It's storage, stupid!

 Recently there's been some posts here and there about abandoning Big Tech (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc) and going it alone.

Partly driven by distaste for Big Tech, and partly out of concerns about digital sovereignty, and it's usually accompanied by a lot of handwringing about what alternatives to choose.

Well, I've been there. Inadvertently, but I've been there.

In the nineties I managed a PC desktop service for a university in England.

This included both student computer labs and (some) staff and admin desktops.

Budgets were tight, computers were relatively expensive, so we had a cost containment exercise. One of the constraints was the cost of software licences from Microsoft. To provide an office suite solely using Microsoft products would put a hole in the budget.

So we didn't.

We went out and bought a whole lot of alternative products with considerably lower licensing costs.

What eventually helped kill off our strategy was that the file formats we were using were incompatible with those used by the rest of the planet - it's no use writing documents in WordPerfect if you need to exchange them with colleagues elsewhere who use Word.

So, the first lesson is that whatever software suites you choose as your standards, they've got to seamlessly interwork with the default formats, which these days means Microsoft Office.

It probably doesn't matter what you choose, as long as it's well supported and unlikely to disappear. If it was me I'd start with Libre Office and make regular donations to keep the project funded, after all I wouldn't be paying for all these Office licences.

The other thing that helped kill using a Microsoft-lite desktop was the rise of the laptop.

We had a pretty good storage solution in place using large NAS servers, and once people had authenticated their managed desktop connected to their storage, which was backed up and managed for them.

However, storage was rationed as the hardware to provide a robust solution was expensive and providing a suitable backup service even more so.

Networking wasn't universal these days, so what usually happened is that people with laptops, which of course were used in a variety of locations between home, work and the cafe down the road, would keep their files locally on their machine, and if you were lucky they would back them up to some managed central storage now and again.

And then Microsoft started bundling Skydrive, now OneDrive, with office, and suddenly laptop users found they didn't need central provision anymore.

So, when companies like Microsoft, Google and the rest offered to provide storage and backup (as well as email) for a competitive cost, universities and large corporates jumped at it - it was cheaper and we didn't need so many of these pesky IT people.

And that has given us the world we have today.

And let's face it, it works reasonably well. 

I've used OneDrive extensively for cataloguing and documentation exercises and to share the data with the project sponsors.

I've also used OneDrive to exchange documents between Linux and Windows machines in a work situation - yes Linux is fiddly and not for everyone, but it can be done.

Equally, you can use a lightweight distraction free machine for offline research and documentation and then upload your work at the end of the day, or if that's not possible, save a copy to a USB stick as  a backup.

But the thing we always come back to is storage. 

We are assuming in all our designs reasonably pervasive internet and access to storage. And yes, we can use non Microsoft office suites as an alternative, and these days, if you choose the right distro, changing from Windows to Linux is no more complex than changing from Windows to a Mac.

The elephant in the room is storage provision. Most organisations have outsourced storage (and its accompanying services like backup and consistency checking) to Big Tech for entirely sensible reasons.

If you truly want to free yourself from being dependent on Big Tech for reasons of digital sovereignty, you need to provide an alternative storage infrastructure at scale. And that is neither cheap, nor easy...

Palmerston railway station

I was looking at the 1891 Australian Handbook, and came across this little snippet in the entry for Beechworth

 All fairly clear, except for one tiny problem, I had no idea where Palmerston was. (Except it most definitely was not the one in NZ!)

Wikipedia's quite good on closed railway stations in Victoria, but it's not perfect - there's no entry for Palmerston.

Stations did sometimes change their names so I did a human eyeball check on the map of Victorian railway lines in 1890, and there it was

the last station before Myrtleford on the Bright line. The railway had reached Myrtleford in 1883, but didn't reach Bright until 1890.

My guess is that the coach from Beechworth to Palmerston was intended to allow people to catch the train on to Bright and vice versa, and even today the V/line bus to Beechworth continues on to Bright to provide a connection between the rail line at Wangaratta and the Alpine towns.

The only problem is, there's no such place as Palmerston today. Obviously the name must have been changed at some point.

Well, the 1930 rail map shows the station is now called Gapstead

Unfortunately, the one railway station Wikipedia's article on the Bright railway line does not have a link to, is, you guessed it, Gapstead.

However VicSig does have a comprehensive page on the former railway station at Gapstead, and shows that it changed from being Palmerston station to Gapstead station on 20 November 1922.

Unfortunately, a search of Trove's digitised newspapers from 1922 does not turn up anything about the name change, or why it took place, so I'm none the wiser as to the reasons for the change.

I also spent an unsuccessful morning online searching for old maps of the area to try and work out the location of the station.

The 1916 army maps of Victoria don't cover the Ovens valley, and there doesn't seem to be any topographic maps of the area when the railway was operating online.

Google maps satellite view doesn't help much either - while the track of the rail trail that follows the the old railway line is clear, there's no obvious feature that marks where the station was.

That's not particularly surprising - when I rode my bike to Baarmutha a few years ago, there was almost nothing left of the halt, basically just a mound where the platform had been and a few bricks.

Probably, the best solution is to go and have a walk along the rail trail one afternoon...

Stanley in the 1891 Australian handbook

 

Interesting find, an entry in the Australian Handbook of 1891 that mentions the Athenaeum and its library.

Given that I'm in the middle of cataloguing the library, and the last spreadsheet we have lists 3200 volumes, including Victorian triple deckers, each volume of which has its own entry (yes, well), it suggests that there must have been some degree of churn in the collection, albeit rather less than would be expected...

An old surface ...

 

Over Christmas, Microsoft had a special offer on the snapdragon based Surface Pro, and I took advantage of the offer to buy J one.

