DACH

Document Supply Centre Requests – revisited

Back in August I wrote a post titled Document Supply Centre requests and the ‘r-word’. Now that this year’s budget for German-speaking Switzerland is used up, I have time to revisit the volume of requests for inter-library loans. Due to the number of requests, and to the need to consider whether a requested item provides “value for money”, I have been rejecting more “borderline” items (i.e. items which do not 100% fit our German Collections Development Policy).

As an example, an item costing 80 Euros or more, in a subject area we don’t normally cover, and with a very narrow or specific focus is not necessarily good value for money because, apart from the actual price of the book, we need to consider the overheads of ordering, processing, cataloguing and long-term storage. In the case of DSC requests, as the book is to be sent out on loan, there is also the extra potential for damage or loss.

But back to the statistics. Statistics can of course, give a skewed idea of what’s happening; for example: when did the academic year start, or when was Christmas or Easter. These external changes at institutes’ “working times” influence how many requests we get. Also, the number of German departments in the UK will affect it. However, looking back at the spreadsheets for the last year, two non-numerical observations are clear:

1. the number of diverse institutions asking for German language publications was much higher then, compared to now.
2. Recently we have received more requests which are out-of-scope, and these are also areas which English-speaking academia should cover well.

In one view I can show you some statistics graphically:

The horizontal lines 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 represent the financial years 2005-2006, up to 2009-2010. So the most obvious observation one can make with regard to my previous post is: for this financial year’s April, May and June the number of requests was extraordinarily high. And even though October is – surprisingly– a time when we get loads of requests, October 2009 was maybe slightly down from October 2008, but still higher than the other three years. December 2009 and January 2010 were not extremely busy, but it is worthwhile bearing in mind that libraries and institutions nationwide have probably started to feel the crunch now, and that interlibrary loan requests are not enjoying the same level of budgets any more as in these institutions last academic year.

However, all this is a bit more complex. I only see the requests for items we do not hold, and therefore there might well be many more requests for German Collections items (those which we already have). So I’d like to conclude with: it’s too early to monitor the recession on the basis of DSC requests at the British Library’s German Collections.
[CG]

Two texts - Two revolutions?

Near the beginning of my research break I blogged about the anniversary of the end of the Austrian revolution. Paradoxically, my last days of study leave are coinciding with the anniversary of the beginning of the revolutions in both Vienna and Berlin. Two very different texts published 162 years ago this month highlight some of the differences between the revolutions in the two cities.

As the Berliners were recovering from the violent street fighting of 18 March they read King Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s proclamation ‘An meine lieben Berliner’. This address to the king’s ‘beloved Berliners’, written ‘in the night of 18/19 March’ tried to lay the blame for the violence on a handful of foreign agitators, and appealed for peace and loyalty. The beloved Berliners themselves took this with a pinch of salt and the term ‘lieben Berliner’ became something of a catch-phrase for satirists in the months that followed. One parody appeared in which the king announces his intention of bombing his ‘beloved’ city and its people, and a satirical broadside shows the original proclamation posted on a street fountain which has been damaged by an army grenade during the fighting.

The preferred reading matter of the Viennese was not a proclamation but a poem, ‘Die Universität’ by Ludwig August Frankl [BL shelfmark: C.175.cc.6.(5.)], celebrating the role of students and academics in the revolution. This was also written overnight, on 14/15 March, while the author was on guard duty, and 8,000 copies were printed in the morning. Because many of these were given away in the streets, the poem quickly reached a large audience and became hugely popular. It was reprinted several times in Vienna and other cities (there was even a French translation) and set to music by nineteen different composers.

Frankl wasn’t the only poet to celebrate the revolution. Indeed, the outbreak of revolution in Vienna was accompanied by an outbreak of poetry which suggests that anyone with access to pen, ink and paper was jotting down some lines in praise of the revolution, the students, the Emperor or the press freedom which enabled them to publish their effusions. There were also poets at work in Berlin, but their verses, at least as represented in the BL, tend to have a more satirical or vitriolic edge: understandably, since there were at least 270 dead by the end of Berlin’s ‘March Days’ compared to the relatively low death toll of 35 in Vienna.

