00:00:00.000I'm delighted to report that I have joined as a scholar the Declaration of Independence Center
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00:01:05.720Hi everybody, this is Gatsad. Today I've got another fantastic guest. I've got Richard
00:01:11.200Ovenden. I had to prepare this a priori because there's a lot of pronunciation pitfalls here.
00:01:17.960you are the director of the bodleian libraries at the university of oxford and a fellow at
00:01:23.820baliol college i'm sure i got that wrong you were awarded an obe order of the british empire and
00:01:30.940you still currently serve as the president of the digital preservation coalition is that still
00:01:35.340yep yep that's all correct yeah well first welcome how are you doing i'm doing well thank you i'm
00:01:41.920very excited to speak to you now the the way that i found out of your work is i was speaking to
00:01:47.560the person at Harvard University Press, and she was kind enough to send me a whole bunch
00:01:54.800of complimentary books. And I chose yours as one of the ones on my list, which was
00:02:00.500This Beauty, which I read about maybe six months ago, Burning the Books, A History of the Deliberate
00:02:06.600Destruction of Knowledge. Maybe we could start there and then we can go from there and see how
00:02:12.480goes tell us a bit about okay okay so um the book is is really about the social importance of
00:02:21.440preserving knowledge and it's i i approach that topic through the lens of what happens when we
00:02:28.940lose it and what are the motivations for um the deliberate losing of knowledge not the accidental
00:02:36.740not not fires that break out by accident that burn a library down but where people set out
00:02:43.400to destroy erase remove knowledge from a community of society um and to look at that through a long
00:02:53.860historical lens i'm a historian by background um and so i can't stop myself from going back into
00:03:00.900those um into those accounts and um and then i try to bring it up to the present day you know
00:03:07.920what is happening today both in terms of public policy around the world in terms of legislation
00:03:14.700but also the trends in things like technology and um you know how are decisions that are made by
00:03:23.440governments or um you know the the tech companies what my colleague in oxford timothy garton ash
00:03:31.100calls the private superpowers the big tech companies you know how are these changing the
00:03:36.800regimes of knowledge um today so it's a kind of you know there's a long i think quite interesting
00:03:43.540set of case studies that i lay out in the book um you know from the ancient civilizations of
00:03:49.800mesopotamia and then trying to bring it you know very much bang up to date or at least as it was
00:03:55.720in 2020 when the book was published um and i've been writing since in um you know mostly in
00:04:03.440newspapers and magazines as as you know the book had some degree of impact when it was first
00:04:09.080published and then editors think oh i know i'm gonna i'm i'm become the go-to guy for kind of
00:04:15.360book burning um so i've written about ukraine in the atlantic and about afghanistan in the ft weekend
00:04:23.100and um and in it in other places as well some of the historical stories uh in the book is is really
00:04:31.280what captivated me the narrative behind those stories i think you cover well over 2 000 years
00:04:36.640would that be correct in saying i think more like 3 000 or 3 000 is there a common thread
00:04:43.640for the reasons why the burning of the libraries and the books happens throughout history?
00:04:50.480And I ask this perhaps from the reflex of being an evolutionary psychologist.
00:04:55.560There is a permanence to human nature that even though we might have different cultural
00:05:02.280traditions, there is a bedrock of shared biological heritage that we all share.
00:05:08.700So can we apply that lens of sort of the human universal?
00:05:12.160I mean, I think so. And I think it really boils down to a quote that is kind of buried somewhere in the book by Derrida, which is there is no political power without power over the archive, which he wrote in his famous book, Archive Fever.
00:05:30.900and uh i i think it's about control if you can control knowledge you can control a narrative
00:05:39.420you can control um what people think of the past and you can control to some extent how they will
00:05:47.680behave in the future because people look to the past for information for ideas for inspiration
00:05:54.340um and it's that controlling aspects and the motivations for why people feel the need to
00:06:02.960control there are political reasons there are sometimes religious reasons there are cultural
00:06:08.140reasons you know there's a whole that becomes more complex more interesting but it's really
00:06:14.300about control and um we see this right up to you know today with ai which of course needs
00:06:23.260knowledge to feed the large language models which then feed the outputs of generative ai
00:06:28.720and where um decisions about what kinds of data go into feed those are a kind of extension it's
00:06:37.680not the same as the destruction of knowledge it's not the same as book burning but it's
00:06:41.820it's that same actually what do we want uh what how do we want to exert control over the domain
00:06:49.900of knowledge in in this in this book my also my 2020 book your book is from 2020 this is the
00:06:56.880parasitic mind uh i talk about because i'm discussing forbidden knowledge which is a
00:07:02.780topic that i pick up again in my most recent book and i tell the story from uh neighbor the rose0.94
00:07:09.060i don't know if you you remember that i love that book absolutely yeah well i i i was idiotic enough
00:07:15.720to actually not read the book, but watch the movie,
00:07:18.300although I don't think I was disappointed
00:07:39.160I think around the 12th or 13th century.
