Eve Lacey

MA (Cantab), MA (UCL), MCLIP

College roles

Fellow (D), Librarian, Skilliter Centre Librarian

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). Before joining Newnham Library in 2014 as a Graduate Trainee, she worked for the Social and Political Sciences Library and Cambridgeshire County Council library service, and she continues to deliver books to housebound readers through the Library@Home scheme. She studied English at the University of Cambridge and Library & 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, classification, and accessibility. 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 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).

She is also a member of CILIP’s Library and Information History Group. Eve won the Persephone Essay Prize for her work on Newnham’s special collection of books from the Persephone Press (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).

In her role as Librarian of the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies, Eve has written about and presented on the digitised Eckstein Albums, coordinated Ottomans Online seminars and the Gems on Shelves series, and contributed translations of Turkish entries to the Encyclopaedia of Islam Three. She is interested in Turkish library history (“The role of Halkevi libraries in the early Turkish Republic”, Library & Information History 39.2 (2023): 92–109 won the 2024 Donald G. Davis Article Award) and is currently researching the relationship between the British Council and the Londra Türk Halkevi in the 1940s.