So while the Viennese generally looked forward to a brave new word, the Berliners’ enthusiasm was tempered by looking back to a bloody conflict. Similarly, many Berliners considered their King to have been the instigator of violence, while many Viennese actually saw their Emperor as having been liberated with his people from wicked counsellors. Hence the long afterlife of an admonitory royal address as a basis for satire in Berlin and of a celebratory poem taken at face value in Vienna.

[SR]

Discoveries 4

Sometimes the way I discovered an item is more interesting than the item itself. In this case it is at least worth mentioning briefly. I have been asked to catalogue items of the so-called Collins Collection (books primarily selected by the book dealer John Collins for their bindings; there's more information in the newsletter of the Friends of the British Library, Issue 56 Spring 2007, p. 5). Some of the bindings look to me – as a layperson – extremely boring or standard, for other books even I can see that the binding is extraordinary, or at least “something special”.

One item for which this is true, is:

Muret. Muret-Sanders Encyclopaedic English-German and German-English Dictionary : giving the pronunciation according to the phonetic system employed in the method of Toussaint-Langenscheidt / [smaller edition for Home and School.]
(Berlin : Langenscheidtsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1905.)
Wq6/9979
Collins 831 [not yet fully processed and orderable]

As you can see it is a reference work of 1905, but there are at least two features I should mention here. First the cover has this interesting depiction of a friendly world where England, France and Germany would help and support each other (in case you can’t see it from the scan to the right: the three hands shaking have each a kind of shirt sleeve which features each countries’ name!).

The other notable feature is the explanation of signs within the introduction. Whereas some similar, helpful advice re usage of words is common, I have so far not seen a dictionary which advised that a word

• is a Masonic terminology (symbolised by a rectangle)
• was part of the “lang. of the criminal classes” (symbolised by a small gallows)
or even
• was part of the “language of the uneducated people” (the letter “P” is used)

I won’t comment on these, of course, but will simply give you the visual proof that I’m not making this up:

[CG]

A frightful hobgoblin…

This week the BL (in association with Jewish Book Week) held a lecture to celebrate our acquisition of the first edition of the Communist Manifesto – or Manifest der Kommunitsischen Partei – published in 1848. Acquiring a copy of this rare item was a long-held ambition for me, but even more so for our head of 19th-century British collections. British? Yes, because although the work was written and published in German by Germans, the actual place of publication was London: the ‘Office der “Bildungs-Gesellschaft für Arbeiter”’ to be exact. It’s not certain where precisely that was, but it may have been not far from today’s BL, in Warren Street where a radical German newspaper was also published; there were links between the two ventures. It’s often claimed that the Manifesto’s Fraktur type had to be rushed over from Germany, but since the Bildungs-Gesellschaft had already had a sample issue of a Kommunistische Zeitschrift printed in 1847, and the Manifesto’s printer, J. Burghard of Liverpool Street, was already working for Germans in London, there would no doubt have been plenty of type already to hand.

The complex printing history of the Manifesto has been throroughly described by Thomas Kuczynski (BL shelfmark X.0702/426(49)). Monday night’s excellent speaker, Professor Gareth Stedman Jones focused instead on the Manifesto’s intellectual origins and its influence. He described how the communist groups which began to form in early 19th century were influenced by radical Christian ideas or rational utopianism. Marx broke new ground by largely writing this intellectual background out of the story and associating communism instead with the growing industrial proletariat.

