Day 8: Cambridge

We had the best of luck today, it was sunny and beautiful for our visit to Cambridge, a gorgeous city. Thankfully this trip was not as early as Oxford. We left by the 8:45 train from Kings Cross, but no sign of the 9 3/4 platform (I think they moved since the last time I was here…).

Our visit in the morning was at ProQuest. I started using their databases this year for school and I am a biiiig fan. Filtered searches, RefWorks/My Research – A+, would recommend. They walked us through some of their projects and how they enhance a library’s value. They described their fashion research collections beyond the very impressive Vogue collection, which include newspapers and (soon) Women’s Wear Daily. There is also the single portal for searching across art and architecture indexes, bibliographies and full-text. They noted that, even though some of this information or digitized items may be freely available elsewhere like on Google Scholar, librarians will still subscribe to the ProQuest collection because they offer such deep, article-level indexing. The people who work on these clearly understand how important this minute description is, and that the value of these historical, digitized items goes beyond just the content of a magazine article – it’s the ads, it’s the context, it’s who the editor was and when, etc. etc. They also described how they apply similar tactics to their science collections, although the user goals and search parameters are slightly different (I did not understand the real, monetary important of “last finds” and how scientific research needs to find and review every piece of already-published information before going forward). Zoe Loveland also presented some very interesting research on how libraries can use metrics to evaluate their journal subscriptions and measure what students and faculty find useful. She also touched briefly on outreach and the ways librarians should continue to interact directly with users to understand their needs. This research is going to be published soon, I gather, so I am eager to see what their findings were in further detail.

We visited King’s College Chapel (GORGEOUS) and went to the library at Pembroke College. The librarian there took us on a tour of the beautiful Victorian-slash-modern building and showed us some archival items on Ted Hughes. Did you know Ted Hughes was into fishing and that the pike is a truly horrifying fish? Now you do!