Just one last very quick post to say that I've now completed and submitted my full report to CILIP and the ESU, and it's available to download from the CILIP website at http://www.cilip.org.uk/about-us/medalsandawards/travellinglibrarian/Pages/travelling-librarian-reports.aspx.

My visits are all completed, and I fly back home tonight. I thought it would be worth making a final post to wrap up this blog and start the job of reflecting on what I've seen and learnt over the past two weeks. I feel like I've said this a lot already, but it really has been an incredible experience and so, so worth all the effort of organising it and the exhaustion I am currently feeling. Looking back on what I was hoping to get out of this experience, I feel I've achieved all the aims I set out with, and learnt a whole lot more on top of that. I wanted to learn more about the collections that I visited, as well as how these institutions worked in terms of access for researchers. I was interested in their outreach efforts, how they work to make their amazing holdings more widely available outside their own walls, with digitisation programmes, events, and use of the web and social media, and hoped to come home with a whole lot more knowledge of what they have and what my readers are able to get both from Oxford and from visiting themselves. All of this I learnt in spades, but I also gained a much greater understanding of the opportunities and constraints surrounding all this work, as well as the similarities and differences between institutions that on the surface appeared more or less alike. And on top of all that, it's been absolutely fabulous for my knowledge and understanding of US history, which has been given a real boost by listening to such erudite and passionate people and having the opportunity to view some real treasures of their collections and learn the stories that go along with them. I said to a few people along the way, as they walked me round stacks and brought out unique and priceless documents, that working at such a distance as I do in Oxford and accessing primary sources almost exclusively as reproduced content, both digital and microfilm, I tend to forget about the importance of the physical item and physical collections, and what they can tell you over and above the content itself. Getting to see 'the real thing' always reminds you more that history is far more concrete than it can sometimes seem, and again this is a boost to my own interest in and passion for the subject and for what I do. Librarians exist to bring people and information together, and I've gained a refreshed appreciation for what this means in terms of the collections outside of Oxford. On a more mundane level, just the experience of walking into a place, getting a feel for the lay of the land, helps me envisage so much more clearly this aspect of the work that the researchers and students I support do. I'm also going back with a massive pile of business cards, the evidence of so many new connections which will be incredibly useful in the future, as well as lists of websites and online resources which I can now point my readers to. And I hope I have achieved my intention to pass on information and raise awareness of the vibrancy of US studies at Oxford and raise the profile of our library collections and the Rothermere American Institute in all the institutions I've visited. We already have one talk there arranged from one person I met, who is coincidentally coming to the UK soon, and I really hope that if and when others of my new contacts make their way across the Atlantic that they will visit also come and visit Oxford in turn.

I don't want to pick out highlights from the past two weeks, because really every day has been fantastic and everyone has been so welcoming, and I wouldn't want to suggest otherwise by naming some places or people ahead of others. What I do want to do though is thank everyone I have met, and everyone who so generously gave me their time and contributed to what has been a wonderful and immensely useful trip. And of course, CILIP and the ESU for giving me the award and funding me - to any UK librarians reading this, I really recommend giving this award a go in the future! I expected it to be valuable, otherwise I would not have applied, but its value has really exceeded my expectations. Thank you, everyone!

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.

My library visits resumed this morning with a trip to the John F Kennedy Presidential Library, which has a fabulous location overlooking the water on the University of Massachusetts campus. It was rather a misty and dull morning, so the views were not as impressive as I imagine they often can be, but it really is a beautifully designed building. I first met with Stephen Plotkin, the reference archivist, who took me up to the reading room and talked to me about their collections (again it was particularly interesting to learn about the collections they have that aren't what you'd expect, such as Ernest Hemingway's papers) and their online finding aids. They have pretty extensive finding aids available online, which go along with their extensive online collections - the Kennedy Library made a big splash earlier in the summer with their launch of their very ambitious digital collections, which I talked further about with Erica Boudreau who looks after this aspect of the library's work. They have been systematically digitising since 2007 and had some 350,000 documents and images available at launch, growing at an estimated 2000 items each week. They are the only Presidential Library, and really the only part of the National Archives, engaged in such an extensive and systematic programme, although as I learnt on Monday, the Roosevelt Library is also now starting a massive project of their own. I was interesting to hear both Stephen and Erica's takes on the benefits and reservations surrounding the work. They are fortunate to have had a lot of funding and sponsorship which has enabled them to take this project on, which is of course the main stumbling block most other institutions have cited for being unable to do as much in the way of digitisation as they may have liked. Erica explained that they don't see their digitisation as an extra project, but rather as a part of what they do and integral to how they operate, and eventually hope to make their way right through their collections. I was interested to learn more about the decision-making process behind the order of priority for scanning - obviously they began with the no-brainers and the popular collections, but when you're working through so much material, how do you decide what to do when? They are digitising in a way that really reflects the archival organisation of the documents - folders, collections and series of collections are digitised together, and you navigate through the online environment in much the same way as you would the physical one. It's hugely ambitious, and a different approach to many of the other institutions I have visited, so it'll be interesting to see over the coming years whether this becomes a model that is taken up elsewhere (and attracts funding), or whether it will remain such a unique approach for this kind of institution.

