York Minster Library and Search Engine, National Railway Museum Visits

For our summer workforce development, I arranged a visit to York to see the Minster library and Search Engine, the National Railway Museum's (NRM) library.

We started off at York Minster Library, which is very old and looks like something from Harry Potter. They have floor to ceiling shelving around the rooms with the small books at the top and the large books at the bottom. This is because of the shelving design, which has the taller shelving at the bottom and the smallest shelving at the top. The cataloguing therefore is rather unique, the bays are numbered, then the shelves are numbered and the catalogue number is finally completed by how far the book is along the shelf. Easy!

We were treated to the delights of 'The Cage', which is a caged off area where the oldest books are. We got to see a book from the 16th century which contained 'all the knowledge in the world'. It started with the biblical stories and went through political history up until the then present time. It was fabulously illustrated and had been annotated by a previous owner. We discovered that as paper was originally very expensive, people would use every bit they had to write things on (including shopping lists). From 'The Cage', we went up the obligatory spiral staircase to the balcony area, where we saw some elaborately bound books. My favourite one was like a small handbag.

The second visit was to Search Engine at the NRM. Now being a railwayman's daughter and a bit of an anorak, this was tremendously exciting for me. We started off by being shown around the public area, which is light, bright and modern. Then we were taken down into the bowels of the NRM, to see the library archive area. Wow! 

They have a huge collection of blueprints of engineering designs. There was the original (signed by Stanier) copy of the Duchess of Hamilton blueprints laid out on table. We moved on to the book collection, with rolling stacks. That's rolling stacks, a library thing, not to be confused with the rolling stock, a railway thing. Although I suppose libraries can have a rolling stock, if they want but it would have nothing to do with trains. Search Engine's archive has allsorts of ephemera too such as a collection of railway tickets and we saw Stephenson's written design for the Rocket. From here, we entered the seriously cool (that's refering to the temperature) poster collection and original art collection. Many of these were used for promotion purposes and because of the materials used, have to be kept somewhat refrigerated. We were all very jealous that their climate control system works far better than the one we have at work.

We saw 2 very different libraries and both are seriously different to our FE library. They were incredibly interesting to go to and it was interesting to hear what kind of challenges they face, particularly regarding the preservation of each collection. The Minster was cool and their stained glass windows have had to have dark blinds put over them to keep the sunlight out. The NRM being a much more modern building has a state of the art climate control system, where we started off in a cool area and end up going into a very cold area. Any of these would be welcome at work, where our Office temperature can be quite tropical.