This last weekend, I was doing birthdays in Oxford: my granddaughter’s first and my old comrade Averil Cameron’s eightieth (and me now towards the latter end of the seventy-nine years in between!). At Averil’s party I did a little tribute, looking back to the late 1970s/early 1980s when I was teaching at King’s College London, and we were part of the feminist classical wing, teaching ourselves French theory and getting our voices heard in what felt like a sea of men.
The centre of the guerrilla action was the Institute of Classical Studies (Library and Common Room), in its previous incarnation in Gordon Square. And we drove back from Oxford in the gales, I found myself recalling a few aspects of library life back then, and some differences from now. Does this ring a chord with anyone else?
Number one. You could smoke in the library – or rather, a bit like on an aeroplane, there was a smoking table, which meant that the whole place was a bit of a fug. I can’t remember when this was actually abolished at the ICS (mid 80s), but I do recall that smoking went on longer in the Warburg Library, which eventually seemed to provide a home for every nicotine-addicted academic in the country, until they finally cleared the air and abolished it too. (As a matter of curiosity, I wonder which was the last library in the country to allow smoking … any answers to that?)
Number two. Everyone was scribbling in notebooks, on pieces of paper and on file cards (remember them?), as the laptop had not been invented. Not everyone’s scribbles were quite the same, mind you. I recall being utterly in awe of Arnaldo Momigliano’s system of note-taking. He had some kind of carbon paper slips (remember carbon paper?) on which he wrote his references, thereby inscribing them effortlessly in triplicate, or quadruplicate. I assumed that the “leaves” were separated once he got home and inserted into different “databases” on different topics. It seemed a height of organizational sophistication that I would never reach. Of course, I never did … as the laptop came to the rescue. (I do occasionally come across half-used packets of file cards though, tucked away in various desks, and can’t quite bring myself to throw them away, though I have no practical use for them whatsoever.)
Number three. We had a super-swift-access cataloguing system in the shape of (again) cards or guard books (to be honest I can’t actually remember which the ICS library had). Now, I see the advantages of online catalogues: mainly the fact that you can consult the catalogue from home, even accessing the holdings of most big libraries anywhere in the world; and it is convenient, also, to know if a book is on loan before you trek to get it. But don’t let anyone kid you that an online catalogue is quicker than those old-fashioned methods in locating a book if you are actually in the library. If you don’t believe me, I recommend that you test-drive the irritating “iDiscover” system that many university libraries, including Cambridge, have adopted. Then compare the time taken to find your book with a simple old, hard-copy catalogue. Those were the days.