This week Librarian Antony Ramm looks back on a special anniversary for the Secret Library blog…

“I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.”

Alexander Smith

The Secret Library Leeds officially launched on Friday February 7 2014 – exactly ten years ago today (to the minute: 3.29pm). Ten years! A full decade, a tenth of a century, 521 weeks, 3,650 days: it’s a long time, however you think of it. So, we wanted to spend the next month celebrating the blog and, most importantly, the people who have brought it to life. What follows are some reflections from one Librarian (among several) who has been contributing articles to the Secret Library throughout that decade.  

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But first, some history. The Secret Library was initially inspired by Leeds Museum and Galleries’ Secret Lives of Objects blog, as well as Leeds Libraries’ very own Leeds Reads website – with the aim of building on the success of the Leodis image archive to create something similarly visual, but focused instead on stock and collections; a platform that would bring our Central Library alive to a wider audience and, crucially, allow interaction between the public and us, the custodians of the collections featured. From the outset, the aim was to publish at least one article every week; initially on a Friday, but today a Thursday. Secondary mid-week posts have also been a regular feature. Taken together, we’ve published over 600 unique articles in the last decade.

Things looked very different at the Big Bang. The blog underwent a redesign around 2018 to feature the tiled front page we’re familiar with today (clearly inspired by Secret Lives of Objects!) but, for at least the first two years, appeared like this instead (do leave a comment if you can remember reading in these early days!):

The aims of the blog, as laid out in our very first, introductory article (an extract can be seen below), were “to bring you insights into the history and architecture of our 1884 Central Library building, a behind the scenes look at the Library and highlights from our Special Collections, including rare books hiding in the stacks.”

That phrase ‘Special collections’ has a fairly specific and narrow meaning in the library context: the most valuable, the rarest, the most unique items held by an institution. And while we’ve never lost that focus on those collections, the Secret Library quite quickly, within its first few weeks and months, expanded to include articles touching on any books or other stock held by the specialist departments at the Central Library: the Art, Music, Information and Research, and even Business and Intellectual Property libraries. The blog also became a place for staff to record and report on events we’d held that used or focused on stock from those services – Light Night, Heritage Open Day, our ever-popular Speed-Date our Library Treasures series. Over time, however, the primary (though by no means exclusive) focus of the blog became local history stock and stories, all sourced from our Local and Family History department.

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That was where I came in, initially writing for the blog in July of 2014 – two articles in a row, one on the novels of Walter Scott and the other on Ernest Hemingway. Both were attempts to spread awareness of the amazing collection of classic but loanable books we had (and still have) in our Central Library stacks, managed at that time by our Information and Research department where I was then based. I continued contributing similar articles until 2016 when I began working in the Local and Family History department and switched to writing about local history stock and themes – with occasional forays back into the Information and Research stock. What stands out to me now, looking back, is the sheer thrill of being able to share my enthusiasm about our collections to a public audience – and, while I can’t speak for other authors, I like to think that passion is something we’ve maintained over the last ten years.

It’s certainly the case that, whatever we’ve written about, the Secret Library seems to have found an audience. In the first year we had around 3,300 visits to the blog; each subsequent year, however, has seen those visitor figures rocket: 5,873 in 2015; 9,622 in 2016; 15,748 in 2017; 16,611 in 2018; 19,982 in 2019; followed by a huge jump to 37,709 in 2020. That increase can, of course, be attributed to the pandemic and the various lockdowns through that year – but it’s pleasing to see that our visitor figures have continued to grow: 51,363 in 2021 (albeit probably still impacted by lockdown), a slight drop in 2022 to 49,354, followed by another leap to 58,593 in 2023 – our highest-ever number of visitors.

Viewing figures have followed a similar trajectory: 6,182 in 2014, increasing by over six times to 38,426 on the fifth anniversary in 2019. These numbers peaked in 2020-2022, perhaps unsurprisingly (the pandemic, once again), with 109, 451 views in 2021 being the highest – though we’re very pleased to be able to say that 2023 saw us almost topping the 2021 figure with a very-impressive 109, 293 views. So far in 2024 we’ve already had over 11,000 views in just one month – which puts us on course to beat the 2021 figure.