00:07:41.460And a gentleman is brought in, I think maybe a Benedictine monk
00:07:44.560who is played by Sean Connery, who's brought in to try to resolve this mystery, played by Sean
00:07:52.540Connery, and all of these monks are dying because there's sort of this blue dye on their tongues,
00:07:59.200and then he finds out, and it's going to resonate well with what we're talking about here, that the
00:08:04.820head monk of the monastery thought that there's this forbidden library, that all the monks should
00:08:11.880not be consuming that knowledge i think it was about from aristotle's you know book on comedy
00:08:18.640and so on that's the work of the devil and so on and so what he did is he laced the the pages here
00:08:24.760where you turn with poison so that if you do actually get into the forbidden library you
00:08:30.620would be killed so that reflex of saying i am the overlord who would decide what you can read or not
00:08:36.400existed certainly a thousand years ago right yeah it's a yeah it's about gatekeeping knowledge
00:08:43.420it's about um and i think the kind of ultimate expression of that is actually to burn a library
00:08:48.820down to destroy um and in the case of the holocaust you know to to attempt to you know
00:08:54.960essentially destroy or control an entire culture's memory right and uh you know so you know there0.83
00:09:03.160have been these moments in history where it's been you know extreme um and that you know a
00:09:10.560cultural genocide a knowledge genocide has pre-emptied a human genocide now in your case
00:09:17.580obviously as a historian you're looking at this 3 000 year period where people willfully try to
00:09:23.980destroy knowledge for a variety of reasons as you said political religious and so on
00:09:28.420Now, forbidden knowledge, in the way that I use the term, well, as it's used in academia, is forward-looking in that we decide, the overlords, what is the type of research that, if you were to conduct that research, it might result in the hurt feelings of a marginalized group or something.
00:09:50.680Therefore, we are using a consequentialist ethic rather than a deontological ethic.
00:09:55.640A deontological ethic would be freedom of inquiry has no bounds.
00:09:59.520It's an absolute principle that you cannot violate.
00:10:03.360Whereas if you think that there is such a thing as forbidden knowledge, then you shouldn't
00:10:08.100do that research because it could lead to bad places.
00:10:11.260Have you ever thought about looking into the future rather than simply the past of why
00:10:17.600we burn existing things rather than why we shouldn't do future things uh yeah no absolutely
00:10:23.740librarians and archivists have to face this question kind of all the time you know what do
00:10:29.240we keep yeah what do we what do we access what what do we accession into our collection so that's
00:10:36.700a question of where we spend our acquisition budgets and where we then what where we don't
00:10:43.660spend those budgets when we get gifted things or we go looking for archival collections you know
00:10:50.280we know that there's a interesting individual we want to acquire his or her archive we approach
00:10:56.460them or their family come to us after their death and say you know we think you know our father or
00:11:03.380husband or wife's collection needs to be preserved and so there are these kind of decisions that are
00:11:09.320made all the time but they actually affect long into the future and whole disciplines have been
00:11:16.460formed by decisions that librarians made in my case my predecessors in the 17th century
00:11:22.140were very interested in particularly Arabic texts actually more generally so we were the
00:11:31.780first library in the west to acquire Chinese books in the early 17th century but also
00:11:36.540particularly uh arabic texts and that was motivated partly by religious reasons we thought
00:11:44.700my predecessors thought there might be you know biblical information information about
00:11:50.220you know the time of christ that might be contained in arabic translation so let's let's
00:11:56.500buy as many of those books as we can because we might find something but also it it translated
00:12:03.100into the emergence of science so you know the early phase of the enlightenment you know the
00:12:08.480late 17th century sees the founding of the royal society in london we see in oxford people like
00:12:13.640robert boyle you know robert hook you know all these great william harvey all these great
00:12:19.400scientists working and some of them thought that there might be interesting scientific information
00:12:27.000in those books and so one of them that was acquired um was um a text of a greek geometer
00:12:36.940apollonius of perga who wrote in the you know in in the i think the second century before the
00:12:44.940christian era a famous book on the conic section so a kind of fundamental geotext in geometry
00:12:52.580but the latin descent of that text which is originally written in greek translated into
00:13:00.380latin in classical times and then copied and copied and copied eventually printed in the 16th
00:13:07.440century had there was a book of it missing and so the scientists were all you know fascinated
00:13:17.240by what was in the missing book and then into the Bodleian comes an Arabic translation of Apollonius
00:13:25.620of Perga on the Koenig sections and guess what it contained the missing text wow and so it was
