The Long Room in the Old Library Image Source: Wikimedia Commons
Kayleigh Ferguson will sometimes find a small bounty between the pages of the centuries-old books in her care at Old Library in Dublin.
“If the book’s falling apart enough … you can find chunks of medieval manuscripts sticking out of the back,” said the 28-year-old, over the phone from Dublin, 3,000 miles from her hometown of Elbridge, New York.
Catholic manuscripts went out of vogue during the Protestant Reformation, she explained, so they were sometimes used as scrap paper for book bindings. Occasionally she finds them while she’s cataloging books in one of the world’s most-trafficked libraries.
Ferguson is one of the “foot soldiers,” she said, of The Great Decant, a $95 million restoration of the Old Library at Trinity College in Dublin, which kicked into gear after the 2019 Notre Dame fire in Paris. She’s an incongruous fixture there, a New Yorker working busily among the stacks of venerated Irish treasures.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
