Julian Roberts

Richard Julian Roberts FSA (18 May 1930 – 20 October 2010) was a British librarian, bibliographer, and scholar.

Roberts was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he started reading Classics, but switched to English in his first year.

In the early 1950s, Roberts began his career at Lambeth Palace Library in London. In 1958, he was appointed as an Assistant Keeper at the British Museum, where the collections which were later to form the British Library were then located. In 1961, he became joint secretary of the Bibliographical Society with Sir Frank Francis, a post he held for 20 years.

In 1974, Roberts returned to Oxford to become Keeper of Printed Books in the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford. He was elected a Fellow of Wolfson College in association with his post, and became the college's Vice-gerent (deputy head of the college) during 1983–84. At the Bodleian Library, Roberts oversaw the introduction of computerised cataloguing and the acquisition of important collections such as the Dunston Collection in 1981, the Marlborough Vicars Library in 1985, and the Opie Collection of Children's Literature in 1988. In 1983, he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in London. On the premature death of John Jolliffe (Bodley's Librarian) in 1985, he became Acting Librarian and then Deputy Librarian, a post that he held until his retirement in 1997.

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