Orphaned Objects

It’s not that I’ve been too lazy to update this blog – oh no indeed! Far from it as a matter of fact. A good Curator is adept at prioritising tasks to ensure the best work is done in the best time so in the last, ahem, four months I’ve simply been working on more time-critical endeavours. Like, erm, digging a pond. And catching up with my hobby of sitting down. And drawing naff cartoons. So there. I will not be giving up the day job. Thanks for asking.   In amongst this there’s been a major funding bid to submit, a conservation-based chemistry course to get stuck into (more in a future blog…) and, last month, a museum to re-open. I know, I know – excuses excuses… Anyway… BACK AT THE SCANNING. What’s going on with the project to digitise my family’s slide collection? Well it’s kind of, erm, done. Yup. 6,451 transparencies all scanned and catalogued, a chronicle of family activities between the early 1960s and 2000. Boom. Done. Oldest and most recent slides. Each is prese...

Bit busy lately writing a major funding bid for my day job so there's not been much progress with the digitising of my family negatives. However, the mountain of job specs, tender briefs, budget spreadsheets and myriad other supporting documents I've been accumulating for this application has made me consider how much paperwork even a small museum can generate. I'm thinking particularly of ...museum policies. Policies, policies, policies. Museums have policies for everything - a policy for what you collect, a policy for looking after the stuff you collect, a policy for cataloguing the stuff you collect, a policy for training people to look after the stuff you collect, a policy for disposing of things you no longer collect, a policy for engaging visitors with what you collect, a policy for making sure what you collect doesn't get stolen or go on fire or get wet, a policy for planning what you're going to do with the stuff you collect over the next five years, a polic...

 It's bright today. Really bright. Bright sun high in the sky, white snow on the ground, bright bright bright. Over my lunch break I decided to run a few 35mm negatives through the scanner just to keep grinding away at the Sisyphean task of digiting my family's photo collection. First scan appeared thus; Attack of the Black Smudge! Coming to a cinema near you. Ugh, this isn't good. And most peculiar - there's no marks at all on the negative, nary even a speck of dust as that gets blown off first. This is very annoying and I'm getting all hot and bothered. Ah! Hot and bothered in the glare of the incredibly bright wintery-snowy-reflecty sun. One quick shut of the curtains and a rescan later and; Absence of the Black Smudge! Coming to a cinema near you, but not very exciting. There we go. So the scanner, perched near the window, was getting overwhelmed by the sun blazing in one side. This hasn't been an issue so far given that this project has taken place in the d...

In December 2015 I gave a presentation at a 'Heritage Show + Tell'  event in Leeds. The event rules were simple - three slides, three minutes, tell a story about your project. I've lost count of how many seminars/lectures/talks/expositions/etc/and-so-on I've sat through at heritage sector events, but this was one of the first formal events I'd spoken at and had to, like, dress smartly and that.  Some of those drawings are mine. Drawing is not among my skillz. I was working for Scarborough Museums Trust heading an Arts Council audience development project, part of which involved commissioning a pop-up 'Museum of Scarborough' which would tour the community and be an enthralling interactive celebration of all things Scarborial.   This was an ideal project to roll-out for the Show + Tell evening, but my quandary was how to make my 3 minute presentation lively, enthralling and in keeping with the quirky nature of the pop-up project - an issue exacerbated by my ...

 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...

  What’s this, a suspicious package? No, but it is DA BOMB 😊   Shiny. Shiny shiny shiny. It’s a shiny new slides/negatives scanner – the Plustek OpticFilm8200i . Ta-daa! Having previously identified the scale of the task at hand to digitise my family's photograph collection, we move onto how best to scan the images and what best to scan them with... I did consider getting the Epson V600 which I’ve used professionally before and has certain advantages, such as scanning multiple transparencies simultaneously and being a generally more versatile flatbed scanner than dedicated photo scanners. However, after much research and stressing over a budget, I picked the Plustek as the best compromise between quality and affordability (even then it was at the VERY UPPER end of affordability, but hey – it’s Christmas…) There’s several flavours of the Plustek but in the end I chose the version which comes bundled with the Silverfast 8.8 AI scanning software for the extra dust removal...