00:13:32.580transliterated by my predecessor John Hudson it was then he then gave the the transliteration and
00:13:41.600translation from the arabic to the professor of astronomy who just happened to be edmund halley
00:13:48.720wow as in halley's comet as in halley's comet and halley then published it by oxford university press
00:13:57.460and it made oxford university press which was new at that point as a new kid on the block
00:14:03.840it made it into one of the great academic presses of europe it really put the press and the
00:14:09.460university on the european map because everyone went wow they found the missing book of apollonius
00:14:15.640of perga um and so you know that those acquisitions begin to shape scholarship
00:14:21.800and you know we see this now in what is being fed into the large language models
00:14:29.960it's shaping the way people understand the world and so these decisions we have to make in our
00:14:36.760profession all the time because we know we make guesses about what the future will find interesting
00:14:43.380sometimes we get it wrong so again my predecessors in the Bodleian um were lucky that we were what's
00:14:50.780called a copyright library a library of legal deposit so in 1610 um and then it's enshrined
00:14:57.780in law in 1710 we received free copies of every book published in Britain wow and we still do
00:15:06.260a thousand books a day come into my library that physically that you you actually store somewhere
00:15:14.040yes so how how big are are the spaces for you to be able to withstand we have a big off-site
00:15:20.480storage facility high bay high density storage very efficient um uh so but in the early 19th
00:15:30.280century where we had this right and the books were coming and obviously there were a lot fewer books
00:15:35.600being published then so the books would come and my predecessors said no to some books because the
00:15:43.220university was all male um it was really there to educate clergymen to some extent some other
00:15:50.000professions like law and medicine um but we turned down we refused to take the first editions of
00:15:59.460jane austen of the bronte sisters of mary shelley because why would we want books written by women
00:16:06.760that are books in fiction why would anybody want to read those in the university
00:16:12.700and so then you know for fast forward in time to the 1870s and the english faculty is founded
00:16:19.900and the first professors want to teach you know the novel and they go to into the library to try
00:16:27.260and find the first edition of persuasion or sense and sensibility or frankenstein and we don't have
00:16:32.320the copies by that by this point those first editions are incredibly collectible they're very
00:16:38.040valuable they cost a lot of money so this was we could have had them for free yikes yikes regret is
00:16:45.700a difficult thing to navigate yeah so you know prejudging the future is is is not a not an easy
00:16:53.380task but it has to be done and we're human beings now if i if somebody asked me who didn't know what
00:17:00.660a professor does and i needed to give a one sentence answer i'd say well i guess my daily
00:17:07.100job is broken up into three activities there is my research there's my teaching and there is my
00:17:13.740administrative duties and then we can drill down into each of these part of research is supervising
00:17:19.440students, writing papers, writing grants, and so on. If I were to ask you, now, you're a different
00:17:26.480type of librarian than the community librarian, and we can actually talk about this after.
00:17:31.360What, in a typical day, what are the key hats that Richard is wearing?
00:17:37.480okay so it's predominantly administration and management so um uh so i chair committees
00:17:47.080i receive and read reports often in draft before they go off to other of what
00:17:55.480what's the okay so some of it will be budget okay um some of it will be kind of hr some of it will
00:18:04.500be about buildings so we're building an extension to our off-site storage facility at the moment
00:18:09.600and I'm the SRO or the senior responsible officer for that project so I chair a committee meeting
00:18:17.920which has the project managers has the project accountant has stakeholders on it and we try to
00:18:26.860govern the way that the project is is going we let a contract to a contractor to actually build it
00:18:34.080um and you know decisions have to be made about this or that aspect of the build project
00:18:42.180and i have to report to a committee of the university on who gave us the money to make
00:18:48.220sure that we're spending it well um so you know that that's one specific project example
00:18:54.500uh another thing that i do is um think about strategy so you know what is the library going
00:19:02.400of focus on in the in the next five year period so we're beginning to think about what our next
00:19:07.880strategy is going to be on and some of it will be really quite intellectually driven decisions
00:19:13.280about um you know our engagement with ai for example some of it will be um thinking more about
00:19:22.780our staff you know about staff training you know what skills do we need in our organization over
00:19:27.980the next five years what are we lacking where do we need to hire in order to you know ensure that
00:19:34.260we have the right set of skills to be able to run a library appropriate for the third decade of the
