Day 5: V&A Museum and National Art Library

Day five of our program saw us spreading our wings and finding our way to the Maughan Library all on our own. We managed to make it on time, let’s hope we can repeat this for our VERY early bus to Oxford tomorrow!

Anthony finished up his talk on journals and described how journals pick editors and conduct peer review. After that, Alison Jones came and spoke to us about digital innovations at Palgrave Macmillan. It was a really helpful talk, and gave a good overview of the way publishers structure their products/services to suit both material and the likely users. For example, the Palgrave Pivot format offers a new alternative to the traditional journal article/monograph model for scholarly works that fall in-between the two. It is published within 12 weeks (with peer review!) and is offered in digital form for either library or individual purchase. She also discussed how the format and content of publishing affects how it is sold, e.g. through direct sale, via Macmillan’s platform, through aggregators or third-party retail. Reference databases, for example, are available by subscription because the content is constantly being updated and changed. It was a really interesting discussion, and very useful for me to understand how publishers are using digital tools now. I had no idea they had so many models to work with and are still pushing the boundaries in the field.

After lunch, the Pratt students went to the National Art Library at the Victoria & Albert Museum in Kensington. What a fantastic library! It’s still in the original Victorian space, very elegant and very impressive. One of the assistant librarians gave us a tour of the library, taking us to the hidden back rooms and upper gallery of the library. The third floor was build up into the vaulted ceiling to add more space to the growing library. After that, they showed us some truly remarkable items from their special collections. We saw a beautiful illuminated book of hours, a facsimile of one of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks (original is in their collection), Dickens’ manuscript for Bleak House, and, my personal favorite, Edward Johnston’s original typeface design for the Underground. To finish up, we heard about the library’s collection development and its digital strategies. One thing that stood out was the difficulty some libraries can have when they are part of a larger institution but still semi-autonomous. I got the feeling that there were issues and projects the library wanted to work on (e.g. long-term digital preservation and storage, further integrating digital collections with the V&A Museum’s digital objects) that didn’t have the right kind of organizational structure to help them out. What happens when the institution’s website changes, but no one told the library to upgrade or save its separate pages? Answer: a lot of stuff gets lost! For libraries that are a part of a bigger governing body, it becomes more and more important to have clear guidelines on which department is maintaing what digital assets. Overall, it was a really wonderful afternoon, and we were very lucky they took so much time to talk to us.