ABSTRACT
Reg Carr retired as Bodley’s Librarian in 2006 and, as many senior professionals have done, he published a sort of apologia pro vita sua (Carr, 2007), reflecting on changes throughout his career. As a young graduate contemplating a career in librarianship in the late 1960s, he had a clear and predictable potential future mapped out: assistant librarians were aged in their early twenties, and this was the normal career grade: one became promotable to sublibrarian (a departmental head) from age 30 onwards, deputy librarian at 40 and, for highfliers, the university librarian aged 50 or so. Retirement age was often still 67, and although the universities had seen some expansion of student numbers in the 1960s, the role was largely unchanged from what it had been a century earlier. Technology did not exist in any meaningful way, with even photocopying being a novel, rather messy, and certainly expensive toy.
