How not to de-accession

Many apologies not not posting lately, but some very interesting devlopments have been happening at work. One of these includes coming across a very rare book indeed. It is Henry Bradbury's first nature-printed work from 1854, and includes 21 colour-printed nature-printed plates in a printed portfolio wrapper. I will be posting more details on this book later, but in the course of researching it I came across some rather unsettling (to put it mildly) library news.

The book itself seems to be related to a patent application by the publishers Bradbury & Evans, and thus I contacted Steve van Dulken at the British Library (see his excellent blog on patents here) for more details. He said that for conservation reasons the British Library no longer permits photocopying of patent specifications pre-1900, but that I should contact Leeds Patent Library.

Thus I duly did, and it turns out that in 2004 Leeds Patent Library had to move offices and were unable to hold their hardcopies of patents. Therefore they gave them away (for free!) to Univentio, a Dutch company mainly interested in current British patent applications, with the proviso that the older ones would eventually be digitized. In 2005 Univentio was taken over by LexNexis, who had no interest in this at all, and apparently all of the hardcopy Leeds patents have now been dumped.

As a tax payer I cannot quite believe financial incompetence of giving away public assets for free; as a researcher and historian I cannot believe that we gave away our heritage for free.

Unbelievable - especially as it is possible to make a living by selling such a collection; just ask Maurice Stroh.

Of course one shouldn't necessarily be surprised. Nicholson Baker has documented at length what he calls "Libraries and the Assault on Paper" in his excellent book (and must read for anybody interested in books) The Double Fold.

There is a happy ending. Leeds referred me to Sheffield Patent Library There, an extremely helpful lady by the name of Paula told me that Sheffield still had all their patents in hardcopy. They are stored offsite, and library staff make a journey twice a week to get the relevant material. They will photocopy the relevant patent application for you for the princely sum of £1.50 handling fee and 20 pence per page. I will be receiving my requested photocopies of Bradbury & Evans' nature-printing patent application in the post in the next day or two (Royal Mail strikes permitting). Now that is a public service well worth paying for and well worth keeping.

Worldcat and Boopsie

I'm often using Worldcat to check library holdings of antiquarian books. As a resource it's pretty amazing, and when I saw that I could run it on my mobile, I thought this would be even more wonderful. And it is .... up to a point.

Worldcat has gone into partnership with Boopsie. With the tag line 'Type less, find more', Boopsie is a search client for mobile platforms. Here's how it describes itself on the Boopsie website:

Boopsie is a mobile search provider. However, we like to call it mobile find - because Boopsie finds things, it doesn't search for them. The Boopsie client is a thin, yet powerful, layer between you and what you are trying to find. Boopsie does not 'contain' the data; it creates and uses special indexes to find the data on other content providers' sites.

So I downloaded the Boopsie Worldcat client onto my Blackberry Pearl 8100 (yes, I know that I'm one of the clerical workers of the world, thank you Mr Hockney). First little snagette is that you actually have to download two Boopise apps: one is the Boopsie main application; the second is the dedicated Worldcat interface.

As a result two icons appear on the Blackberry display. Clicking on the Worldcat icon opens up a screen with a search line at the top next to an icon that flickers between a blue search 'magnifying glass' and a red satellite dish. The point of the dish is that the Worldcat app is meant to pick up the GPS signal from the Blackberry's position and be able to tell you how far you from the nearest library where it's located the book you're looking for. Cool eh?

Err, no. Here's the first problem. I live and work in London, but for some reason it thinks I'm in Seattle, WA. You can manually change your location, but only you can only change it to Londons in the USA or Canada. Why, therefore, is it called Worldcat? I would understand this if it thought Boston was in Massachusetts rather than Lincolnshire, but really... It works fine on the main website, Worldcat even knows how to find and position British postcodes, but obviously it's Boopsie that has the problem. Google Maps, incidentally, works like a dream on my phone, and seems to instantly pick up my position everywhere I've ever been with it, whether that's in the New World or the Old.

Unfortunately, the second flaw is generated by one of Boopsie's strengths. The idea behind Boopsie is to create a fluid searching experience using minimal keystroke entry to gain results. (Boopsie's own example is that to find 'jacqueline kennedy onasis' in Wikipedia, one only needs to type 'jac k o'.) But with antiquarian books, this doesn't really work because you drag up hundreds of inconsequential entries too, so the usual maximum keystroke entry is required. In fact, I now start my searches with a date to minimise the junk returns.

Then there's yet another flaw. The search returns pop up nicely in the Worldcat app, but to see extra detail, it loads up each entry into the Blackberry's web browser. So now you're effectively running two apps and swapping from one to the other is a bit of a faff.

Still, I think these are little quirks that can be lived with to get the power of mobile research through the world's largest library resource.