However, the Manifesto and its ideas initially attracted little attention. This was partly due to Marx himself: when European revolutions broke out in 1848, he saw this as the beginning of a ‘bourgeois revolution’ which must be completed before the rise of the proletariat could follow, so he devoted himself to supporting this first revolution and, as it were, put communism on hold. This explained something that had surprised me in my own recent 1848 research: I’d found no obvious references to the Manifesto in the material I’ve been studying, and even the term ‘communist’ hardly appears. But if the standard-bearers of communism were playing down their ideas, it was unlikely that others would pick them up. It was only in the 1870s that the Manifesto began to receive serious attention, gradually gaining influence among socialist and communist groups until it achieved canonical status after the Russian Revolution of 1917.

And the frightful hobgoblin? That comes from the first English translation of the Manifesto, by Helen MacFarlane, published in the magazine The Red Republican in 1850 (BL Shelfmark: RB.23.b.6333). Instead of the now-familiar translation, ‘A spectre haunts Europe’, MacFarlane translated Marx’s ‘Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa’ as ‘A frightful hobgoblin stalks through Europe’. Evocative, certainly, but I think English readers are better off with the spectre.
[SR]

A (non)typical day in a life of a Curator

There are no typical work days for most Curators at the British Library (also compare to Susan's previous post, covering this from a different angle: see http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/dach/2009/07/counting-the-days.html). Of course, there are recurring tasks, such as checking the incoming post. In 2009 we received 349 donated items via post. All need to be considered, and either forwarded for processing, returned, or disposed of in accordance with BL policy. Today it’s only a Swiss local almanac which has used an image from one of our books – I will pass this on to Permissions, as they will need to see it first.

Another daily task is to look at the German-Enquiries inbox (german-enquiries[atsign]bl.uk): there’s a note of a new book published in Germany, which I forward to Susan and Dorothea who select from Germany. I then briefly discuss with my colleague Barbara what has been happening with Dutch Collections in the last few days, as Barbara is taking over checking incoming communications from me today.

My own inbox includes a follow-up email about requesting digital scans; this is part of Imaging Services so I will need to refer the requester to their web order form.

As I’m scheduled later to supervise a historian being interviewed for a radio programme on a book about German prisoners of war in the UK, I check my background information on the book and topic; often curators get asked about something relating to our books. Indeed, they wanted to know why access to this book is “restricted”, which it isn’t: it can be ordered by anyone, but must be read in the Rare Books Reading Room.

After lunch, I deal with German DSC requests. But as often, one request is not straightforward: it is a book in a set of volumes, and the catalogue record doesn’t make it clear which we have already received. When I check the shelf, the volume in question is there.

I return a couple of books and collect a book for Susan; it’s something which also fits in with one of my research projects. I briefly inspect this book’s features against my checklist, and pass it on to Susan.

Although the library offers many talks by internal or external speakers, I don’t manage to go to many of these. But today’s was about Digital Research and how libraries could facilitate this, as digitising material is only the beginning. This will be relevant for the British Library in the near future. I hope that we will get a chance to work as curators in this field.

Back at the desk, I’m going through a duplicates list from one of our German Exchange partners, some of which are of interest to our collections. After this, I look at a draft for a blog post by Susan, and send out another version. I now also have time to follow up an email which indicates that one of the web pages where I changed a broken link hasn’t been loaded to the live server properly (I edit web pages for all Western European languages.) I also just spotted a new broken link, reported on a French page.

For the remainder of the time in the office today I will look into a presentation I’m scheduled to give to some postgraduate students in a couple of weeks’ time. Unfortunately, I don’t get very far, something for another (non)typical day in the life of curator.
[CG]

To e- or not to e- ?

Another request for statistics, this time about the speed at which electronic publishing is developing in Germany. In fact, I was asked for ‘impressions’ rather than hard statistics, which was a relief as reliable figures are difficult to find. Thankfully, due to the introduction of a law which demands the legal deposit of e-books, the catalogue of the German National Library (DNB) can be taken as reasonably representative for total output. It lists 16,114 electronic publications issued in 2009. Perhaps not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of these e-publications are in the natural sciences; a sample of 400 titles revealed only 18 which would conceivably have been in scope for the BL’s Humanities and Social Sciences collection.

