I left Washington DC this morning and caught the train up to Philadelphia. I arrived in an absolute downpour and made my soggy way to the Library Company. This library was founded in 1731 by Benjamin Franklin and has a fascinating and illustrious history. They were the largest library in America until the 1860s when the Library of Congress superseded them, and have incredibly extensive holdings of early printed books - half a million volumes, in fact, which makes them the second largest collection of early American imprints in the world. I met with the Librarian, Jim Green, and his colleague Rachel D'Agostino, who is their Curator of Printed Books. Jim gave me a lot of fascinating information about the focus and development of the library's collections, which are mostly pre-1880 and have been developed along subject lines, such as African American, Women's history, visual culture, popular medicine. I was surprised to learn they have such large collections relating to African American history in particular. The way they see the library is very different to the other libraries I've visited so far - the context provided by the library as a whole is very important; the collection is almost more important than the individual items. They see themselves as having a role to acquire and house older volumes that are discarded by other libraries, and view the social history that can be seen from their collection as very important.

I then went upstairs to meet some of the staff who look after their graphic collections and who are doing a lot of the library's digitisation work. They showed me some great examples from their collections, and demonstrated their Digital Collections catalogue, ImPAC. As well as digitising material themselves, often relating to their exhibitions, they are working with other websites such as phillyhistory.org and commercial partners such as Readex and Alexander Street Press. As with the other libraries I've talked to about digitisation, money and resources mean that this is largely being done in response to funders' interests, and again the theme came up of balancing this with the need to get uncatalogued material catalogued and made findable in the first place.

Finally, Rachel took me on a tour around the stacks, which are a veritable treasure trove. I don't think I've ever seen quite so many antiquarian books in one place ever before, and the wonders just kept on coming. They also hold the book collections belonging to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (which is next door; they look after the LCP's manuscript collections in return), and even have a few shelves of incunabula. There were amazing 19th century bindings, boxes and boxes of broadsides, and even, most randomly, a mummy's hand! I could have happily spent hours in there, and it was a wonderful introduction to the scope of their collections.

The Library Company felt in some ways more familiar and closer to my library and home institution, with their fellowship programs and the way their collections have grown often in relation to those fellows' interests. I was also left with a real sense of the historical aspect of the library as a total entity, and here, the importance of the container and the context, not just the content. This is unusual, in an era where increasingly the two are becoming divorced with digitisation, and really came across as this library's unique selling point.