Well, "23 Things Cambridge" certainly kept me busy. So busy, in fact, that I haven't managed to post anything about my work at the Centre for South Asian Studies (CSAS) yet. At the moment I am cataloguing the archive of rare books in preparation of CSAS's big move to its new site on West Road next year. I did my first round of cataloguing early this week and luckily, most books were already catalogued and only needed updating. So it was an easy start.I would like to use this blog to say a few words about books I catalogued and that caught my attention for one reason or another. In this week's lot there was one book about Railways in India. Now, I find railways highly fascinating (my father used to work for a railway company, so I basically grew up with and on them). This book does not only give a very detailed and interesting account of the history of railways in India but it also contains numerous pictures. I find the idea of transporting elephants by train particularly intriguing.
The tracks look rather wide. Will have to check the book for any information on this ...
This blog exists mainly because I participate in the "23 Things Cambridge" online workshop. Through this workshop I hope to learn how web tools can be useful in library and archive work. I am an active user of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Before this media were available I created and maintained my own website. I am new to blogging because I don't think my life is exciting enough to entertain other people, so I'm not going to blog about my life.Incidentally, I am about to start cataloguing some of the archived collections at the Centre of South Asian Studies. Anybody who has been fortunate enough to visit the centre will know about the wealth of information, be it books, microfilm or audio/video recordings, the centre has to offer (most of the latter ones online, but more about this later). However, only very few people will know about the "hidden" archive, i.e. those items that aren't available in the library and many of which haven't even been catalogued yet.Rachel Rowe (the Smuts Librarian for South Asian & Commonwealth Studies) and I thought that some of you out there may be interested in1) What's in these collections,2) How work on cataloguing the collections is progressing,3) What kind of difficulties a junior archivist/librarian encounters and4) How she manages to solve these problems.Overall, this blog might be of interest for anybody interested in libraries, archives, collections and anything related to South East Asia. So another thing I hope to get from the "23 Things Cambridge Workshop" is some feedback on my posts from experienced librarians and archivists. Any comments will be highly appreciated.
