms of design, as something people interact with. Everything we do in the library must have a rationale. A clear design idea must support the placement of anything from desks to signage to web images. The best design should be unnoticed, like an upside-down printer.

This afternoon I had my desk and desktop PC removed from my office. It is now a space whose purpose is primarily to interact with people. I now have only one computer: my MacBook Air. Breathing is easier with clean lines.

This post is co-authored by Joe Honywill, Associate Director, Digital Environments and Partnerships at Senate House Libraries

Borges’ Breadcrumbs

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Writing about writing commonly demands more honesty than that demanded of the novelist. Writing is a deeply personal act that results, if all goes to plan in something owned by the public. As in all art this strange contradiction is only made possible by the peculiar personality of the artist, but it also continues to enhance or in some cases to destroy the personality that enabled it to act in the first place. To create or imagine something from nothing is an activity performed by most human beings incessantly; just think of mothers inventing fairy stories to quieten children – transforming wooden spoons into Punch and Judy is a widely held gift. To produce original and lasting work with narrative power and emotional resonance is to lift those stories into the realm of art.

The novelist at least can blow opaque glass around herself in the form of characters. I do not believe, after years of writing and of studying the writing of others in relation to their biographies, that any writer truly designs characters without reference either to their own or to those of others. Even writers, for example Graham Greene who were especially skilled at personality deception within their own lifetimes, are eventually found out. I work every day with humanities academics and I am certain that a kind of Inspector Morse-like persistence runs through those choosing to write books about others who write books. Academics are closer to being detectives than artists themselves.

So it is rare to find a writer who accepts such a state of affairs and who writes, either without their own blown glass, or who writes about their own writing openly. The trick for academic study here is to find in such texts, what tricks the writer is still playing by slight of hand and double bluff. In the case of some such books the writer hides no deception by explicitly intending it, a triple bluff.

The writer who brings such games to the heights of great art is Jorge Luis Borges. This writer can be ‘read’ in as many ways as he wrote; as magical realist, as literary science fiction, as surrealist poet or as avant-garde essayist. Behind all of these epithets though there remains an extraordinarily honest mind. Borges’ ability to imagine mazes was in one sense the life-long achievement of the finest deception. It is a fiction made of lies in the strictest sense because the work proposes the existence of worlds that cannot be true. However, it is based on the reality of Borges’ own mind, his personal world view and I would be the last to call any great writer a liar simply because he could prove the physical presence of one of his creations.

His profession defined Borges as much as politics and artistic antecedents influenced him. No writer has reimagined the entirety of human knowledge in such compellingly brief detail. (The only other notable attempt, although not a literary one was by Dewey). The ‘library’ for Borges, himself a librarian of international importance, became eternally associated with the concept of labyrinths. Within this construct we find the true Borges. He never walked through the entrance to one of his stories without a handful of breadcrumbs. Those clues to his travels, perhaps through the realism of his own magical words have never become stale.

From an early age, Borges was writing astonishingly original visions of how human history is not linear. His heroes and heroines play out their lives in what, at first glance appears to be environments unknown to the laws of physics or the convictions of religion. Incidentally, it is this aspect of his work that makes him more than a writer of beautiful stories. It means his stories are also genuinely controversial in the challenges they set to our own understanding of what is possible in terms of science, or what may be possible in terms of religion.

Borges is important as an artist because he takes a position between the two great modern sides of the debate on human purpose, or its absence – on one side the apparently unassailable evidence found in atoms and on the other, the equally impregnable certainty held by billions of people, that they are in direct contact with a deity. Borges’ position though is not that of the agnostic, which would get him nowhere and would make his labyrinth nothing more than a mental toy. His writing is derived from a third truth; that art itself can offer an answer to the confusion of life.

In Borges’ labyrinth we find a place literally built on the entire measurement of human knowledge and experience. This is his literary vision. Additionally, we see an environment that most closely resembles the only atmosphere that could support such epic, discoverable life: the library itself.

When Borges achieved his long-held dream of becoming the Librarian of the National Library of Argentina it was a dream realised initially as a nightmare. He said, ‘God finally gave me all the books I had craved and then removed my sight.’ It was a cruelty akin to Beethoven’s deafness or Ravel’s apraxia, but it did not halt either Borges’ reading or his ability to conceive works of art.

