Today I caught the train out to Worcester, some fifty miles west of Boston, to visit the American Antiquarian Society. This is another long-established and world-renowned collection of early American material, with enormously extensive and broad holdings of particularly early printed materials, although they also have significant collections of manuscripts, particularly relating to New England. Their Librarian, Tom Knoles met me and began by giving me a fantastic tour of their building, introducing me to various staff members on the way. They have a beautiful reading room and extensive stacks - all their material is kept onsite and can therefore be fetched very quickly. He explained that they are about to implement an automated system for stack requests, but are still working manually at the moment. When the new system comes in, readers will be able to place requests from offsite for the first time, but they still won't actually fetch material until the reader arrives at the library. It sounds as if they are still expecting the new system to be very staff-mediated, and overall I got the impression that they take a lot of care to support readers in using and accessing their collections - all new readers are given an orientation when they arrive and they are very keen on having senior staff working on the desk to make themselves more available to researchers. This is particularly important as so much of their collection is not catalogued. They are obviously working hard to get material catalogued but with such a huge backlog (the library existed for a very long time before anyone even began a card catalogue), it's going to take a huge amount of time to do that. However, the way the collections are arranged, the staff are able to find uncatalogued material for readers, and they stress that if it's American and pre-1877 there's a strong likelihood they'll have it and it's worth asking them to check.

Tom gave me a tour round the stacks as well - they've extended their building several times to accommodate their growing collection and do still have quite a bit of growth space. As with many of the other places I've visited, this really gave me a good idea of their holdings. They organise them by format or type of material, and they really have huge collections of all sorts of things - they are known for their newspaper holdings, which are amazing, but they have huge collections of broadsides, pamphlets, other periodicals, maps, prints and other graphic collections, ephemera, children's literature and even sheet music! We dropped in on their newspaper curator who showed me their dedicated newspaper catalogue, Clarence, which provides detailed information down to the issue level of their newspaper holdings - they estimate that they have some 2 million or so issues and about 1.6 million of them are now included in this database.

We also stopped by their conservation area for a chat about how they look after their materials, as well as taking a look at the impressively industrial looking digitisation area. The American Antiquarian Society has worked for years with commercial vendors such as Readex to make their materials more widely available, first as microcards and microfilms and now as digital resources (this is of course where an enormous amount of the source material for Evans and Early American Newspapers originally came from). EBSCO are currently in residence working on a huge digitisation project going through their periodical holdings, and they have also worked with Alexander Street Press, contributing material to their letters and diaries databases. It was interesting to learn more about this over lunch with Tom and a couple of other staff members. The AAS is a private institution and had a long history of partnering with microfilm vendors, which meant for them that the decision to continue those kind of commercial arrangements into the digital environment made sense, and it does bring them in a not inconsiderable amount of revenue that they can use to continue building up their collections. They also get access to the databases themselves, as contributing partners, which they view very much as tools to help researchers navigate their physical collections too. They also have been careful to retain ownership of the digitised images, which after a certain period of time they will be able to use themselves. This is not to say though that they are not carrying out any digitisation themselves - they have also undertaken quite a bit of the same kind of projects as many other institutions, digitising parts of their collections and making those available on their website. Lauren Hewes, who is their graphic collections curator and who also came to lunch, walked me through their website in more detail in the afternoon, showing me how to find a lot of this digitised material which I hadn't found myself - a lot of it is quite hidden away, but they are building links into their catalogue and looking at ways to make finding their freely available digitised material easier. They also have very extensive collection guides and finding aids which again mitigate their cataloguing backlog. She also showed me their digital assets site, which is not yet fully available (in that it's a bit hidden away and not fully linked to anywhere), but which you can access if you have the URL (which I now do!). This is a digital archive of all their images, including the ones that were created by vendors which they are now free to use themselves, and already contains thousands of images of documents and graphics. They are still working on the metadata and there are some rudimentary subject headings for browsing, but they don't really see this as a search tool, rather as an archive which will be (and already is, in some cases) linked to from their online catalogue. I obviously knew about the AAS's extensive work with the likes of Readex, but wasn't fully aware of what else they are doing in this area. They do hope eventually to have everything digitised in one way or another, and because of the way they are working with commercial partners this does seem more achievable than it might otherwise appear. Whether we'll be able to afford to access it from Oxford is quite another question though!

I've jumped ahead in the time a little, but on the way back from lunch, Paul Erickson, their Director of Academic Programmes, showed me their fellows' house and told me a bit about their fellowship programme. They would be keen to get more UK graduates applying, so I'll definitely be passing on that information to our readers too.