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In-Person Training: Testimonial from The National Trust

Testimonial The National Trust

As lockdown continues to ease, I’m grateful to Yvonne Lewis for this testimonial from the bespoke training I designed and delivered to staff at The National Trust.

“Anne designed a day’s cataloguing training for the National Trust. She worked with a small group of hand-picked property staff with considerable experience of object cataloguing on our bespoke library and museum system. Anne provided workbooks to take them through the fundamental principles behind book cataloguing and basic MARC fields. Everyone also worked through several examples, with a few tricky ones thrown in to show how judgement can still be required when dealing with your institutions needs from the catalogue.

The team had a lovely time on the day. Many questions were asked and answered. Anne also provided an element of post-training support to deal with those odd questions which always come up once you’ve left the building. Using the new trainees as fully as we would have liked has been paused due to COVID-19. We are hoping to re-start cataloguing projects slowly in 2021/22 as circumstance permit. Once we have seen how successfully the training has been, we will be considering when and how to extend the programme.”

The National Trust has its own bespoke library management system and catalogues using AACR2 in MARC, across both modern and pre-1950 books. I’m grateful to Yvonne not only for this testimonial, but also for briefing me fully on their LMS, which can only be accessed on-site, and supplying me with screenshots of the entry screens to add to the workbooks. I’m also grateful to HQ staff for printing the workbooks so that I did not have to carry them into Central London alongside my suitcase of example books for trainees to catalogue.

Bookings for in-person training is brisk – so far we have both paid and pro bono workshops booked in through to April 2022, and we are open to more. You can book a discovery meeting at https://calendly.com/annew-discoverymeeting or contact info@beginningcataloguing.com if you want to start a discussion.

Yvonne’s testimonial is available on linkedin (scroll down to “Recommendations”. Note: an odd glitch has me showing up as a client of Yvonne’s rather than the other way round).

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The Unwritten Book (General Seminar)

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.”

Continue reading “The Unwritten Book (General Seminar)”
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Cataloguing Careers: Yvonne Lewis

Yvonne Lewis

The lead feature in Beginning Cataloguing Monthly is our series of interviews with people who work or have worked as cataloguers.

This month, we’re delighted to feature our Associate Yvonne Lewis, who is the speaker in our November General Seminar on The Unwritten Book.

Now the longest serving National Trust book curator, Yvonne started out as a graduate trainee at Lambeth Palace Library before completing her MA at UCL. When she started work as a cataloguer, the state of the art was 5″ x 3″ catalogue cards, and in her interview she describes the progress she’s seen, through old-style library management systems and retrospective conversion to the online resources with which we are familiar today.

Beginning Cataloguing Monthly is free, but distributed only to subscribers. If you’re not one yet, you can sign up here: http://tinyletter.com/beginningcataloguing.

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National Trust Guidebooks

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#throwbackthursday Some of Yvonne Lewis’s early writing credits were the library sections of National Trust guidebooks. Since then, she has published extensively on private libraries and their formation, including co-authoring an exhibition publication on the library of Richard Ellys (1682-1742) and highlighting a range of collections in the National Trust Arts, Buildings, Collection Bulletin over the years. There’s more to come, since she has recently completed an MRes in the History of the Book @ies_london so has articles in progress. Yvonne is co-teaching Beginning Bibliography in August. Link to her profile page in bio. Image: Kingston Lacy, from the cover of one of the @nationaltrust guidebooks to which Yvonne has contributed. #beginningcataloguing #kingstonlacy #countryhouselibrary #privatelibraries #nationaltrustlibraries #nationaltrust #bookcollecting #bookstagram

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