LMI Accession Registers

We have previously asked for volunteers to assist in the conversion of the LMI Accession Registers into an Excel Workbook. To date two volunteers have expressed an interest in being involved.

The Records of the Launceston Mechanics' Institute have now been transferred in their entirety to the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery. Included in these Records are an invaluable three-volume set of Accession Registers. The Accession Registers are the only record of the totality of the collection. They record every title held at 1885 (9123 volumes) and every item added from then until 1932. This means they include all items withdrawn from the collection between 1885 and 1932, whether through deletion, loss, transfer or replacement.

Sample page from Volume One of the Registers

The work of transcribing the records will be a very time-consuming project. It can be made easier however by working from digital photographs of the pages of the Registers, and a test set of images of the first thirty pages have been made. The principal advantage is that the work can be done from home.

Some of the benefits of this work are:

• Because the accession registers are chronological records of the growth of the collection they offer a different window into the collection than does a catalogue.

• As they stand the Accession Registers can only be searched by an Accession Number. When they are available in an Excel workbook it is possible to search by multiple Accession Numbers, Author, Title, Date Added, Withdrawals and Notes.

• Provenance – There are an unknown number of items from the collection surviving in a variety of places;

•             The LMI collection which has been transferred to FOLMI contains the majority of these items.

•             LINC Tasmania will continue to hold some items in its Launceston Local Studies Collection, Meston Collection, Launceston General Reference Collection, State Reference Stack, Serials Collections.

•             QVMAG will continue to hold some items, especially in its Serials Collections.

The clearest evidence of provenance in the physical item are the LMI Stamps, Bookplate and, most definitively, Accession Number.

Developing and maintaining a searchable list of items accessioned is the best available tool for establishing the provenance of an item and recording its survival and location regardless of where it is held.

Mapping to the surviving Collection – our intention is to catalogue the surviving part of the collection to Libraries Australia. This will be done by uploading MARC records based on the bibliographic details collected from the physical item. These records will therefore differ from the Accession Records in their level of detail.

The usefulness of creating a separate searchable listing of items based on the Accession Registers derives in part from the potential to add the information retrieved from the Accession Register to the MARC record. Examples could potentially include past cataloguing practice, donor names, price, supplier, notes – information not usually available from the item itself.

Libraries Australia records for the collection could readily be exported as a report in a compatible format to facilitate comparison.

Research Value – The ability to access detailed information about what was added to the collection and to compare that with what has survived is the most important reason for creating the two separate listings. Some of the research questions that could potentially be illuminated are;

•             Survival rates. Which books had a high survival rate and which did not? – by genre, author, subject (subject lists are available from the printed catalogues), format.

•             Changes in collecting focus over time – and by implication library policies.

•             Rates of collection growth over time – Accession Records provide a snapshot of all books added in a particular selected period.

•             Changes in reading preferences and tastes – which could be mapped to membership/subscriber numbers.

•             Weeding policy.

•             Collection management practice – how the collection was organised, arranged and accessed.