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Hello!

Welcome to my blog where I’ll share all sorts of tidbits and photos about the libraries, archives, and special collections that I visit as a Library and Information Studies student abroad in London.


 I'm Jessica, an LIS student at the University of Alberta. Together with other students from around North America, I will spend a month in London, England to learn about librarianship, collections management, and archival preservation at various British institutions. Check back often to see where we visit and to read what was shared by the fantastic librarians, archivists, and information professionals that lead us through these stunning locations.

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London Transport Museum

Tucked into the Covent Garden Piazza is the London Transport Museum  (LTM), housing a collection of over 450,000 items related to London's history of urban growth and development as it ties to its transportation. I went to this museum to find out more information about train travel and timetables for my research paper, and though I was disappointed to learn the library is closed because they are in the process of moving their collection, I was able to find out lots about the evolution of all forms of London's transportation and their projections for the future. They also have an excellent website with lots of information about their library's physical and digital collection which has filled in a lot of gaps for me.  According to their website, the LTM library "holds a unique collection of over 14,000 books, journals and special collections covering the development of public transport in London – past, present and future." Online users have access to ...
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Royal Geographical Society

A trip to the Foyle Reading Room of The Royal Geographical Society  (RGS) this morning marked the final program visit of our time in London. While it's sad to see our time coming to a close, it was lovely to spend the morning with Eugene Rae, the principal librarian of the reading room.  I, unfortunately, did not bring my phone (ie. camera) into the room and so do not have photographs of this experience. Apologies for a text filled blog post! By Steve Cadman [CC BY-SA 2.0  (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons On a large table in the reading room, Eugene laid out many documents and facsimiles from the RGS archive. Using these to illustrate his stories, he told us about s ome of the grander voyages undertaken by members of the society.  Using photographs of key players, maps highlighted with routes, and genuine artifacts he told us about the journey to find the Northwest Passage, the African expedition to find the roo...
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The National Museum of Computing - Bletchley Park

Our trip to Bletchley Park was the one that I was most looking forward to, having a vague idea about the covert activities that occurred there during the Second World War thanks to shows like The Bletchley Circle and  movies like the Imitation Game   (which takes bold creative liberties, it turns out).  We were there to see the National Museum of Computing ,  which is actually a separate entity from Bletchley Park though they share a space and a history. The location was chosen because it is only a train ride away from London without being conspicuously close .  Our guide, a mathematician and rocket scientist named Sheridan, led our group through a history-rich tour, detailing the advancements in computing science with various iterations of computers and objects like memory storage devices. He went into detail about the great minds who contributed to codebreaking during WWII, like Alan Turing, Bill Tutte, and Tommy Flowers and the machines they de...
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