00:19:42.10021st century some of it will be about some of my work in a day will be around development so you
00:19:49.000know I'll be having lunch with somebody who might support us financially to do a particular piece of
00:19:54.940work or i'll be writing um a letter to somebody asking them for money um uh so it's it's quite
00:20:05.140varied um a lot of it is around management and administration some of it is around leadership
00:20:11.980so it will be um giving a talk to um so next week i have to give a talk to the leaders of
00:20:20.140digital operations across the university and to talk to them about how we're approaching various
00:20:27.220uses of technology to preserve make available and manage information
00:20:35.100or it will be giving a general update to the whole staff and that might be you know people who are
00:20:44.440on the security, in the security team, right through to senior managers. And so, you know,
00:20:50.900that kind of leadership role also extends to me writing for newspapers about what's happening
00:20:57.180with book banning in America. So, you know, I, you know, there's a big piece of it, which is
00:21:04.320around leadership. And then there is my duties, which are to the university. So by virtue of my
00:21:12.280role I sit on various university committees that make decisions about the shape and the forward
00:21:19.720progress of the whole university so trying to insert the needs of the library the museums and
00:21:28.880the botanic garden which I also oversee and thinking about you know collections the way that
00:21:35.520students and researchers interact with them but also the way in which our organizations also
00:21:41.420also speak to a broader public and that's particularly important in an age when universities
00:21:47.320are being um you know the value of them in society is being questioned um where there are other
00:21:54.000players in the if you like in the education market space where um there are huge challenges around
00:22:01.980funding around student fees you know all of these issues um and i think you know libraries and
00:22:08.020museums have a role to play in you know that public debate the the the one hat that you didn't
00:22:17.940mention that sort of resides in my romantic notion of what the head librarian at university
00:22:23.980of oxford should be doing is you'd be wearing a smashing bow tie heading off to a sotheby's or
00:22:30.300christy's auction okay and you're you're you know you're one of the key players in trying to pick up
00:22:36.640some da vinci manuscript does that ever happen or does that only reside in my mind um so um actual
00:22:45.280kind of you know major acquisitions i do get involved with from time to time mostly are
00:22:51.560participation in the the marketplace for rare books and manuscripts and archives i leave to my
00:22:59.360colleagues so they'll be doing placing bids in auctions and talking to dealers and and that kind
00:23:08.200of stuff it's really the very you know the larger projects that i will get involved with
00:23:13.980and sometimes because i actually come out of the rare books world so i i'm kind of known by a lot
00:23:21.160of dealers i've made friends over the decades and they'll they sometimes they approach me directly
00:23:26.700and say Richard we've got this amazing opportunity um and sometimes I can't stop myself from getting
00:23:34.060involved because I just love it um and sometimes it's relationships you know with kind of writers
00:23:40.420so John le Carré is one whose archive we have and I wrote to John le Carré when I was in a much more
00:23:47.840junior role in the library you know still a senior role keeper of special collections that was my job
00:23:54.000um and so i wrote to john lecari and said you know look you don't know me but i'm just writing
00:24:00.280just in case you're thinking about what to do with your archive we'd love to have it in the
00:24:06.040bodleian and he wrote me the most delightful letter back saying you know uh i as far as i'm
00:24:12.400concerned um the bodleian would be george smiley's spiritual home wow is that communication
00:24:19.640somewhere preserved and oh wow that's wonderful yeah yeah yeah so i got to know him you know i
00:24:27.960went to visit him in cornwall and got to know his wife very well and um you know he deposited
00:24:35.540part of the archive in his lifetime then the rest of it came after his death i now work very closely
00:24:41.200with his children who are the you know run the literary estate we did a big exhibition we published
00:24:47.840a book we've been working with the family on a documentary film so you know i i'm still very
00:24:55.040involved in in all of that when i when i reached out to you a couple of months ago to to invite
00:25:02.020you on the show i think i had included two links of previous chats i had on the show with two
00:25:09.960two antiquarian uh dealers uh one of one is much younger tom ailing the other one is supposedly
00:25:17.980sort of the granddaddy of that that world oh yeah yeah yeah harry bertenture did you know do you
00:25:23.240know both of them or i i know of both of them i i know i don't know i haven't met tom um but he has
00:25:30.420very kind of prominent social media presence right um and harry bertenture is yeah absolutely
00:25:36.740Tencha is one of the great dealers, particularly in early books and manuscripts.
