22, 2006, published January, doi: 10.1098/rsnr.2005.013160 2006 Notes Rec. R. Soc.

 Terry Quinn FRS Libraries: past, present and future  

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Notes Rec. R. Soc. (2006) 60, 1–3

doi:10.1098/rsnr.2005.0131

Published online 18 January 2006

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LIBRARIES: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

In the fourth (1944) edition of the Shorter Oxford English dictionary the word ‘browse’ is

considered to refer only to the activity of goats, deer and cattle feeding on the leaves and

shoots of trees and bushes. It warns that the word is sometimes used carelessly to mean

‘graze’, which readers will of course know means to feed on grass or growing herbage. Since

1944, however, both words have taken on much wider meanings in the English language.

Today the term ‘grazing’ is also used to describe the eating habits of certain people, both

children and adults, who no longer sit down to three meals a day but instead seem to nibble

almost continuously. This is a very recent usage. The word ‘browsing’ has taken the meaning

of perusing the pages of a book or a journal or looking along the shelves of a library or

bookshop. More recently, it has become very familiar to those of us who sit in front of our

computer screens. Indeed, one of the options that is presented on the opening page of the

JSTOR archive of the Royal Society’s publications is ‘Browse’, which means going to the

chronological list of volumes where one can choose the one to consult. In the past, newly

formed scientific and academic institutions or societies placed a strong priority on setting up a

library, an endeavour in which the Royal Society was no exception. At that time, though, and

in the two centuries that followed, many of the great libraries were those built up by private

individuals—notably Sir Hans Sloane’s library of some 50 000 volumes, which became the

original core of the British Museum Library in 1753, and that of Sir Joseph Banks, which

contained 25 000 volumes. An essential requirement of a library is the possibility of browsing

in the sense of looking for material close to or related to the main subject of interest.

Sometimes, of course, a visit (in the sense of a physical visit or search on the web, another

new usage) to a library or repository of information is in search of a single specific piece of

information, in which case one does not normally browse, although the temptation to do so is

always present. The content of a science library has greatly evolved since the seventeenth

century. No longer consisting solely of books and manuscripts, it now includes long runs of

scientific journals that increasingly became the repository of new knowledge. In addition,

there began to exist catalogues of the contents of libraries that themselves became great

works of scholarship; these have evolved into electronic databases, as did compilations of

abstracts of published works. All of this now provides the basic reference and source material

for current and future scholarship in the fields of scientific and other research. In any event,

the role of a library is an essential prerequisite for almost all intellectual activity, particularly

in science and the history of science, and the possibility of browsing as well as searching must

always be present if the library is to serve its purpose fully.

At least three of the articles in this issue of Notes and Records refer directly or indirectly to

libraries, their use or things found in them. Paul Quarrie gives a detailed account of the

origins and contents of the scientific library of the Earls of Macclesfield. As patrons of the arts

and sciences, the first three Earls were each major intellectual figures of their time and it is

thanks to them that such a magnificent library was created. Sadly, the library has now been

dispersed after a sale, but until then it was almost completely intact and had remained

unchanged since its formation during the first half of the eighteenth century. Comprising not

only books but also a great collection of scientific manuscripts, it was the most important

collection of such manuscripts in private hands. Included were autographed letters and other

1 q 2006 The Royal Society

T. Quinn2

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papers of Newton as well as letters and papers of such people as John Collins, William Jones,

William Oughtred and Edmund Halley. The Newton papers had already been acquired by the

Cambridge University library some years ago. In another article, John Young presents his

translation from the Latin of the Newton alchemical manuscript recently discovered by Ross

Macfarlane among the Royal Society’s previously uncatalogued Miscellaneous Manuscripts.

Its discovery was the subject of a short piece in Notes and Records in September 2005. Young

discusses the provenance of this manuscript and Newton’s alchemical work, and gives

a description of the manuscript itself. He has also provided a transcription of the substantial

16-folio manuscript, which because of its length is provided online only, along with

photographic images of the original folios. The third article on this same theme is by John van

Wyhe. It is an account of the project to put online the complete works of Charles Darwin,

whose writings cover much more than his works on evolution. He was a prolific writer on

many other subjects including geology, botany, biogeography, psychology and taxonomy, to

say nothing of scientific travel writing. The online archive will include all the extant books,

articles and manuscripts as well as a search engine and catalogue. All of these will be

digitized and presented in two forms, a searchable text and a facsimile image of each page.

