Cataloguing in the dim light of a wet day...

 As expected, there was no power or heating at the Athenaeum this morning.

It had rained heavily the night before and the sky was still dark and overcast, but by strategically positioning myself in front of a window there was enough light to see what I was doing - mostly.

It was cold though and I found myself wrapped up in a fleece jumper and MacPac padded gilet for the first time since last winter.

The good news is that I have now finished all the 'A' shelves and am now ready to move on to the 'B' shelves, however I'm having a little time out to work on a set of donated books that have never been catalogued. 

(not our copy - this one is from the New York Public library via the Hathi trust)

Strangely some of them have cataloguing worksheets and accompanying notes but others completely lack any provenance.

At the same time, once I've done the waifs and strays, I'll deal with the prayerbooks, which are currently uncatalogued before going back to the historic book collection.

As we had no power, there was of course no internet, but my little 4G portable internet modem worked well allowing me to catalogue happily away.

However, as I suspected my old refurbished T440 Thinkpad was a little more of a problem - dating from 2014, I bought it as a refurbished machine when it was already eight years old. It's given excellent service, it's been ultra reliable, but the battery is not what it was - it managed a little under two hours on a full charge - not usually a problem as I usually have it plugged in to a powerpoint.

I'd come prepared and brought along the newer refurbished Acer Travelmate I'd originally bought for J as an alternative to her bigger HP laptop to take to presentations etc.

Well, J never really took to the Acer so I'd prepped it as a possible replacement for my Thinkpad for cataloguing work - as most of the work is done in the cloud via a browser the compute demands are not really that great, and it promised better battery life.

I did think that the smaller screen might be a problem, but it turned out not to be, and certainly battery life was much better, so when I got home after this morning's cataloguing session I swapped out the Thinkpad for the Travelmate in my work bag.

I'll keep the Thinkpad as is for a few weeks until I'm sure that the Acer does its job and then, well I don't know - I've probably got enough Linux machines as it is and the Thinkpad is the same age as the old windows based celeron Thinkpad 11 I keep around to use with Rufus...