Little Ship Club library

The Library is an integral part of the Club’s intellectual and material heritage. It is an important resource for the Club providing information on its past, present and future. It is enshrined in the Aims and Objects of the Club (Rule 1.2.6). Many of the founder and early members of the Club were writers. As part of the founding ethos to share the enjoyment of our sport and teach its skills, these people wrote books, edited yachting magazines and founded publishing houses. If there was no suitable book on a subject, they wrote one. So you will find the names of Griffiths, Luard, Irving, Adlard Coles, Rantzen etc in the Library as well as on the Roll of Honour in the Claud Worth Room. And the intellectual legacy of the Club can be found in the RYA teaching programme and the history of the Royal Navy. Consequently we have some fine first editions, dedicated and annotated by prestigious authors.

The Library is a valuable asset to the Club in all senses of the word. At a recent professional valuation for insurance purposes, by Lyon and Turnbull, we were pleasantly surprised at the value of our stock of books. We have an estimated 1,600 books – all of which come to the Club free of charge. We do not buy books. New publications and editions arrive in a steady stream from the publishers at a rate of about 40 to 50 a year (even in the present economic climate). We also accept donations of books from members who are downsizing and bequests from the estates of former members. So if our donor was a keen racer, we expanded our stock of books on racing. Where the bequest came from a DIY enthusiast we gained a lot of books on boat maintenance. In the last year alone, I have taken collection of around eight crates of books. The new publications from the publishers come to us with a request for a published review. We try to accommodate this in order to keep the new books coming in. We invite members to review books which interest them or about which they have some knowledge or skill. They are published on line (by the Librarian) and in the Club Journal, 'The Little Ship'. Some Club members are enthusiastic and good at this and some are less so. We are always on the lookout for reviewers. Please feel free to volunteer.

[The online Library pages are a member benefit and are accessed by logging in to the website where you will find a navigation tab 'Library' on the members home page. Reviews are published on the Member Home page as well as the Library page.]

During the process of valuation, a number of individually valuable books were identified. These have now been removed from the lending Library and are stored in a slightly safer location and available from the Librarian upon request. I shall refer to this part of our stock of books as the Collection. We are currently continuing the process of going through the lending Library and identifying more individually valuable books – which we are then removing to the Collection. The aim is eventually to find suitable specialist buyers for the books whose value to the Club is financial and not historical.

The lending section of the Library is run on a trust basis. As you know it is virtually impossible to lock the bookshelf cupboards and the room is hired out by the Club to non-members. There is a ledger for members to sign books out and there is a printed copy of the catalogue in a Blue folder on the same shelf. Anyone who can get into the Library can help themselves. The best time is a Tuesday evening when hopefully one of the Library team will be about and able to help. The catalogue is divided into 10 sections: data or reference books (which cannot be removed from the Club house), boat maintenance, cruising, navigation, racing, sails, history, meteorology, and then fun, fact and fiction. The books are then listed in alphabetical order according to author within each category. All the books have a number and some have a letter according to a system devised by Martin Rowbotham, the librarian who oversaw the move back to Bell Wharf Lane. There is a more detailed explanation in the Blue Folder in the Library and here on the Club website.

I took over as librarian in 2007 and since then we have introduced a good few changes. We now insist that reviewers email us their copy to save time on re-typing and editing for publication. We now do much more work and correspondence with members and publishers on line and are able to do quite a lot of work from our homes. This is very useful as we are often denied access to the library itself. When I first took over as Librarian, I turned to my local Library for advice on both cataloguing and IT systems. I spent time working there to see how the professionals do it and have talked to the County IT and cataloguing department. They have used two systems: Spydus and Concerto. But they advised neither are suitable for a collection of our size. Our current database is held in an old version of Access on the oldest computer in the Club house – this despite our best efforts to obtain more modern technology. We are always looking for improvements.

In 2009 the then webmaster Jon Knight found a database system that could be accessed via our (then) fledgling website. So for several years it was possible to access the Library catalogue online. More recently the link was removed. The Library has had a presence on the website in all its versions since it was first put up. However our suggestions for design and content were not fully taken on board at any of its re-vamps – which continues to cause us some problems. It is, however, still possible to access quite a lot of the published book reviews which gives members an idea of our more recent acquisitions, but they are not able to see the full catalogue unless they come into the Club.

In order to make room for the incoming books, we sell off some of our old stock to members at about a pound or two a time. We post a notice on the website when we plan to hold a sale and often list the titles we are selling. Part of the proceeds go to the RNLI, part covers Library expenses. We also donate our discarded books to the Ocean Youth Trust South for them to keep or sell on. We picked this particular youth charity because a number of Club members and ex-members have personal links with them. This year we have donated some five boxes of books.

Tasks in hand and future projects
The team does several hours work per week just keeping things up to date. We log, catalogue and shelve the incoming books (Ian Malcolm’s skills make him especially suited to this). We arrange for and often have to chase up reviews (Anne Malcolm keeps tabs on these) and maintain the existing books in good condition (Barbara Vass is a very skilled book binder) and for this we need access to the actual Library. We are continually making small improvements and identifying larger ones.
Current projects
A continuation of the valuation (Peter Linstead Smith has volunteered to help); and an improvement to the Library web pages, a possible reform of the catalogue system, a more up-to-date database, renewed access to the database via the website. All this requires more volunteers and access to the Library for several continuous hours when the volunteers can be available.

Future developments
There are some who feel modern technology (e-books, a myriad of informative websites and so on) heralds the demise of the printed word. Our observations over the last year or so, are – not yet. Specialist publishing houses with niche markets are thriving. Marine books are a niche market. There is little decrease in the number of books coming to us from the publishers. We had electronic versions of Reeds Almanac and Imray charts the first year that they were introduced. They were run on the Library computer with a link to the website, but there was little interest. Members preferred to consult the printed versions. Very few members, if any, made use of the link to the Library catalogue from the Club website, so that when the webmaster removed it, I had no grounds to protest.

However, in the event of a greater sea-change in technology and publishing, we believe that printed books will become collectors’ items. We are therefore taking steps to make sure that the Club has a collection of books of historical and financial value that will appreciate with time as well as the most recent editions in the lending section. So in various parts of the Library, you will find the Racing Rules for 2016, newspaper clippings from 1850, the latest cruising guides plus accounts of voyages in these same areas made in past eras. You can plan your cruise of the Baltic, say, with the most recent cruising guide and read Arthur Ransome’s acccount written 100 years ago.

This article was first published in the Spring 2013 issue of The Little Ship, journal of The Little Ship Club.