WELCOME TO

THE PERSONAL WEBSITE OF

<< Robin Alston >>

¶The Library History Database¶

Bibliography of the English Language
1958-2008

The Scolar Experience
The Janus Experience
Essays and Papers 1975-2002
Review of Snyder’s History of ESTC

BITS & PIECES

[Informal News & Happenings]
[Updated January, 2008]

Sale Catalogues 1676-1800
British Isles – North America

CV
[Updated October 21, 2008]

Contact

& & &

Bibliography of the English Language

Volume XXI – in three substantial volumes - listing many hundreds of additional, editions, and new entries for all volumes published to date, and several thousand new locations was published on April 1 this year in three volumes. A second volume of Addenda [XXI Part 2] will appear in 2010 in time for the data it will contain to be included in Volume XXII which will provide comprehensive indexes to all volumes and will constitute the final volume in the series. These indexes are in preparation by Jane Read, a professional indexer. Volume XIX Part 2 which lists material in newspapers is almost completed and should be published in December this year.

Work on Volume XX – materials in manuscript – has been progressing steadily since the year 2000, when I discovered to my horror that all the files which I had accumulated since 1960 had been lost in transit from Suffolk to London. I have had, in effect, to retrace the research of almost forty years. Not, in fact, possible. However, over two thousand entries have been recovered, and I hope that my researches in the UK this year and next will add a further thousand.

John Jolliffe on Stone Age Thinking at the Speed of Light.

Courtesy of David Helliwell (Bodleian Library) I published the text of a paper given by John Jolliffe in America at Terry Belanger’s Book Arts Press on March 17, 1983. John’s widow (Beryl) has given permission for this lecture to be reproduced on this website. John’s title (mischievous as always) was: “Stone Age thinking at the speed of light.” For those who feel that computers and libraries are not entirely a good thing, it makes refreshing reading. It is reproduced in Bits and Pieces.

The Burney Newspaper Database

In 2008 - after many years of planning and, no doubt, over-planning - the Gale Research conversion of the Burney microfilms was was made available to readers in the British Library. Nowhere on the Gale trial site (to which I have recently been granted access in Barbados) is it stated how this project came into being. The Burney project owes its existence to the fact that I was part of the development of the remarkable Mekel M400 microfilm digital scanner, and played a significant part in the development of its many features which made the Burney conversion possible. I met Maurice Amesbury, the designer of the Mekel machine, in the research laboratories of the Air and Space Museum in Washington. This remarkable facility was run by an Argentinian engineer – Hernan Otano. He knew more about what was happening in the world of computer applications than anyone in Britain, and I always visited him on my frequent trips to Washington during the formative years of the development of ESTC which was my major responsibility in the British Library. Maurice came to London three times during the development of the Mekel camera and I was able to provide him with the considerable variety of microfilming in the BL’s collections. He brought a prototype to a London computer exhibition held at Hammersmith in 1997 and I was impressed by the camera’s ability to cope with a wide variety of problems found in films made over the years at University Microfilms in Ann Arbor. I persuaded the British Library to acquire the M400 at a significant discount from Mekel Engineering, and was responsible for the initial trials which used a wide variety of stock microfilms of British Library materials – including, of course, the Burney microfilms. The project was beginning to yield wonderful results, and so the BL had to transfer responsibility for further testing to a full-time member of staff – in fact Edmond King, then involved in the Preservation Service. Progress was halted as the fees from consultants threatened to endanger the project’s future, and nothing more was heard of Burney until the BL was successful (in partnership with Gale) in getting siginificant funding from the National Science Foundation in Washington – largely as a result of my having demonstrated to Michael Lesk (who left Bellcore in Morristown to become an officer in the NSF) the system’s potential. I am preparing a paper giving details of the genesis of the Burney project and this will be made available on this website when completed. I am at a serious disadvantage, however, in trying to write the project’s history since all my files and working papers relating to my involvement as Consultant to the Director General between 1975 and 1996 are in the Bodleian Library! For those interested in the beginnings of digital access to printed or manuscript materials my lecture to the Society of Archivists is worth checking – essay11.htm.

Library History

I am currently engaged (pre-occupied seems more appropriate) in the arduous process of putting together the notes I have made over a period of forty five years reading through the entire contents of the Burney newspapers in the British Library, with a view to producing a better bibliographical guide to book sales in the British Isles andf North America than Lawler, the British Museum list printed in 1915, or Munby-Coral (1977) of sales of private libraries in the British Isles from 1676 to 1800. So far I have edited the file up to the end of 1800 and have brought to light over 2,000 sales not previously recorded. The final process in this vast task which has been accumulating in cardboard boxes for decades is proof-reading the entries and attempting to document the names of the owners (over 4,000). I hope to deliver copy to the printer in January 2009. It now occupies over 900 pages in quarto format. A specimen of the catalogue can be consulted at munby2.htm.

Total accesses to date: 4,311,000 – the monthly average is +- 32,000 visits.
Statistics supplied by Sunbeach.Net

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Contact addresses in 2008/9:

October - March

67 Ocean City, St Philip, Barbados. Tel: 246 416 9097 – Cell: +246 266 8201
Email: r_alston@sunbeach.net – checked every day wherever I am!

April – July

8 Silver Street, Masham, Yorkshire HG4 4DX. Tel: 01765 688341 – Cell: 07745 160140

Updated:     01-10-2008

This is the best picture I ever managed to get of the Round Reading Room, in which I spent the greater part of my working life between 1960 and the day it finally closed: the famous bell rang for the last time at 4.45 on Saturday, October 25, 1997.

No place on earth where you could search for knowledge like this was. The new British Library belongs to the future, not the past.