Scrimp and Save

As well as the little piece I did for Discover NLS on "make do and mend" (on page 9, entitled "Three publications intended for hard times"), I noticed that the Imperial War Museum had done something similar with their "Top Tips for Hard Times" on their website. They also have Tweets from "Mrs Sew-and-Sew"!

One illustration that couldn't be fitted into the Discover NLS article is the one featured here, which was meant to show that ‘growing your own’ added to the war effort by lessening the need to import food, therefore freeing up ships to load cargoes of weapons and other wartime essentials instead. This is in the publication Food from the garden. The other 2 publications featured are "Make Do and Mend and Wise eating in wartime.

Pandemic influenza

Flu is topping the headlines this week as the [swine] influenza A (H1N1) virus has spread from Mexico to other countries.
In our Official Publications collection we have a good selection of documents and leaflets aimed at professionals and the public about pandemic influenza. The fascination and value of official publications is that it is information direct from the agencies themselves, such as the Department of Health , the Health Protection Agency and the Chief Medical Officer.
Some titles we hold are:

Pandemic flu : facing it together : an influenza pandemic will be the biggest test of planning and preparation you are ever likely to face / Department of Health (2008)
Pandemic flu : important information for you and your family / Department of Health (2005)
Explaining pandemic flu : a guide from the Chief Medical Officer (2005)
Pandemic flu : planning for pandemic influenza in community care : an operational and strategic framework / Scottish Government (2007)
Faith communities and pandemic flu : guidance for faith communities and local influenza pandemic communities / Department for Communities and Local Government (2008)

Shrinking the malaria map

25th April was World Malaria Day and today I was listening to the excellent Lancet podcast about the latest global programmes to control and eliminate malaria. Pam Das and Sir Richard Feacham discuss why, in the last 2 years, funding has made significant effect on controlling malaria particularly in the malaria heartland of tropical Africa and in other areas such as Sri Lanka, China and Latin America. Goals have been set to eradicate malaria by 2050. This involves a 3 pronged "Roll Back Malaria" programme: aggressive control in malaria heartlands; progressive elimination in endemic margins (also known as Shrinking the Malaria Map); intensive research.
World Malaria Day was the start of the Roll Back Malaria (RBM) partnership's "Counting Malaria out" campaign, which aims to provide effective intervention in 100% of the population of endemic countries by 2010. This will involve indoor spraying of 200 million homes annually, the installation of 700 million insecticide-treated bednets, 1.5 billion annual diagnostic tests and more than 200 million doses of treatment.
Online documents and multimedia resources are on the World Malaria Day website.
The WHO's World Malaria report 2008 is available in our Official Publications collection.

All horses great and small

The Civil Veterinary Department of India had 3 main duties: horse-breeding; animal disease research and control; instruction in veterinary medicine and animal husbandry.
While adding metadata for several India-wide CVD volumes (this is one example from 1893-94) I came across interesting correspondence between Veterinary Officers about procurement of good quality horses in the early 1890's. Troop horses from Arabia and Hungary were particularly sought after as they could work for longer in the hot climate on less food than UK horses. "[Hungarian horses] are strong, with great stamina and stand fatique...better than any other horse," wrote J.B. Hallen.
Transit from Buda Pesth to Bombay by rail and steamer cost £10-15 per horse, including the groom's wages and expenses, so it wasn't cheap to import the animals.
Australian Thoroughbreds were also recommended as excellent breeding stock for cavalry mounts.
There are many tables in these volumes recording Government stallions and mules. Some of the names are fascinating - there are occupational names like The Doctor, The Butler and The Lawyer, royal names such as Silver King, Black Prince and His Grace, Imperial names like Colony Boy and East Indian, men's monikers such as Stanley, Stuart and David, and funny ones like Martini Henry, Sinbad the Sailor and Not Beaton. The Arabs were more exotically christened; there are Pasha, Silvermane, Khushnuma and Ali Abdoolah. My favourites are Wigwam, Safety Valve and Leotard!

Starter for 10

Life in the United Kingdom
Passing the life in the UK test - official practice questions and answers.

This book is based on the content of the Official Home Office Life in the UK handbook. It is a guide to the questions asked in the Life in the UK test, so if you want to live permanently in the UK or apply for British Citizen, you need to take the test.
It contains over 400 questions in a variety of formats such a multiple choice, true or false statements, etc. and maybe more importantly has the answers to the questions.
The instructions are simple to follow and each test should be answered in 45 minutes. The pass rate is 18 out of the 24 questions in each test which is a 75% pass mark.
Some of the questions are:
What is a quango?
Why did the Huguenots come to Britain?
How many days a year must schools be open?
In which year did married women get the right to divorce their husband?
How many parliamentary constituencies are there?
And how many senior MPS make up the cabinet?
Do you know the answers to these questions?
I will post the answers on the blog next week.

Photo feature

Have a look at our new feature, our Flickr badge, which has photos of some of our collections, an exhibition launch party, and the Kolkata Book Fair (more to come). You'll find it on the right hand side under the "Subscribe" information. Just click on any of the wee boxes in the "badge" and you'll be taken to the Flickr page with my photstream where you can view all the pics.

