Interview with a Librarian: Katie Birkwood, Royal College of Physicians (RCP)

We continue our series of interviews with librarians with Katie Birkwood who has been the rare books and special collections librarian at the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) since 2012. She cares for approximately 20,000 rare books assembled over the RCP’s 500-year history, spanning medicine and many subjects beyond, and has curated exhibitions about the library of John Dee and anatomical illustration. Follow the RCP archive, historical library, and museum team as @RCPmuseum on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

 

At what point did you want to become a librarian? 

I took an undergraduate degree in music, and it included modules on transcribing and interpreting medieval musical notation. I found that I was more interested in the manuscripts themselves – and in the material history of the music’s transmission – than I was in the music itself. From there it was a fairly quick step to deciding I wanted to work looking after material texts, whether printed or manuscript, rather than studying them directly.

 

What has been your most exciting discovery? 

I’m very cautious about using the word ‘discovery’ in libraries; too often it’s used to describe something documented and catalogued that has just become noticed in the press. By definition it had already been ‘discovered’ by the person who catalogued it. Small, mundane, personal discoveries made in the course of everyday work stick in my mind, the most. They don’t necessarily make the headlines, but they contribute to my own understanding of early modern book culture, and in documenting them in our catalogue I hope they’ll be available to the researchers of today and the future. I’ve found all sorts of things stuck to or tucked in between the pages of RCP books: pressed plants and leaves, squashed insects, a feather, and even a scrap of gold leaf. There are a few dubious stain marks, too, as you might expect in a medical collection, although analysis of one proved inconclusive.

When there’s time to spare for it, I love digging down into the details to untangle bibliographic mysteries. Tracking down the attribution of an anti-worm recipe made from ox gall and cumin, and copied into an incunable plague tract by an early owner was satisfying, and there was a serious lightbulb moment when I realised an apparently baffling edition of The seynge of urynes (a classic 16th century vernacular diagnostic text) has a pen-facsimile title page.

 

Tell us a little bit about your latest project.

A serious achievement for 2020 was creating an online version of our exhibition Under the skin: anatomy, art and identity, which ran in the RCP building at Regent’s Park from Autumn 2019 until we closed for the March 2020 lockdown. Transforming a physical exhibition into an online experience has positives and negatives: you can’t fully recreate the emotional drama of being surrounded by stark and surprising anatomical images, but you can combine different media – image, text, audio and video – seamlessly in a way we can only dream of in our physical space. Opening up the exhibition to a global audience, and being able to run additional (online) events has been extremely satisfying in a year that otherwise felt a lot like treading water.

 

What exciting plans are in the pipeline?

The library is a partner with the Institute of English Studies, University of London in collaborative doctoral award research project funded by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership. Catherine James is studying evidence of women’s ownership and use of medical knowledge in early modern English, by undertaking a survey of the RCP collections. Although progress has been affected by the last year’s restricted access to the collections, Catherine’s already found some interesting works and owners, and we await her findings and publications with interest.

 

Do you collect yourself?

To my shame, not really. I have a penchant for picking up 1980s and 1990s independent queer women’s publishing, but only when I stumble across it. I don’t have the killer instinct for hunting down desiderata.

  

If money were no object what book/manuscript would you like to add to your library?

We’re very lucky to have a lot of the big hitters from medical history in the library already, so if money were no object, I’d build a time machine and travel back to 1666 and save William Harvey’s library and museum (given to the RCP in the 1650s) from the Great Fire of London. Of the 1,400+ books known to be in the library in 1660, only around 100 were saved from the flames, and only one with Harvey’s annotations. It would be marvellous to be able to examine the notes and thoughts of the RCP’s most famous historical fellows, and to have his collection reunited.

 

What is the greatest challenge facing rare book librarians in the next few years?

I think it’s fair to say that, on the whole, people love what we do: the thrill of the real is still a big draw. But – as with so much in the heritage and academic sectors – there’s not the will to fund it sufficiently. Metadata is vital to access – ever more so in the digital world – but good cataloguing isn’t quick or easy, and takes skilled staff and detailed knowledge of collections. Financial pressures only ever seem to get tougher, and the real groundwork of making collections accessible is too often seen as expendable.

 

Has the pandemic brought some positives for librarians as well as negatives?

For the RCP, the pressing need to develop online routes for audience engagement without having to worry about creating a ‘perfect’ offer has been beneficial. I’m certainly wondering why we didn’t manage to start streaming events before, having long been concerned about the London-centric nature of our activities.

However, on the other hand, the national picture for libraries and other heritage bodies is looking pretty bleak. There have already been very high profile threats to collections, and I’d be surprised if there weren’t more to come. The worst effects have been seen off so far, but I would be surprised (though delighted) if that trend were to continue indefinitely. I worry that the legacy of the pandemic will be the long-term diminution of research library services across the board.

 

 

Stay tuned for the next in our series of Interviews With Librarians, published monthly online. You can read the previous interview with Liam Sims of The Cambridge University Library, here. 

If you have any comments or questions based on the above interview, we'd love to hear them. Please email your queries to sarah@thebookcollector.co.uk.