The Alice N. Hays Notebook: A Tour of Early Twentieth-Century Library Methods in the UK and Europe

Abstract

• In the summer of 1909, Stanford librarian Alice Newman Hays embarked on a journey to visit libraries across England and Europe, compiling a record of cataloguing practices to share with her colleagues back in California. Among the stops on Alice's journey were prestigious institutions like the Bodleian Library and British Museum, as well as public libraries in Oxford, London, and Paris, where her librarian's eye was attentive not just to how her peers overseas managed accessions, cataloguing, and storage, but also to the experience of being in these library spaces. The notebook she kept of her travels also maps an international network of library professionals, connecting Hays with several prominent librarians and bibliographers of the early twentieth century, including Falconer Madan and L. Toulmin Smith at Oxford, Alfred Rogers at Cambridge, and Alfred W. Pollard at the British Museum. Her observations, in all their attention to the embodied experience of library use, are also a critical reminder of the human labour required to face the multifaceted challenges of preserving and making information accessible – labour that is too often elided in our histories, especially when performed by women. This edition contains the full text of Hays's notebook and is accompanied by an introduction which provides relevant contextual information, including brief historical notes on the development of Stanford's library and a biographical sketch of Alice N. Hays.