IN DEPTH
Special Collections – What’s new?
With Special Collections being particularly affected by the lack of physical access during the coronavirus pandemic, Dr Karen Attar finds hope for the future despite the hardships. Here she looks at how an updated edition of the Directory of Rare Book and Special Collections in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland reveals a flourishing sector.
SPECIAL Collections have suffered badly during Covid-19. Digital surrogates help researchers interested in editions and texts, albeit not those exploring margi- nalia, bindings, and other copy-specific features. But problems arise even when focussing on books purely in terms of content.
Many books are too old to have been created digitally and too new to have been digitised post-publication. For reasons of value or fra- gility the material must be read in supervised reading rooms, exempting it from the ‘click and collect’ library services with which libraries started to open after the Covid lockdown. So at a nadir in terms of use, it is exhilarating
to become aware through an update of the CILIP Rare Book and Special Collections Group’s Directory of Rare Book and Special Collec- tions in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland of special collections flourishing. The Directory describes special collections, old and new, in all sorts and sizes of reposito- ries from prison to palace via ecclesiastical, educational and other establishments across the Great Britain and Ireland. Editing it involves contact with about a thousand organ- isations and is a mammoth task, which is why long periods have elapsed between editions: 12 years between the first edition (1985) and the second (1997), and 19 between the second and the third (2016). Thus, when a reader turned up at CILIP in 2019 to report an absent collection and clam- our for a fourth edition, human stamina for the project was non-existent.
16 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL DIGITAL
Dr Karen Attar (
Karen.attar@
london.ac.uk) is Editor of the Directory of Rare Book and Special Collections in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland and Curator of Rare Books and University Art at Senate House Library, University of London (
https://london.ac.uk/senate-house-library).
Emerging diversity
But a paperback reissue of the third was viable. The text block could not be changed to allow for collections acquired or released since 2016 by the 873 repositories represented in the third edition. However, it was easy to add pages and describe new libraries, ultimately over seventy of them, in an appendix. Many new reports came from relatively new libraries across sectors. Diversity emerges, exemplified by two libraries which opened in 2018. The Aga Khan Library in London holds over 52,000 volumes on Islamic Studies, while the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art in Manchester has some 2,000 publica- tions associated with Chinese modern artists, including limited print runs produced by artists or independent galleries across East Asia. Rare books from the early sixteenth century
December 2020
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