The largest non-science presence in the DNB catalogue list is made up of 'on demand' publishing, which accounts for some 4,726 titles. I deliberately left these out of the sample described above since, we were really being asked about research-level material, and although some ‘on-demand’ material fits this category, most of it is more lightweight and popular, or a form of vanity publishing.

A quick survey of 35 academic German publishers’ websites proved that only ten offer some of their publications as e-books (I’ve since heard that an eleventh is due to start doing this imminently). In all cases this was in addition to an available hard copy version. Seven out of the ten offer the e-versions at a discount, generally between 10% and 20% but in one case 50%; two offer them at the same price (in one case with an additional download fee) and one actually charges more for their e-books, presumably due to the fact that they currently provide them only to libraries on a licence basis. But in all cases the e-books appeared to represent a relatively small proportion of the firm’s total output. This was even the case with a couple of more literary publishers which I checked out.

This slow progress is due in part to concerns about intellectual property issues, as demonstrated by the strong resistance to the Google books project from German academics and publishers. The German Publishers’ Association have established their own rival e-book service, ‘libreka’, but this has been seen in some quarters as an expensive flop).

So on the whole, my impression is that e-publishing, at least in Humanities and Social Sciences scholarship, is progressing slowly in Germany. In fact, I suspect progress is equally slow in most countries, despite the way in which e-books are currently being talked up in the media. But I saw another commuter reading an e-book on the tube this morning, so perhaps I’m just behind the times. Of course I can see advantages in e-books and e-readers, but I think (and hope) that they will continue to co-exist with the physical book, offering researchers the advantages of both without tying them to the disadvantages of either.
[SR]

Small ads

Trawling through the first issue of a revolutionary periodical from the Vienna of 1848, I found my attention sidetracked by the advertisements on the back page. The first to catch my eye was within the scope of my professional interest in printers and publishers: a job advert for a corrector in the shop of the magazine’s own printer. But then I spotted the alarming offer underneath from one Wilhelm Gollmann, advertising his services as surgeon, midwife, dentist – and vet. His waiting room must have been quite a scene. If the medical profession has moved on since then, another advert showed that estate agents’ language has stayed much the same: ‘Not to be missed’ is the heading of an advertisement for a shop for sale.

These inspired me to check out the small ads in other issues, and they are a fascinating insight into both the personal and the political. Many are what you would expect – people seeking or offering jobs and accommodation, tradesmen advertising their wares, and individuals selling goods ranging from a grand piano to a National Guard uniform (‘to fit a tall gentleman’) by way of ‘two good horses with harness and travelling carriage’.

from Knötel, Uniformenkunde, VIII. Band, No. 7, @ BL 8827.dd.9

Some of them throw interesting sidelights on social assumptions, such as the woman seeking a teaching position, who emphasises that, coming from northern Germany, she ‘speaks a very pure German’ – one in the eye for the Viennese dialect there. Some also raise more pertinent questions: were so many shops up for sale or rent because the unrest and uncertainty of the times was driving tradesmen out of business? Or was this par for the course? (Obviously a comparison with pre- or post 1848 papers would answer this one quite easily.)

Alongside these general advertisements, anyone willing to pay could and did use these columns to express their own opinions, often at some length. These might concern urgent political issues and events, but also involved more personal grievances such as an accusation that a butcher is selling short weight, or a traveller’s complaint that due to the lack of programmes at Herr Strauss’s concerts he ‘continually had to get up and go over to the orchestra to see what was being played!’. I was rather taken by the combination of political and romantic sentiment behind the appeal by ‘a German-minded girl’ for Archduke Johann’s morganatic marriage to be formally recognised and his wife and children given full royal status

Finally, there are the genuinely personal ones, such as the man seeking to meet ‘an educated spinster or widow … of noble and gentle character, healthy and cheerful’ between the ages of 30 and 45 (he himself was 50!). And the cryptic ones: an assurance to ‘Dear Hanni in Ischl’ that the new apartment ‘has many nooks and numerous entrances’ (surely a code for something?), and the request to ‘the lady in the blue veil’ to ‘give the desired answer.’ I wonder if she did?
[SR]