In his short story, ‘The Library of Babel,’ Borges merges his professional understanding of libraries with his personal view of the ultimate authority of texts. The Library is endless, containing all the knowledge in the world. It is populated by people (acting here as eternal librarians), who move amongst the endless shelves and point-less spirals of books. They are searching for a way to comprehend this place of comprehensive knowledge.

In order to properly describe Borges’ library I will quote extensively from the work of New York-based software engineer and fellow blogger, Adam Lee. Many thanks to him for ‘doing the math,’ as our American cousins call it:

‘Until I read Daniel Dennett’s discussion of it in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea I had not properly understood just how vast this library was. According to Borges’ description, each book in the Library is 410 pages; each page is made up of 40 lines each consisting of 80 positions, and there are 25 possible alphabetic symbols that can fill any of these positions. This works out to 410 x 40 x 80 = 1,312,000 positions per book, each of which can be filled in 25 distinct ways: 25 x 25 x 25… and so on, 1,312,000 times. In other terms, the Library of Babel contains 25(410x40x80) = 251,312,000 books. This makes the total number of atoms in our universe look like a tiny number.

Since it is impossible to conceive the size of this number, let’s imagine something more manageable: the number of variants of just one book, say, War and Peace. (I do not know if this book actually has something like the 1,312,000 characters possessed by each book in the Library of Babel, but say for the sake of argument that it does.) In all the vast Library there is only one book that replicates it exactly as it was written by Tolstoy. But how many slight variants are there, versions that differ by just one character?

Again, there are 1,312,000 positions in the book, each one of which can differ from the canonical version in 24 ways (since the original character at that position can be replaced with any of the other characters). Thus there are 24 x 1,312,000 = 31,488,000 one-character variants. By the same logic, there are an incredible 991,493,388,288,000, or about 991 trillion, copies of this book that vary by just two characters (31,488,000 ways to vary one character, times 24 x 1,311,999 = 31,487,976 ways to vary a different character). The number of three-character variants is exponentially larger, and the number of four-character variants larger still; and then there are the versions that differ by five, by six, by seven… (Dennett points out that even a copy with several typos on each page would still be quite recognizable.) And none of this includes translations of the book into other languages, retellings of recognizably the same story in different words, abridged versions, summaries, versions with scrambled page order, versions with alternate endings, commentaries, commentaries on the commentaries, reviews, parodies, scholarly analyses, denunciations, deconstructions…

Just how big a number is this? The estimated volume of the observable universe is 1033 cubic light-years, or about 1087 cubic centimeters. Assume that the thickness of a sheet of paper is 0.1 mm, and that each sheet is of standard 8.5 x 11-inch dimensions (about 21.6 by 28 cm). Then the volume of a single book is 21.6 x 28 x (400 x 0.01) = about 2400 cubic centimeters. It would take 4.16 x 1083 such books to completely fill the volume of the observable universe. How many variants on War and Peace would this be?

Incredibly, all the books that were exact duplicates of War and Peace, save for a mere twelve or fewer single-character differences somewhere in the text, would more than fill our observable universe.’

In the hexagonal rooms of Babel, Borges created the most compelling description not only of libraries but also, it might be said of the Internet. Owing to the epic deception of his imagination we are also shown the truth about libraries from a rare perspective; that of a librarian who was also a writer of genius. Borges holds a view common to librarians that it is the knowledge itself, the books indeed, that are the real purpose. The act of collecting is its own religious fervour and its own scientific proof.

The purpose of libraries is not to reflect human knowledge or trends but to exist beyond these things. In imagining something from nothing, Borges uniquely describes an everything. It is a literary device no doubt, but also one envisioned by professional conviction, resulting in a Library containing all other lies and truths. This library needs to be understood for what it is, a precious and valuable resource. The Library of Babel is in that sense no different from any other. It is a construct owned by the public. Libraries are formed by books and each book is created in private for public use. Writing about writing demands honesty but so does writing about libraries. Authors and librarians drop breadcrumbs.

A single book is a library of references, reflections and rediscoveries. When placed beside another it becomes a collection. As part of a group of millions it transforms towards Babel. If you walk into a library of this size you are following Borges’ breadcrumbs. Treasure every step. Libraries are the greatest creation of the human species.