The College Record 2022

Articles
Credit: John Pheasant
A Short History of Nowhere Near Everything:
reflections on almost 40 years of changes at Queen’s
Tessa Shaw
I started work at Queen’s in 1983, four years after women
were first admitted. There have been interludes – two
periods of maternity leave, a leave of absence to work
in Malawi with VSO and a secondment linked to a
development programme for women across the University. Whichever way you look
at it though, I have been employed at Queen’s for a long time. The students look
young– in fact mostly everyone looks young – time to retire.
There have been seismic changes in the world outside College in the time I have
been here – from the fall of the Berlin Wall through to the war in Ukraine. The world
of libraries and information has changed exponentially across the years and I am
grateful to have been taken along with it during my time at Queen’s, though I draw
the line at saying what my favourite Excel formula is.
Queen’s has been constant in many ways, mostly the fabric of the College. The
quads are much as when I arrived, likewise the Chapel, the Upper Library, the Hall.
There are three members of the Governing Body who have kept time with me, albeit
on stellar routes – Professors Blair, Parkinson, and O’Callaghan – the first is now
retired and the second two I remember as undergraduates. The ebb and flow of
terms and vacations used to be a gentle constant but is blurred now with the busy
conference and events business. The College is a 24/7 operation.
Let’s do some of the numbers
Six Provosts, six Fellow Librarians, four Librarians, four interregnums between
Librarians, 500 graduate trainees, Technical Service Librarians, casual library
assistants, summer project workers and conservators. In the region of 5,500
undergraduates and postgraduates – thousands of Old Members ~39 Harmsworth
Professors, three floods, one refurbishment, one fabulous new Library, four new
rugs, three comfy chairs, two restored globes and two domes and approximately
54,000 books and periodicals (and a few turns of the Orrery key).
What has changed? Just about everything.
In the Feinberg Room in the New Library there is a card catalogue – a register of all
the holdings that were in the Library. It was the honey pot resource around which
students used to gather to locate books and periodicals and was key to my early
working life at Queen’s – now it is a relic of a previous age. Pause for self-reflection.
100 The Queen’s College | College Record 2022