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withdrawn from the collection between 1885 and 1932, whether through deletion,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.
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| 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.
