Cataloguing in closed week

08 Jul 2008

Whilst the Library team was confined to the laborious task of auditing 9,000 books in the basement last week, the Manuscripts team had the luxury of working in the Caird Library itself.

The project Andrew, Kate, Martin and Mike were tackling was to catalogue a small backlog of recent acquisitions. Irene from the Documentation Department also become an honorary member of the manuscripts team for the week, joining in with cataloguing and data inputting as well as providing guidance and support to the team on data entry.

This work is important preparation for the new research centre and the move to offsite storage next year. It gave us the opportunity to really get to grips with using a new cataloguing system. At the moment manuscripts are in the same catalogue as the Library collections but over the last few months all the manuscripts data (some 66,000 records) was copied over into the new system. A new web catalogue just for manuscripts is being developed right now and should be online at the end of this month (watch this space ...).

Unfortunately this means you can't take a look at the team's hard work on the catalogue quite yet. To give you a flavour, a letter from the carpenter of HMS Alceste to his father caught the attention of one team member. In the letter, the carpenter provides a vivid first hand account of the ship wreck of HMS Alceste off the coast of Java on 18 February 1817 and his subsequent rescue and return to England. He details a catalogue of injuries and ailments, including dysentery, a broken toe and bruised ribs, and he narrowly escaped having his face burnt! (Once the catalogue goes live you can look this up under HSR/N/9.) And another team member catalogued papers relating to the Court Martial of Admiral Byng, including letters to and from Voltaire (ADL/Z/40).
 
And here are some photos of both teams hard at work. Well done to all involved.




Cataloguing manuscripts on laptop in the library.



More cataloguing of manuscripts.



Working with the new archival cataloguing standards.



Auditing books in the store using wireless.