CLIG members who failed to sign up for this year's summer outing to Oxford really don't know what they missed. It was a beautiful sunny July day, the city looked at its best, and even people who had long worked in the commercial sector felt a tug back to the academic life. We started at the (relatively modern) Bodleian Law Library with coffee and a brief history of the library and its progress from Barbara Tearle, the doyenne of law librarians, who has run it for many years. What Barbara doesn't know about law libraries is certainly not worth knowing; you couldn't ask for a better guide. And for me, on the brink of designing and laying out a new library when the firm moves premises early next year, there were invaluable nuggets of information in what she told us, as much about what not to do in the layout area as what to do. There is a major revamp planned for the law library, which will take care of the snags in the present area. Since all areas of the Bodleian Law Library have been built large-scale, there are proportionately greater chances of going wrong on a grand scale too, but there were useful lessons for us all irrespective of the size of our libraries.

Suitably impressed with the comprehensiveness of the stock and the organisation of the Library, we walked to the University Club for a splendid lunch among the academics before splitting into two groups to visit our chosen old Oxford library. On offer were the Old Bodleian and Merton College Library, [the latter of] which was my choice.

We reached Merton slightly early for our tour, a lucky chance because it enabled us to have a quick tour of the Merton Undergraduate Library as well. This is housed across the road from the College in another classic old building, formerly the Bursar's home. Beautiful restoration and reproduction work in the building has been carried out to ensure that even the modern sections like the issue desk are totally in harmony with the original. It is still clearly a home, with subjects in separate rooms and no large open areas. It looks lovely, but the librarians must find it quite a headache to maintain tidiness and order at all times.

Then it was across the road to the College, in through the archway and across the Mob Quad to the upstairs library. Merton is one of the oldest colleges at Oxford, and this library and the nucleus of its book stock date from the 1400s. The beauty and antiquity of its woodwork is awesome - you could spend days just taking the atmosphere of the place. The library is laid out in two wings at right-angles, with the books housed along the walls of the individual 'choir stalls' in which students worked at narrow benches close to their books. The reason why they had to be close was demonstrated to us by Paul, our wonderful guide

whose evident passion for his library and its history added greatly to the pleasure of our tour. In an age when the cost of a single book could exceed that of a small house, you couldn't take chances on people walking away with your stock, so the solution was chains. A large eyelet-hole at the bottom of the spine with a chain long enough for the book to be opened on the narrow desk beneath the shelves was deemed to be the answer. (I now fantasise about neat rows of Chitty, Bowstead, Benjamin and the rest safely chained up against the depredations of larcenous lawyers in my new library. Beats bar codes and bleeps, any day!)

A lovely, magical place, a wonderful day out in Oxford. Did I say you don't know what you missed? Well now with this and Gemma's account of the Old Bodleian visit (below) you know a bit more. Resolve immediately to put yourself down for the CLIG Away Day next year!

The Old Bodleian and Radcliffe Camera

The building, as you would expect, is gorgeous (both inside and out). The Duke Humfrey's library in particular warrants a special mention as it has recently been beautifully restored (after finding that the structure had been made unsafe due to some ravenous beetles!). The Old Bodleian is a closed stack library, so while the more popular books are kept in the reading room the majority of the stock is housed on the 11 floors below. Feeling like intrepid explorers we followed our brave guide Ruth into the stacks to see the inner workings of the library. To request a book the reader must fill out a slip of paper which the librarian then seals in a vial and sends down a pressurised chute to the basement. These slips are then sorted according to what level the book is stored on (all the books are classified according to size to save space) and sent to that floor via the same network of tubes. Someone then wanders into these vast stacks, retrieves the book and sends it up to the reading room via a very cranky conveyor belt (our guide reliably informed us that this historic piece of machinery was so old it was listed!). It was amazing to see this, frankly antiquated, system at work and hear the vials whizzing down the tubes over our heads.

As a last treat we were allowed on to the roof of the Radcliffe Camera, which afforded us a spectacular 360 degree view of Oxford. We couldn't have ended the day on a better note.