bodleyslibrarian

Great question! With huge collections like ours (and other major research libraries), scholars (and librarians) make discoveries all the time. Often these are things that people knew about before but have been forgotten about, sometime things which have been overlooked. A US scholar working with one of our Curators found an incredibly interesting and important map China and east Asia in our collections: but we had had it for over 350 years, and many scholars had looked at it in the 17th and early 18th centuries, but it got rather neglected until very recently. There are now two whole books and a dozen articles written on this map!

Well I chair a lot of meetings, and have discussions on budgets and staff, but I do get to do more interesting stuff like working with our students and researchers here in Oxford on projects, discuss our digital work with our partners (e.g. the Vatican Library and Michigan (this, for example). I even met Stephen Hawking and David Attenborough (link) recently who came to open our current exhibition last month!

But libraries are so much more than physical spaces. The great libraries of today make it possible for people to access information and knowledge wherever they need to. Sometimes this is in beautiful ancient reading rooms (like we are lucky to have here in the Bod) and sometimes on a train or while you are waiting for a bus on your mobile device. Its all 'the library'. The digital stuff you used for your science degree is acquired, managed and preserved by librarians!

Well my colleagues have pulled together the most incredible exhibition - called Marks of Genius - you can see it for free in the library until 20 September - and there are some really amazing things in it. Just seeing J RR Tolkien's hand drawn design for The Hobbit, or the manuscript written by the young Princess Elizabeth (later to be Elizabeth I) which she wrote as an 11 year girl, to give as a New Year's Gift to her stepmother Katherine Parr, remind you of the power of books to connect you to some of the greatest minds and individuals who have ever lived.

Digitizing definitely helps provide access -we are doing a huge amount of it here (over 200 million pages from our collections freely available online), including a nice website on the Selden Map of China. But it in now way replaces accessing the original books and manuscripts.