After a hiatus of several months, due to it being too cold in the depths of winter to sit around cataloguing in the stacks and to the arrival of a bequest of a large number of music scores which, for the benefit of our music students, it seemed more urgent to get catalogued and in circulation, I returned to the stacks and to the exactitudes of antiquarian cataloguing. Today's first subject: a 1697 copy of the French translation of Descartes's Principia philosophiae. Since my last visit, Oxford has changed its Library Management System, which is the software running all its cataloguing, circulation and other library services, to Aleph, which means getting to grips with a whole new way of doing things -- took me about half an hour to work out how to get a superscript o (as in 8ยบ for octavo). After two hours of careful cataloguing, I hit Save -- only to be told that I don't have permission to save antiquarian records! (Fortunately, I can save records locally, onto my computer, even when I can't save them on the Oxford system.) So I've sent off a polite request to the powers-that-be for antiquarian permissions, and live in hopes that I shall be deemed worthy!
