Discovering a ‘Hidden’ Collection: Early Printed Books and Old Master Prints in the McGill Library Collected by T.W. Mussen
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Thomas W. Mussen (1832–1901) was the rector of the Anglican Church at West Farnham, Québec from 1859 to 1901, and bequeathed his collection of old master prints and early printed books to McGill University. This article describes a special project undertaken by the author in order to reconstruct the collection that has long remained hidden from the research community. This article analyses the book collection under language (5 categories), place of publication (3), date of publication (7), and subject (8) and demonstrates the uniqueness of the collection by comparing it to the holdings of other Canadian libraries.ResuméThomas W. Mussen (1832–1901) était le recteur de l’église anglicane à West Farnham, Québec de 1859 à 1901 qui a légué sa collection d’estampes et livres rares à l’Université McGill. Cet article décrit le projet spécial entrepris par l’auteur dans le but de reconstruire de sa collection longtemps cachée de la communauté de recherche. Cet article analyse la collection de livres en fonction de la langue (5 catégories), du lieu de publication (3), de la date de publication (7), et des sujets (8) et prouve le caractère unique de sa collection en la comparant aux fonds des autres bibliothèques canadiennes.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".