One of the most interesting (and sociable) tasks involved in managing the Olympics website is that of meeting up with new people and encouraging them to contribute to the site. Apart from the external contributors, we’ve had two interns so far who have worked on the environment and politics pages, exploring our collections and making discoveries which have benefits for both the interns and the Library itself. Currently we have Jade McKenzie working with us for three weeks. She has just completed a psychology degree and is looking at the finer points of motivation in sport, in order to produce a bibliography of materials held by the BL which can then be added to the site. She will be searching across the range of different media that we have in the collections, including the sound archive recordings, which are increasingly being used in qualitative research.

It may come as a surprise that there are always fresh discoveries to be made in a Library that is now over 250 years old, but the collections are so vast (and constantly being added to) that even the most experienced curators hedge their bets when asked what we hold on a particular topic. Subject access has obviously improved out of all recognition now that catalogues are searchable online, but even I remember when the British Library collections were subject-searchable only by dint of intensive detective work, allied to a knowledge of the sometimes arcane details of the British Museum Library cataloguing rules. In those days we were helped by printed subject catalogues and also by other people’s recollections of seeing something on a shelf somewhere, or recorded on a 5x3 card at the reference desk.

 

The British Museum Library subject catalogues could quite legitimately be the objects of research themselves and it is interesting to see how descriptions of sport, and the organising of its various subdivisions have evolved over time. ‘Sport’ in the earliest volumes of the catalogue consists mainly of books about the hunting of animals. What a good job our notions of sport have evolved from that sorry state of affairs!

 

Catalogues 'within' catalogues also have to be available online these days. The following poster of ‘the greatest lady swimmer in the world’ is not separately indexed in the main BL catalogue, being part of a larger collection of items, those of the Evanion Collection. However, you will pleased to know that the online catalogue of the collection, with digital images of many of the items, is available on the BL website by selecting ‘Evanion collection of ephemera’ from the menu under ‘catalogues’