Gwen C. and I (Rebekah) posted this together -
The two search options given by the Contagious Disease Acts task were looking for additional items through the London Lowlife Collection or looking into items published by the Pall Mall Gazette, with the object of finding materials on women and public health related to the three pamphlets in response to Miss Garrett.
Our first step was to do several basic keyword searches with the computerized catalog in the Lilly's Reading Room. We searched "Pall Mall Gazette" and came up with 11 items (incidentally, almost all were related to various social causes, including animal rights). Only one of the items was applicable to our topic - "Sketches from Shady Places" by John Rutherford (Pen name "Thor Fredur).
A second keyword search of "Contagious Disease Acts" lead to two applicable sources - two different government reports on the Royal administration and operation of the CDA's. Oddly enough, the earlier report, from 1871, was cataloged under "public health" as the primary topic, while a later report (1879) on the same topic, by the same people, for the same purpose, was cataloged under the primary topic of "Sexually Transmitted Diseases." This situation brings to light the importance of multiple searches, with different keywords or methods of searching, to find all the related and possibly relevant materials.
We also tried looking for the London Lowlife collection, however, nothing came up on the computer, so we may have been going about searching for this collection in the wrong way - next time we'll look in the card cataloug as well, under the subject heading "London Lowlife."
Our last, and best, result came after searching "public health" and "women" under the advanced keyword search option. We found the autobiography of Elizabeth Malleson, the author of ones of the pamphlets in the London Lowlife collection! The book included pictures, letter, and biographical information, with contributions from others as well as Malleson. It was written at the request of her children; however, it was not published until 1926 (10 years after Malleson's death), and only for private use. We looked for this same book in the card catalogs along the wall, and although we did not find any works by Mrs. Malleson, we found articles by her husband, Frederick a pastor, published in a Sabbath reading magazine.
Our last, and best, result came after searching "public health" and "women" under the advanced keyword search option. We found the autobiography of Elizabeth Malleson, the author of ones of the pamphlets in the London Lowlife collection! The book included pictures, letter, and biographical information, with contributions from others as well as Malleson. It was written at the request of her children; however, it was not published until 1926 (10 years after Malleson's death), and only for private use. We looked for this same book in the card catalogs along the wall, and although we did not find any works by Mrs. Malleson, we found articles by her husband, Frederick a pastor, published in a Sabbath reading magazine.
Just a note in correction - after a bit of further research, Frederick Malleson was not the husband of the Mrs. Malleson who wrote the pamphlet. Sorry about this mistake! I'm looking up a few things to see if they were related in some way.
ReplyDeleteRebekah, thanks for the clarification. I think the "London Lowlife" collection is an artificial designation. Your idea to look it up in the card catalogues is a good one. You might also ask Professor Cape if there is a printed collection list--it's a vast collection, with boxes of literally hundreds of items, so a collection list might help aid you in identifying single items of interest.
ReplyDelete-Dr. Graban
Finding the "London Lowlife" collection was difficult, there is probably no way we could have done it with out help from the reading room staff. Actually once we found the card the guy working there still had trouble finding the reading list, and when he tried looking it up on the computer for us he also couldn't find anything. Finally once we had the list and had picked out a piece that we wanted to see they had a hard time finding that also. Must just be a difficult collection to get to because of how vast it is.
ReplyDelete