A university's fingerprint

I might have written on this topic before, but I was reminded of it as I had a discussion with a group of master students in history of ideas here in Oslo this morning. A university library is the fingerprint of the university. The books tells about syllabuses or a professor's special interest and the journals subscribed to tell in which directions research is leading. As the university libraries both in Oslo and St Andrews feel like my home library, I have become very aware of their differences. The university library in St Andrews has, for instance, many books on Norwegian middle ages (many of them in Norwegian) and I found that several of them had been donated to the library by a scholar who probably could read Scandinavian. St Andrews is good at Medieval History, so this migh not be very strange. Another peculiar fact about the St Andrews library was that most continental theorist could be found in English, but seldom in their original language. Now I am struggling here in Oslo as the library has seven (!) copies of Roland Barthes' S/Z and none of them in translation and my French is poor.

There were two things that caught my notice in today's discussion. First that all had read N. Å. Andersen's Discursive Analytical Strategies: Understanding Foucault, Koselleck, Laclau, Luhmann; a book that I have yet to meet anyone in Britain who has read. The other thing was that none of us could think of any historian in Oslo who had suggested ordering a subscription to Rethinking History (ed. Alun Munslow). I was explained in St Andrews that no one wanted it there and I had to get a copy of an article sent from the British Library. The library in Oslo has many more journals that the one in St Andrews, so they might not need to be as picky in deciding which journals to subscribe to.

Comments

[Erling Sandmo]

Interesting observations about universities' fingerprints and about the reception of Andersen's book. To be fair, however, the Oslo library does subscribe to Rethinking History and has done so from the first issue. I read it there regularly: It is placed among the history journals. If the history of ideas students do not read history journals, they are missing a lot. Maybe your observation touches upon the curious and unfortunate wedge between the two disciplines in Oslo.

[ksbrorson]

Hi, nice of you to stop by my blog.

I have read Rethinking History at the university library here too. I often brows the section with historical journals. However, I still wonder who decided on the subscription to it. It is a journal with a methodological manifesto, and I wonder if there are many readers of that point of view here in Oslo.

[TeercewOpebygrasp]

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