Author: Cara Sheldrake
At the moment, as a volunteer, I am not hunting through collections researching for a project or digitising vital material; instead I organise books and pamphlets for the library. In any given week I catalogue a handful of new acquisitions, recent publications and donations, and continue to work through the backlog of material associated with the archive collections.
This means not just putting the title and author into a form but also checking for duplicates and alternative editions, noting its condition and the circumstances of its acquisition, assigning it categories and keywords and shelving it appropriately.
For me, the library here at the Mills Archive is actually 3 things simultaneously. As well as its main role as a key resource for researchers, the library also acts as both an extension of individual collections from the archive and as a collection in its own right.
The most important part of the cataloguing is making sure that my categorisation of each text is based on its actual mill content (definitely not always straightforwardly indicated in the title!) so that researchers can find the relevant material quickly and efficiently on the online catalogue. However, since a significant proportion of the literature that we have has been donated as part of a collection or through the generosity of our supporting partners it is important that those connections are maintained and highlighted so that material can continue to support the collections directly.
Additionally, the library functions as a kind of collection in its own right in that it is able to gather together texts often kept separate in other libraries and in doing so it creates new connections and acts as a record of the types of material being published about mills. This is especially important since the library also includes pamphlets published by local interest groups and mills themselves, which chart activities and developments over many years.
This is a busy time at the archive and the library is no exception. Since it was first set up the library has grown enormously and more than filled its current shelves; as such it no longer seems appropriate to carry on without a classification system. As with many specialist libraries, traditional classifications (e.g. Dewey Decimal) don’t have enough nuance to differentiate between the various subject categories within milling. This means we require our very own system, which gathers together texts in particular key fields and is designed to reflect our current holdings with the capability to expand.
This new system is being developed by Elizabeth Trout and myself and is based on the original categories identified by Mildred Cookson and Peter King that are currently used for library searches but with a lot more detail. It is still very much a work-in-progress but do expect to see some changes in the shelving in the near future and look out for more information about individual texts in the catalogue when the new website goes live.
I hope to highlight a few of the things which make our library extra interesting over a few more blog posts, so watch this space.
