A lot of our researchers may be aware that we have a reference library onsite but not many know that it expands way beyond the searchroom into the strongrooms and our upstairs general office. We have been collecting secondary material on Berkshire since our creation in 1948. The first book recorded in our earliest library accession register was not a book at all but a bill for inclosing lands in Enborne, Hampstead Marshall, Inkpen, and Kintbury which was presented to us by the County Librarian on 16 August 1948.
Our reference library includes subscriptions, histories written by local people on local places, local history books, books on Berkshire families and businesses, classic historical reference books like the Victoria County History books, parliament acts, guides to records held at RBA and elsewhere, pamphlets on local churches and places etc. The library covers topics from Highways and Byways in Berkshire to Social Aspects of the Wallingford Corporation, 1599-1660.
For a long time searching the library collections has relied on the library card index, which is organized by author and place and subject, with a separate index for periodicals. Whilst the card index served us well, as we and our visitors use the online catalogue more and more, the library card index sometimes gets forgotten, and the material doesn’t get used as much as it possibly should.
For a long time, there have been whispers and suggestions to digitising the library index but often it has fallen to the back of our long to do lists.
Our future aim is to add the library index to our online catalogue so that when you search for records relating to a particular property or place in Berkshire for example, your search will also return any books/pamphlets on the same topic, hopefully enhancing and providing helpful context to the original documents.
A simple task you might think? Well, behind scenes since 2020, we have been working to make this dream a reality, but it required multiple stages of data migration.
Stage 1 was to type up the physical accession registers into an excel spreadsheet which proved trickier than you may think to decipher multiple years of archives assistants handwriting. There may have been a fair amount of googling to discover the true authors names! This stage may have taken a long time if it was not for lockdown and staff being at home. This meant staff made quick work of typing up the accession registers.
The second stage involved taking the information from the digitized accession registers and creating a library catalogue spreadsheet, divided into books and periodicals, and making sure all the information uniform, a column for authors, publication date etc.
However, when we returned to the office, understandably progress on the second stage of the library project slowed down quite considerably whilst we got back into public service. So the project it got forgotten once more. Until stock take 2023! During the end of the year, we close for two weeks to undergo tasks that are hard to achieve when we are open to the public so what better project than the neglected library project. Despite the monotonous nature of the task, staff pushed through, and stage 2 was completed.
Stage 3 is now underway – we are cross comparing the library catalogue on Excel with the card index, making a note of the entries that may have been missed from the accession register (these things happen!) and fleshing out the details of the items such as editor, ISBN etc. We wear many hats as Archivists and Archives Assistants, so this stage is being carried out around our usual duties.
When stage 3 is complete we shall move on to our final stage of adding the items to our CALM catalogue and making it accessible online.
Thank you to all staff members and volunteers, past and present, who have helped move the library project along. We do not have a completion date for the library but just know behind the scenes it is chugging along and hopefully one day soon, the whispers of a digital library catalogue won’t be whispers anymore. In the meantime, if anyone is interested in the library material that we hold please contact us and we will be happy to assist with searching our card index and Excel spreadsheets.