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Listing a 4000-strong photographic collection

Discussion in 'National Railway Museum' started by National Railway Museum, Jan 6, 2012.

  1. National Railway Museum

    National Railway Museum New Member

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    Over the last year a team of volunteers has been working hard to list a collection of approximately 4000 photographic prints acquired from the former North Eastern Railway Headquarters in York (now the Cedar Court Grand Hotel). These have been stored in their original filing cabinet since their acquisition and were unlisted, making them*fairly inaccessible.
    The team has systematically listed the photographs, noting*subject, date and other significant information. They have*come across*some great prints while they have been working, including snow ploughs, historic sites, images of the old*railway museum, royalty and much, much more.
    The group have now finished listing the prints and I have a very large pile of handwritten listings sitting on my desk waiting to be typed up! This year, two new volunteers will be joining the team to do that very thing. Once these lists are typed, we can make them available to staff and researchers in the museum.
    Now that the prints are listed I am also able to rehouse the prints into archive boxes, arranged by theme, for improved storage and for their long term preservation.
    Below are some examples of the images in the collection.
    [​IMG]0-6-0 goods locomotive, 1870s

    [​IMG]King George VI as Duke of York at Darlington

    [​IMG]Women porters stacking grain, 1943



    Filed under: Image collections, Research [​IMG] [​IMG] [​IMG] [​IMG] [​IMG] [​IMG] [​IMG] [​IMG]
     
  2. Fred Kerr

    Fred Kerr Resident of Nat Pres Friend

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    Pardon me for being a little naughty but I have devised an Excel Database to catalogue all my b/w and colour images and I venture to suggest that such a database would be worth considering rather than have a pile of easily-lost hand-written notes. In my case I have catalogued locomotives identifying such information as traction type, traction livery, location of image, date image taken, working - and train description - and film format given that different types of film stock and digital imaging have been taken over the years.

    I would venture to suggest that the same framework could be adopted but the data fields would be changed between image tables which could be set for locomotive images, building / infrastructure images / staff etc thus for the collection to hand you might consider NER locomotives; NER rolling stock; NER Personnel [ including Royasl Visits ]; NER Workshops / Railway Depots; NER Stations; NER Social events etc.

    Given the homogenous nature of railways a parallel set could be created for each company with the benefit that they could be merged into larger tables at some future date or simply retained as separate tables for ease of reference.

    My apologies if I appear to "be teaching granny to suck eggs" but the phrase "typing up" suggested a creation of references that might not be useful to future researchers; I hope my suggestions prove helpful.
     

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