I attended the AGM of the Library and Information History Group (LIHG) yesterday afternoon through in Edinburgh, which was very insightful indeed.

It was held in the Signet Library, just off of the Royal Mile, in West Parliament Square, an area of the city so steeped with history that it seemed to be the ideal location for a group that are interested in the history of libraries and of the library profession.

My interest in attending this event was primarly to attend the talk and tour of the library, which is a very important law library within Scottish Legal History. The talk that we were given detailed the development of four of the legal libraries within the area, from the 1600s, which i have to admit left me feeling a little bit dizzy with numbers, and also very appreciative of modern fire prevention and fighting techniques, as the frequency of fires which these libraries seem to experience in the early days of their history was quite astonishing!

The library itself was a Georgian masterpiece of a building, with sweeping staircases, enormous pillars and walkways, and stained glass windows. How very different to the modern constructions of libraries today! The library itself was an exercise in preservation, nevermind the books that it held. Much of the original furniture remained, and rugs which would cost upward of £0.25 million to replace today. How extraordinary!

The library contained both legal and non-legal texts, most of which were kept in shelving behind glass or metal screening. I do not think that i saw a single person using it in the time i was there! Their situation regarding cataloguing is that only three quarters of the books in the lower library (law related) are electronically catalogued and available in an online opac, the rest are included in a card catalogue (held within the most magnificent mahogany cabinet!). The upstairs library has not been catalogued for the online opac due to funding restraints. Indeed, until only a few years ago they kept a hard copy loans record!

The building is really very impressive, but i have to admit that i was a bit confused by all the technical legal type information, i.e. the different users of the library and courts and such. There was not a great turnout for the event, most people there were already members of the group and of the committee, but they were very welcoming of me, the little outsider who knew very little, if anything, of library history.

Most of the people there really seemed to be very interested in library history as a research subject, and seemed in that sense to be as much historians as they were librarians. They seemed to realise that there was a real problem for their group in getting people interested in the history of libraries and that most librarians and library staff had very little knowledge about the history of the libraries in which they worked and of library history in general.

I think that the experience gave me a real insight into a view of librarianship which i had not really considered prior to attending. Understanding how the profession has developed and how it has been regarded by the public over the many years is of interest to myself, but i do not think that i would join the group as yet - if anything, i do not feel as if i know enough about the history of libraries to merit joining.

I will certainly in the future think more about the profession from this angle, and perhaps next time I visit a library building will think not just about what it currently offers and what it will offer in the future, but also about what it has offered in the past and how it has shaped and influenced the lives of the people who have used it and has grown and changed with the community in which it is placed.

UPDATE: I forgot to also mention one of the most unusual things that i discovered on the day - that the speaker who gave us the talk and tour of the building had been only the second qualified librarian to work in the library since it first opened (hundreds of years ago!)… what does that say for the recognition of the profession!?? Also, she was the first woman to work as a librarian within the library too….. (16th June 2006)

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