Orphaned Objects

 The project to digitise an estimated 5,000+ of my family’s photographic slide collection is well under way, indeed I’m merrily feeding slides into the hungry scanner as I type. A niggling issue I’ve encountered is how to view the slides BEFORE scanning. Why do I need to do this? Two reasons – firstly to thin out any duplicate shots, particularly of trains (I’ve made a rule to not dispose of anything with a family member in, even me…), and secondly to return the slides to some semblance of chronological shot order after decades of being haphazardly pulled in and out of their boxes and generally jumbled up.  With the traditional method of holding slides up to the light and squinting being both unsatisfactory and eye-strainy, and setting up a projector being a bit unwieldy, we are lucky to have this…. A VIEW TO A VIEW The technology of the future! The future of - the 1970s. I’ve a real soft spot for this slide viewer, partly because I remember sitting as a child and being enthra...

 I love cataloguing. There, I said it. Which is for the best really as if you’re going to work with museum collections and you don’t love cataloguing, well, you’re probably not going to have a good time.  Archiving cataloguing is a time-intensive and, yes, at times tedious job. Before I hit the scanner for my family photo digitising project I need to decide how to catalogue the images - after all scanning thousands of photos isn't much use without an easy means of navigating them. I’m creating a catalogue from scratch which is tremendously exciting but can also lead into bad habits which will waste time and compromise the final product if not set up right. It’s critical at this early stage to establish a system that will record an appropriate amount of information in a logical and useable way, so it’s worth sitting back and considering the options. Daunting. This is a daunting spreadsheet, alive with potential, the bleak white wilderness piercing my soul. Or similar. In pr...