National Art Library @ Victoria & Albert Museum. 14 June 2018

Thursday. 14 June 2018
National Art Library @ the Victoria & Albert Museum
https://www.vam.ac.uk/info/national-art-library

Victoria & Albert Museum.

Today we took the #74 bus to the National Art Library (NAL) at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). Our tour guide Frances met the LIS group and brought us to a Seminar Room where she showcased several prominent items from their collection. Frances explained that the National Art Library was founded in 1837, 14 years before the Victoria & Albert Museum began operating in 1851. The foundation of the NAL was an international collection of art; the V&A was established after the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park and featured items from all around the world. Today the NAL holds over one million items.

This manuscript from 1560, written by a scribe, features every handwriting script known in Italy at that point in time. 

Book from the Royal College of Design with illustrations of natural history.

19th Century Germany. This is a collectible "peep show" book which provided
a telescopic view of Queen Victoria opening the Great Exhibition. 

The Great Exhibition fully extended.

1911. Le Bestiare is an example of a Livre Artiste (Artist's Book), a partnership between poets and artists.
This copy, number 86 of 120 is signed by both the author and the poet.

Next we saw a recent example (2013) from the NAL's Book Art Collection, the largest collection in the UK totaling 5,000 pieces. To be considered Book Art, the piece must be a work of art in and of itself and have some relationship to a book. This item is called Word Pharmacy.  Each of the smaller boxes is modeled after a specific type of medicine and they represent a different part of speech. 

This leaflet provides a humorous interpretation directing the reader how to "use" adjectives correctly.

Next, Caroline Penn from Information Services gave us a tour of the library. We learned that the NAL is the 4th largest Art Library in the world following the Getty, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Institute Nationale in France.  The NAL's serves as a public library, a library for the V&A museum staff as well as a curatorial department (collecting books based on design). The NAL is a closed access library, users must request items which are then pulled by staff and delivered (which could take up to 90 minutes). The building itself is comprised of a Center Room, the Reading Room and three floors of storage. As with many archives in Great Britain, finding room for storage is a challenge. There is an offsite facility, Blythe House which houses the NAL collection of children's books. Every August the library closes for two weeks during which the collection is assessed, items are weeded and or/rearranged.  The acquisition budget totals 175,000 pounds each year. The most interesting tidbit I learned is that items are shelved by height, not by subject!  By doing this, the library saves an incredible amount of shelf space, which allows more items to be displayed. The NAL uses its own classification system--a press mark numbering from 1 - 900 followed by a letter. The Librarians rely on a "finding list" index to identify the location of a particular item.