Eve Lacey
MA (Cantab), MA (UCL), MCLIP
Fellow (D), Librarian, Skilliter Centre Librarian
College Roles
- Fellow (D)
- Librarian
- Skilliter Centre Librarian
Contact
Telephone: 01223 335739
Email: librarian@newn.cam.ac.uk
Biography
Eve Lacey is Librarian of Newnham College Library and the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies. She is a Chartered Member of CILIP (the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals). She joined Newnham Library in 2014 as graduate trainee, and previously worked for the Social and Political Sciences Library and Cambridgeshire County Council library service, where she particularly enjoyed running the Summer Reading Challenge at Great Shelford public library. She continues to deliver books to housebound readers through their Library@Home scheme. She studied English at the University of Cambridge and Library and Information Studies at University College London, where she was awarded the Mary Piggot Prize for cataloguing and classification, the Sir John Macalister Medal for the most distinguished candidate on the MA, and the CILIP Student Prize for exceptional achievement in the field.
Research Interests
Eve is interested in reader services, library history, and classification. She acts as a college representative on the University Library’s Education programme and participates in their Support and Enquiry group, which looks at inductions, inter-library loans, and ways to make libraries more accessible, including tackling threshold anxiety and awarding gaps.
She is also a member of CILIP’s Library and Information History Group, taking an active interest in Newnham Library’s early history and, in her role as Skilliter Librarian, in the history of Turkish libraries (“The role of Halkevi libraries in the early Turkish Republic”, Library & Information History 39.2 (2023): 92–109). Eve won the Persephone Essay Prize for her work on Newnham’s special collection of books from the Persephone Press (later published in Katherine Mansfield and Psychology, ed. Clare Hanson and Gerri Kimber; Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and, with Debbie Hodder, she contributed a chapter on Newnham Library’s early years to Walking on the Grass, Dancing in the Corridors: Newnham at 150 (ed. Gill Sutherland and Kate Williams; Profile Editions, 2021).
Eve has worked with colleagues across the University to address the way subjects are described in our catalogues (inspired by her dissertation, “Aliens in the library: the classification of migration”, Knowledge Organization 45.5 (2018): 358-79). In 2021, she delivered the Jack Mills lecture on classification and co-authored a chapter on “Cataloguing, classification, and critical librarianship at Cambridge University”, in Narrative Expansions: Interpreting Decolonisation in Academic Libraries (ed. Jess Crilly and Regina Everitt; Facet Publishing, 2021).