The lurking plague

During retroconversion of our printed catalogue, my colleagues discovered The plague manual, published by the World Health Organization in 1976. It was bubonic plague, caused by Yersinia pestis, which caused over 25 million people to die between 1347-1352.
There are several forms of plague: bubonic, pneumonic and septicaemic. Plague is certainly not a disease of the distant past; it is endemic throughout the world today.
The Plague Manual describes plague survey teams, the Central Plague Laboratory guidelines, serological and bacteriological examination of plague-suspect material, fleas and plague control methods. Annexes contain diagrams showing how to skin a small mammal and flea anatomy.
The WHO's webpage on plague contains today's plague manual, plus factsheets and disease outbreak information.

Rate for the job?

The National Minimum Wage came into force 10 years ago today (Wednesday 1st April) despite fears from some quarters that it would "destroy" thousands of jobs; research shows that this has not been the case. The legislation is backed by penalties for employers who do not pay the minimum wage and these have been strengthened in recent years.

A site for bored eyes

The Science Museum's History of Medicine site, Brought to Life, is well worth a visit if you are interested in learning more about diseases, surgery, medical techniques and objects and famous scientists.
The site is split into areas which makes it handy to surf in small chunks. There is material to support both GCSE and undergraduate study and the selected links and bibliographies offer further tantalising information at the end of each article.
The site is funded by the Wellcome Trust.
Photo credit: Science Museum home page

Operation "Allied Force" - 10 years on

It's the 10th anniversary tomorrow (24th March) of Operation Allied Force, which was a bombing campaign by NATO in the former Yugoslavia as a response to Slobodan Milosevic's military action in Kosovo. Looking through our Kosovo resorces, it just brought home to me how much official information is now on-line, and also what a great resource the House of Commons Library Research paper series is. There's a very good background paper by the Library staff of the first few days of the NATO air strikes, and it's certainly worth looking amongst these papers for information on just about any issue, international or otherwise, that the UK has a vested interest in. They're all at shelfmark GHC-I.9, so you can browse our online catalogue using the "Shelfmark" search.

(Picture credit: NATO)

TB or not TB

Tuesday 24th March is World TB Day which is a continuation of a two-year campaign to stop TB. The day raises awareness of people who are affected by tuberculosis (TB) throughout the world.
Here in Official Publications, we have many leaflets about TB from the UK's Department of Health as well as information from the World Health Organization.
Some may think TB is an illness of the past - TB is well known for killing writers Katherine Mansfield, Anne and Emily Bronte, Anton Chekhov and John Keats - and that it has no place in today's society. But TB has been on the increase since the 1990's in European cities and whilst antibiotics have been an efficacious treatment for the tuberculosis bacilli, the emergence of Multi-drug resistant TB (MDR TB) and Extensively drug resistant TB (XDR TB) is a serious concern.
(Picture credit: TBalert.org)

500 years behind bars

Prison: five hundred years of life behind bars by Edward Marston, has just been added to the OPU collection. It is published by the National Archives and contains information extracted from the documents and photographs held there.
It is a comprehensive history of prisons, from the Tower of London through to Victorian developments and the abolition of hanging. Illustrative plates show records and photographs of prisoners, prison plans and even prolific hangman Albert Pierrepoint's request for execution equipment.
In his conclusion, Marston writes, "Prison involved loss - loss of family, loss of friends, loss of reputation, loss of earning power and loss of control. Most of all, it meant loss of liberty, and this has remained the basic ingredient of imprisonment until the present day."
This book tells how this was implemented throughout history and what impact it had on those who were behind bars.

Clash of cultures

With President Obama recently declaring his intention to begin a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, I was having a look at some of our Iraq war items. One is a primer for U.S. military personnel deployed to Arab countries, "Through the lens of cultural awareness"*, which lists the various "cultural" mistakes made in their dealings with the Iraqi population, such as: "Soldiers have shown ignorance of Islamic religious practice. For example, Iraqis arrested by US troops have had their heads forced to the ground, a position forbidden by Islam except during prayers. This action offends detainees as well as bystanders . . . the military has enough to worry about without alienating the local population.”

Interestingly, it also includes T.E. Lawrence's 27 articles on working with Arab armies.

You can read it here in NLS* or online.

The Great Reform Act

(or more correctly The Representation of the People Act of 1832) was a piece of ground-breaking legislation which began to change the country's electoral system.

The National Archives' Learning Curve website has some original sources on political protest which helped the drive towards electoral reform. The British Library's recent exhibition, "Taking Liberties", on the fight for Britain's freedoms and rights, features the Act.

And of course, the National Library also has a new feature which includes this major event. Plans of 75 Scottish towns were published to implement the Act in Scotland, and you can now see them on our Map Library's
Great Reform Acts plans and reports website, which includes the House of Commons text accompanying each map.

Stop that camel!

