Consortium News and Updates

Consortium News and Updates

Sep 14, 2023 rap



Note from Bob Proctor - ANRL Sep 14, 2023

The Nudist Research Library Consortium meeting of Sep 9, 2023 highlights:

  1. A fifth nudist research library has been added. It is the Canadian Naturists Federation Research Library and is headed up by Randy Low There is no Website
  2. Mark Pavelchak announced that funding has been approved for purchase of a Synology Disk Station DS220 NAS for WNRL. The NAS was recommended by Bob Proctor of ANRL.
  3. Bob Proctor presented “Technology Initiatives at ANRL”
    1. The Agenda Item started with a phonecall with Dave Foote, and that was preceded by a long chain of emails related to Thinking about the library web page Thinking about the library web page
    2. New volunteer activity in ANRL’s Technical Committee related to improvements to Website
      1. Replacement of Drupal by Wordpress - not high priority
      2. Proposed new branch of Website (new domain?) for a Database and search engine
      3. Database populated from ANRL only? … or populated with listings of holdings of Consortium Libraries?
    3. Next step: populate Database with actual documents, not just titles
    4. Possible global search
      1. DocFetcher
      2. Library-related modules in Drupal
    5. Search results could return library names where documents exist
  4. Exactly how this could work is being investigated
  5. Possible Work items
    1. Mention this activity at a Consortium Meeting
    2. Ask each library to Publish listings of their holdings
    3. Work on common catalog to resolve name conflicts
    4. Publish status of technology used at each consortium library
    5. Maybe think about a common Website for the Consortium
    6. Alternatively, each library to have a page on anrl.org

Note from Bob Proctor - ANRL Feb 10, 2022

Technology enhancements at ANRL include:

  1. Updates to our FileMaker Relational Database which holds Membership records and the inventory of our Archives: ~1,000 Books, ~360 Who’s Who files, ~250 audio recordings, ~950 Videos, ~440 Club folders, ~130 Calendars, ~2.350 Club Newsletter files, ~360 Photos, and ~12,300 Magazines. Many Database records point to files which live in our Network Attached Storage (NAS). The Database makes reports for our Website and Patron Kiosk.
  2. ANRL’s NAS holds our master Digital Archives. We have six volunteers today who can login and write new files to NAS from their homes. ANRL invites other libraries in the Nudist Research Library Consortium (NRLC) to purchase their own NAS devices for their Archives and to be a safe backup for NAS devices in other libraries.
  3. NAS Archives are mirrored to Google Workspace (GW) and are shared with key people from other libraries in the NRLC. The Archived files are viewable on ANRL’s Patron Kiosk.
  4. ANRL’s Website https://anrl.org holds many kinds of information and reports for the public, plus it has a Staff-Only area in which the library staff can view library documents, procedures, workflows, and training material.
  5. ANRL’s search engine of choice is DocFetcher Pro. This app indexes PDF files which have been scanned and converted to text with Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Building index files takes some time but only has to be done once. Search with its powerful search syntax is extremely fast. Viewing found documents is fast and easy. Until available to Patrons, search queries can be sent to us and we will search and return results.

Many of ANRL’s new volunteers are engaged in projects and are very productive. Some other volunteers are waiting for assignments. With all of the challenges at ANRL, there is always something exciting, interesting and challenging to work on.

Note from Mark Pavelchak (WNRL): 2022–02–09

A lot has happened at WNRL over the past year! Here are some bullet points:

  1. We signed a new five year agreement with Glen Eden so GE will be our home until at least 2026 and hopefully a lot longer.
  2. We completely redesigned our website and purchased the WNRL.org domain for it.
  3. After 15 years of anticipation, we have finally received the Archive of the Institute of Nudist Studies (AINS), which was the personal collection of Dr. Cec Cinder. He is of course the author of the Nudist Idea and member of the AANR Hall of Fame. He was also on WNRL’s first Board of Directors when it was founded in 2006, and indicated at the time that WNRL would be the final destination for his collection. We are still inventorying the contents of the collection but here are two highlights:
    1. 75% of the more than 200 books we acquired are new to WNRL and 15 of them were published before 1930.
    2. There are several boxes of material related to the Free Beach movement, which was Dr. Cinder’s passion.
  4. We received a significant grant from the Naturist Education Foundation (NEF) to properly store, preserve, analyze, and promote the contents of AINS. Most of the grant will be used to construct new bookshelves designed to match those we had custom-built in 2016.
  5. Thanks to donations from Dr. Carl Hild, we have significantly expanded our holdings of early German nudist literature. In particular, we now own:
    1. The first 22 volumes of Die Schönheit (“The Beauty”), from 1904 to 1925, and
    2. 64 bound issues of Die Freude ("The Joy‘’), from 1923 to 1929.
  6. We have also recently received other significant donations including 9 boxes from the late Rich Pasco, three from Charlie Perkins of Lupin Lodge, and one from Dr. Carl Hild.
  7. Because the donations keep coming, we will need to find a larger space in the near future and we are exploring ways to raise the funds that it will require.

Have a great time at the Festival. Thanks for spreading the word!

Regards,
Mark