Using the phone camera stand

 A couple of weeks ago I bought myself a 3D printed phone camera stand off of ebay.

At the time I said that the component fit was a little loose.

This means that the stand does not hold the phone at exactly 90° to the vertical, which leads to potential perspective distortion.

Using it to photograph small objects like coins this not a serious issue

any slight perspective distortion is hardly noticeable.

With larger objects such as postcards, it's a bit more of a problem

producing pictures where the top is a little wider than the bottom.

For practical purposes this does not matter, it's still perfectly legible for transcription purposes, but, aesthetically ...

Now I do a lot of my image transcription and manipulation on J's old imac, which runs Ubuntu, so any solution would have to be Linux based.

Googling mentioned perspec as an automatic utility, or as an alternative Darktable which is interactive, in that you manually select the image, run an automated perspective analysis tool, and then, if you like the result, bascially click on 'fix this please'.

After a little bit of trial and error I managed to produce this fixed image

which, I think you'll agree, is a bit better as regards perspective.

Quietly pleased, and certainly something I'll use again when preparing images for use in presentations and so on...

Hygenic Libraries in the 1950s

 I'd been assuming that hygenic libraries were a feature of the years between the first and second world wars, especially after the 1919 flu pandemic and subsequent repeat outbreaks, as well as several severe outbreaks of polio in Melbourne in the 1930s.

While it's true that the arrival of antibiotics after the second world war got rid of a whole range of bacterial diseases such as tuberculosis,  almost overnight, that was not the case with viral diseases such as polio - there was no effective vaccine until the mid 1950s, and treatment was still pretty basic.

So, it's probably no great surprise that commercial hygenic libraries persisted into the 1950s as seen in this library sticker inside a Mills and Boon romance published in 1952.

Perhaps, not such a surprise - I remember as a child in Scotland in the early 1960s (well before vaccination for measles, rubella and mumps) that library books from the city library came with a stern warning that in the event of an outbreak of disease in the household they should be returned not to the library but to the town medical officer for sterlisation. 

I even have a vague memory of going to the old mansion in Randolphfield (long gone, and now replaced by the police headquarters building) used as offices by the Chief Medical Officer with my mother to return books for sterilisation after a bout of chickenpox when I was seven or eight, which would make it 1963 or 64...

Cuts, cuts, cuts !

 It's that time of year when councils and state governments start to think about saving money, and inevitably they look at their GLAM services (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums), and wonder if they can make some cost savings

which these days that usually means letting people go, which inevitably means a loss of expertise locally, and you can't just replace that expertise with a succession of interns.

Sure, they may be good technically, and some are very good, but they don't have the experience or indeed the social network that your now down sized archivist or conservator has built up over the years.

And when you complain you inevitably get comments along the lines of 'you can get it all on YouTube nowadays' or 'who needs libraries, Amazon provides a better service', comments that reveal complete ignorance on the part of our local legislators of what the GLAM services deliver.

I've worked in universities, I've worked in cultural institutions, and for ten years after I retired I volunteered with the National Trust on a collections documentation project, and now, because I like messing about with old documents, artefacts and computers, I'm cataloguing the historic book collection at Stanley Athenaeum, as well as the usual bits and pieces - first level IT support mostly - on the side.

The Athenaeum functions as a family history resource for the area and we get visitors from across Australia and New Zealand trying to trace how their forebears ended up where they did.

We're all volunteers. Quite a few of us won't see seventy again.

And inevitably, as we all get older, some of us will give up due to ill health, or just getting too old to do it any more - we have a continual struggle to attract and retain committed volunteers.

Some of us know about local and family history, and can coax valuable information out of  both Ancestry and the Public Records office with ease, some of us have a some sort of a heritage cum museum background and bring those skill to the table, and some of us are just interested. We're all experts in our own way, but we'd all admit that we have gaps in our skills and our knowledge.

And this is where having access to a funded resource like our local museums is invaluable, often to simply talk to one of the professional archivists or conservators.