What have been our most read articles? Well, our average number of views per article is about 500, so most posts hover around that figure. But then we have our ‘super articles’ – those with over 1,000 views. And then we have our real stars, up in the rarefied air of over 5,000 views. And, beyond that, something truly special: those article/s with over 10,000 views. There aren’t in truth, many of the latter – leaving aside our Home Page (with over 100,00 views) and our dedicated Leodis page (over 20,000 views), we’ve only had one article (to date) with more than 10,000 views: Joanne Harrison’s piece on Back to Back Housing in Harehills.

That article, in fact, highlights one of the major developments of the Secret Library over the last ten years and one, I think, that speaks to the blog’s success: guest authors. Increasingly, over the years, since about 2016, we have given the blog over to people who have used our stock, resources and services in the course of their research, as a way of promoting both their work and our collections. The Secret Library has become, at least in part, a platform for people and organisations who wouldn’t otherwise have somewhere to publish their work, or who benefit from the specific audience base we have: we’ve had particular success featuring students, and early-years academics, and volunteers, both ours and those from other local heritage organisations. There’s much more to say on this, so keep reading over the next few weeks.

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Alongside the guest authors and the increased visibility that has given the blog, I think we’ve also benefited from expanding the website itself, so that it has become its own unique archive and not ‘simply’ a place to browse past articles. By that I am specifically talking about the menu tabs along the top of the site: I’m not now sure exactly when this began – sometime between 2016 and 2018 most likely – but that development has proved invaluable, allowing us to create permanent ‘pages’ on the blog that can be filled with either unique content not elsewhere featured in the weekly articles – our Collections and Treasures pages, for instance – or which can bring together links to articles on particular themes: short biographies of unheralded Leeds people, various heritage trails we’ve developed, archived exhibition content, articles about the history of Leeds Libraries, and our downloadable research and collection guides.

During the pandemic we expanded that menu tab offer to include a page dedicated to family history how-to articles – that page alone (not including the articles actually featured there) has had over 6,000 views. Most recently, we’ve connected the Secret Library to the newest version of our very popular Discovering Leeds website through another dedicated menu tab. All of this helps tie a decade’s worth of content together into one (more or less) coherent whole and, because of our ongoing focus on local history, has generated what is possibly (possibly) one of the three or four most useful websites for local history in Leeds (the others that spring to mind are the Thoresby Society website and the Secret Leeds forum – there are more though).

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Not everything on the blog has been as successful, of course – at least in terms of views and visitors. There are plenty of articles that haven’t even, to date, reached 164 views (the minimum needed for a post to appear in the statistics we can access behind the scenes). I’m not afraid to say that many of those are articles I’ve written – particularly some of those early ones looking at Information and Research stock. The conclusion there, then, would seem to be that our readers (and people who find the blog through general web searches) are most interested in local history themes. But, then again, what stands out for me is the randomness of what has and hasn’t got a wide readership – there are articles that you’d expect to have more readers that haven’t as yet, while others that wouldn’t seem naturals for popularity have recorded surprisingly (though well-deserved) high numbers.

But, in any case, perhaps looking through the prism of statistics isn’t always the best way to assess an article’s impact. Sometimes an article’s value doesn’t become clear until weeks, months, or even years later – when a researcher stumbles upon it, for instance, or the article takes on a life of its own and develops into something else. Take our 2021 Heritage Advent Calendar series – an article per day, each by a different member of staff, each looking at Christmas through a particular book or other Library resource – for instance: only 3 out of 24 articles in that series reached more than 164 viewers, but the research for the articles led us to develop a popular and very-well received group talk in December of 2022. (Delivered twice, in fact – once at the Central Library and again at the City Museum)

Similarly, some articles have made genuinely important contributions to research – their impact will be measured in years to come, as the lines of enquiry opened by that work percolate through scholarship. I’m thinking here of pieces we’ve published on themes such as LGBT+ history, the history of disability in Leeds, the stories of Black people in Leeds and Bradford before 1948, the hidden histories of the South-Asian community – there are others, no doubt, but in each case these are works that may not have found an audience yet, but which make a crucial intervention into the ‘standard’ history of Leeds, bringing marginalised communities and narratives back to the centre of the story.

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Researching even this short(!) article obligated me to refresh my memory of the many hundreds of articles we’ve published since 2014 – and I found to my pleasant surprise that I had genuinely forgotten some amazing pieces. I’d even forgotten some articles I’d written myself: ghostly tales of the Brontë family; the 1890 Leeds International Exhibition; a look at the longest book series in our stacks (the 40-volumes of the History of the Popes by Ludwig von Pasto, if you’re interested); and something on a first-edition of Claude-Adrien Helvetius’ De l’esprit.

