There’s quite a lot to report this month, and it’s all good news. We will soon be getting the Tower at Westminster College properly investigated and environmental monitors will be installed over the next few weeks. The Tower will make a lovely space for the library’s modern collection once we have collected enough information to tell us how to reduce some temperature and humidity fluctuations we’ve been observing over the last few months. These are probably inevitable given the age of the building, and once they are solved we will have a lot more space to work with for unpacking the collection. To give you a flavour of the sort of thing we’re unpacking, we’ve sprinkled this post with some of the highlights of what we’ve found this month.

We are also getting new shelves for the Carrie Room, which is very good news indeed as the unpacking in the Cheshunt Room is going much more quickly now we have our two volunteers to assist. The Carrie Room should be able to house a further 8,000 books, also from the more modern part of the collection.

Now that we have so many more books on the shelf, we have been starting to think about conservation issues. Given they have been in storage for so long the books are in remarkably good condition, but a few are inevitably going to need intervention, particularly as a significant proportion of the collection is over 400 years old. We have started measuring some of the books more in need of help for boxes. We have also been learning some basic “book first aid” skills and are beginning to prioritise the collection for future conservation care. A big shout-out goes to Jane Giscombe, the library’s conservator, for all the help and advice she has been giving.

We’ve still been getting lots of enquiries: requests for information in the Surman Index (which we have here in hard copy); questions about 19th-century missionaries; and family tree-related queries. As always, get in touch if you think we might be able to help you in any way, or if there are books in our collection you may wish to consult in our reading room at Westminster College, Cambridge. (Our catalogue can be found here, and our manuscripts handlist is here.)

As always, please follow us on Twitter and Instagram if you have not already done so, and have a look around our website to find out more about the Library and the Congregational Memorial Hall Trust.

See you next month for our July update!