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...

Juvenal or Juvenile

 The last week or so, my bedtime reading has been Lindsey Davis's 'Murder in Purple and Gold' which takes place against the background of the Roman Floralia festival.

I must confess to a weakness for Lindsey Davis's Roman mysteries, and despite being complete fantasy, they are impeccably researched and the background is accurate.

Now, despite my deep fascination with Roman history, I didn't know much about Floralia. 

This isn't unusual, there's not that much known other than the festival is said to have been implemented around 238BCE during the early, not quite mythical, period of the republic and was in response to a series of very wet cold springs.

In an agrarian society, dependent on what they could grow locally, which was the case in the early republic, a series of wet cold springs when the crops didn't start to grow properly meant hunger, and possibly starvation. It's possible that this was due to volcanic activity, but no one really knows.

Anyway Floralia started as a festival of fertility and new growth. What form it took at the beginning  is not known, or even whether there had been some earlier agrarian festivals that were formalised into Floralia.

Fast forward to the end of the first century CE.

Floralia was still going strong. Unlike many Roman religious festivals it was light on austere ceremony and had evolved into a raunchy raucous celebration of life including naked acrobats of both sexes, nude dancing  and naked prostitutes dressed up as gladiators (basically minimal pretend armour and not a lot else) engaging in mock gladiator fights.

Well that's what we think anyway. Actual written sources are fairly sparse. There's a reference to Cato going into a tent where a naked comedy was being performed, and walking out in disgust, some prim later writers expressing po-faced disapproval, and the satirist Juvenal, who provides some fairly ambiguous descriptions of what went on in satire#6.

Basically, it seems to be the case that everyone knew what went on, the Roman fun police disapproved, and not many people wrote about it, or if they did, what they wrote didn't survive.

And this is my cautionary tale.

Being a geek, I thought I'd see what various historians had written about Juvenal's descriptions of Floralia and the associated events by searching for

'juvenal naked dancers floralia'

which while it might not be the sort of thing you would do at work, is eminently justifiable as a search.

Unfortunately Google didn't think so, decided I couldn't spell juvenile, and cautioned me about searching for abusive material.

Perhaps I should have capitalised juvenal, or omitted his name entirely from the search string, but there you go, what's done is done.

Incidentally, this isn't the first time I've had problems with the word juvenile. 

While documenting the contents of Lake View, I came across a number of children's books produced by a company called Juvenile Productions in the 1930s that seems to have little or no trace of itself. Most of the books are reprints of earlier children's stories, and had titles that included words like 'fairy'.

At the time of publication there was probably no hint of nastiness linked to the title, but now, we live in a different world...

Moth traps - a cautionary tale

 Well, we had a near miss up at the Athenaeum today.

Like a lot of similar bodies we use sticky moth traps a bit like the ones below to minimise the risks of insect damage 

all good.

Good practice is that you put the moth traps in the display cabinets, date them, check them in a month or so, and either replace them or remove them as not required.

These traps work by having a layer of glue on the base of the triangle and the idea is that the insect or other nasty gets caught in the glue.

And now for the cautionary part of the story.

I was cataloguing some nineteenth century novels this morning and found a moth trap that had been placed on top of the novels in the display case.

The books had been wrapped in mylar bags (a bit like kitchen ziplocs) as they were in poor condition, with broken spines, insect damage and the like.

The insect traps had been dated to late 2019/early 2020 and had not been removed or replaced, and the glue, which is thixotropic, had flowed off the trap and on to the mylar bags.

Fortunately no damage had been done to the books and it was simply a matter of removing the moth trap and then replacing the sticky bags with new ones.

The dates are significant, just before the pandemic when everything was locked down, and importantly, a lot of voluntary organisations saw a significant turn over, with people simply not coming back after the lockdowns were over, and other people taking their place.

This of course meant that any handover of duties was patchy at best, and some things simply got missed.

The solution is simple, a search and destroy mission for any other outdated moth traps, as well as checking for damage, and putting in place a task calendar to ensure that the traps are checked regularly in the future.

And why am I airing our dirty linen in public like this?

Well, we're not the only volunteer run organisation in the world, and I'm sure other organisations must have had a breakdown in procedure like we did.

And I'd like to emphasise that no one did the wrong thing, it's just that in a period of churn things get lost. In this case we got away with it, another time we might not be so lucky...

it's been a Wilkie Collins sort of a day...

As usual, I had my morning cataloguing up at the Athenaeum, and this morning it was Wilkie Collins, one of my favourite nineteenth century authors.

Strangely, unless it's been misclassified and I'm yet to find it, we don't appear to have a copy of The Woman in White, which is perhaps his best known novel today.

This isn't terribly unusual - the Woman in White was incredibly popular when it first appeared, and it's possible that the book simply wore out and was not replaced. As I've said before the accession registers and other paperwork relating to the early days of the Athenaeum's library have disappeared

The Woman in White made Wilkie Collin's reputation, even inspiring a cartoon by his friend John Leech depicting a housholder, engrossed in his novel being ordered to come to bed by his wife.

What we do have is a second edition of the Moonstone, unfortunately volume three is missing

which was clearly sourced second hand from Mullen's as the books have remnant Mullen's circulating library labels, 

a copy of Poor Miss Finch that dates from 1872 that was probably bought new by the Athenaeum, copies of his early novels Antonina and Basil that have been professionally rebound, suggesting that they were reasonably popular and even a yellowback edition of Miss or Mrs from the end of the nineteenth century suggesting Wilkie Collins remained popular throughout his lifetime and beyond

Other than that, it was the usual mix of late Victorian and Edwardian adventure novels, interwar mysteries and 1950s romance novels...

Bottles documented (and a few books)

 Well after last week's unplanned cancellation, it was back to cataloguing the bottles as promised, as well as a few more books in the historic book collection

the job itself was fairly straightforward, and as I'd carefully packed up a box with my little Linux documentation laptop, some weights to hold the background down, right angled rulers etc it seemed to be really quick - actually it took me about an hour due to being out of practice in assembling a documentation package, but I got there.

I'm happy that the procedure, derived from my work with both Lake View and Dow's is robust. My only real worry is the use of excel format for the spreadsheet - its use is only part of my procedure because originally the National Trust had a workflow where they converted the excel spreadsheets automagically to  csv for ingest to their archive management system.

It could be argued that instead of xlsx I should have used ods, or indeed generated a csv format file to ensure the long term accessibility of the data.

In this case I don't think it matters over much, but just for fun I added an ods and csv subdirectory with the supplementary spreadsheets

and replaced the manifest.txt file with an updated version to reflect this change.

Other than that it was simply a case of yet more documentation of the historic book collection.

No spectacular finds, just mid century romance and mystery novels, which perhaps reflects a post war desire for a touch of colour and escapism, but I did find one book that had previously belonged to a circulating library in Melbourne operated by Myer's ...