Parsimonious documentation

 Today, down at Lake View, I've been documenting the contents of a large nineteenth century display cupboard which has been dressed with a selection of plausible looking willow pattern dishes and some big heavy nineteenth century religious texts, plus the collected works of Sir Walter Scott.

Even though these books are props with no real connection to the house, one doesn't want to damage them by opening them and stressing the spine to photograph the title page.

The standard solution would be to use a book pillow. These usually are made of Tyvek or something similar with an inert filling and are quite pricy at around $75-80.

I don't happen to have one, don't particularly want to buy one, and anyway it would would take too long to come in the post, especially as we are getting close to Christmas.

I needed an alternative solution.

Given that the books are not intrinsically valuable, all I needed was something with a washable cover that I could stack to make a support.

And I hit on a solution - a box of kid's beanbags from K-Mart

for a little under $7.

Just the right size to stack to support a book cover

and because they are designed for little kids to play with, they have washable covers, very useful in case an old book sheds something, and if they get really mucky, cheap enough to throw away...

 

Of prayer books and penises

 As I mentioned elsewhere, one of our tasks at the Athenaeum is to decide what to do with a pile of tatty, mouldy, broken spined bibles and prayer books we have inherited from various local deconsecrated churches.

The books themselves are in a sorry state, some have lost one or other of their covers, some have pages missing and some have evidence of white mould.

They're not unique, and they are are not even very valuable as objects, however, in a family history context they can be valuable as they have the names of an owner and possibly even a date inside, which gives an anchor point to say that the owner was in the Stanley area at such and such a date.

Others have more indirect clues - one, undated, has a drawing of the Athenaeum wall clock, and we know that the Athenaeum was used for Sunday schools in the 1860s, and another, a drawing of a famous prize fight, and others, quite good caricatures of what I assume were members of the congregation of the time, and yes, I did open one book to be greeted by a drawing of a penis, showing that not much has changed in the intervening 150 years.

But what to do with the books?

Many are in such a poor state it would be difficult to justify the cost of conservation, and nineteenth century prayer books are hardly unique.

So our strategy is to photograph and record the names, the scribbles, and the caricatures and where they were found, and only to conserve the books which are particularly rich in graffiti and caricatures, as well as retaining some of the prayer books and bibles in better condition for use as props to illustrate aspects of nineteenth century life.

The rest will simply be disposed of, although we have had a left field suggestion that we ask a local arts society if they are interested is using them as the basis for artworks on life in the nineteenth century.

Otherwise the mouldy covers will probably be incinerated and the paper shredded as bedding for chickens, before eventually being composted ...

Using google lens to identify an object

 Down at Lake View today I came across this

basically it's a cane covered glass bottle with some weird apparatus on top and the inscription 'By Royal letters patent No. 2'.

I knew I'd seen one before somewhere and had an idea that it might be something to do with soda, as in aerated water, but I was absolutely buggered if I could remember where and what.

So, I pasted the image into Google Lens to do an image search, and it came back with two results, one from the PowerHouse Museum in Sydney, and one from the Sparklets Collector's site - apparently there are people out there who collect old soda syphons.

Crucially the Sparklets Collectors site mentioned that the P01/WK model, made from 1897 to 1913 could have either By Royal Letters Patent No.2 or No.5, as in the PowerHouse museum examples.

Incredibly useful and undoubtedly saved me a bit of head scratching.

I'd previously used Google lens once or twice to help identify the source of an image, and have been impressed by its image finding capabilities, but I'm doubly impressed by the effectiveness of this slightly left field technique to identify artefacts ...

jrnl - a command line journal tool

 Journalling seems to be having a moment.

It gained some traction during covid lockdowns as a way to help give meaning to what was happening - basically as a form of psychotherapy.

Essentially, it's like keeping a diary in which you write down thoughts, feelings, and the fact that the postie looked at you in a funny way this morning.

Well, I'm not going to talk about that sort of journalling, I'm going to talk about something else.

When I was working I always kept notes and records of meetings and so on.

I must admit I wasn't terribly organised about it, and should have written some structured notes about what happened at the end of each day. Eventually I discovered Planner diaries - the ones with a diary page for a week and a notes page - Leuchtturm and Moleskine both produce them, and I'm sure other people do as well.

And that worked pretty well for me.

Fast forward to 2024. I'm retired but I'm volunteering on two entirely separate archiving projects for two separate bodies.

Lets say the possibilities for confusion are infinite, so at the end of each day's volunteering I write my self some notes about what was discussed, what I did and if there needs to be any special preparation for the next weeks work.

