
Today–after a brief visit to King’s Cross Station’s famous Platform 9 3/4–we took an early train from London to Cambridge. Our first stop was the ProQuest offices, where we were given snacks and three different presentations: one an overview of the company and how it works with libraries, one on customer experience, and one on digitization projects, using the case study of ProQuest’s digitized trench journals from World War I. We’d heard a bit about digitization of historical documents from the libraries we’d toured earlier, so this was a good chance to learn about this sort of process as experienced from a publisher’s side. While much of the other presentation content was at least somewhat familiar to me from my librarian days, it was also interesting to hear about the multiple sources for ProQuest’s new digital product concepts. Products originate in various ways: sometimes from identifying unmet research needs, sometimes from identifying a specific collections to be digitized, and sometimes because a source institution approaches ProQuest with a proposal.
Following this visit, we had lunch at a local pub with delicious sticky toffee pudding on the menu. Our plans for a visit to King’s College Chapel after that fell through, so we had some opportunity to sightsee in the afternoon. I considered trying punting, but after that proved to be cost prohibitive, opted instead to spend the free part of the afternoon sitting by the river, watching ducks, boats, and students.
We finished the day with a tour of the Pembroke College Library hosted by Librarian Pat Aske, where we learned how the library has changed and grown over the years to accommodate new technologies and students, while retaining historical facilities and collections. Digitization of Pembroke collections has begun, but is so far limited to a very few books available on CD-ROM.
As the area is still in the middle of an unusual heat wave, the train ride back was a bit uncomfortable, and by the time we were back in London, I was ready for a very long nap.