"Turn Right at the Crocodile" When was the last time you went to a library?
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
by Eric Boa
It began online. I submitted my request for a book and was told to provide “eight working days’ notice” prior to my planned visit. I wasn’t surprised – and pleased when I was given an appointment within a few days. Not many people will want to read about the Maladies et Insectes Nuisibles (Diseases and Insect Pests), part of Auguste Chevalier’s multi-volume treatise on Les Caféièrs du Globe (Coffees of the World), published in the 1940s. So I was grateful to find that the Natural History Museum (NHM) library, here in London, had a copy. The NHM library is one of a small group of specialist reference libraries who maintain a comprehensive stock of books, journals, personal papers and other marginalia. It’s an invaluable resource for scientists, scholars, writers and the curious.
My visit took place a few weeks ago and aroused mixed emotions. It is always thrilling to be surrounded by books and to wallow in the studious silence of a library. I sat next to someone who was going through the personal correspondence of a Victorian naturalist. The accounts of explorers are a rich source of information about the natural world and how people used its resources. Modern authors such as Wade Davis (One River: a wonderful account of Richard Schultes and the search for wild rubber in the Amazon Basin – and more) and Andrea Wulf (The Invention of Nature: Alexander Humboldt’s New World) could not have written their books without spending a lot of time in libraries. Or indeed without the devotion of librarians in helping them find things.
Happy then on my first visit to a library in a long time, but also a little depressed. Services are being eroded. The NHM has shortened hours for library users. You can only visit the library from Tuesday to Thursday and have to debunk for an hour over lunch. Staff numbers are being cut and I worry about a downward spiral of reduced access leading to reduced use, thus weakening the case for financial support. The NHM was the UK’s number one visitor attraction in 2025, with over seven million visitors. That’s around 20,000 per day, of which 10 on average use the library. The UK government provided the bulk of the roughly £117m income in 2023-2024, with significant contributions from other sources, such as special exhibitions, trusts, wealthy individuals and commercial activities. At first glance it might seem that library services are not a funding priority.
I found insidious signs of how the NHM library is viewed from within. None of the many staff dealing with visitors at the main entrance could tell me where to find the library. One quick interchange suggested that some were unaware that there was a library. I was really to blame here. I re-read the email confirming my visit and retreated to an entrance marked ‘Security’. Finally, I was inside the museum, but still none the wiser as I stood under the skeleton of a large whale. None of the many visitor signs said ‘Library’. It took some time before I spotted someone among the scrum of visitors who looked official. “This will sound strange”, he graciously advised: “first door on the right after the crocodile.”
I stood outside an anonymous entrance, a non-descript door in a small recess. It was locked. I could see the visitor desk inside and waved. The door buzzed and I was in. The sad part of all this palaver was that none of the visitors passing the library entrance was likely to realize the wealth of knowledge lurking the other side. And even though I eventually noticed a sign above the door saying library’, it was tiny and dull.
How about a mention of the library and its work in producing leaflets about the displays in the main museum? I think not.
The NHM library, along with other great reference libraries, will continue to survive. Even in an age where vast amounts of literature have been scanned, PDF-ed and made available through non-for-profit sites such as the Internet Archive or the Biodiversity Heritage Library, there will always be a need for physical libraries. But there is definitely a retreat in commitment from smaller organisations with squeezed budgets. The organisation I worked for has closed its library, ostensibly because of lack of space at a new site. I’m sure that declining numbers of users also played a part, with staff members accessing journals online and where necessary borrowing books or photocopies of articles from libraries such as the NHM, the Bodleian at Oxford, or the British Library.
The latter two are part of a small group of Legal Deposit Libraries who receive copies of everything published in the UK, including non-print and digital formats. This encouraging scheme, in place since 2003, does not take into account historical documents or journals. These are spread across a diminishing number of much smaller libraries which hold specialist literature. Slowly, gaps are created as older publications effectively disappear. There’s a limit to how much can be scanned. Institutional memory fades as those who worked in libraries retire. I’m also aware that I’m part of the problem and the revolution in how information is captured and disseminated should be celebrated. Working in libraries brings back fuzzy memories that invoke a warm feeling and nostalgia for academia as it once was. Anyone who can remember endlessly wandering up and down aisles looking for a book, or spending fruitless hours going through compilations of abstracts, will also remember tedium and frustration.
Gone are the days when scientists requested reprints. Publishers would provide authors with a limited number to distribute. Regular access to journals was restricted for many, particularly those working in poorer countries. The reprint system worked up to a point. Popular articles would soon be gobbled up by eager scientists while postal services struggled to deliver. A colleague at Aberdeen waited many months to receive a reprint, delayed because UK had been interpreted to mean Ukraine. After being sent to the Aberdeens in Canada and Australia someone helpfully scribbled on the envelope “try Scotland”.
I’m all for digital publications. The invention of the portable document format (pdf) in the early 1990s signalled the start of wider sharing of publications. E-books and other formats have expanded what people can read and widened knowledge incomparably. I don’t want to go back to trudging through the aisles or finding an anticipated valuable paper to be a dud. Are libraries damaged by the ready availability of information online? Yes. Is it Death by PDF? No. Libraries adapt to new conditions and I’m perhaps more optimistic than I sound, and that I will still be able in the future to turn right after the crocodile in my pursuit of hidden facts.
