BookCollectorZ

Our catalogue is now available through an online service BookCollectorZ. You can search this catalogue to discover our holdings. Check it out here: https://cloud.collectorz.com/folmi/books

Partnering with Trove

We are proud to be a content partner with Trove, the National Library's brilliant aggregator of content from libraries, museums, archives, and other organisations big and small.

Just over a year ago our outstanding team of volunteer cataloguers began to contribute records to Libraries Australia so our collection could be more widely accessed and researched. Already 6418 titles have been added. Our aim is to have the whole of our book collection catalogued in the next year.

Trove progressively harvests records from Libraries Australia making our collection fully searchable from their site.

Records in Trove are linked to a National Union Catalogue (NUC) Symbol. NUC Symbols are issued and maintained by the National Library of Australia. Every NUC Symbol is unique and allows Trove to identify the organisation holding the item. A NUC Symbol is added to each incoming record by the Trove harvester. Our NUC symbol is TLMI.

We have now added a Trove search widget to our sidebar so the reader can browse or search our collection. The search parameters have been set up to limit your search to books with our NUC symbol.

If the search box is left blank you will be taken to a complete list of our titles. If a search term is entered the results will include only items held in our collection.

UPDATE August 2020. Regrettably Trove has withdrawn the Search Widget following their 2020 site upgrade. It served us well for three years, but we are no longer able to offer this feature on our blog.

The Trove story - from their site
Trove's origins can be traced back to a project launched by the National Library of Australia in August 2008. Its aim was to build a portal for all of the Library’s online discovery services, including the Register of Australian Archives and Manuscripts, Picture Australia, Libraries Australia, Music Australia, Australia Dancing, PANDORA web archive, ARROW Discovery Service and the Australian Newspapers Beta service.

Today Trove is transformed, growing far beyond its original purpose and becoming many things to many people: a community, a set of services, an aggregation of metadata, and a growing repository of full text digital resources. Trove is a platform on which new knowledge is being built. It is a collaboration between the National Library, Australia's State and Territory libraries and hundreds of cultural and research institutions around Australia, working together to create a legacy of Australia’s knowledge for now and into the future.

Visit the Trove site to learn more about this outstanding service.

Cataloguing Our Collection

The Friends of the Launceston Mechanics' Institute have started to catalogue our collection and our holdings will gradually appear on the ANBD and TROVE over the next two years.

 Our National Union Code symbol is TLMI. The screenshot below shows three of our titles as they appear on TROVE, including one of the titles which does not seem to be held elsewhere in Australia.

As we begin the biggest project we have undertaken so far, it is timely to revisit a survey undertaken in October 2014.

It will be interesting to see if the results are borne out when the collection is fully catalogued.

The aim of the survey was to determine the proportion of Launceston Mechanics' Institute's nonfiction books held in other Australian libraries. A further aim was to provide a basis for comparison with the holdings of the Ballaarat Mechanics' Institute, an Institute of similar age and size to the LMI.

Methodology

A representative sample of the LMI collection was checked using the National Library of Australia's TROVE books discovery service. TROVE indexes 21 million books, theses and proceedings held in Australian libraries.

The same sample was checked against the holdings of the Ballaarat Mechanics' Institute, using a database supplied by the Institute.  The BMI collection is not listed on TROVE.

The sample was randomly selected by tagging and checking the tenth book on each shelf.

Sample size – LMI nonfiction Sample (n=367) – 95% confidence, 4% MoE.

Publication dates of all sampled items were recorded in order to develop an age profile of the collection.

This is an outline of what we discovered:

TROVE Listed

1. Libraries listed on Trove held 276 titles in the same edition as that held by LMI (75.2% of the sample).

2. Of these 53 (14.4% of the sample) were held by only one other library.

3. Libraries listed on Trove held a further 47 titles (12.8%) but only in a different edition to that held by LMI.

4. Libraries listed on Trove offered access to a further 39 titles (10.6%) in digital format but did not hold the printed book. i.e. only LMI held a print copy of these titles.

5. LMI held copies of a further 5 titles that were not listed on Trove in either print or microform editions and for which no digital access was offered. (1.4%)

6. In total 24.8% of the sample was unique to the LMI collection in print form in that specific edition

Ballaarat Mechanics' Institute

1. Of the 367 titles in the sample, 86 (23.4%) were found on the Ballarat collection database.

2. There were 55 exact matches (14.9%).

3. 31 titles in the sample were the same title but in a different edition.