I was also able to pick Stephen's brain on a few other aspects of the library and the Presidential Libraries system as a whole, which, along with my conversations with Nancy Smith at NARA and with the staff at the Roosevelt Library, have really given me a much better appreciation of the system as a whole and the context in which they operate. They are, as I was told by everyone I met, a unique public-private partnership with two distinct and occasionally conflicting missions - on the one hand these institutions are charged with preserving and promoting the legacy of the President they are there to commemorate, but on the other they have an important role to play in contributing to the historical record. There was an article in the New York Times about this a couple of months ago with regard to the Nixon and Reagan libraries which caused a bit of a stir, so it has been interesting to hear the take on this subject from the various people I have met in the Presidential Library system. It is a system that seems very different and a little unintuitive from the outside, not just for the fact that the libraries and papers are so widely dispersed geographically, but for this very mix of history and what could veer dangerously close to hagiography.

In the afternoon I made my way to the Massachusetts Historical Society, which is a world-renowned and venerable institution dating back to the late 18th century. They are known for their extensive and very impressive collections relating to the Colonial, Revolutionary and Early Republic periods, but also have huge 19th century collections and even a lot of 20th century material. I was greeted by their librarian, Peter Drummey, who gave me a fascinating and informative tour of the building, culminating in a visit to the inner sanctum of the stacks where some of their most special special collections are kept, including the Adams and Jefferson papers. Peter brought out a selection of documents for me to see - they keep some of the real treasures in display drawers to have them readily available to show people - including letters from Adams, Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt, and a beautifully illustrated diary from a girl in the 19th century talking about going to the circus to see elephants and a beluga whale. He also pulled out Jefferson's farm book and, most excitingly for a librarian, Jefferson's own library catalogue, with his description of his classification scheme in the front, and many careful checkmarks and erasures throughout. He was a thoroughly entertaining and informative guide to the history of the society and its collections, and it was a great start to my visit.

I then spent time talking to Tracy Potter, their reference librarian, and Elaine Grublin, who is Head of Reader Services, learning more about how they work to make their collections more accessible and the services they offer to researchers, both in person and from a distance. I was able to pick up various tidbits of information on a very practical level that is really useful to know. They also supplemented what I'd just learnt from Peter about the type and extent of their collections, especially some of the things they have which they are less obviously known for. Peter had explained that there are two types of state historical societies in the US - the older ones such as the MHS were generally privately established and as such don't hold public records, whereas a lot of the newer ones do have that more formal official role. I haven't been able to get to an example of that kind of library on this trip, but it would be interesting to visit one in the future and learn more to compare.

Tracy and Elaine also spoke to me a bit about the society's digitisation efforts, which I then learnt more about from Nancy Heywood, their Digital Projects Coordinator. They have been doing quite a lot of digitisation, both in the way of one-off, individual items for object of the month type posts and in more curated selections and collections. We had an interesting discussion about the findability of this kind of material, and usability of their site - at the moment you can find their digitised collections in a couple of places, which is not so intuitive, but they are working on a redesign which should improve things. I've offered to help provide some feedback when they do get the new site up and running, which will also prompt me to make sure I take a good look at it myself when it is ready. We also talked a little about their approach to and experiments with putting material outside their site - they do a bit of this at present, and are definitely thinking about ways to make their collections more visible in this kind of way. They already have a good twitter feed posting John Quincy Adams's 'line-by-line' diary day by day, and are actually doing some good work with that very collection in terms of creating links between the different versions of the diary so that you can compare entries in the short and longer versions by each day - the kind of thing that a digitised version allows you to do very easily but which are cumbersome to achieve in the microfilmed edition such as we have at the VHL. Many of e issues they face with this aspect of their work are much the same as most of the other institutions I've visited, and again highlighted just how unusual the approach of the Kennedy Library from earlier in the day is.

