AGM and Dinner: Speaker Helen Shenton

Helen Shenton was the first female Library director in Trinity College's 433-year history, when in May 2014, she took on the job of leading the Library.

Before she took up the role as librarian and archivist at Trinity, she was Executive Director of Harvard Library. This role saw her bring together seventy-three individual libraries in areas such as digitisation, accessibility, collection and content development, and records management. Prior to this, she worked at the British Library and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

In 2020, she announced that after public consultation the Library would be commissioning four new sculptures of Rosalind Franklin, Augusta Gregory, Ada Lovelace and Mary Wollstonecraft. These were the first new sculptures for over 100 years. Although the Library has 40 sculptures, they are all of men. The organisers had agreed that the four new sculptures would be restricted to that of notable dead women.

In 2022, the Library began relocating some of its most valuable books. The building where they are located, known as the Long Room, is to be renovated at an estimated cost of €90m. 750,000 books will be moved with some of them needing a centimetre of dust to be removed while others are extremely delicate. The complexity of the task is such that two years has been devoted to planning. Some of the books are valuable artefacts which includes the Book of Kells which dates from the ninth century.