Of the articles I can remember writing, a few stand out as the most enjoyable to research, or the most satisfying, the ones I learnt most from: a look at the Leeds of Herbert Read’s youth (particularly enjoyable as I didn’t know much about Read before beginning); a snapshot of the earliest images available on Leodis; a glimpse into the world of ironmonger A.R. Turner; and a deep dive into Michelin-starred restaurants in Leeds (pleasing as the research allowed me to update a Wikipedia article – not by any means the first time the Secret Library has been cited on the world’s encyclopaedia). And, while I’m not sure if ‘proud’ is the right word, I’m pleased I was able to get so many Star Wars references into an otherwise sincerely-researched and written article about 19^th-century temperance activist George Lucas. Other contributors and readers will, of course, have their own such list of most treasured articles – the point is that everyone who engages with the blog comes away hopefully knowing a little more about our collections.

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I’ve also, of course, rediscovered many articles authored by colleagues and guest writers. It’s almost impossible to pick out just one article from among the many hundreds, but I was particularly taken with Zoe Scott Fitzgibbon’s interview with the ‘vivacious’ Audrey Mann; partly, I think, because it was a piece that escaped my attention at the time of publication, but also because it strikes me now as exactly the sort of writing that sums up what the Secret Library is all about at its best: accessible, but not dumbed-down; bite-sized, but satisfying; genuinely illuminating research, but also a fun story; a strong connection to our collections but, most importantly of all, focusing on the people involved.

So, I think more than anything, this is a time to celebrate the people who have contributed to the Secret Library over the last ten years, sometimes more than once – all have made the blog what it is today (deep breath): Adam Barham, Phillip Wilde, Ross Horsley, Vickie Bennett, Sally Hughes, Gilly Margrave, Karen Downham, Tony Scaife, Rhian Isaac, Orla Kennelly, Maureen Jessop, Sophie Hedley, Russell Croft, Stu Hennigan, Polly Clare-Hudson, Ella Brown, Val Hewson, Nick Tasker, Louise Birch, Jonathan Wright and Natascha Allen-Smith, Pushpa Kumbhat, Josh Flint, Kiera Falgate, Joanne Harrison, Joan Ellis, Bill McKinnon, Helen Skilbeck, Mark Kirkby, Andrew McTominey, Helen Wood, Emily Owen, Louise Dwyer and Gill Crawshaw, Lisa Faulks, Will Poulter, Dirk Paagman, Mike Harwood, Chris Nickson, Jessica Heath, Haaris Mahmood, Peter Benson, Irfan Shah, Teresa Flavin, Phillippa Read, Nina Whitfield, Lauren Wells, Scott Ramsey, Tim Knight, Thomas Wooton, Kara McKechnie, Laura Ager, Francesca Roe, John Heywood, Nina Adamova, Jane Roberts, Miriam White, Kyle Thompson, John-Pierre Joyce, John Boocock, Amy Clayton and Lucy Slater, Tony Stead, Phillippa Plock, Mick Ward, Dominique Trigg, Robert Vernon, Rob Kilner, Matthew Bellwood, Charlotte Cullen, Robin Daji, Katie Johnson, Lucy Moore, Debbie Evans, Zoe Scott Fitzgibbon, Hannah Mitchell, Leanne Speight, Louise MacLeod, Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Hannah-Rose Murray, Clive McManus, Sophia Lambert, Catherine Ross, Jonathan Hooper, Emily Coulthard, Danny Friar, Lisa Brown and Flo Armitage-Hookes, Jude Ramm, Becky Bavill, Geoff Carter, Rebecca Illidge, Darius Battiwalla, Tony Harcup, Dave Bean, Agnes Leonowicz, Bryan Walters, Ruairí Lewis, Hannah Mackenzie, Festival of Gothica, Hannah Cullen, Janice Heppenstall, Geoffrey Mogridge, Dimple D’Cruz, Andy Armstrong, Jeanette B, Alexandra Brummitt, and Harry-Anne Bentley. (Apologies to anyone whose name is missing from this list – contact us and we can add you in!)

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The future of the blog, then, belongs to more names like those above – anyone, staff or library customers, who uses our Central Library, our resources, our stock, our books, our collections for their research or for personal interest, anyone who simply sees something Leeds Libraries-related and thinks I’ve just got to tell someone else about this.