Astrolearn astrology library progress report
– No. 3: 23rd July 2015
This has been an exceptionally quiet week of solitary progress with cataloguing. I have got through thoroughly revising the listings for most of the modern paperback academic works on astrology and its history this past week, as well as a few of the shelves of hardback ones, adding in additional details such as full paginations, binding formats, series titles and numbers, and footnotes detailing series editors and other relevant information such as, in some cases, the sources for editions and translations of modern printings of medieval and ancient works. All this information, I believe, will add value to the bibliography as a research and learning tool.
A typical full day’s thorough cataloguing work is one 78 cm-wide shelf of books. Some books take longer because of problems such as unopened pages, which make it exceptionally tricky to paginate them properly.
There is still a lot of offline work to do on the catalogue in the time ahead, easily enough to fill three to four weeks of uninterrupted work:
1 shelf of mostly unbound academic dissertations together with a few hardback books;
1 shelf of hardbound academic dissertations mixed with hardback academic books;
1 shelf of mostly hardback W. J. Tucker books plus a few other hardback books;
1 shelf mostly of hardback Teubner critical editions and Project Hindsight translations, also including Housman’s five-volume edition of Manilius;
1 shelf of exceptionally large hardbound books, mostly academic, some in slipcases;
12 shelves of miscellaneous modern hardback books, mostly but not all academic.
Then there is probably the equivalent of at least one shelf’s worth of paperback academic and historically focused books still lurking in other shelves. And there may be other important books still lurking in some other shelves.
As indicated previously, I intend to leave aside the many shelves of miscellaneous non-academic modern softcover books, since my present view is that the amount of time it would take to paginate them and register their binding formats and conditions etc. would be unwarranted. Depending on how I feel when I have got through all the material listed above, I may or may not be minded to tackle the several shelves of large A4-sized books with custom bindings before commencing the upload of the books section of the bibliography.
Since I shall be playing host to a close relative over the coming week, and there will consequently be no progress in the next seven days, next week’s progress report is likely to be minimal in content. But if nothing else, I hope to be able to report the receipt of the rather fine-looking academic history book by A. Hauber on whose purchase I reported in last week’s update: “Planetenkinderbilder und sternbilder zur geschichte des menschlichen glaubens und irrens” (1916). I received a note in the post this afternoon advising me that it is awaiting signed-for collection, so it should be only a matter of days before I pick it up.
Since work on cataloguing the books is now expected to resume at the very end of July, my best estimate date for the commencement of the uploading of the first part of the material is now the last week of August. But this may slip to the first week of September if the job takes longer than expected.
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