00:26:05.220i know that early in the book probably in the first few pages you give a stat where you say
00:26:12.220here's how many you know community libraries existed in britain at time x and here's how
00:26:18.800fewer they are today in light of that trend are you pessimistic let's suppose i'm a undergraduate
00:26:27.020student who's thinking of doing a master's in library studies and i go to see the eminent
00:26:33.260richard at oxford to say what do you think should i be doing this are you telling me
00:26:38.440sure there's still room for you or get out before the ship sinks no no no no that i'm very optimistic
00:26:45.200about the profession uh i think we've got you know amazing um skills that are highly relevant
00:26:52.120in the age of ai um you you and i think the the issue that i draw attention to in that part of
00:27:04.360burning the books about public life we call them public libraries in the uk um is really
00:27:10.200is not about the value of how society sees the value of libraries it's really much more about
00:27:19.260um the the way in which decision making in government has passed from one set of if you
00:27:29.560like internal rules to another and so the devolution of power of responsibility for
00:27:36.160budgets to local authorities in the uk has meant they have been faced with very very difficult
00:27:42.340decisions and so although we have lost a lot of public library branches um it's very uneven so
00:27:50.060you'll find some local authorities who have maintained their funding and and their library
00:27:57.400services absolutely vibrant whereas others for a whole variety of local reasons some of them to do
00:28:04.500with the flavor of politics some some of them to do with just the pure chance of of how budgets
00:28:12.460have evolved um that are very weaker so i'll give you one example which is the city of manchester so
00:28:19.140where um andy burnham who as we speak is kind of probably going to become the next prime minister
00:28:25.620has been mayor of the city of manchester he really gets libraries or has done in in his mayoral
00:28:33.100authority and the public library system in manchester is a joy to behold it's really well
00:28:39.820funded it's vibrant it's really busy you know it's absolutely fantastic um and so it really can be
00:28:49.380done if there is the kind of the vision the political will but it also requires the head
00:28:55.400of the library service the chief librarian to be a strong advocate to be out there with data with
00:29:03.220examples with stories and mobilizing in the kind of public sphere for the value that libraries can
00:29:11.360bring to the the people of the city of manchester and so it's not just a you know a thing where
00:29:18.420librarians have to stand around weeping you know we actually have to get out there and be
00:29:24.580really really strong and clever and smart and active participants in the political sphere
00:29:31.280in local government and in the public sphere more generally do you think that and this may
00:29:37.260on first sight you know first processing seem like a silly question but maybe it isn't
00:29:43.000do you have to be a lover of books to be a librarian or you could be just a pragmatic
00:29:50.740person says look this seems like a nice nine to five job you know i want to be left alone doing
00:29:57.200you know not too much cortisol or do you have to be imbued with this passion for the book
00:30:02.680to become a librarian i you definitely don't have to have that it's not a prerequisite
00:30:08.420i i personally think it helps yeah um but there are a whole variety of jobs in libraries i mean
00:30:16.300you know we have a finance team so you know our accountants don't you know they're not necessarily
00:30:22.600right because that's not the first thing i look for when we're hiring you know an accountant we
00:30:28.280want them to you know really be good a good accountant be good with finance um but if it
00:30:35.340really helps if they're inspired by the mission of the organization and that mission of the
00:30:41.200organization isn't to imbue the world with a love of books per se it's about providing
00:30:48.020knowledge you know trusted knowledge to our community and some of that is through books
00:30:54.760through physical books through ancient manuscripts through the archives of great writers like john
00:31:00.180le carre and and kind of really loving those really helps a library to convey that mission
00:31:07.300If you've got people who are passionate about it, who really see the value of it, who are good at communicating it, it's absolutely, it really, really helps because other people get excited.
00:31:20.200They get kind of enthused and they kind of see the points that are being made very differently if they're reading some dry report.
