Notion Anchor Analytics

Studio

A studio above the book lane

Notion Anchor Analytics Co., Ltd. was registered in 2014. The studio is the back room and the front table at 67/1 Pradit Manutham Road, where loan slips are read, sheets are drawn, and folios are sewn for libraries that want their own season on paper.

The company began with a map, not with a prospectus. In 2011 Mali Chanthara was circulation supervisor at a Bangkok university library. During exam week the literature bay emptied and the committee could not agree whether the copies were lost, stolen, or simply still out. She asked Arun Srisuk, who had trained as a print draughtsman, to draw the open loans against the bays. They used butcher paper and the stamp book. The map was pinned in the staff room. Two other desks asked for the same drawing the following term.

By 2014 the requests had outgrown evenings. They registered Notion Anchor Analytics Co., Ltd., took the Lat Phrao room, and have kept the same two-person practice: Mali at the desk and the briefing, Arun at the sheet and the binding. They still refuse work that would require carrying a library’s live register off the premises.

Portrait of Mali Chanthara, a woman in her forties, seated in a dim library studio

Mali Chanthara

Mali leads every commission that involves speaking with circulation staff. She spent twelve years on a campus loan desk before the company was registered, including the years when the library moved from a stamp book to a printed register and had to explain both to the same committee.

In a briefing she would rather mark a gap in the slips than fill it. If a month is missing, the folio says so. She writes the first letter back to a library and attends the committee sitting with the bound copy.

Portrait of Arun Srisuk, a man in his fifties, standing beside a drawing table

Arun Srisuk

Arun draws the leaves and binds them. His earlier work was street plans and exhibition captions for printers in Bangkok; the discipline he kept was that a line on paper had to match a measurement someone could check. He treats a bay count the same way.

On a desk watch he is the quieter of the two. He will not interrupt a queue to ask what a column means. Those questions wait until the desk is clear, or they go to Mali if she is the one seated that day.

How a library is treated

Records stay with the library. Photocopies we are given come back with the folio, or sooner if the registrar asks. A draft is shown in pencil before binding, so a misread column can be corrected while the sheet can still be changed.

The work is interpretive. A copper line for an old hold is a convention we explain in the room, a mark on a sheet rather than a judgement of a reader. Collection policy remains the committee’s. We will say when a fourteen-day loan collides with a three-week exam, and the committee keeps the decision.

Fees, deposits, and cancellations are set out on the fees and refunds pages. Letters about a commission go through the studio desk.