Yes, it's true sometimes I use YouTube to find out how best to do something, but then we all do that, these days - even my GP does it, like when she says in the midst of a consultation "I'm not sure, I'll just check Google".

And as heritage services become more and more attenuated, and increasingly shift to a volunteer based model, local professional core institutions become more and more valuable for the support role they provide as a local centre of expertise and the specialist facilities they can provide, and indeed for providing continuity, given the inevitable churn among the volunteer community (and the loss of skills that goes with the churn).

And that's something you can't just get from a YouTube video...

A phone camera stand...

 Documenting small artefacts like coins at home is a pain.

They're small, they're fiddly and they need to be photographed at a fairly high resolution.

Often the best camera to hand is your phone, and holding it steady to get a straight down shot is tricky.

So, when an advert for a phone camera stand like this popped into my facebook feed, I was interested so I went digging and found the same items for sale a little cheaper on ebay

Well, it was only just over twenty bucks, so I thought I'd give it a go.

It arrived as a set of plastic bits (I'm guessing 3D printed) with no instructions

but assembly was fairly intuitive

and with my phone in place the end result looks like this

Assembled, it's a little wobbly - the fit of the components is not particularly tight, but the image quality produced is more than reasonable at a 320% zoom on my phone as in this image of a 1928 Irish Free State penny. (Incidentally, the phone used is nothing special, a mid range Android phone, an Oppo Reno 4 bought as a runout model in 2023. I'm guessing just about any standard form factor phone will work with the stand.)

For what it cost, I think I've got myself a bargain.

Obviously I could glue the bits together to make a more rigid structure, but I've decided to keep them as is for the moment, as that will make the item more easily transportable in one of my gear boxes for onsite documentation ...

Well it's Friday, so it's cataloguing time

 After last week's hiatus, it was back to normal with my Friday cataloguing session up at the Athenaeum.

No real finds this week but a couple of little items that connected with other things I've written about recently.

In the end papers of a copy of Dan the Dollar by Shan Bullock, and published in the early 1900's by Maunsell's in Dublin, there's an advert for a literary magazine, edited by W.B. Yeats, which uses Irish script for items written in Irish. 

I've written elsewhere about how, before 1916, Irish intellectuals self consciously used Irish script to construct an Irish identity separate from the prevailing Anglo Irish identity. It's interesting to see it used in print as early as 1905 as well as in handwritten communications such as postcards.

The other interesting item was a bookseller's label fro Stephen's in Melbourne on an 1866 book by Elihu Burritt describing a walk from London to John O'Groats in the far north of Scotland.

As the accession registers are missing we have no idea when and from where the Athenaeum acquired the book but I'll wave my hands about and guess some time between 1866 and 1876.

What's interesting is that the sticker says 'New Books, Magazines and Newspapers received by every mail steamer'.

This of course meant books and magazines imported from England, as well as newspapers, and suggests that Stephens had a regular order for English newspapers and magazines, as well as for new books.

While it's not quite the same Orwell, in Burmese Days, his novel based on his experiences in colonial Burma in the 1920s, talks of going to an English language bookshop in Rangoon to look at the latest books from England. So too it must have been in Melbourne in the 1860s and 70s before books began to be printed locally.

Before Australia was connected by telegraph in the 1870s to the rest of the planet, newpapers brought by mail steamers were the principal source of overseas news (There's the probably apocryphal story of a wealthy member of the squatocracy who had a copy of that day's Times of London posted to him every day, and when they arrived in batches via the mail steamer, stacked them in order and read them one at a time with breakfast.)

What it also shows is the importance of the mail reaching the mail steamer in time, and hence the use by the postal service of a 'Too Late' postmark when the mail missed the boat (literally)...

Leaving Evernote

 I've been an Evernote user since 2011, however the latest round of price increases have finally persuaded me to bite the bullet and close my account. This isn't because it's a bad product, it's simply that I'm paying a lot for features that are of no use to me - as it has added AI based features and group working tools it has moved a long way away from what was simply a very good records management solution.

Closing my account of means moving my content out of Evernote and to somewhere or something else.