00:31:30.480so i think it's definitely not um and uh uh uh an absolute prerequisite but it really really helps
00:31:41.480yeah that makes sense what is your if i may say omnivorous uh way of consuming books are you more
00:31:49.920of a fiction guy are you more of a non-fiction guy i'm both i'm absolutely both so i have to
00:31:55.440read fiction before i go to sleep at night okay so um you know and i i'm my wife is a great
00:32:02.400fiction reader as well so i'm quite often sort of taking her uh recommendations um but also
00:32:10.060i do quite a lot of public um in conversations with writers um and so i try to read you know
00:32:17.300i did one with isabel allende um in new york last year for example so you know that was a great
00:32:24.240opportunity to read as much of Isabel Allende as I could leading up to that um uh but I also
00:32:31.500you know like to read stuff that's on the Booker Prize shortlist or as much as it as I can before
00:32:37.900the the ceremony but then also um I'm a historian so you know I I like I'm you know I actually I've
00:32:45.760lent it to a colleague the new history of the Weimar Republic by Katja Hoyer um I'm reading
00:32:51.720this really interesting book called we are not machines by sarah o'connor who's a financial
00:32:56.120times journalist um i've just reviewed a couple of books of the observer on data um and i love
00:33:03.720photography so um you know i'm constantly buying new books on on photography so i'm yeah not yeah
00:33:11.080he probably behind me this i'm i'm doing this from home and uh i'm meant to be on a one-in-one
00:33:17.100out um regime but it's everything is double stacked it's there are piles of books on the
00:33:23.340floor i just i can't stop myself one of the things that uh i'm most looking forward to in moving from
00:33:30.080our montreal home to our mississippi home is that the dollar goes much further in mississippi so
00:33:36.380if we can close on the book that we're thinking of getting i am going to be able to have the most
00:33:42.580glorious personal library possible. Whereas here, everything's kind of caving in on me,
00:33:47.240all my books. And I tend to, unlike you, I wish I had your sort of ability to navigate through
00:33:54.400fiction and nonfiction. I would say 95% of what I read is nonfiction, to my great chagrin,
00:34:02.620because I know that there is endless great novels that I'm missing out on. So I've been
00:34:08.480trying to remedy that slowly uh okay but surely uh what are some typical personality traits i
00:34:17.900ask this again from the perspective of psychologists is there a typical personality
00:34:23.520profile of a good librarian now of course here i'm asking this from the perspective0.76
00:34:28.600of we have a stereotype of the sort of tight you know uh a somewhat anal librarian with the0.89
00:34:39.360with the bun surely not surely you certainly don't fit that mold is there such a stereotype0.65
00:34:44.680or it's complete nonsense i mean i i kind of i i find those stereotypes intensely annoying because
00:34:51.400um you know it may have been true 60 or 70 years ago i don't know because i i i you know i'm 62 so
00:35:00.960i don't really remember that era very much um but i think there are a huge variety of types of roles
00:35:08.740that a library needs and certainly some of those are kind of detailed focus methodical process
00:35:15.620driven uh people who you know really you know are quite happy doing a a kind of task that requires
00:35:26.600them to focus deeply on detail and we absolutely need people like that and they tend to be and
00:35:34.620again this is an incorrect stereotype they tend to be people who are quite happy not to be out
00:35:41.540there on the front right um people facing they're quite happy to be in the back room yeah actually
00:35:49.080um we also need people who are you know have the personalities that are very engaging with
00:35:56.040people and we you know that's a very very you know libraries are full of those kind of people
00:36:03.380we absolutely need them um to be not just on the front desk of a library on an information desk
00:36:10.980But increasingly in a library like mine, actually out working in scholarly communities outside of the library, you know, going to visit research teams, you know, just talking to a colleague about, you know, the team we have in our medical libraries who spend most of their time actually in the medical sciences division,
00:36:34.080talking to researchers or in the hospitals talking to clinicians talking to students in the
00:36:40.080um you know are about to go on their ward rounds um you know teaching them about the latest you
00:36:49.480know online resources you know the medical um medical information that they can access on their
00:36:56.580laptop or on their smartphone so these are um these are very different kinds of combinations
00:37:04.240of skills that you need um i think being service oriented being user oriented is absolutely a
00:37:12.180prerequisite of of libraries these days um but also we have you know it specialists so we have
00:37:22.220data science people you know we have people who are specialists in metadata and again some of
00:37:27.880those actually you know increasingly they they work much of the time from home they don't really
00:37:32.940need to be in the physical library space all the time um and so there are you know we're lucky in
00:37:40.320having these varieties of roles and not just the stereotype ancient stereotypes the cheesy
00:37:47.740stereotype of the betweeded bespectacled book stamping shush person that's so anachronistic
00:37:57.540and it gets me hot under the collar well my apologies for having upset you no no no no I
00:38:04.740I know exactly where you're coming from and I think I look at the you know we have a very good
00:38:09.700graduate trainee program in the library and so you know I look at young graduates who are coming
00:38:15.360in to do their years um kind of taster year in in the library world and we revolve them around
00:38:22.240different types of function we also set them projects to do um next week i'm going to you
00:38:28.520know we have a day where they all kind of report on their projects to each other and to to people
00:38:34.120like me and it's so inspiring they're so clever you know they're so articulate they've got brilliant
00:38:40.880ideas and i just feel so excited for the industry thinking of these this great talent who are going
00:38:46.940to go out and you know working university libraries national libraries some of them
00:38:51.380working for law firms some of them are going to be in public libraries um some of them are you
00:38:57.800know going to be working where the word library doesn't appear in their job title at all um but
00:39:03.020they're still going to be doing that kind of work so you know i'm really optimistic about the future
00:39:08.560And I think that the character traits that we need are actually more complex.
