Fanny Stepniak and the 1907 RSLDP congress

 I've written before that Fanny Stepniak, Sergei Stepniak's wife, was a bit of a mystery to me.

There's evidence that she worked with Constance Garnett on Russian translations after Sergei's death, but very little to suggest she continued to be politically active.

Well, that's possibly not the case.

I've just finished Robert Henderson's book on the pre 1917 Russian exile community in London, and in his description of the 1907 party congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party - the pre revolutionary underground political party that eventually became the CPSU - he mentions that Fanny Stepniak was personally included by Lenin in the vote of thanks to the organisers at the end of the  party congress.

The party congress was held in exile in London and is notable for being where the Bolshevik faction under Lenin gained control of the political direction of the party.

Strangely, the congress was held in the Brotherhood Church, the christian anarchist group that gave rise to various Tolstoyan communes in England, including Purleigh, from which Tom Ferris and Bertie Rowe travelled to meet with Tolstoy in the winter of 1902-3, and the communes at Whiteway and Stapleton just outside of Leeds.

I'm guessing, and it is only a guess, that as well as being in contact with Constance Garnett, she was also in contact with the Maudes, and used her contacts to help arrange the use of the Brotherhood Church by the RSDLP...

Field postcards

 I've written both about the use of indelible pencil and more generally about the use of ordinary pencil on postcards in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

I've recently acquired two examples of first world war British field postcards, one written in pencil, the other in indelible pencil

The pencil example is addressed to a Miss N Abel in Clifton Road in Aberdeen and dates from 1917

Simply signed 'Jack', it confirms the receipt of a parcel.

I did have a go at tracing Ms Abel using Scotland's People. There's exactly two female N Abel's in the 1911 census, one of whom is only 9 months old and the other aged 21 at the time of the census, which would make her 26 or 27 in 1917 when Jack sent the card acknowledging his parcel.

Unfortunately the N Abel who was in the 1911 census was a jute worker living in Dundee, not Aberdeen, so it's more than possible that the person the card was sent to was not jute winder in Dundee, or perhaps by 1917 she had moved to Aberdeen.

The second example is written in indelible pencil and was sent to a Miss E Webb in South Cerney outside of Cirencester

While the address is clear enough time has not been kind to the back of the postcard making it almost completely illegible, but playing with contrast and a few other tricks provides an almost legible image

and suggests that the author of the post card is both well and will be sending a letter at the first opportunity and it is signed by a Cliff(?) Hunt.

Unfortunately a search does not show a Cliff or Clifford Hunt with the British Army in 1917. I've almost certainly misread the name and need to do some more work on this.

However I've had a little more success in tentatively identifying the addressee.

In the 1911 census of England and Wales there's an E Webb who was born in roughly the correct area in 1896, which would make her 21 or 22 when the postcard was sent to her in November 1917. It's possible they were sweethearts and one hopes that if Cliff survived the war they married and had a long and happy life together

A most impressive array of bottles...

Ever since I documented the contents of Dow's Pharmacy in Chiltern for the National Trust, I've been fascinated by nineteeth century medicine bottles. 

When we were in Melbourne recently, I noticed an impressive display of nineteenth century medicine bottles in a pharmacy on Wellington Parade in East Melbourne.

To try and give an impression of the size and range of the collection I've used an online jpeg stitcher to combine my images. 

It's not ideal, but it does give an impression of the collection.

I'm happy for you to right click and download the images, but for a more detailed view here are the individual images in left to right order

If you do want to take a look yourself, remember it's a working pharmacy, not a museum, the staff have a job to do and customers to serve, so it's best to go at a quiet time and it would probably be appreciated if you bought a couple of things when you visited.

LibraryThing and the Athenaeum

 Maybe I have a new project.

Up at the Athenaeum, we have a heritage book collection – basically all the books they bought between 1862 and the early 1970s when it ceased to function as a library and reading room.

As far as we can tell they never threw anything out, only replacing books if they remained popular, which gives us a picture of reading tastes, and how they changed from the Goldrush era onwards.

Now we have an excel spreadsheet listing the roughly three thousand or so books but data quality is not great.

Publishers and authors names mis-spelled, different abbreviations  for the same publisher, etc etc.

I’ve spent the last few weeks checking publishers’ names to see if it was fixable, but really it’s not, the simplest solution is to recatalogue the entire collection.

This of course is a problem in itself, we’re not a library, we don’t have a catalogue system as such, all we want to do is catalogue the collection as accurately as possible, and then load the data into Victorian Collections for long term preservation.

Well, I think we have a solution - LibraryThing.

Originally designed to help people catalogue their personal libraries, it’s been used successfully  to catalogue small research libraries.

While is does have add on modules to give it the functionality of a larger scale OPAC, we only need its cataloguing capabilities. After all we are not going to add, lend, or deaccession material.

Data can be exported in both excel and MARC format, which means that not only could be load the data into Victorian Collections, we could potentially load it into a Library Management system, such as our local library’s Sirsi Dynix system, if desired.

But the real killer is that we can validate entries against both the British Library and the National Library of Australia, meaning we don’t need to create every entry from scratch.

