When this blog was launched, the thought of reaching 600 posts would have seemed absurd.  Producing the first 6 felt like enough of a challenge.  This blogpost celebrates some of our blogging activity over the last 7 years.

The blog was the brainchild of David Lowe, our now-retired head of department.  A great deal has changed since the first blog post appeared in November 2013.  In it, David introduced the blog and also what was then the department: European Collections & Cataloguing.  In 2016, he wrote again about the department, this time to introduce its new incarnation: Collections and Academic Liaison, a coming together of European Collections & Cataloguing and the English Collections Department.  More recently, I touched upon the need to think about a new name for the blog itself (as yet unresolved) in this post.

For the first few years, David encouraged the department to produce two posts a week.  The challenge grew easier as we all got more and more used to the process of thinking of subjects and writing the posts, but increasing pressures in other areas of work meant that we eventually scaled back to a more manageable weekly post on average.  Our 600 posts published so far have attracted 130,000 views.

The majority of our posts have been written by departmental staff, but we have also had contributions from further afield.  The 599th post, for example, was written by Sir Charles Chadwyck-Healey about material in the incredible Liberation Collection he has given the Library and which Irène, our French specialist, has recently finished cataloguing.  The collection itself has been the subject of 45 posts so far.

Some blogposts could be considered regulars, such as those about the latest prize-winning literary works, particularly Italian and German.  The Slavonic item of the month posts have also been a regular feature since the blog started (and before, as explained at the end of this post).  In some cases, we have focused on specific topics across multiple posts and languages, such as the recent series of on books about race and racism, inspired by the activity of the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement.

We employ a series of categories and tags to make it easier for readers to find their way to posts of interest to them.  Thanks to these, I can report that the numbers of blogposts about the Library’s historical collections and those about new acquisitions are roughly neck and neck.  For the first few years, the ebooks category lay fairly dormant, but it is getting much more use now.  A nice recent example is a post about upgrading the catalogue records for Latin American Open Access ebooks published by CLACSO.

Sometimes posts are connected to specific events and dates, from the recent anniversary of German reunification to a June 2018 tie-in with an exhibition about Wifredo Lam and Aimé Césaire.  The now-standard Christmas blogpost is always popular.  Here is 2019’s, and I know that Katharine, its author, is already thinking about some lovely possible subjects for 2020’s.

I am terribly grateful to all our contributors as well as all our readers.  Hopefully someone will be writing a blogpost in 2024 or thereabouts to celebrate our 1,000th post!

Mel Bach