00:39:14.300And I think the opportunities, what we have to do a lot more is thinking about skills and training and continuous development of our workforce.
00:39:26.300Do you ever get, this is not a natural segue, but I thought of it as you were speaking, although I was focused on what you were saying.
00:39:32.600do you ever get into tricky situations not unlike how for example museums will suddenly have a knock
00:39:41.340on the door where some where the Egyptian government comes along and says hey that
00:39:45.580beautiful collection that you have it's time to return it do you get similar situations where
00:39:51.100you've got this incredible collection that somebody else says that belongs to us give it back
00:39:56.660um i i think within the within the bodleian i've only experienced that a couple of times
00:40:03.560um and it's been slightly unusual one of them has come from the republic of ireland
00:40:09.940um so we were there's a famous manuscript called the annals of inish fallon that we own
00:40:17.620that was given to us in the early 18th century actually by an irish clergyman and
00:40:48.420that there's any moral case for it to be returned
00:40:51.240and I continue to point out to the people
00:40:53.760who claim that it should be that the library of trinity college dublin contains hundreds of
00:41:00.620english medieval manuscripts and i'm sure that they're urging the my counterpart helen shenton
00:41:07.300at trinity to return all of those manuscripts to england um so uh you know that that's one example
00:41:14.920but certainly the library community has faced you know does share some of those issues you know there
00:41:21.300are some um you know jewish uh um uh stolen uh property um stolen by the nazis redistributed
00:41:33.440you know one thinks of artwork you think of the monuments men that film i don't know that
00:41:39.060but actually the monuments men started out with books yes and that was covered in your book and
00:41:47.140i thought that was one of the most compelling parts of the book yes yeah yeah so extremely
00:41:53.160interesting how um you know the nazis wanted to control knowledge in terms of you know jewish and
00:42:01.260the you know the jewish knowledge often in the hebrew language or in yiddish and and and then
00:42:08.200you know european vernaculars um and then you know there was this process of trying to return it and
00:42:15.320And to some extent, many of those stolen books ended up on the shelves of not the specialist institute that was run by the kind of Nazi Alfred Rosenberg, but by in ordinary German libraries, university libraries, public libraries.
00:42:32.700And there is still a team that is finding those books on the shelves of those libraries and trying to reunite them with the heirs of the legitimate owners.
00:42:42.560So that process does continue. And certainly in the market, in the trade for old books and manuscripts, it's one of the issues now that everybody looks out for. Does the provenance trail lead back to Nazi ownership?
00:43:02.180what would be in your wildest dreams the singular book that oxford doesn't have in its
00:43:12.240in its library that you would be so desperate to acquire ah well that's a very interesting
00:43:19.100question i i mean i i don't think there is a single book there are a number of books which
00:43:24.380i would like us to own um which we don't own that are rather expensive um in terms of printing
00:43:34.140you know so you know i mentioned i i have a kind of real interest in the history of photography
00:43:39.440and um there are several kind of landmark books in the history of photography that we don't own
00:44:13.320um but you know it's i i don't think we have a particular kind of target like that um i think
00:44:23.320it's you know there are kind of you to some extent you have to go with what the market has
00:44:28.780um occasionally you know that there's a particular individual with a particular book
00:44:34.040and if you're lucky enough to get to know them you can kind of gently make the suggestion right
00:44:41.380I did this once with a former Oxford alum or an Oxford alum who ended up in Australia and had developed a passion for collecting books when he was an undergraduate at Oxford.
00:44:55.780And he ended up as being a judge in Australia.
00:44:59.800And I happened to be in Melbourne and went to visit him.
00:45:03.880And he proudly showed me off his collection.
00:45:06.940And I oohed and aahed over a particular thing, which was the traveling library of Charles I.
00:45:20.340And I just said, you know, a lovely man called John Emerson, I said, John, you know, this would be so, it would make such a great acquisition for the Bodley and, you know, we would absolutely love to have it.
00:45:59.940As an evolutionist, it shouldn't be difficult.
00:46:02.240It will be first edition, Charles Darwin on the Organist Species.