The Indian journal of veterinary science and animal husbandry contains hundreds of articles covering a range of subjects such as parasites, tapeworms, animal diseases, nutritional values of animal feed, milk and wool yields, even foetal monstrosities. Following on from Jan's post on cannabis, today I found that camels were used to smuggle opium and charas (handmade hashish formed into balls or sticks).
The article in volume 11 is from 1941 and states: "The Sinai Police are an exceptionally subtle body of men and can almost smell narcotics through a brick wall and eventually nine camels were put under suspicion at Kantara and three others were soon in the lock-up at El Arish."
The drugs were smuggled in the camels' stomachs: "The strange ability of the camel [is] to swallow 25 heavy containers 15 x 4 cm. and to be able to travel and work with little inconvenience to himself."
The inconvenience came when 'guilty' camels were slaughtered and the drugs seized from their first stomachs. Lead was used by the smugglers to prevent the drugs from travelling any further through the animals' systems.
With over 30,000 camels passing annually from the East into Egypt, the authorities proposed using an x-ray's "searching beam" to detect drugs. "An interesting case of the use of science in the perpetration of crime as well as in its detection!" concludes E.S. Farbrother, the Director of Veterinary Services in Bombay.
(Camel photo credit: Camelphoto.com)

Batholomew Archive - now blogging

Our colleagues in the Map Library now have a blog with regular posts about the Bartholomew Archive. As the site explains, the Archive is the remarkable record of the Edinburgh-based firm of map engravers, printers and publishers, John Bartholomew & Son Ltd. It is one of the most extensive cartographic archives available for research in a public institution.

Smoking is bad for you...

The government's latest public information film warning 11-18 year-olds about the dangers of cannabis continues to stimulate debate about the drug. Over a hundred years ago, the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission report (the largest ever report into its cultivation, use and effects)was published. You can find it here at the NLS; The first report (there are 8) contains some great sepia photographs.

Obama's blog

President Obama's changes at the White House include a new White House website and a blog (all the best people have a blog...!), though of course, it isn't actually him who's posting the entries. Still, it's worth a look. He's Tweeting as well.

Heading home

After a successful NLS "gig", Kevin and I are heading for home tomorrow. Kevin's talk, "Kolkata Curiosities" went really well at the Book Fair yesterday, and despite me having a rotten cold, I managed to get through my talk at the NLI this afternoon. The assembled librarians were quite a shy bunch, so not many questions, but all contributions were very positive. The NLI director K. K. Banerjee was there (as was ours - Martyn Wade arrived safely this morning) and it all looks very promising for partnerships between our two national libraries. I was interviewed for TV, too (what with the paparazzi earlier in the week and now this, it's quite gone to my head).

Edinburgh's going to seem very strange when we get back.

Malaria capers...

I should mention that yesterday we paid homage to the Scot Sir Ronald Ross, who of course proved the link between anopheles mosquitoes and the transmission of the malaria virus. This plaque is in the grounds of a Calcutta hospital, on the spot where Ross's laboratory stood. We took along the Malaria Giant Microbe to visit his nemesis!

Kolkata update

After several attempts at another post late last night (problems with internet connections)I gave up, so here I go again – fingers crossed.
I want to mention the marvellous British Council staff, who are unflaggingly generous, kind, and fixers of the highest order. They also do a rather good blog. Edd McCracken of the Sunday Herald, also did a blog and the Book Fair will be featured in the paper this Sunday, though I’m sure Edd’s got enough material to get a series going.
It’s difficult to keep track of everything we’re doing here. (I'm afraid I spent a whole day with a, er, tummy bug, and lay around feeling faint like a Victorian memsahib). As a result I was disappointed to miss tea at the Governor's residence.
The visit to the Scottish Cemetery was a highlight; we hope that the efforts by RCAHMS and the Kolkata Scottish Kolkata Heritage Trust to restore it will bear fruit.
A talk by Lord Bruce on Scots and India was very well received, and he was followed by the very learned Prof. Barun De, who revealed that he is a great fan of the NLS. He reminisced fondly about his visits there in 1957.
Later, we visited the Eastern Zonal Cultural Centre, and watched a workshop where rural artists are given a chance to raise themselves above the poverty line. They do some beautiful work, and we were particularly struck by the similarity of the painted scrolls they produce and one we have in NLS which dates back to 1788.

Book Fair begins... kind of

Still the building work continues, but the Fair goes on for another couple of weeks yet, so they've got time.
Kevin and I bought some books for the NLS, including one on the development of vaccines. We don't want to weigh down our suitcases, but as we are leaving behind what feels like several kilos of NLS leaflets, then we should be OK!

After our welcome by the Mayor on Monday (previous post) we were given a walking tour of Dalhousie Square which is being renovated. Naively, I thought it was being pedestrianised, but in fact the police were holding back a huge build up of traffic for us. All along our route we were assailed by photographers; this happens everywhere we go, and they are now referred to as the Book Fair paparazzi.
Then on to St Andrew's Church (established 1818), for a lighting ceremony by the Governor of Bengal (high security throughout), followed by a church service, more tea and refreshments (always on offer here), and then back to the hotel. By this time, Kevin and I were zombie-like after missing a whole night's sleep travelling the previous day.

We spent the next morning at the Scottish Cemetery (see the RCAHMS blog link for more information) and also Park Street Cemetery, but that's another posting...