10 years and over 800 blog posts ago, the head of European Collections and Cataloguing, David Lowe, launched ‘European Languages across Borders’.  Today we are very excited to rename our blog ‘Languages across Borders’ and to welcome our colleagues in the Department of World Collections as our new partners in the blog.

The decade has seen a lot of change.  In 2016, European Collections and Cataloguing merged with English Accessions to become Collections and Academic Liaison, with this now one of two departmental blogs (the other being the ebooks@cambridge blog).  In 2017, David retired, having contributed over 50 blog posts himself.  In recent years, our blog has covered some of the UL’s major changes (eg the introduction of the Library Storage Facility) and the trials and tribulations of the Covid years (including the joy of returning to work with print books), all done through celebration of the collections old and new that we are lucky enough to work with.  In 2020, we celebrated our 600th blog post with a whistle-stop tour of the blog’s history and the kinds of things we write about.  I’ve reproduced some of it further down.*

The term “European” in our blog’s name was always a bit difficult, because while we knew that it referred to the original roots of the languages we collect in, now from countries around the world, it often suggested to others that our collecting activities were restricted to a single continent.  So we ourselves in CAL were happy to lose that word (and to see the WordPress URL “europeancollections” change to a Cambridge URL as well as to “language-collections”) – and, of course, the new name paves the way for more blog posts about language collections with non-European roots.

Our new blog partner, the Department of World Collections, is made up of the following teams and collections:

• Centre of African Studies Library (which has also got its own blog)
• Centre of South Asian Studies Library
• Royal Commonwealth Society Library
• University Library language teams (much like CAL’s):
  • Chinese
  • Japanese and Korean
  • Near and Middle Eastern (“major collections in Arabic, Hebrew and Persian … [and] more limited collections relating to Aramaic, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopic, Georgian, Ladino and Yiddish, Turkish, Turkic languages, Urdu and Iranian languages such as Kurdish”)
  • South Asian, Tibetan and Southeast Asian

We have really good working relationships between the two departments, with so much in common in our work, and it’s fantastic to be going into partnership in this blog.  World Collections staff will still use the CUL Special Collections blog especially for older material, and of course the Centre of African Studies Library staff will still have their own separate blog, but ‘Languages across Borders’ gives them all a home as and when they need it, particularly for promoting modern language collections.  We all look forward to working on the blog with our World Collections partners, especially the incoming head of department who will start next month.

Mel Bach

* from the 600th blog post, in November 2020:

“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.”