Discoveries 3

Oh, you think, we are back to these Discoveries entries, and the next thing he is going to say is that he found this book by accident whilst looking for something else, and it will be a book to do with the dark past of the country he was born in. Okay, this one is actually different:

1. It’s about a Brit who moved to Switzerland, giving us insights about living there.
2. I did actually search for “England” and “Schweiz” (Switzerland) to find publications in our collection on the theme of “England seen through the eyes of others”, and after Switzerland, I might actually search for examples from Austria and Germany, but we’ll see.

The title of this post’s discovery is:

Langford, Reginald Augustus. England-Schweiz unentschieden. Wie ein Brite die Eidgenossen kennenlernte. Vignetten von Hans Fischer. (Zürich, [1957].) 10196.g.30.

Before I get carried away about the slightly humorous drawings by Hans Fischer (1909-1958), I should probably briefly translate the title of this book: England versus Switzerland, A Draw.

RA Langford’s book touches, of course, on topics which are specifically Swiss, but there is a nice little story in this book, which is supposedly part of the Swiss male’s characteristic. Now all worries about stereotypes aside, I could well imagine a German or an English man behaving in this way too; it is relatively amusing. Langford describes the scene for this story and recalls the dialogue below: imagine a young, female English teacher, and her new male pupil who wants to have conversation classes.

Teacher (in an encouraging and inviting way): Would you like to tell me about your work?
Student (not very keen): My work isn’t very interesting – every day it’s the same...
Teacher: That doesn’t matter, just tell me something about it.
Student: Well, actually there isn’t much to tell you.
Teacher: Yes, but what are you doing for a living? Business correspondence? Or accounting?
Student: Actually a bit of everything.
Teacher (trying not to lose her friendly and encouraging demeanour): What are your hobbies?
Student: Actually not many. [note: this doesn’t make direct sense in German either]
Teacher: Are you a member of a local club or an association?
Student: No.
Teacher: Do you ski?
Student: No. […]
Ten minutes later, following a similar pattern…
Teacher: Are you interested in books? Student: Not really. No time to read.
Teacher: Maybe we should read something together now?
Student: Alright, if you wish. But actually I came to make conversation.
(@ BL 10196.g.30, pp. 69-70)

[CG]

Back in harness

If my weeks of study leave went quickly, my first weeks back have gone equally fast, helped by the fact that I’m still on a 3-day week with 2 regular days of study leave. Of course Dorothea and Clemens have managed everything smoothly in my absence – just as I expected, but it’s bizarrely comforting to know how dispensible I am! Everyone’s acquired some new experience, and we’ve also acquired some interesting new antiquarian books and an intern, Asha Riederer from Switzerland, who’s been helping out in the German and French sections. And I shouldn’t neglect to mention the new blog by our ‘Team America’ colleagues. As they have made such kind references to our own efforts, I hope to return the transatlantic favour in full at some point with some thoughts on the exiles from ‘my’ revolution who ended up in the USA, the ‘forty-eighters'.

It has been a bit hard to readjust. At least I was lucky to come back to only about 180 emails; this was partly because I’d been checking my work email address and deleting various circulars, invitations to meetings I couldn’t attend, spam and similar, and partly because I had temporarily removed myself from the various mailing lists I belong to. It’s actually quite liberating to be ‘off list’, and I’m almost tempted not to rejoin, but they do keep me in touch with the professional world. For example, if I’d still been getting postings from the excellent American list German-E (geddit?) I would have been better prepared for the news that the German National Bibliography will no longer be published in hard copy after the end of this year. This is a bit of a blow for us since the handy A4 sized issues are ideal for doing preliminary selection work while commuting, and probably easier on the eye than the online version will be. As it is, I feel as if I’ve had to re-learn how to do German selection in the last three weeks; looks as if I’ll have to start yet again in the new year.