I'm going to tell you how I did it - I was not particularly clever in the way I approached it, but then the simplest approaches are often the best.

It's important to understand how I used Evernote to understand why my approach worked for me.

I used Evernote as a standard records management system - basically a database which allows you to search and index content and stores your content in an object store of some sort.

What I didn't use was the group working and clever new AI based tools it now comes with.

When I first started with Evernote back in 2011 it was good, really good. So good that I used my own hard earned cash to buy a subscription to the product.

The fact it was multi platform was great - it meant you could go to a meeting, whip out an iPad and pull up the relevant document in a few clicks.

Nowadays, as opposed to the situation in 2011, there are a number of products out there that can happily function as a basic records management solution - Standard Notes, OneNote and even the open source Notable.app will do this - I'm sure there are others. 

But of course, I'm retired, so why do I need a records management solution?

Well, the world's gone digital. Invoices come as emailed pdf's, as do utility bills, various legal documents and so on, so in the same way as once you would have had a drawer of household files, now you need somehwere where you can find a copy of your house or car insurance, or a copy of a utilty bill.

Like everyone else on the planet I was never very good at clearing out the old material, so a certain amount of cruft had built up, so the first thing I did was go through all my evernote notebooks and reduce them to a manageable size - this got rid of about 75% of my Evernote content.

But how to migrate it, and what to migrate it to?

Pragmatically, the answer was Microsoft's OneNote - I already had quite a lot of work related material from my work with the National Trust in OneNote, so I knew it could do the job, I had plenty of storage free, and more importantly there was a freely available migration tool that allowed you to import an .enex format Evernote notebook export file into OneNote.

So having pruned my content, I exported each of my Evernote notebooks as an .enex file, then ran the conversion tool.

Also, as I'm a paranoid bugger, I've saved all my .enex exports to a directory on OneDrive, just in case I need to go back to them. Remarkably it's only about half a gigabyte of data, so it doesn't add much to my overall storage usage.

Randomly opening some note in the imported notebooks suggests everything's there. I perhaps need to do a little bit of renaming and tidying and a bit more checking, but basically I seem to have got everything out of Evernote that I wanted to.

Then all that remains is the matter of cancelling your subscription.

You need to be strong, as they will make a number of counter offers - in my case a 45% discount on the renewal cost - and I must admit to being tempted - but just keep clicking cancel. You never quite escape, they leave you with a free subscription just in case you have a change of heart.

Then it's simply a matter of uninstalling the clients from the various computers I use, in my case the laptop on my desk, the machine I use for cataloguing and the laptop I take travelling, plus an ipad and an android tablet, and my phone.

Most of the others - basically Windows 10 machines that I havn't quite decided what to do with can wait, and as Evernote never did do a Linux client that's not an issue to worry about.

Another day's cataloguing

 Glorious blue sky but absolutely freezing this morning up at the Athenaeum with ice in the outside toilet washbasin until noon.

However, this time I had the sense to wear a pair of wool socks, coupled with a merino t-shirt under my jumper, so I stayed warm, even if I perhaps looked a bit like the Michelin man.

As an experiment we've replaced the classic cardboard tent moth traps with dome traps, with the idea that the contents will be less likely to leak and damage the books or artefacts if they get forgotten about or if the liquid starts to flow more than expected over a run of hot summer days

Cataloguing itself was fairly straightforward with the usual mix of late nineteenth century sensation novels that have been long forgotten such as this 1874 potboiler, still with Mudie's labels on the cover

and the usual mix of cirme and mystery novels from the 1930s and 40s. It's noticable how poor the quality of the paper is in the nineteen thirties, and especially the nineteen forties novels, compared with that of sensation novels from the 1870s and 1880s.

I'm ascribing this to printers still using either rag paper or paper made from mixture of rag and woodchip pulp in the nineteenth century, but by the 1930s they were using woodchip almost exclusively.

The nineteen forties books are particularly bad - something that I put down to war time economy measures and a mix of recycled paper and virgin pulp, producing paper that after eighty years is distinctly yellow and brittle, and will almost certainly be a conservation challenge down the track...