Memories from London

Working at the Parliamentary Library was very special, due to both the physical building we moved around in and the people we worked for and with. The Reference Room team was the best –  lively & social.  All in all it was a great place to be practicing librarianship in the 1980s.

 

Spending one afternoon a week in isolation, sequestered in the small Clippings Room (to the left of the main entrance), was not my favourite duty. 

 

Nor was serving time in the Media Room (on the right, off the long hall-way down to the tea-area), always holding my breath first thing in the morning hoping I had timed the 24 hr clock correctly and that all the recordings had been made in their entirety without the video or cassette tapes running out.

 

Manipulating the huge, wooden spined newspaper folders onto the impossibly small photocopying machine was frustrating and seldom successful. 

 

Morning tea from ‘Art Craft’, a bakery across the road, was eaten in a leaky, glass-roofed corridor on old sofas with compromised suspension.

 

Some of the simpler things I appreciate now after having lived in London for 10 years – free parking in the angle car parks right outside the front entrance to the library and the sash windows we could open for immediate fresh air.

 

Wendy (1986-87)

Memories from the 1950s

The heavy canvas-bound accession volumes

 

I joined the staff at the beginning of 1953 as a 17year-old straight from College. I was ‘the Accessioner’ in the Catalogue Department which was upstairs in the corner room facing Hill Street.  I recorded all books in huge and very heavy ledger books which was fine for the new books but when I had to alter information on books in earlier volumes it was difficult to lift them down from the shelf.  Soon after I started I had to accession The Kinsey Report. I remember being constantly watched by the chief cataloguer to make sure I didn’t read anything that would harm my supposed innocence!  I  progressed to typing catalogue cards and of course filing them in the catalogue downstairs.  Eventually I went downstairs and did all the ordering of new books.

My six years working in the General Assembly Library were very happy ones.

 

My best wishes

Margaret Beauchamp (Mead)

 

Issues and Returns

Nedra Shand (left) assists MP Whetu Tirikatene-Sullivan at the issues desk

 

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century the Library used handwritten Day Books, Member’s Ledgers and Recess Ledgers to record book issues. Today circulation is controlled through a computer system. Between these two methods existed the system described by Jenny - a staff member in the 1960s.

 

 

 

 

‘My last position in the Library was as Issues Librarian in the main lobby downstairs. This was a great spot to observe all the comings and goings and you came to recognise many MP’s and their wives and the staff from their offices. Staff from other areas in the buildings also used the library as did ‘Recess Privilege’ holders when Parliament was not in session. We had quite a large fiction collection as well as biography and travel etc. It is really funny thinking back to the Issues system of the time. We noted items on large cards for MP’s and had ‘pockets’ for everyone else. We had a system of different coloured clips which were used week and week about and this was how we identified any overdue items. Parliament always went into a long summer recess and I used to send out baskets of books to the MP’s and their wives for holiday reading. You soon got to know the many tastes they had in reading …one particular wife was addicted to hospital romances.’

The infernal machine

Reading room, early 1980s

As a youngish researcher in the early 1980s I remember coming into the General Assembly Library. Upstairs, having ordered newspapers two days in advance, you could not take them downstairs to the photocopier – but salvation was at hand, if only you could master the infernal machine, an ancient portable device akin to a clothes press in a laundry. As far as I remember none of the staff would go near it – and wished you the best of luck! First you positioned the newspaper page on a pad, fed special heat-sensitive paper into the machine, brought down the heating pad which was on a spring-loaded shaft, held it down with steady pressure, and set the timer by guesswork. If 1 minute produced a dark brown to black mess you set the timer to 45 seconds and so on. Once you got the gist of the machine and it warmed up you got into a rhythm and the results were semi-legible. In those days any reproduction, however poor, was a considerable advance on endless taking of notes and I learned to appreciate its idiosyncracies. Does anyone else remember dealing with this particular device? (JM)

Typewriter

Anyone remember using this old typewriter – and what it was used for?