Reports presented at the Annual General Meeting, June 8 2018.
President's Report 2017-18
Introduction
It is a privilege to present this report to members on the
occasion of our fifth Annual General Meeting. I take this opportunity to
reflect on what has been achieved in the past year and to lay out our plans and
aspirations for the coming year.
Membership
Membership has remained constant in the past year. I would like to acknowledge the contributions
of our committee members, our hard-working volunteers, and the support of all
members, in what has been achieved.
Achievements This Year
As foreshadowed at our last meeting the past twelve months
has been a period of consolidation primarily, with a focus on cataloguing and
conservation work. Our energies have been largely directed to these ambitious
projects which have required large amounts of time and effort.
Our Cataloguing Project has been outstandingly successful
and a great credit to the team dedicated to making our collection more
accessible. The support of the Plomley Foundation, through its Funding Grant,
and under the auspices of the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, has been
the enabler of the project. But it has been the many hours of voluntary work
undertaken by the cataloguers, largely in their own homes, that has made this
project such a remarkable success.
Our Conservation Project has operated in parallel with the
cataloguing work, and has concentrated on the non-fiction component of the
collection. We met the targets we set in our application for funding from the
Community Heritage Grants program, and our final report and acquittal was submitted
in December, and has been accepted in very complimentary terms by the National
Library as administrator of the Grant.
The Grant has set us up with the skills and a very useful inventory of
equipment and materials for our ongoing activity in cleaning, treating and
preserving the collection. It must be acknowledged however that a great deal
remains to be done for us to work through the entire collection.
Other activities have included some additional work on the
LMI Records held by Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, the ongoing
dispersal of out-of-scope books, and incremental progress in developing a
better understanding of the collection through research and interpretation.
Promotional Activities
A highlight of this year was our participation in an
international conference held by the Bibliographical Society of Australia and
New Zealand, in Hobart last year – "Connecting the Colonies: Empires and
Networks in the History of the Book". As an ancillary event to the
conference the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery (QVMAG) and the Friends of
Launceston Mechanics' Institute (FOLMI) offered attendees a tour of their
respective library collections on the Saturday afternoon following the conference,
25 November. We were honoured to host an illustrious group of academics and
researchers from around the world for the tour, to hear their responses to the
collection, and to explore its research potential with them.
We have curated a new exhibition on the Bell's Poets set of
109 volumes which has recently been placed on display in the foyer of the
University of Tasmania's Launceston Campus Library.
Our online presence has continued in terms of content and
reach, albeit at a slower rate than the previous year. Visits to our blog
numbered around 6000 in the past year. Facebook and Flickr pages continue to
attract followers. We have expanded our contribution to TROVE by developing
lists on their site of digital content relating to the LMI and including a
TROVE search facility on our web site which links directly to our collection.
Our very supportive friends at Mechanics' Institutes of
Victoria have continued to promote our activities through their newsletter and
more widely.
We have explored interesting linkages between our respective
Institutes with a member of the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution
and look forward to a visit from Jane Sparrow-Niang in November.
The Year Ahead
The Cataloguing project will be completed by the end of
2018, and a concerted effort will be needed to progress the work of the
Conservation Team. This will become our priority task for the coming year.
Additionally we intend to complete the reorganisation of the
LMI Records and produce a guide to them.
An invitation has been received from the Bibliographical
Society of Australia and New Zealand for us to submit a proposal for a
publication relating to aspects of our collection. A proposal will be developed
in the near future as this would be a valuable opportunity to engage with a
group of specialist researchers.
We will of course continue the search for a permanent home
for the collection – this being the greatest challenge we face as an
organisation.
Acknowledgements
Firstly I want to record my thanks to the University Library
staff, and in particular to Wendy Hoyle, the Campus Librarian and acting
University Librarian, and Prue Senior, Senior Client Services Officer, for
their ongoing support, advocacy and interest in our project.
I also want to acknowledge the National Library and thank
their Community Heritage Grant team for their contribution. This is an
outstanding scheme, exceptionally well-organised and very supportive of grant
recipients. With their support we have been able to take an accelerated path
through their carefully staged grants process, completing what is usually a
six-year program in just three years.
I also thank the management and staff of the Queen Victoria
Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston LINC and the State Library of Tasmania, for
their ongoing assistance and support. We are particularly indebted to the
Plomley Foundation for their financial support of our cataloguing project.
Peter Richardson, President, 8 June, 2018
PROJECT REPORTS
Conservation Group
Much of the work done over the 2017-18 year was done in the
convivial (and warm) domain of the welcoming Ross Smith at QVMAG. There were up
to six members of the Group at a time on Friday afternoons beavering away at
constructing phase boxes and 4-flap folders, creating Mylar covers and encasing
books in boards tied with tape. With practice, especially by the teams
dedicated to specific kinds of construction, we became more adept at measuring,
bending & cutting, wielding bone folders and Stanley knives, and turning
out presentable and effectively conserved books, each with its own appropriate
treatment.