While I didn't like the install procedure, I was impressed with the lightness and power of the device, so much so that a few days ago I bought myself a refurbished Windows 10 based model.

It wasn't that expensive - a tad over two hundred bucks with shipping, power supply and keyboard included. The screen is good and bright and the keyboard looks hardly used. The case is scuff free and unless you looked closely the machine would pass for new.

I would guess that being as it's the turn of the year a lot of corporates and government bodies are rolling over their machines to newer ARM based devices, and its comparative cheapness comes from it being stuck on Windows 10 until it goes to the big network in the sky.

It has a number of advantages for me over the newer models, intel, not ARM based, meaning I can install my standard Windows tools, as well as use VirtualBox to make a virtual Linux machine should I need some Linux in my life (in theory, you can install Linux as a replacement operating system but the procedure's a bit finger-in-the-ear, more so than installing Linux on an old Chromebook, so I'll go with VirtualBox for the moment).

But the main draw is the form factor - it's light, and even though the battery is a little tired, battery life is still good enough for four or five hours.

With a USB A and a USB C port I have the external connectivity I need for archiving work, and of course it connects to OneDrive.

As you know, I've spent a lot of time trying to put together a highly portable little machine for research and cataloguing, and while I've come close, every iteration has either been too heavy or had poor battery life, both of which are a pain if you are planning on carrying it about in the course of a working day.

This time I might just have hit the sweet spot...

Hygenic libraries (again)

 I've written before about Hygenic Libraries.

Today's cataloguing exercise up at the Athenaeum brought to light another hygenic library label

this time from a library in St Kilda.

Again, there's no real information on what the procedure used was, but a little digging suggests that the books were either wiped down with formaldehyde solution, or, for a slightly more sophisticated treatment (and one less risky to the library staff) fumigated by being placed in a  chamber with formaldehyde vapour, perhaps like this 1930's example of a fumigation cabinet

Libraries and archives centres still carry out periodic fumigation to control silverfish and and the like - for example, when I worked at ANU, I had an office on the top floor of the Menzies library, and every Christmas shutdown they warned us that the building was closed as they were fumigating the books...

In the 1920s and 1930s, in the wake of the flu pandemic, and other local epidemics, such as the polio outbreak in Melbourne in the late 1920s, there were serious concerns that diseases might be spread by library books, and as I've written elsewhere, public libraries were still sterilising books as late as the 1960s if the borrower had come down with a notifiable infectious disease,

The advent of antibiotics, widespread vaccination and generally better public health meant  that by the late 1960s,  books in public libraries were no longer normally sterilised between loans, although during the recent Covid pandemic libraries that kept lending books did sometimes use UV sterilisation boxes.

Formalin is a pretty powerful sterilisation agent and was used extensively in hospitals and is still sometimes used in laboratory situations, but is not usually used on museum specimens. to sterilse them or get rid of insect infestation.

A shoestring circulating library

 Well, after the Christmas and New Year break, it was back to cataloguing the Athenaeum's historic book collection. I'd managed to complete shelves A4 and A5 before the seasonal break, so today I made a start on A3. (A1 and A2 need a ladder, which has health and safety implications, principally that there's someone else there to call triple zero in case I miss my step and fall off the damned thing.)

Before Christmas I'd accumulated enough evidence to show that the people running the library in the latter part of the nineteenth century were buying second hand books discarded by Mullen's circulating library in Melbourne, or imported second had books from England.

Not all books were bought second hand but quite a few of them have been, including this copy of JM Barrie's A Window in Thrums, dating to 1890.

Initially it didn't look to be terribly promising with a circulating library label on the front of the book.

The label was in poor condition and only just legible

but if you stare at it you can make out the words Horsham and Mechanics Institute. At this point I was envisaging the fun I had tracing the circulating library in Ryde, but they had made it easy for me, with a second copy of the label on the inside fly leaf

showing it came from the Horsham Mechanics's Institute - that's Horsham Victoria, not the one in England. 

There was a mechanics institute in the English Horsham but it seems to have closed down in the 1860s. Given that the book in question was published in 1890, I feel confident in saying it is from the Horsham in the western district of Victoria.

We have a partial provenance in the form or two handwritten notes on the flyleaf, one to say it was acquired for 6/- on 02/01/1891 and a second note in a different hand saying it was acquired on 13/12/1901, presumably by the Athenaeum.

In contrast to the Athenaeum, which was clearly run on the smell of an oily rag the Mechanics Institute in Horsham was a well funded organisation which regularly purchased new books as in this article in the Horsham Times of 28 June 1912.

(Horsham Mechanics Institute Building in 2008 - wikimedia commons)

The Mechanics Institute later transitioned to become Horsham's public library. The old Mechanic's Institute building is no longer the town library, but is now home to the Horsham Historical Society.

I had a look on StreetView and the building still looked much the same in 2024, rather unglamorously located next to a Bunning's carpark ...

I guess the only remaining question is why gentlemen were charged a quarterly subscription of three shillings but ladies were charged 2/6. Was it, given the attitudes of the time, because men were expected to use it for serious study, while women only used it to read romances and sensation novels ...?

The circulating library in Ryde

 That's Ryde, IoW, in England, not the suburb of Sydney.

I'd previously mentioned that while cataloguing a Victorian triple decker up at the Athenaeum, one volume had come from Mudie's, one from a Mudie's franchisee in Weymouth and one from a circulating library in Union Street Ryde.

Identifying the library has been tricky, but a discussion with Ann Barrett of the Ryde Historical Society has confirmed that the most likely source is either the long established circulating library at the Assembly rooms in Ryde, or another more commercial enterprise run initially by the Misses Gibbs.

Crucially, neither of them seem to have been Mudie's franchisees, suggesting that they were buying second hand books from Mudie's and perhaps elsewhere, and then selling them on for export to Australia ...