Another day at the cataloguing coalface

 Earlier this year we had a problem that none of the insect traps in the historic book collection had been checked since who knows when.

Well we cleaned up, replaced the moth traps with new ones, and waited.

Well today's been three months since we replaced the traps. The moth attractant still smells when you open up the traps to check but there's no evidence of insect intrusion.

Now it has been winter here in the southern hemisphere, which meant fewer flying beasties, but it's now well into spring and there are definitely bugs about.

But the lack of evidence of insect intrusion is a good sign and suggests that we did not have a developing infestation during the period when the traps were not being checked regularly.

We've decided to leave the traps as is until the end of January and do a second check, at which point we'll replace the traps again.

Otherwise the mix has been much as before with Victorian era sensation novels, some sourced second hand from Mullens, golden age mystery novels, and the odd romance, but also a new trend

with the development of the cold war in the 1950s, spy and espionage novels start to make their appearance.

The actual cataloguing process using LibraryThing is working well, but I've moved from using their aggregated Overcat catalogue to using the National Library of Scotland catalogue.

The NLS catalogue has pretty good coverage of the period that the historic book collection covers although some of the entries are quite sparse and sometimes require to be cross checked with the British Library catalogue and the National Library of Wales catalogues.

One slight source of annoyance with the NLS catalogue is that where and author uses a pseudonym, the catalogue 'corrects' it to the author's true name - for example if you catalogue  The silence of Dean Maitland by Maxwell Gray, the catalogue will correct the author's name to Mary Gleed Tuttiet.

Other library catalogues do not do this - it's obviously been a perfectly justifiable design decision by the NLS.

However as the book is filed under G, the author name on the spine, I usually correct the author's name back to the pseudonym and add a comment about the use of a pseudonym and point to a suitable source, usually wikipedia.

Otherwise it's been a pretty productive week. It's been surprisingly cold for October after last weekend's rain, so I havn't done a lot of gardening although I did cut the grass one day. 

My seedlings are going well and my tomatoes will soon need to be potted on for a second time, although the possums have totally decimated my broadbeans.

However, the potatoes are doing well and so far, touch wood, they've left the runner beans alone. I've started a second lot of broad bean plants in pots with the aim of growing them to a possum proof size before planting them out.

I also did a little bit of blogging this week - first about Holderness - and then by a strange but totally explicable link, zeppelin raids on the UK during world war one.

The link is the little town of Howden, that lies to the west of Hull on the north bank of the Humber, and while it's not in Holderness as such the landscape share the same flat open countryside as seen further east, and came to mind while researching both Holderness and zeppelin bases.

I can't say that I ever stopped in Howden, but when we lived in a village to the east of York, the easiest way to get to either the M62 or M18/M1 freeway was to drive south to Howden rather than drive towards Leeds and jiggle about in usually heavy traffic.

Howden was the site of the major British airship base during world war one and later the site of Britain's ill fated attempt to build an airship to match Germany's expertise in the field.