And it works for me, and gives me something to check back on if I've forgotten something.

At the same time, sad anorak that I am, I keep a set of of one line gardening notes in a Notable notebook about when things have been planted out, fed, etc.

So I was interested to come across jrnl, a command line journalling tool for Linux and a few other operating systems

For the moment I'm only trying it out, and I've only installed it on my Lenovo IdeaPad, which runs ubuntu.

Ubuntu, provide a snap meaning installation is literally a couple of clicks - I did find that it helps to have decided where you want your journal file to live, before you start - for the moment mine is in the incredibly unimaginative ~/journal/journal.txt

In use it's incredibly simple - type jrnl to get started, type away and then Ctrl+D exit

and the resulting file looks like

which is pretty simple.

Personally, I think of the design of the program points one to creating a series of terse entries along the lines of 'toner cartridge changed in docuprint', whiich is undoubtedly valuable but would probably bear collating with other notes etc in an end of week write up rather than treated as a journal per se.

For example, when I was cataloguing the contents of Dow's I would write some fairly basic weekly notes about the building temperature, whether I had noticed any degradation in any of the artefacts, and which items had been catalogued.

Jrnl would have been an ideal tool for this.

However in creating a single monolithic text file I could see it becoming unwieldy.

You also of course need to think about backup, perhaps by copying it to a cloud based filestore on a periodic basis, or by using a utility such as deja-dup.

That said, I think it's potentially valuable as a tool for capturing what happened during a day's fieldwork etc, without resorting to anything more complicated than a terminal window ...

[update 13 November 2024]

Well, I went to install jrnl on my Lubuntu machine, and found that the Lubuntu software library tool didn't have it in its list of available packages, so I installed it from the application's website using pipx, and ended up with what is obviously a later version.

In usage it's not that different, but importantly it no longer creates a monolithic text file but creates a set of directories ../year/month and creates individual files named date.txt

so, as today's the 13th we have a file called 13.txt, which makes managing the entries much easier, especially when collating them into a weekly report or something similar ...

Owner bound sheet music in the nineteenth century

 

Today, down at Lake View I catalogued some bound sets of sheet music dating from the 1880s or thereabouts.

At first I was a little confused by the collections as some of the sheet music had different people’s names - one waltz in the bound set might have Phoebe Illegible on the cover and another Mary O’Scribble while the volume itself said it belonged to Mary Higgins.

And then I realised - people, particularly in country Australia, in the nineteenth century probably collected and exchanged sheet music just as we used to sell CDs to second hand music shops, and buy others from the same shops - after all a set of sheet music was typically priced at between 2s and 2s 6d - which, using the RBA's inflation calculator, would come out at around between $20 and $30 today allowing for inflation - and strangely enough roughly the cost of a CD.

Sheet music was popular - a quick search of Trove will show any number of stationers offering popular composers at discount.

The reason of course was quite simple - if you wanted music, on the whole you had to make it yourself, or else wait for a travelling music group to pitch up at the local music hall, which outside of the cities could be quite a long wait.

And people crave entertainment, especially in the cold dark nights of winter, where there was nowhere much to go - and remember in small country towns where everyone knew everyone, there was only so far a social soiree could go to alleviate boredom.

So just as people, especially middle class people read books to pass the time, they would also play the piano, the violin, the flute or simply sing to entertain each other, and for that reason, people would have the pieces they especially enjoyed playing bound together to make them more manageable, and more portable, perhaps much as we would gather favourite CDs together to take on a long car trip ...

Really popular authors in the nineteenth century

 Up at the Athenaeum I've been working on the heritage book collection, which basically consists of all the books bought by the Reading room from the early 1860s to the 1950s.

Uniquely, the collection was never broken up, so we can get a picture from its contents of what people actually wanted to read. 

Sometimes a book was so popular that they bought a second copy, and sometimes a book was so worn it was replaced with a newer edition, so following on from my previous post what were the good folk of Stanley reading in the 1870s and 1880s?

Totally unscientifically, I roughly scanned the collection listing for a number of well known nineteenth century authors - as some books from the period don't have a date of publication in the front matter (Not all nineteenth century publishers included a date of publication  on either the title page or its reverse) and just to add to the fun some books have multiple copies with different dates and different publishers - I resorted to manual scan of the collection listing.

And what did I find?

Sensation novels mostly, Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon as well as Louisa M. Alcott, Bulwer-Lytton, plus more than a dash of Charles Dickens.

There are more serious books as well, Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species, books on poultry raising and so on, bust basically, just like us, they liked a dash of excitement in their bedtime reading ...