Author: Cara Sheldrake
What do we mean when we say the word “mill” and what sorts of things do we talk about when we examine “milling”? These are just two of the questions that we have been considering as part of the development of a classification system for the library.
As the first phase of the project draws to a close I have been reflecting on the process of selecting categories that reflect both the technical means of differentiating mills and milling and the actual types of writing about mills that fill our shelves.
During my time cataloguing I have discovered a lot about the variety of works in our collection. There are two main ways that the books tend to group mills themselves: by the power-source of the mills and by the function of the mills, and studies are frequently limited to specific locations. However, works about mills also cover, for example, technical aspects of construction and the lives of their owners and inhabitants, and the library aims to provide contexts with books examining historical development and geographic tours. Furthermore, our current keyword list, which is based on some of those used within the archive includes such delightful niches as beetling mills (used to put a finish on linen and important in Northern Ireland) and coprolite mills (coprolite is fossilised dung and was mined in Cambridgeshire and ground up to make fertiliser).
It was particularly difficult to decide which topics could be reasonably grouped together, which subjects should be categories in their own right, and which ranked as particularly important subdivisions – everyone has their own favourite area.
In the end though, there were two key practical deciding factors in the ranking and dividing of categories: are there a lot of books about this, and does it relate to any of the special interests associated with collections? For example, with more than 60 books with ‘flour’ in the title and several covering wheat more generally it was also clear that grain processing was already a substantial topic.
By contrast, our library has as yet a fairly limited amount of works catalogued that deal with individual millwrighting companies, but as the Archive builds on recent work for the Holman Bros. this may change. In fact I eventually selected 18 main categories and around 40 more sub-categories of those – a full list will be available when the new system is running but in the meantime I would love to hear your nominations.