This is a major project in the history of science and is of course a sign of the way things will

be. The ability to browse through Darwin’s works will become a possibility for a vastly

increased number of people.

So, what of libraries in the future? Clearly, there will always be need of original material

but as time goes by the original material will itself become increasingly electronic in form.

Already, the strong push in the medical field to have free access to electronic journal articles

from the date of publication will become irresistible and this will be true for journals in all

areas of intellectual activity, not only science. The consequences for today’s publishers of

academic journals is evident and could well result in the disappearance of paper copies of

scientific and other journals because there will be no one to pay for printing. One might

wonder how long it will be before specialized scientific books become published in electronic

versions only. Research in the history of science will, in one sense, become much easier as the

original material will be available to all on the web, provided of course that it has been

digitized by someone. It seems inevitable that in the future most libraries will be virtual

institutions leaving just a small number of places where the books, manuscripts and journals

of the pre-electronic age will be preserved and only the fortunate few having access to them

will have the pleasure of reading a real Newton or Darwin manuscript. Great efforts are now

being made to devise ways to ensure the long-term security and accessibility of electronic

data. These are evolutions, or indeed revolutions, that cannot be planned other than in the

short term, driven by the irresistible power of new technology.

Among the other pieces in this issue is an article by Matt Jenkinson on the first publication

in English, in 1685, of Confucius’s Great learning, translated from the Jesuit Latin text by

Nathaniel Vincent FRS. This text was part of a court sermon delivered in 1674 in the presence

of Charles II as an example to contrast the high moral and personal standards recommended

by Confucius with the then low moral and personal standards of the King’s Court. Not

surprisingly, it was not well received and he was only permitted to publish it some years later.

Few experimental physicists educated in British universities during the middle part of the

twentieth century would not prick up their ears if they heard the names ‘Kaye and Laby’. It

would probably have been in a dog-eared copy of their Tables of physical and chemical

constants, first published in the 1930s, that the student would have found the thermal

conductivity of copper or the electrical resistivity of nichrome, together with much other

3Libraries: past, present and future

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basic data essential for the design of experiments. In his short article Douglas Ambrose, a

contributor to successive editions of Kaye and Laby from the 1960s, gives an account of the

handbook produced by these two Cambridge physicists, both later elected to the Fellowship

of the Royal Society, who together published the first edition of their essential reference book

after having been research students at the Cavendish laboratory. The last paper edition was

the 16th, published in 1995, but now the latest edition appears on the NPL website in

electronic version only.

This issue continues with a tribute to Max Perutz by Sir John Meurig Thomas on the

occasion of the first Max Perutz Memorial Lecture given by Professor Sari Nusseibeh at the

International Human Rights Network of Academies and Scholarly Societies at the Royal

Society on 19 May 2005. There are then four Reports, one on the Royal Society purchases

from the Macclesfield Library by Sir John Rowlinson, also featured in Paul Quarrie’s article,

one on the History of Science, Technology and Medicine Department at Oxford University by

Robert Fox, one by Vivian Nutton on a meeting to mark the 400th anniversary of the birth of

Johann Laurentius Bausch (1605–65), the prime mover among the four founders of the

Academia Leopoldina, and one by van Wyhe, mentioned above. These are followed by two

Recollections, one by Peter Felgett on the origins of Fourier spectrometry and the other by

Britton Chance on the cavity magnetron, a follow-up to the earlier piece on the same subject

from Sir Bernard Lovell. After the book reviews there follows, as is the tradition in this issue,

the text of the President’s Anniversary Address given at the Society on 30 November. Finally,

there is a selection of four plates from seventeenth-century medical and alchemical texts in

the Royal Society’s library.

Terry Quinn FRS

The frontispiece shows a portrait of George Parker, 2nd Earl of Macclesfield (ca. 1697–1764) by Thomas Hudson.George Parker, astronomer and politician, served as President of the Royal Society from 1752 to 1764. (Copyright qthe Royal Society.)