00:46:06.080do you have a first edition we do we do actually i think we might even have more than one copy
00:46:11.080um oh so in the same way that you threw that little seed into that gentleman's brain
00:46:16.900should you ever wish to get rid of of your multiple copies then dr sad here would be happy
00:46:24.660okay okay you've been put on go ahead can i ask you another question which is what were the books
00:46:31.760that you read that made you the person you are today oh that is such a good question so i mean
00:46:36.880the easiest way to answer it would be in terms of what we're talking about now evolution is in my
00:46:44.100first semester as a doctoral student i studied at cornell uh the professor who i was taking an
00:46:51.320advanced social psychology course about halfway through the semester he assigned a book called
00:46:56.420Homicide, which was written by two of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology, a husband and wife
00:47:02.040team, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, where they were studying cross-temporal and cross-cultural
00:47:10.700manifestations of criminality to demonstrate that they happen for the exact same reasons,
00:47:17.120irrespective of culture or era. And the reason why they happen in similar fashions is because
00:47:24.060of these kind of evolutionary underpinnings so for example the most dangerous man the most
00:47:30.300dangerous person in a woman's life irrespective of any culture that's ever been studied is usually
00:47:35.180her long-term male partner it's not some you know rapist that's hiding in the bushes it's her male
00:47:40.960partner who usually goes into a homicidal rage if he either has suspected or realized infidelity
00:47:48.200and then then there's an evolutionary argument as to why men have evolved that tendency to be
00:47:54.780so sexually territorial it's related to paternity uncertainty and so on and so forth well when i
00:47:59.840read that book that was my epiphany that was my eureka moment i will now use that framework
00:48:07.400to apply it to the areas that interest me in human behavior consumer behavior economic behavior and
00:48:13.980And hence, I ended up eventually founding the field of evolutionary consumer behavior, meaning the Darwinian underpinnings of what makes us consumatory in our nature.
00:48:23.240So I would have to say that that is the incontrovertible book that affected me the most in terms of my academic trajectory.
00:48:32.120Okay. And have you kept that first, your first copy of that?
00:48:36.340I do. I have it. I have it in my office, actually, which I'll soon be vacating.
00:48:41.380it's there with all of my notes as a doctoral student yeah so it's it's all there so it has a
00:48:47.020kind of talismanic quality for you exactly right there's another book that really meant a lot to
00:48:52.600me although I didn't eventually pursue that path although it is based on Alan Turing a fellow Brit
00:48:58.900okay so I my undergrad was in mathematics and computer science and I took an advanced
00:49:05.400theoretical computer science course called Formal Languages by Hopcroft and Ullman,
00:49:11.760where they talk about Turing machines and so on. And I was absolutely blown away that a human being
00:49:19.120can be able to generate this kind of thought process, which is very difficult to explain
00:49:25.780to someone who hasn't actually studied Turing's work. It's simply astounding that a human mind
00:49:33.160can come up with some of the stuff that, of course, his end was a tragedy. So that would be
00:49:38.280another book that I would put. But speaking of books and books on books, I discussed this before
00:49:43.600we went on air. I have a small but interesting collection on books on books, two of which you
00:49:49.660said you're actually very familiar with. This one right here, A Splendor of Letters, The Permanence
00:49:56.080of Books in an Intermittent World, and another one, The Library of Fragile History. And you said
00:50:02.060that you know both of the co-authors anything you want to say about these books and any other
00:50:07.180books on books that you think our listeners and viewers should be checking out oh okay well um i
00:50:14.260think you know both those books are sort of general histories of of libraries i think nicholas
00:50:20.480basbane's is a great kind of advocate for the library as a kind of institution as a kind of
00:50:26.820concept and idea um i think um andrew pedigree and arthur van der weduwen's uh library of fragile
00:50:34.820history um again a very i've reviewed it actually for the financial times weekend um so you could
00:50:42.120check my review out but i think one of the arguments i say about it there is that um i
00:50:48.820disagree with the idea of fragility i think um i i don't i don't see libraries as kind of fragile
00:50:56.960institutions um i think they've they've been much stronger certainly there've been plenty examples
00:51:02.240of their destruction their loss but you know the fact that you know the first libraries that we
00:51:08.060know of and can kind of recognize actually really quite strongly were in the you know the second and
00:51:16.600third millennia before the christian era and that the same functions are still being performed today
00:51:23.800i think isn't it shows the extraordinary enduring power of libraries of that concept of being
00:51:30.780actually quite a strong one um so i kind of disagreed with their kind of fundamental
00:51:37.520sort of idea and they they end their book on quite a kind of downbeat note um which again i i i i
00:51:45.780think they're right to point out the risks and the dangers that we face around the idea of
00:51:53.060preserving and accumulating knowledge and to do so on behalf of communities rather than on behalf
00:52:00.660of shareholders but I think you know libraries have proved themselves to be extraordinarily
00:52:09.060adaptable, agile, vibrant. And, you know, we're already thinking about the future. So that,
00:52:20.120you know, that inheritance that we have of long term thinking, that actually Nicholas
00:52:26.700Basbane's book is very strong on, continues to this day. And I think that certainly my library