Ah yes, the new year. After all, we’re on the threshhold of Christmas already. Good children in DACH will already have had their gifts from Nikolaus, and here in our small DACH corner of the BL it’s probably time to put up the German Section Christmas tree. Though with time rushing by as it does, our Christmas Dinner will take place in January again: Dreikönige, anyone?
[SR]

Discoveries 2

In a previous post, 'cunningly' titled Discoveries 1, I had promised you further insights into publications and issues I come across during my normal curatorial work. Here is another instalment, or "discovery".

I'm working on a project relating to some boringly dull librarian issue which I won't enlarge on here now, and whilst checking a book within the context of that project I came across:

Deutsche Sprüche / (Hamburg : Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1935.)
W90/4816

When I looked at the cover, I immediately thought: don't judge a book by its
cover. However, what I saw plus the year 1935 didn't bode well for what was between its covers. The table of contents suggests that there are three sections to this book:

• Die neue Sittlichkeit [The New Morality], 50ish pages


• Volk und Vaterland [Volk and Fatherland], 15ish pages


• Religion, 30ish pages

Okay, you see already that the clear winner is The New Morality, which covers about half the pages of this publication of quotations. The next page is a quotation, almost like a dedication page, signed by "Dr. R. Ley" in April 1935. The first sentence is 'Diese "Deutschen Sprüche" sind herrliches deutsches Gut.' ['These "German Proverbs" represent the splendid German good/property'].

In case you didn't know either, Dr. Robert Ley was the 'Reichsorganisationsleiter' in these years, and was an important NSDAP (the ‘Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei’, National Socialist German Workers' Party) politician, who then became responsible for building houses (these good deeds are easily forgotten because of him being responsible for anti-semitic as well as other nasty propaganda and actions - particularly often aligning Hitler with a god-like, infallible figure in his speeches).

Obviously the selection of quotations and authors will reflect contemporary taste and knowledge (or even the Zeitgeist), but some material in here is odd. For us it now seems a bit weird to have one quotation each of the following people, if I just pick page 25 as an example:

First, there is the final bit of a quotation by Joseph von Görres (1776-1848), apparently a publicist, historian and university professor; then 2 sentences by Hans Grimm (1875-1959) a novelist and dramatist I have never come across myself. The next quotation on that page is by Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803): 'Auch mit wenigem lebt man glücklich; zu verschmähen den Reichtum ist auch Reichtum; nüchtern-fröhliche Armut machet nüchtern, tapfer und fröhlich.' ('One can also live happily with very little; to disdain riches is also a kind of riches; sober and happy poverty makes [one] sober, courageous and happy.' - please don't blame me for the tautological ring of the adjectives and words used here - that's in the German!)

Then we get to not one, but five statements by Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) - that's not maybe that surprising seeing that this is in the section of 'Die Neue Sittlichkeit' [The New Morality], and I won't quote one of his sexist 'pearls of wisdom' on the man who goes out to show 'courage' on the battlefield, whereas the woman 'devotes herself patiently' by 'patient suffering and bearing'. As with the Herder quotation (see above), one feels that the choice of such a statement was based on how many words were re-used in the shortest space, but it also shows to me something I already had discovered while skimming 'Mein Kampf' (no honestly, I couldn't bear to read this horrible tosh): Hitler was a really bad writer! One wonders whether there is a Ph.D. with a very factual analysis of his choice of words and
the limitations of his vocabulary; or was that in order to appeal to the simpletons of the Reich?).

Finally, the page concludes with Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843). By now you might have spotted that within this section on "morality" quotations and therefore authors are listed alphabetically.

However, it would be interesting to find a similar collection of British or indeed German quotations of any post-1935 year, and see how many even feature a section about 'new morality', and how the choice of authors would compare to this volume. Maybe something for these dark months? Maybe something for you to work on?
[CG]