The primary step for the conservation of all items was
cleaning. This, and the follow-up treatment for mould and red rot, were
conducted in D007 at UTAS observing the health and safety parameters
demonstrated by Noni Zachri in her training workshop in February 2017. After
treatment, books were placed back on the shelves in Dewey order, working
backwards from 999. We’re presently into C20th British History in the 940s.
It’s fairly careful and repetitive work, and it’s not surprising that progress
has been slow in 2018 with fewer members able to attend working bees or come in
independently.
The numbers of books so far treated are:
Cleaning: 1095
Mylar
sleeves: 63
Clarkson
wrappers: 28
Boards & tape: 89
Red rot: 64
Mould:
20
These cleaned and treated books
represent about 11/3 rows, shelved at the back of D007.
I’d like to thank all members contributing time to the
project, and to make particular mention of Julieanne Richards who has cycled
out to the Uni on many occasions to work alone.
If we’re to make much headway in this really time-consuming
task we’re going to have to re-invigorate the way we tackle the project. I’d
welcome any suggestions.
Facebook Page
It has been a quiet year. Sue McClarron has put in 6 posts,
including links to specific FOLMI blogs, articles in the Examiner and items of general
interest. There are now 64 followers, double the number of last year. Sue
invites comments and stories from all members of FOLMI.
Displays
We’ve mounted three displays. The first was on Charles
Darwin, of which the LMI had a rich, varied and at times humorous collection of
holdings. It was mounted both at the LINC and the UTAS Library in the handsome
display case made by Toby Mitchell.
The second is presently on the 2nd Floor of the
newly-renamed Library; it commemorates the 100th anniversary of the final year of World War 1
from a perspective made possible by the rather tattered and well-thumbed books
and periodicals now surviving from the original Mechanics’ Institute collection
of that time.
The third, recently mounted in the UTAS Library, displays
the 109 miniature volumes of Bell’s Edition of the Poets of Great Britain,
published in London between 1776 and 1784. Our set has first, second and later
editions of the works, all produced between 1778 and 1788, and was purchased
for the LMI in 1843. Our set had earlier been owned by Joseph William Wright,
as the original bookplates show.
Report from the Cataloguing Group
This time last year the Cataloguing group was coming to the
end of doing the Non-Fiction books in the LMI Collection. There were about 7000
titles in that area of the collection.
Since the Non-Fiction was finished we have been working away
at the pre-1914 Fiction collection and to date have added 4420 books.
Our Trove total now is 11,219 titles.
There have been some unusual titles along the way: ‘The
garden of resurrection: being the love story of an ugly man’, ‘Winning a wife
in Australia – a story drawn from actual experiences’, ‘The shady side, or life in a country
parsonage’ and ‘Queer chums: a narrative of a midshipman’s adventures’. There
have also been many, many melodramatic endings and illustrations!
Progress has been hampered by illness and other commitments
of members of the group. Dorothy Rosemann has had several stays in hospital but
is back doing cataloguing now. Di Worth broke her ankle badly and is slowly
recovering. She is our expert cataloguer and does those books that aren’t as
straightforward or can’t be found on the two databases the rest of us have
access to.
We thought we were nearly at the end of the Victorian and
Edwardian fiction – those dated up to 1914, but the a check of the list of
books catalogued by the state library in that category in the 1990’s shows
there are many books unaccounted for. Some of these may be in Launceston’s
Local Studies collection or in the Phil Leonard Room, or in Hobart. We will
follow this up when all the books we have in our possession at present are all
added to the Libraries Australia database
We have found that about 11% of the books are not originally
part of the collection but have been added later, probably for safe-keeping.
Some of these were from Longford Library and have been given to QVMAG for their
collection, as have some of the others which were originally school or Sunday
school prizes. Many of the remainder have been given to Friends of the Library
for their annual Book Sale.
We still have the fiction from 1914-1945 to be added to the
database. This will bring both fiction and non fiction up to 1945. Some members
are working on creating a spreadsheet for the cataloguers to use when adding
this group of books to Libraries Australia, so that we keep our own record of
what we have added.
We are grateful that the Plomley Foundation has agreed to us
using part of the grant money to extend our subscription to Libraries Australia
for another year and we hope this will be sufficient for us to finish our task.
We are able to do our work by taking boxes home from D007,
working on the books and then returning them to the great stack at the southern
end of D007. There’s quite a lot of hefting boxes around but it is very
convenient to do it in this way.
Hundreds of hours have been expended in this task and I
thank the members of the group for their continued support and hard work.
Prue McCausland
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