This morning I have been at Columbia University for a slightly different visit. One of my colleagues from Oxford, Alena Ptak-Danchak (who is our Keeper of Scientific Books) used to work at Columbia and coincidentally is also in New York right now. I had a morning that I hadn't yet managed to fill, so Alena offered to meet me and take me in to visit some of the libraries at Columbia. We began at the Oral History Center, which is a major draw for researchers coming here. They have about the most extensive oral history collections for American history, covering a huge range of projects from the Eisenhower administration to 9/11, and the center is very actively engaged in oral history projects, the fruits of which will eventually be made available in the library and also in some cases online. Charis Shafer gave me an excellent introduction to the work of the center and their collections, as well as a greater insight into some of the unique considerations of working with this kind of material - the importance of the release and consent forms, and how that governs what is available and the way that the changing nature of the Internet can end up making someone's data more publicly available than they initially agreed to. Digitising oral history really is largely done therefore for preservation, as they can't make the transcripts and audio available without the consent of the interviewee. Interestingly for some older material the audio even is no longer available at all, as it was considered unimportant in some cases once the transcripts had been created. Nevertheless they do have some collections online and available remotely where they have the permissions to do so. They also have an online portal which provides more information on the collections, finding aids, and access to those collections which are available online. Charis also walked me through the process by which the oral histories are collected and processed, which was very interesting to learn about. Some of this dovetailed nicely with what I learnt about the oral history collections at the Miller Center at the beginning of my trip. This is something I hadn't realised would be so useful about my trip, the way in which what I learn at one library gets reinforced or complemented by what I learn at another, and I'm getting a lot more of that 'big picture' than I thought I would.

Next we dropped in on the rare books and manuscripts reading room and had a chat with Eric Wakin, who is their Curator of American History and who gave me some more information about their special collections, as well as some of their digitisation projects (which are limited, largely for all the same reasons as all the other libraries I've discussed this with) and what he does to help students and researchers navigate their holdings. He's emailed me a useful looking document that he uses to provide this guidance, which will be a great reminder when I come to investigate this further back at home. He also pointed me on to another couple of people within the Columbia libraries who we then went on to drop in on and who also graciously spent some time talking to me - John Tofanelli who looks after Columbia's digital collections for US history (I can only desperately envy their budget and the e-resources that they have), and the Avery Library which houses the Architecture and Fine Arts collections - not somewhere I would have soon thought of in connection to US history but who have been doing some excellent digitisation work with some of their historic collections. Alena also gave me a tour round both the main library and the campus before she went to attend a lecture and I headed off to my afternoon appointment.

This afternoon I went up to Harlem to visit the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. This is part of the New York Public Library system and is a high profile institution with amazing collections relating to 20th century African American history and culture. Diana Lachatanere (from the manuscript collections) and Mary Yearwood (from the print and photograph collections) talked to me about some of the collections that they have as well as giving me a tour around the building. They have done minimal digitisation, but are working hard to make their finding aids available online. A lot of their materials have been microfilmed in the past and are available that way though, and it was good to learn how extensive these are (but, sigh, more for the desiderata list...). In addition to the usual funding/resources issues, as their collections are mostly 20th century, they are also prevented from digitising a lot of their material due to copyright considerations. Like the Library of Congress, their collections are separated and consulted according to format, and are all held in closed stacks. The Schomburg Center also holds a lot of public events and has extensive exhibition space; curiously when you come in to the building, the library is really not very obvious at all, confined to the basement and upper floors, and it's the galleries that are visually more prominent. They don't just collect books, papers and photos though, but also have large fine arts and sculpture collections so do have this somewhat wider focus than just their library collections.

Today I caught the train up the very beautiful Hudson Valley to visit the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, just north of Poughkeepsie. The FDR Library is the oldest Presidential Library (although Hoover is the earliest chronologically) and really the whole Presidential Library system was begun by FDR with the establishment of his library. Unlike all the other Presidential Libraries though, this one was established while the President was still in office and so is the only Presidential Library that was actually used by a sitting President. It is located on the Roosevelt family estate on the banks of the Hudson, right by the house where FDR was born, grew up, and next to the rose garden in which he is buried. It's a glorious location, and the whole place is really steeped in the history of his life and his family.