The British Library link is especially valuable as in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century about 90% of the books in the collection were imported from the UK, with the remainder coming from the US, especially after the first world war when there seems to have been an interest in Westerns and crime novels – the original pulp fiction.

Legal deposit rules mean that the British Library should have a copy, and hence a catalogue record of every book published in the UK in the nineteenth century.

(It’s not quite perfect sometimes when I check entries manually I find there are minor inconsistencies in entries between the BL’s catalogue and the National Library of Scotland’s catalogue entries for the same book, but they are probably not significant enough to cause a problem).

Nineteenth century Australian publications might be more of a problem.

Not all are in the NLA’s catalogue, but the State Libraries of NSW and Victoria respectively are fairly comprehensive.

The only problem is that LibraryThing does not link to them, meaning that in these cases we would have to create a manual entry.

The other problems that I’ve come across are Book Club editions, and books published in Australia in the second world war.

Due to the shortages of materials in Britain book exports to Australia almost stopped, but a few UK publishers entered into licensing agreements to have local editions produced here in Australia by Australian publishers, and not all of them seem to have made it into the NLA catalogue.

Likewise, there are some post world war II pulp fiction reprints that were produced locally but don’t seem to be in the NLA catalogue. Again these would have to be investigated on a case by case basis.

However I’m confident that we can use LibraryThing to automagically ingest in excess of 90% of our holdings.

Probably the next step would be a trial run of a couple of shelves worth of books and see how it goes.

That should allow us to refine and document our methodology and perhaps come up with a more realistic estimate of the number of person hours involved.

Smartwatches - what's the point?

 A long time ago I bought myself a cheap no name fitness tracker, which worked quite well, allowing me to track my bike rides and to beep when I had a new email or text message - a feature that turned out to be quite useful, especially when I was wearing nitrile gloves and documenting an artefact - I could glance at the tracker and decide if the message was worth degloving for.

In time I replaced it with a brand name device, an Inspire HR, which actually did a little less, but came with nicer management software.

However, it did everything I cared about, was light and comfortable to wear, and didn't need to be charged too often.

Then, three or four months ago, Telstra, our phone and internet provider, emailed me to say I had a pile of loyalty points that were about to expire.

Unfortunately, the points were not enough to make a serious difference to the cost of a new phone, but they did have the Ryze wave smartwatch available, and I had enough expiring points to cover it, making it effectively free.

Now, I've always been curious about smart watches, so this seemed to be an ideal way of finding out if there was a use for one in may life.

Out of the box it did everything that was expected of it, had a nice legible display, and was a perfectly competent device - a bit bulky on my wrist but comfortable enough.

But...

I realised after a couple of months that I was only using the same functionality that I was from the Inspire HR, or indeed the cheap fitness tracker,

Basically, it really wasn't adding anything to my life.

So I stopped wearing it and went back to my battered and scratched Inspire HR.

Now, it's entirely possible that if I had brought another brand of smart watch, it might have had some attribute that really helped make life easier or better, but reading through the specs for those made by Google, Garmin and Apple, I don't really see anything stand out as regards to capability.

So, are they just expensive doodahs, or am I missing the point?

Linux on an old imac

 I appear to have accidentally done something useful.

J's old 2017 iMac had been sitting in a corner in the study, waiting to be wiped and taken to the recycler.

Too old, too slow.

So, today I decided to wipe it.

Rather than do something straightforward I thought I'd try installing the latest version of Ubuntu out of curiosity - I'd heard good things about the current version of Ubuntu and older intel based imacs, so it seemed worth a go.

Certainly, when I tried installing Ubuntu on an older imac five or so years ago I found it really didn't work that well, so it seemed like a fun idea to try installing a newer version of Ubuntu on more recent hardware,

Obviously, bluetooth mice and keyboards don't work until you've installed the new operating system so you need to use an old wired keyboard and mouse. The other thing I found was that you needed to plug the install USB into the back of the mac and not into a USB socket on the keyboard, otherwise I just used a standard installation USB I'd made a few months ago using Rufus and writing the volume as a dd image.

Well, surprise surprise, it recognised the image and booted cleanly

I chose a minimal install because I wasn't totally convinced it would work that well, but it got to the end of the installation process cleanly and rebooted nicely

and once logged in did the usual welcome thing

as I'd gone for a minimal install, I had to install Libre Office and Kate, not to mention Notable by hand and all seemed to work.

To check the webcam, I installed Cheese

giving you a picture of Yours Truly taking a picture of a picture.

Now so far, apart from being mildly surprised at things just working, I hadn't really found a killer use for the device, but I had been wondering on and off whether to buy a larger monitor or an old all-in-one machine to work with scanned hand written documents - working on a laptop can be a bit trying at times - so I downloaded a copy of a Madeleine Smith's marriage certificate

and that convinced me I might accidentally have made a useful machine out of the old imac.

It's not quite perfect - power management doesn't seem to work quite how you'd expect, with suspend and power off not doing exactly what you'd expect, but I can live with that. 

Otherwise I'm pleased with the result and reckon I've saved myself the cost of a decent monitor ...