A milestone reached

I am delighted to announce that I have now completed the cataloguing of the Enid Blyton Collection!  There have been quite a few challenges, and exciting discoveries, along the way and it feels like quite an achievement to have reached this point.  It’s always a moment of great satisfaction to an archivist to finish cataloguing a collection, and this is certainly no exception.  This is a collection which we are sure a lot of people are going to want to see, and the catalogue should make it easy for people to identify exactly what we’ve got and what they might be interested in seeing.

At present, the catalogue is only in draft form.  As with all our catalogues, it will be proof-read and fact-checked to make sure there are no typing or factual errors in the content.  We usually have two proof-readers for each catalogue.  One proof-reader should have a good working knowledge of the life and career of the author or illustrator in question, in this case Enid Blyton, so that they can spot any glaring mistakes in the content.  The other proof-reader is a second pair of eyes in terms of simple typing errors, spelling mistakes and the overall sense of the catalogue structure and descriptions.  It can be very easy, when cataloguing a collection, to start taking certain information for granted or to make assumptions which are clear to me but might not be so clear to members of the public consulting the catalogue.  The proof-reading process simply ensures that the catalogue makes sense to someone other than me!  Once that has been completed, we will arrange an update of our online catalogues to make all of the records available to the public.

The conservation and digitisation elements of the project are still very much active, and we also have an exciting programme of Enid Blyton events and activities planned, which will kick off at February half-term.  So this is by no means the end of the blog – there will be plenty of news and behind-the-scenes insights to come over the coming months.  Do stay tuned!