Of all the libraries I’ve been to, the Bodleian was the most helpful in advance, and the most fun. I was able to arrange to see up to six items and name the day I was coming – they would be ready for me.
First I had to go to the Weston Library to get a Readers Card. You take a number and go through the kind of door where they have to buzz you in. I gave them my application (which I’d prepared in advance) and all my identification, and my letter from the college. I paid a few pounds. Then I had to take the oath, reading this aloud. I felt like I was auditioning for the part of Reader.
I also asked about the Oxford Student Union. There they have not only a copy of H.G. Wells’ Text-book in Biology, but also some wonderful pre-Raphaelite murals, but they are not part of the Oxford University libraries to which I was gaining access. The Bodleian admission desk let me use their phone to ask permission, and they said I could come in the morning.
Then I set off to find the Upper Reading Room. They weren’t kidding.
There they had everything I had ordered. And by “six items” I don’t just mean six photocopied articles like at Bromley – these were six full volumes, three from Science and Art and three from the University Correspondent. I needed help to get them all to my table.
Now each library has different rules for getting copies of articles (which I need to do to avoid hours of taking handwritten notes). At the British Library, they had a photocopy service that charged a fortune, but you could use your phone to take pictures. However, you were not allowed to stand up — you had to photograph at your table, sitting down. This made the angle a little tricky, but they had lamps.
The Bodleian has no lamps, but not only did they let me stand up, they allowed me to take the volumes to the window sill for good lighting.
As a result the photos are much better than the Bromley scans, so for duplicate items I re-photographed. Plus, these were the whole volumes, so after photographing the articles I had on my list, I could browse through other entries and advertisements. This was particularly useful for Volume I of the University Correspondent, since it had the usual “why we’re publishing this journal” information, no doubt written by William Briggs. One of these mentioned that an interview with him had just been published in the September 1890 issue of Educational Times.
Educational Times is a journal I have been able to find on Hathi under a different title, but this article couldn’t be viewed “for copyright reasons” (strangely, neither could many of the others I’d already downloaded). The Bodleian let me order it for tomorrow. Another item on my list, an article on curriculum written by Wells and his friend A.T. Simmons, they had also. This one they could “Scan and deliver” to my email. I put in a request and by the time I went and had tea in the afternoon, it was in my email.
So now, the main issue is getting all this stuff off my phone camera and into usable pdf form for uploading to Paperpile. Today for the first time I realized that when Google uploads photos to Drive, it gets the date wrong. Completely ignores the EXIF and just uploads willy-nilly, with its own upload date in whatever time zone it prefers at that moment. Suddenly I realize all my photos of all these documents will be as unfindable as a medieval document in a non-indexed book lying around a monastery. So that’s the next challenge…
