November – Orang-Utans in the Library and elsewhere

Recently I attended a special Terry Pratchett talk as part of Culture Night in the Trinity College Long Room Hub. The Librarian, who enjoyed showing an orang-utan image, told us about Trinity’s enormous and varied Pratchett collection. The Legal Deposit requirement means that a copy of every edition of every work published in UK and Ireland has been presented to Trinity, adding up to 350 from this author.

Further, Pratchett’s agent Colin Smythe, a former student at TCD, had gifted the library with 2000 works. They took a team six months to catalogue. The items included films in video and DVD, computer games, plays, as well as paper books. Trinity had conferred a degree on Pratchett, who fell in love with the Long Room Library and joined the Department of Industry.

Records for the library included geography, illustrators, translators, editors. Josh Kirby was the most common artist. Some names were the same for two people and had to be separated. Colin Smythe had kept an Index for his agenting work which was a great resource. German was the most popular language, but no books appeared in Irish.
Scripts included non-Roman ones, like Georgian, with some odd fonts, and titles were changed to fit. For instance, Papa Puerco was Hogfather. Chinese and Japanese characters were also found.

This is an ongoing Smythe donation, so every year there is another box arriving around Christmas. 1864 items included 1700 print books, 67 audio books, 12 DVDs and 9CDs. The metadata is enormous.

World Cat is a university and public library catalogue from all around the world. 2673 Pratchett works are listed in 73 languages and TCD now has more languages. Also, critical works are collected, and TCD now has 90% of all these known works. There is a Wikipedia workshop and a translation centre which can access the works at Trinity.

During questions, our librarian confirmed that Harry Potter appears in Irish but no Pratchett works. He has only had time to read a portion of the collection. As to digitising, videotapes can degrade over time so the team can digitise them to enhance access, but needs to preserve the original item.

We attended a Virtual Reality Meetup. This was my second time attending. We saw various entrepreneurs and graphics studios around Ireland presenting their work. Jonathan Swift wandering around the Long Room Library at Trinity College and answering questions, was one finished effort. Presumably Prince Harry and Meghan Markle saw this during their visit. Samuel Beckett’s Play has been re-enacted for VR so the viewer can control which of the cast speaks their lines next. A group showed us a virtual person walking around their studios.

I tried out a road safety demo – I took the part of a young man who has a drink in the pub and then goes out to collect a friend in his car. Wham, the car is upside down, ambulance and police are helping him, next thing he is sitting in court. I was able to look up and down the courtroom while the judge spoke. My husband tried a more entertaining experience and went on a virtual roller coaster ride. This was a really interesting and educational event.


October meant Octocon where I was on the crew both days and sitting on the panel about dragons. I can tell you the winner of the Golden Blasters Best of the Decade was short film Einstein-Rosen. I love it! We had a great time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVfxj...

That was a busy month and we’re looking forward to Christmas. Another short film I recommend watching is this one made by Greenpeace, read by Emma Thompson, which the supermarket Iceland was going to run as its Christmas campaign - but it was banned for being too political. Who would think an orang-utan and a little girl would be banned?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk...



Time for a horse book to be free. This month you can download Rodeo Finn from Amazon Kindle 16th – 19th November. Finn, a horse-mad teen girl from a dairy farm in Ireland, faces up to challenges in Ireland and in Arizona. If you download, please consider leaving a review.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rodeo-Finn-C...

https://amazon.com/Rodeo-Finn-Clare-O...

Visit my website www.clareobeara.ie for news, puzzles, books, reviews and events; also my blog on places with good disability access. I am adding book covers to Pinterest boards after I review the books, so feel free to find me on Pinterest.