RE: Please N, Baker Go Away

[Mark Purcell <Mark.Purcell@mercury.olis.ox.ac.uk>]

On the subject of old catalogues:
>A librarian friend of my mine suggested an appropriate place would be Baker's
>garage. It's big and awkward. In the best of all possible worlds with all
>the money in the world,  we might keep it. But I suspect you'd not be
>interested in contributing a sizable portion of your ancient languages
>acquisitions budget to store the old catalog.

Many of the Oxford college libraries have kept catalogues going back to
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (one of my acquaintance has
eighteenth-century pressed flowers inside it).  I am wholeheartedly
agree that new technology needs to be embraced wholeheartedly: it offers
so many new opportunities for us to explore our collections, and to make
them available to a wider audience.

But throwing old catalogues out of some misplaced technology fetish is
*crazy.* They contain the most priceless information.  If you look in
the old ledgers here in Oxford, you can see what books were available to
some of the most distinguished minds of our past.  You can see how
seventeenth-century researchers organised knowledge, and you can trace
books that have long vanished or reconstruct the shelving arrangement of
chained libraries which no longer exist.  Old catalogues have the most
profound importance  for the history of book collecting and reading.
One day someone is going to want to study reading and scholarship in the
twentieth century.  How will they do it if we have destroyed the
evidence?  It isn't good enough to say that old card catalogues take up
too much space: the amount of physical space required to store a library
catalogue is trifling compared to the total size of the collection.  

Some members of the list may know that staff at the British Musuem
destroyed many of their library records in the years after the First
World War.  You want to know just what Karl Marx was reading in the
Round Reading Room?  Tough luck!  Will future generations curse us for
making the same mistake?

Mark Purcell
Oxford University Early Printed Books Project
>