Librarian's Turn

Yesterday was a typical work day for Philip-- he's making good progress on the book's glossary and should finish it in the next few days. So I took advantage of the day to re-visit the Bodleian Library for a guided tour. (Something I didn't imagine any of our future visitors would have a remote interest in seeing)

The architecture of the library is a wonderful example of English Gothic, built in 1602. Unfortunately, they don't allow photographs taken of the reading rooms, but I did get this photo of the Divinity School.




Those of you who are Harry Potter fans will recognize this as Hogwarts Infirmary and the room where Professor McGonagall taught dancing.

The Bodleian Library is strictly a reference library--no books are lent. And it is what is called "a legal deposit" library, meaning it is entitled to a free copy of every book published in Britain. As a person who spends her days cataloging books, I found that to be a bit intimidating. (I could only imagine the folks somewhere in the bowels of the library toiling away at their computers...) They have 120 miles of shelves between several buildings and have a unique pneumatic tube system (like at a drive-up bank teller) whereby you write on a piece of paper what book you want and within 3 hours it will be delivered to you! Some of the books are housed off-site... in abandoned saltmines in Cheshire-- they found the saltmines to be a perfect environment to store books! If you need one of those books, it will take 3 days. (Newtown Public Library needs its own saltmine for withdrawals...)

Later in the evening, it happened that Alison, Andy and I were all at our computers at the same time, so we had an impromptu Skype 3-way conference call. For those of you who aren't familiar with Skype, it is a program which allows you to call other computers anywhere in the world for free and you speak through your computer's microphone. Phil snapped this picture of me talking with them. Fun!


--Deb