Information Scotland

The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland

August 2003 Volume 1 (4)

Endpiece

Once in a lifetime

Brian Osborne extols two gripping reads and one gripping event.

There are not too many things that can accurately be described as “once in a lifetime” events but the publication next year of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography surely qualifies.

The old DNB has been a pillar of reference libraries for more than a century and with its supplementary volumes it fills both a vital need for a comprehensive British biographical source and a couple of shelves of most decent reference libraries. However librarians will have to face up to the daunting prospect of investing in a completely new, and completely indispensable, edition in 2004. A bit of budgetary planning and special pleading will be needed as the cost will be a fairly daunting £6,500 if you order before 30 September 2004. Thereafter the price goes up to £7,500; neither sum being the sort of spare money that I suspect many libraries will have lying around in these hard times. A pre-publication order will also get you free access to the online edition for 12 months.

As one of 10,000 contributors to the work I saw with fascination something of the process that brought this £25m project to completion and the editorial efforts that have been made to make the new work inclusive, authoritative, comprehensive and, especially in the online edition, extremely accessible through multiple search options. It will be possible to search for the entries for every subject born in, say, Hamilton (one trusts for the sake of that fine town that somebody famous was born there) or for every subject who was a librarian (thank heavens for Sir Anthony Panizzi and Philip Larkin.)

Not quite in the “once in a lifetime” bracket but still notable enough is the Edinburgh International Book Festival – an event which, under the direction of Catherine Lockerbie has prospered remarkably, and which each August makes Charlotte Square one of the most lively and interesting places to be.

Undoubtedly one of the world’s leading book festivals in quality and size it represents a marvellous resource for anyone interested in books and writing, and is something in which Scotland should take a proper pride.

The Scottish Library Association for a number of years sponsored an event at the Book Festival – a sponsorship which aimed to demonstrate the Association’s support for the Festival, our involvement with the book world and our commitment to literature. Sadly this practice has fallen into desuetude (a word I have long yearned to have an excuse to use in print) and we are now only represented by a shelf of CILIPS publications in the book tent, which, as a grumpy former Honorary Publications Officer, I don’t really think is good enough. Undoubtedly we never recouped the cost of our sponsorship of events in additional publications sales – but that was hardly the point of the exercise.

The Book Festival is worth supporting for its own sake, and the profile and prestige that libraries and our professional body could get from being associated with it are, if unquantifiable, nevertheless real. If supporting the Book Festival seems worthwhile to bodies ranging from the Saltire Society and the Educational Institute of Scotland to Harvey Nichols and the World Wildlife Fund, then is it too radical an idea to suggest that CILIPS should get seriously involved with it again?

And finally; as they say; if you haven’t already read William Dalrymple’s White Mughals, let me urge you to do so now. It is always comforting to have one’s views confirmed and when White Mughals won the Scottish Arts Council’s Scottish Book of the Year award in June I was delighted, and not just because it was the only one of the finalists that I had read – I’ll get round to the rest, I promise!

I had read the book while on holiday and managed to finish the last page, with just the suggestion of a tear in my eye, as my plane landed at Glasgow. Dalrymple’s book is a masterpiece – it is a moving human-interest story of love across racial boundaries in late eighteenth-century India, it is a brilliantly researched piece of biographical writing, and a gripping picture of an age and a country with something to say about our present age and concerns.

Go on, treat yourself, buy a copy – it only costs £8.99!

Information Scotland Vol. 1 (4) August 2003

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Last updated: 13 February 2004