I was looked after all day by Kirsten Carter and her colleague Sarah, who spent some time talking to me about all my areas of interest - the library, their digitisation projects and use of social media.

The Library is currently being renovated, for the first time since it opened in 1941 and so everything is in quite a state of upheaval. The reading room and stacks are all in temporary accommodation within the visitor centre, and about 10% of their collections are being housed offsite and are not currently available for consultation. However they are maintaining their services throughout the disruption, which looks set to continue until 2013.

They have just started on a massive project to digitise some 350,000 documents, which they hope to make available by next summer. Next to the massive project currently underway at the Kennedy Library, this is about the biggest digitisation project undertaken at a Presidential Library, and they are clearly very excited about it and its potential. They have already undertaken a number of smaller projects, depending on funding - the background considerations to their digitisation projects are much the same as with the other institutions I have visited. Also like many of these other institutions, they are also working very hard to get their finding aids available online too, to help users get more information about their collections and what they have available before they come to do research. They are also enthusiastic users of social media to promote the library's collections and engage with a more public audience. They have uploaded a huge amount of archival film to YouTube, are busy putting up historic photos to Flickr, and have a blog where they post documents and information about them.

After a break for lunch, I had the opportunity to go on one of the National Park Service's tours of the Roosevelt home. The ranger gave us a lot of information about FDR's background, life, and particularly the way his polio affected both him and the house. There are a few of his wheelchairs about the place, and we also got to see the manually-operated trunk lift (or giant dumb waiter) by means of which FDR was able to get up and downstairs in the house. There was great secrecy, of course, around his inability to walk, and his wheelchairs and ramps would be hidden when visitors came to the house so as to preserve the fiction that he was not as disabled as he was. One lovely anecdote that was shared though related to his love of political cartoons, a number of which hang in the entrance hall. Many of them are very anti-British, and when King George VI and Queen Elizabeth came to visit in 1939, Sara Roosevelt thought quite strongly that they should be taken down, but FDR disagreed. So the cartoons stayed on the wall, and when the King came in, of course he went straight up to them, only to say "Mr President, you have some in your collection that I don't have!".

After the tour I had a wander around the museum, which includes FDR's study, kept just as it was in 1945. The Library contains FDR's own book collection as well as his papers, which is interesting in and of itself, and also means they have a lot of material you might not expect them to have, such as a large collection of pulp murder mysteries (including the one he was reading when he died), a collection of documents relating to earlier Presidents (they have the signature of every President pre-FDR in their collection), and most amazingly and unexpectedly, one of only two surviving copies of a 1480 missal from Utrecht, which Kirsten and Sarah brought out for me to see, along with a number of their crown jewel documents: a draft, with fascinating annotations, of his 'day of infamy' speech after Pearl Harbor; his speech for the signing of the social security act; his handwritten 'bedside note' from when he was informed in the middle of the night that Germany had invaded Poland (essentially his own press release); correspondence from King George in advance of the royal visit, as well as a wonderful set of instructions about what the King and Queen were to have provided for them in terms of breakfast and which newspapers were acceptable or not to be provided (The Times and The Telegraph among the former category, The Mail, The Mirror and The News of the World among the latter). I also got to see a couple of documents from the Eleanor Roosevelt papers which are of course also housed at the Library: her letter of resignation and indignation sent to the Daughters of the American Revolution after they withdrew their invitation to Marion Anderson, the famous African American singer, to perform in Constitution Hall (Mrs Roosevelt instead arranged for the concert to take place on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial); and her annotated draft of the UN Declaration on Human Rights. As with the other treasures I've been privileged enough to see on this trip, seeing these documents was a real thrill. This aspect of my trip has really made so much of American history seem so much more 'real', almost.

Finally, Kirsten and Sarah took me on a tour of their stacks, which was a real visual demonstration of the extend and breadth of their collections - not just FDR's papers or Eleanor's, but vast holdings of papers from other individuals involved in the FDR administrations, as well as cabinet after cabinet of photos and huge quantities of sound and video recordings. It's been another fantastic and illuminating day!

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.