Anne Welsh is a career-long cataloguer and a life-long writer. Following the success of Practical Cataloguing (London: Facet; Chicago: Neal Schuman, 2012) she focused on academic research and teaching before founding Beginning Cataloguing, which provides consultancy and training for institutions and, increasingly, to individuals preparing their libraries and archives and seeking an institutional home for them.
Our next Book History Seminar will take place on Wednesday 13 January at 1pm.
In this live-only seminar, we will discuss factors affecting the publication and circulation of LGBTQ+ fiction in postwar Britain. We will examine how obscenity statutes and laws criminalising homosexuality impacted everything from a book’s text, to its cover design, to how and where it was sold. Examples will be drawn from the speaker’s personal collection.
Yesterday, Yvonne Lewis shared the story of ‘The Unwritten Book’ – the evidence William John Bankes left behind him of his travels, and, in particular, a set of lithography stones intended for publication in a book that was never printed in the end.
There are many reasons that these stones are both interesting and mysterious, but the greatest mystery is why they exist in the first place. Lithography was invented in Munich in 1798 by Alois Senefelder, and as Michael Twyman points out in his core text on the topic, “the lithographed book is almost as old as lithography itself” (p. 15). One of its leading proponents in Britain, Charles Hullmandel, set up his press in 1819, and so Bankes’s travels (circa 1815-17) coincided with the very earliest period of English lithography. Hullmandel’s marks appear on the back of the stones, and, as Twyman asserted in a paper he gave in 2016, “Hullmandel can be linked with the stones now at Kingston Lacy in several ways. First and foremost he owned them all, at least initially. Secondly, he made the drawings on some of them himself. And, thirdly, wherever a printer’s imprint appears on a stone it is his.”
Our final General Seminar of 2020 will be led by Dr Ahava Cohen, on Internationalising RDA.
Ahava Cohen leads the Hebrew Cataloguing Department at the National Library of Israel and is in charge of Hebrew policy for Mazal, Israel’s multilingual, multiscript authority database. As such she has a deep interest in making formerly Anglo-American cataloguing codes work for a broader range of languages and cultures. In 2019 she wrote a report for the RSC on the Western and Christian bias of the cataloguing guidelines; the report was accepted as part of the RSC’s focus on removing such biases and internationalising RDA. Ahava will discuss the work involved in identifying bias in cataloguing guidelines and the emotional labour of trying to reconcile the varying needs of language and cultural groups.
Ahava Cohen (Dr. RDA) is chair of the European RDA Interest Group (EURIG) and the backup European Region representative to the RDA Steering Committee (RSC). She graduated with a certificate in LIS in 2013 and her 2019 doctorate focused on the localization of RDA to a country which catalogues in four languages, three of which have yet to benefit from a translation of RDA. Her professional interest lies in balancing international standards with decolonizing and deassimilating the catalogue while maintaining the high production output required by busy cataloguing departments.
Join us online on Tuesday 8 December for our next Book History Seminar, in which Krystle Attard Trevisan will share her curatorial and research expertise in printmaking techniques in book illustration.
Krystle is the first art historian in Malta specializing in historical prints and book illustration. Her ongoing doctoral research includes cataloguing and studying the only intact 18th century print collection in a public museum of over 4,500 prints amassed by one man. She has also started hunting for Incunabula in Malta with a team of other researchers. She has recently joined MUŻA, the Malta National Community Art Museum that houses the national collection of art, where one of her tasks is to research the prints and rare books that have remained unstudied for years. Her passion is to teach about the importance of printmaking in the history of art and of the book through public outreach and object-based study.
This is a live-only seminar – no preparation in advance (except for the speaker, obviously), no recordings afterwards, just an expert speaker talking on Zoom for around half and hour followed by group discussion and chat.
Last week saw the first of our Book History Seminars, led by Sara Charles (Teaching Manuscripts) and I took the Chair’s prerogative to write the event report.
Our General Seminar Series launched in style with Emma Booth‘s call to action on Metadata Matters. In this event report, Robert Drinkwater, University of Salford, shares a couple of items he has added to his to do list as a result.
This session was led by Emma Booth of the University of Manchester, formerly of King’s College London and the LSE and author of the recent NAG report on Quality of Shelf Ready Metadata. Emma started by outlining her experience at Manchester and went on to talk about standards and systems and their bearing on the discovery experience of users. The presentation concluded with a discussion of the need and efficacy of advocating for metadata quality. Listening to this presentation and participating in the ensuing discussion gave me cause to reflect on my own habits, workflows and dependencies as a Cataloguer. I took away a number of actions and reminders for myself, a couple of which I’ve outlined here:
It’s been six months since Beginning Cataloguing opened for business, although we’d been gearing up and getting things ready for longer, of course. Today’s article provides a brief reflection on some things I’ve learned, in case they are of use to you.