4. A subsequent check of 373 fiction titles held by LMI revealed even less correlation. Only 11 titles (2.9%) in this sample were held by both Institutes.

In summary:

1. The LMI nonfiction collection includes a significant proportion of material not held elsewhere in Australian libraries.

2. There are great differences between the holdings of the LMI and the Ballaarat Mechanics' Institute – a feature which merits further research.

3. The age profile of the sample – below -  illuminates, and raises many questions for further research about, the development of the collection over its period of operation.

Figure 1: LMI Collection by Date of Publication

A Charles Darwin Miscellany... a travelling exhibition from the book collection of the Launceston Mechanics' Institute.

Where: Launceston LINC

When: until the end of April

The profound influence of Charles Darwin on all areas of nineteenth century thinking was the springboard for this exhibition.

It is a mark of the quality of the service provided to the Launceston community that its Mechanics' Institute acquired such a range of Darwin's works in early editions, and that its collection reflected contemporary thought and reactions to the twin theories of evolution and natural selection.

The select group of items in the exhibition all relate to Darwin with examples from his own writings, the works of his supporters and opponents, and from those who were influenced by his theories, including many noted authors.

  

The Institute collection offers a unique insight to the intellectual life of Launceston in the colonial era and to the openness of a small and isolated city to the ideas that were profoundly reshaping the world.

A Punch cartoon from 1861

All facets of the collection are represented in this selection - nonfiction, novels and periodicals - a tiny part of the 22,000 volumes which have survived from this remarkable library owned and operated by the people of Launceston for over one hundred years from its inception in 1842.

This travelling exhibition is proudly presented by the Friends of the Launceston Mechanics' Institute with the support of Arts Tasmania's Lynne Stacpoole Caring for Your Collection Grant Program.

This project was assisted through Arts Tasmania by the Minister for the Arts.

Books on Polynesia

One important area of analysis of the surviving Institute collection is to establish the retention rate of books through a comparison of what was in the collection (sources such as the Accession Registers and printed catalogues are invaluable in this regard) and check this against what is still held.

The working hypothesis is that survival will vary greatly in different subject areas and categories of reading. Thus, recreational fiction titles would be less likely to survive than philosophical works on the basis that they would be more heavily read when new and then fall out of favour, or would be worn out and discarded because of condition. Only when the collection is fully catalogued, will it be possible to conduct statistically reliable surveys to measure survival rates.

In the interim a small survey was conducted on a subset of the non-fiction collection. A subject area – Polynesia – was chosen because a list of holdings in 1906 was available as the basis for a check of the shelved collection.

In the Catalogue of the Works in the Launceston Mechanics' Institute and Public Library (1906) as a subset of Reference Room Section D Australia and Polynesia, a separate listing of 37 titles was arranged under the heading Polynesia (pp18-19). This was the first catalogue in which this subject category had been separately listed. 

KORO BASABASAGA

 Detail from an illustration in Seamann's Viti (1862)

A survey conducted in September 2014 aimed to discover how many of the titles listed remained in the surviving part of the LMI collection, and where they were located.

Of the 37 listed titles, 33 were located. Ten of these are in the Launceston LINC Local Studies Collection, and 23 have been transferred to FOLMI. Another is listed on the State Library's catalogue as being held in Launceston, but was not found on the shelves. Thus only three items of the 34 appear to have been lost from the collection since 1906.

Such a high survival rate (89%) needs to be considered as a factor of the subject  category – Polynesia - one likely to be of enduring interest to a limited readership and having historical value through links with the history of Australian exploration and settlement. Additionally the location of the books in the Reference Room in 1906 suggests they were not available for loan.

The survey however reflects the value of having such strong provenance records to assist in the interpretation of the collection.

The main period of collection development in this subject area appears to have been the 1880s when travel titles by C F Gordon Cumming, Mrs Edgeworth David, Rev W W Gill and Frederick Moss were all added. However some titles are of earlier date, including early editions of Melville's  Omoo and Typee, Rev George Turner's Nineteen Years in Polynesia (1861), and botanist Berthold Seemann's Viti (1862) an interesting account of a Government mission to Fiji in 1860-1 led by Colonel William Smythe which was tasked to investigate cession of the islands to Britain.This last appears to have been donated to the collection by a teacher at the Launceston Grammar School, Mr Hedstrom.