Newsletter

Hello members and supporters of FOLMI,

It's quite a while since we circulated news of our activities. We've been travelling steadily on a couple of projects, so here's an update.  

All the best for 2018!

Restarting conservation work on the LMI Collection in D007

Conservation work will restart in the week beginning 26 Feb. It will be based at UTAS Room D007 and will focus on cleaning. We’ve rewritten the guidelines on this, and on other procedures, to make the tasks as straightforward and efficient as possible. Months of working on cleaning has convinced the teams that we can get much more done with a simplified procedure using the vacuum cleaner and smoke sponges for virtually all books.

If you’d like to be involved in any of the conservation activities, please contact Mike McCausland (63272540 or mmccausl@yahoo.com). He’ll also soon be ringing around the existing teams as well as potential participants inside and outside FOLMI.

Cataloguing

There’s been steady progress made by our dedicated team in adding entries to the Libraries Australia database over the last six months. Having completed the nonfiction the team has moved on to fiction and periodicals. They have now entered over 9,500 nonfiction and fiction titles.

The final number of fiction titles to be entered will be well down on the 6749 books of the Victorian & Edwardian Collection in the TALIS catalogue we inherited from the LINC. It seems the State Library used the Launceston Stack to ‘sequester’ old books that had come from donors and other libraries around the state; these went unchecked into the V&E Collection and catalogue. Interesting as these volumes may be – coming as they do from private collections, Sunday School prizes, regional libraries at Evandale, Longford, Ouse etc. – they can’t be included as part of our LMI Collection. Fortunately many have a new home in the QVMAG’s special collections.

Di Worth, our experienced cataloguer living in southern Tasmania, has done a magnificent job in entering the periodicals, which are certainly awkward to catalogue. There are a few queries being answered by examining the hard copies on the shelves at D007, but once this is done, this most significant part of the Collection will have been entered. Eventually they will need conservation work – a vital step considering their general condition.

The long-term cataloguing project will not be completed by the middle of the year, so we shall need to renew our registration for cataloguing with Libraries Australia for another year.

Facebook

Are you regularly checking our Facebook page?  It carries current news and links to the FOLMI blogspot and other sites of interest to members. Sue McClarron has been maintaining it; if you have any items you think would interest members and the general public, contact her at smcclarron51@gmail.com.

We also continue to post regularly on our blog at http://launcestonmechanicsinstitute.blogspot.com.au/

That long-term goal, a permanent home

There is a proposed collaboration between Launceston Historical Society, Tasmanian Family History Society, Royal Australian Artillery Association of Tasmania and FOLMI to establish a Launceston History Research Centre at the Paterson Barracks on the corner of St John and William streets. This is being followed up by John Dent, Gus Green and members of all four community groups. Its goal is to make a submission to the Department of Defence, the State Government and the City of Launceston to take ownership of the Paterson Barracks when it is decommissioned in a few years’ time.

The objectives of the group are to:

·         Preserve a heritage asset – the buildings

·         Bring new life to the buildings and a city precinct through a new use

·         Provide an information/research service that is currently lacking

·         Celebrate the military and immigrant history of the city

·         Provide new public access to community assets and resources

·         Create a new centre for sharing ideas, expertise and knowledge

·         Create new opportunities for collaborative research

·         Enhance the visitor experience in the city… and much more.

Mike McCausland
Secretary, FOLMI