Heythrop Library

1. What do you enjoy most about your role at Heythrop Library? 

I am not the first person to say this and I certainly won’t be the last, but the fact that there are so many different essential tasks to deal with and projects to get stuck in to, really keeps my role here fresh and interesting. I enjoy meeting new library users and providing them tours and inductions in the reading room; I also love the sometimes mind-stretching work of classifying new acquisitions: that is, ascertaining the nature of a book’s contents and assigning it a classmark, which determines where you will find the book on our shelves. It can require quite a bit of lateral thinking, and is a fun little puzzle which has the added benefit of teaching me more about the subject area covered by the book in question.

2. Where did you work prior to Heythrop Library? 

Before joining the Heythrop Library team I worked as the Library Assistant at the Biblical Studies research library in Cambridge known as Tyndale House. Prior to this I worked in a voluntary capacity for St Edmund’s College Library in Cambridge, and going back even further I have worked in as a student ministry assistant at an Anglican church in Southampton, which is where I attended university.

3. Why does Heythrop Library’s collection interest you? 

In the last 6 years or so that I have worked in the libraries sector I have gradually accrued a fair amount of knowledge and interest in biblical studies, theology, Church history, and related disciplines, all of which made the Heythop’s library collection appealing to me. That said, nothing could have prepared me for the breadth of fascinating and varied nature of the collection here, even just in the Mount Street reading room. The philosophy section in particular is a subject area I am enjoying getting to know better, and the Ignatian spirituality section reveals more gems every time I take a look!

4. Are there challenges of working at Heythrop Library? 

One of the most significant challenge as a library of this size is that there is always a long to-do list of tasks requiring our attention, a perennial problem that I expect will always persist. For example, tackling the backlog of uncatalogued books and journals is an ongoing process, which has to sit alongside more immediate user enquiries such as book acquisition requests, membership sign-ups and renewals, and cataloguing new library materials. I can map out on a Monday how I expect my work week to look, only for plans to change significantly by the end of Tuesday and the entire structure of my work must alter. On the other hand, this can be one of the joys of working at the Heythrop Library: that each day is unique, and can throw up unexpected mysteries to solve on behalf of our readers, which is very rewarding.

5. Favourite book inside and outside the collection? 

When I first joined the team here I was pleased to see on the shelf in the Christian spirituality section David Benner’s book The Gift of Being Yourself, which I first read a few years ago when doing student ministry work. It is a slim volume but very readable and affirming. It is quite a popular title with our library users and with good reason; thankfully the library has multiple copies!

Outside of the collection, as an English Literature graduate it is difficult to choose only one favourite but the top spot has to belong to either Italo Calvino’s ingenious 1979 novel If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, or to the beautiful and evocative One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. An honourable mention must also go to anything written by George Saunders.

SV