Leeds University Library in the Late

Leeds University Library: Change and Development in its Services, 1975–2003 Oliver Pickering The following account was written in 2003 to form a chapter in a volume intended to celebrate the centenary of the University of Leeds in 2004 but which was later abandoned. I am publishing it now (April 2021) as a small contribution to UK academic library history. At the time of writing I was Deputy Head of the Special Collections department. On 14 October 1975 Harold Macmillan, the former prime minister, officially opened the University’s new South Library and in so doing inaugurated a fresh phase of Leeds University Library’s history. By his side were the Vice-Chancellor, Lord Boyle, in whose memory the building would later be renamed, and the University Librarian, Dennis Cox, who had worked hard to make the vision a reality. The remarkable growth of the Library, creating a need for ever more space, constitutes one of the main themes of its history during the last thirty years. Others are the increasing attention paid to meeting users' needs and, of course, the exploitation of information technology, which on that day in 1975 had hardly begun.1 The earlier part of the twentieth century had fallen, in Library terms, into two almost equal halves: before and after the opening of the Brotherton Library in 1936 and the accompanying arrival of the Brotherton Collection, Lord Brotherton’s private library of rare books and manuscripts. The Brotherton family’s gifts and bequests had transformed the reputation of Leeds University Library, and Richard Offor and B.S. 'Tony' Page, Librarians 1919-47 and 1947-69, now had a magnificent building to fill. The collections grew rapidly after the Second World War, necessitating the insertion of a mezzanine floor in the 1950s. By 1968, when Dennis Cox in practice assumed the Librarianship, the situation was becoming critical. The moment coincided with unprecedented growth in student numbers and with international developments in academic library provision, specifically the concept of a self-contained ‘student library’. Thus it was that the South Library, when it opened, contained both the science and engineering research collections – greatly relieving the pressure on the Brotherton Library – and a large and specially assembled collection of undergraduate textbooks (the Student Library), available either for seven-day loan or for reference only. There 1 Much of the material in this chapter derives, in documentary terms, from the Annual Reports of the Librarian and the Library’s Readers’ Newsletter (which was published from 1992 to 1998). It also draws on unpublished Library sources and on information provided by long-standing current and retired members of staff, to whom I am very grateful. 2 was also a purpose-built audio-visual area. Altogether it was a pioneering development – the first separate student library in the UK – and so successful in attracting users that for many undergraduates the Brotherton (not so happily) became almost unknown.2 The South Library was also in marked architectural contrast to the circular Brotherton, with its dome, marble pillars, and long wooden tables. Built over six floors, the new library’s outstanding features were a large central void, allowing an overview of almost the whole building, and the stepping of the upper floors at their outer edges, which enabled the creation of private reading carrels out of each other’s sight and out of direct sunlight. The building as a whole provided space for 300,000 volumes and 1,250 readers. The modular nature of its construction, which it had in common with the other buildings of the great expansion of the University in the 1960s and 1970s by the firm of Chamberlin, Powell & Bon, was to prove its worth more than twenty years later when it acquired an extension to the south. The relatively poor accommodation for staff (though no worse than in the Brotherton) and recurrent problems with services, especially heating and ventilation, came to be seen as typical of the building type and period. The advent of the Student Library brought new procedures with it. While the acquisition and cataloguing of materials for the main collections continued on traditional lines (although from 1974-75 on the basis of the recently established Anglo- American Cataloguing Rules, a change that brought great benefits to catalogue users), Student Library books were bought to formula and received only the scantiest of descriptions. It was anticipated that the stock would continually change to keep up to date with reading lists, and that permanent records would not be needed. Furthermore, while the main libraries continued with slips and cards – although experimenting throughout the 1970s with a range of semi-automated methods of producing them – the Student Library catalogue was output on microfilm, in multiple copies, and used simplified classmarks. These were rational decisions, and it could not then be foreseen that the way forward was through standardisation of practice within the Library, not diversification. Automation proper had been introduced to the Library’s circulation system – the control of book borrowing – as early as 1973 with the purchase of an ALS computer, which worked with punched tickets for books and users, and updated its records overnight, offline. It survived until 1983, to the frustration of staff who had to cope daily with swathes of print-out. The decision to automate book borrowing (and to introduce AACR-based cataloguing for the main collections) stemmed from a recommendation from two members of staff whom Dennis Cox, always concerned to modernise the Library's practices, had far-sightedly set to work on rethinking existing systems and structures. 2 For details see D. Cox, ‘The South Library’, University of Leeds Review, 19 (1976), 27-33. 3 As the 1970s wore on the use of the University libraries increased rapidly, and by 1979-80 the number of loans totalled over half a million a year. Whereas the Medical and Dental libraries had moved together into spacious new accommodation in the University’s Worsley Building in 1977, and the library at St James’s Hospital into new premises in 1979 (the Law Library, too, was to benefit from an extension in 1981), pressure on the main buildings was exacerbated by the continuous growth in stock and by the closure of other self-contained ‘sectional’ libraries: Agriculture in 1975 and Education in 1979. In the latter case the transfer of stock resulted in the erection of extensive metal shelving in the ambulatory of the Brotherton reading room, a disfigurement that remained until 1993. 1975 also saw the beginning of departmental library closures – books again flowing into the main libraries – following a decision to reduce and then end the allocations made to them from central funds. In all these circumstances the University had little choice but to prolong – and keep on prolonging – the Library’s temporary occupancy of the second and third floors of the Parkinson Building. When the West Building at last opened in 1993 the collections in medieval and modern history and modern languages had lived a separate life up there for twenty-one years. The early 1980s represented a relatively low point in the Library’s affairs. The euphoria of achieving the South Library was in the past, and the benefits of computerisation were still known only in theory. The buildings were filling up, and financial pressures on the whole university system were fast increasing, leaving the Library to have to fight for money. The first cancellation of periodical subscriptions had taken place as early as 1976-77, and by 1981 both services and staffing levels were suffering. For a time opening hours were cut, provoking a student work-in in early 1982. It was much longer before the Library was again staffed adequately. But in other ways it began to move forwards again, with the University's recognition that computerisation, at least, had to be funded. Cataloguing – though not the public catalogue – was automated in 1981, the barcoding of books began in 1982, and in 1983 the ALS computer was at last replaced, at great expense, by an online Geac circulation system. (The first Geac computer lasted eight years, to be superseded by a larger model of the same make in 1991.) Loans of books had increased by some 90% in the intervening decade. By 1983 the Library was also offering searches of online bibliographical databases to researchers in (particularly) science, engineering and medicine, although it would be 1991 before users first had the ability to search such resources for themselves. In 1982-83 the Library also received a welcome boost to its book purchasing grant, but the rate of overall acquisition of materials had never significantly slackened. Books and manuscripts do not, after all, always have to be bought. The early and mid- 1980s saw the arrival of the vast political and personal archive of Lord Boyle, who had died in 1981; the beginnings of the Leeds Russian Archive; and the deposit of very large collections of Quaker printed books and archives, and of the old library and archives of 4 Ripon Cathedral. It was, however, the assiduous work of the Library’s team of subject consultants – freed by Dennis Cox from more routine 'housekeeping' duties – that contributed, day by day, to the consolidation of the arts and humanities collections into a nationally significant resource. The holdings in history, English, Chinese, French, and other modern languages particularly stand out, as do the research materials in microform. Dennis Cox’s retirement in 1986 happily coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the arrival of the Brotherton Collection, which was marked by the publication of a celebratory book,3 but Cox himself had presided over a more than doubling of the size of the Library’s holdings, achieved as a result of his persistent advocacy, to the University, of the importance of having research collections.

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