First Column 8

 The very first Column 8 – as far as I can work out from my diary – though it wasn’t the first to be written. That appeared a week or two later. Unusually it was published without a title and was fitted in under part of a letter to the Editor that spread across at least three columns. This one appeared on the 10th October 1990. 

 Untitled.

 I see the Public Library has come to the end of a survey they’ve been doing. They were trying to find out which of the magazines they subscribe to are actually read.

I don’t know if anyone else shared a sneaky feeling I had. If my favourite magazine was cancelled, how would I ever keep up to date with it?

When faced with a survey sheet that had only a single tick on it was anyone else tempted to give it a few complimentary ones?

It’s a bit like wires that get put across roadways to count the traffic. I’d love to go and drive over them a few more times – just in case they’re planning to close the road.

When you’re only interested in certain magazines, you can fail to appreciate just how many the library actually gets each month.

Computer buffs maybe don’t know about those on gardening; fashion devotees may not notice the ones on football. In fact it was only when I had to do a bit of research that I came to appreciate just how many hundreds of different magazines the library holds.

And not only how many hundreds of different ones, but also how many years they cover: some of them date back to the 1930s.

But if I get inspired by the large numbers of magazines the Public Library carries, I have to admit it’s probably beaten hollow by those in the University Library.

And even more amazing, the stacks where the magazines are stored at this library are all wide open to view.

I did an exploratory visit down there one evening recently, trying to find out just what was held. I could have been there from tea-time to midnight and not even begun to scratch the surface, but I did come up with some peculiar items.

It makes you wonder just what the collecting policy is for periodicals at the University. Or perhaps I should say, what it’s been in the past, since a number of magazines appear to have copies up until a decade or so ago. Then they peter out.

Either there was some ruthless purging about that time or some ruthless pilfering.

Be that as it may, what is there is fascinating. Magazines in all sorts of languages, along with well-known English language ones, like Time and Newsweek. There are newspapers too: for example, the New York and the London Times.

The shelves house magazines on every sort of subject, political, literary, professional, historic, plus magazines that no one every hears of anymore or never heard of at all. There are copies of Blackwood’s dating from last century containing original stories by Dickens.

I think my favourite curiosity was this – several shelves spanning several decades of an English women’s magazine. What academic use would that have?

Perhaps many years ago some lady member of the staff dreamed up a crafty plan. In order to read her favourite magazine over her morning cuppa, in the most economical way, she filled in a little form – and let the library pay her subscription.

Monarch Range advertisement from the October 1928 Country Gentleman
courtesy Don O'Brien - Wikimedia Commons

 The last couple of paragraphs caused a member of the University staff to write and inform me that my suspicion about a female staff member was far off the track. The magazines were held to keep track of cultural changes not just in such things as fashion, or homemaking, but in changes in thinking and viewpoints over several decades. Here's the letter that appeared a week or two after the column was published. 

Michael Wooliscroft, then the University Librarian, wrote:

Sir, I wish to respond to some of the points in Mike Crowl’s Column Eight of October 10. I am glad that
he found the periodicals collection in the University’s Central Library so interesting. Currently the University Library obtains 9756 periodical titles for the Central, Dental, Hocken, Law, Medical and Science Libraries – 5507 by paid subscription and 4419 by donation.

Use of periodicals in a University is different to that of many other libraries and the open access feature which Mike Crowl took advantage of is important. In some subject areas, especially in science and medicine, but increasingly so in the social sciences and in commerce, the periodical literature can be more important, or as important, as the book stock.

The reason that quite a number of periodicals ‘peter out’ in the early 1980s is a financial one, when funding did not keep up with the rises in periodicals subscriptions and there was a major cancellation exercise.

The English women’s magazine which Mike refers to, presumably Woman’s Journal, was a donation. The library holds copies of that magazine from 1927 to 1980.

While the library has limited space this title was accepted because of its long run for serious academic purposes. For instance, the changes in the way products have been advertised over the years is of interest to the marketing department. The way women are portrayed is of interest to the new course in women’s studies. And the content in general is of interest to social historians.

I would like to assure Mike Crowl that libraries do not use university funds to pay for subscriptions for their own personal reading. And as our compulsory retirement age is 65, this would mean that his mythical ‘lady member of staff’ would have had to initiate the subscription at the tender age of 12. We do not employ persons of either sex at such a tender age.

Photo of Michael Wooliscroft courtesy of Dunedin Recollect