So how did I document the contents of Dow's?

 

The actual procedure was pretty straightforward – basically the pharmacy contents consisted of carboard boxes and glass bottles.

The bottles, especially after the consolidation of the Australian glass industry  in the 1920s, were all pretty similar, and the cardboard boxes, were, well cardboard boxes.

Some were interesting in terms of their design

 

But all were much of a muchness.

What it comes down to is that bottles are on the whole pretty boring, but the stories they can tell are interesting such as what the distribution of bottles of Owbridge’s lung tonic tells us about trade in the nineteenth century.

So, the procedure was fairly simple:

The pharmacy was divided into a set of areas, and a thematically named directory was created for each area.

Photographs were taken of each area and a Markdown document was created for each area as a finding aid, listing the locations of the objects.

Markdown was chosen as it is a well known structured text format and can be read without special software.  Filenames were of the format area_name.md

An excel spreadsheet was created for each area. Each spreadsheet has four columns, a sequence number, an object description an image column and a comments field. Filenames are of the format area_name.xslx.

Description fields contain the following, the object type, eg a glass bottle or a cardboard box, the label contents if present and whether the contents are present. If the contents are liquid this is noted as an aid to future conservation work. Colons are used to delimit the individual parts of the entry as an aid to converting and manipulating the data for ingest into some long term preservation solution.

An example entry may read

hexagonal blue glass bottle ~100mm: cork stopper: no label: contents not present

The second image column contains filename of a digital image of the object. Images are always stored in a sub directory named Reference Pictures

If the object is a cardboard box the image will be of the box and any contents, such as a metal ointment tube.

The final column is a freeform colon delimited text field.

If the object is a bottle and has a label, typically the first entry will the filename of an image of the label followed by an image of the rear label if present, then any embossing on the bottle. If a manufacturer is known the manufacturer will always be the last entry.

Information about manufacturers and individual products was researched and saved in a OneNote notebook to assist with the creation of detailed catalogue entries where required.

If the item is a cardboard box, the first four entries will be photographs of the faces of the box, followed by a description of the contents and one or more photographs of the box contents. As before, the final entry will be the manufacturers name if known.

Each object was examined and photographed and the basic parameters recorded. If leakage or damage was noticed, this was recorded in the comments section.

In the case of a cardboard box, it will be noted if the box was judged too fragile to be opened and the contents examined. Likewise it will be recorded if the box was sealed, preventing further examination.

At no time was any container opened due to the risks associated with exposure to the contents.

A variation in this methodology was used in documenting the contents of drawers in the shop area of the pharmacy.

·    Drawers were documented in sequence starting at the top left and finishing at the bottom right

·    Each drawer is to have its label and contents photographed in situ

·    Each drawer is to be treated as an individual artefact and the contents are to be documented as a set of contents within the artefact

o   Each separate artefact’s description is to be added to the comments field and  is to be prefaced with the word contains

o   Where an artefact itself contains multiple objects each component object is to be recorded in the comments field and prefaced with the string item_contains

·       Contents may then be removed, photographed and documented in the standard manner

·       Each drawer label is to be recorded.

·     If the label is damaged or missing that is to be recorded along with the position of the drawer in sequence

So essentially one ends up with a directory with a human readable name that contains a finding aid in markdown format, an excel spreadsheet and a subdirectory containing all the reference pictures.

 

 

                                                                                                         

Standardising my Linux machines

 I'm well pleased with my latest iteration of a lightweight research machine, that I decided that I would rebuild the old Dell 6320 that I used in the earlier Xubuntu based iteration.

This machine sits in a corner of the outdoor studio, really a converted garage, and has been running the Raspberry Pi X86 desktop.

The machine doesn't need to do much - really all it does is let me look at the weather forecast when I'm working outside in the garden, and perhaps write up the odd gardening note.

In part, this is because the outdoor studio is currently a giant junk pile, but we have plans to clean it out this summer to provide a large painting space for J and provide me with a project bench for playing with old cameras etc.

And that of course means I'll need a machine in there to look up old camera manuals etc.

Even though the Dell's battery is not in the best of health the machine has a decent sized screen and a keyboard that is reasonably nice to type on.

So this afternoon I installed crunchbang linux. The network connection in the studio isn't quite as robust as it could be, and my first attempt at an install failed when the wifi repeater reset itself, but the second time installation just worked giving me a usable machine.

As the machine's not going to see serious use in the first instance it's not quite the same as my more serious lightweight machine -  I decided not to set up deja dup, or add my extra applications (kate, ristretto, notable etc - these can be installed later if need be) as for the moment all I really need is a web browser and a text editor for writing raw markdown if required ...

Why a folksonomy?

 When I was cataloguing the contents of Dow’s pharmacy I used a folksonomy rather than a formal controlled vocabulary.

A folksonomy is of course simply an informal controlled vocabulary that is readily extensible, which is a good thing where, as in Dows, there was no clear understanding of what exactly the contents of the pharmacy might be.

So, and object at Dows can be

• a glass jar – jars have wide openings
• a glass bottle – bottles are taller than they are wide and have narrow openings
• a cardboard box
• something else such as a metal or plastic tube

a glass bottle can be

• clear – contents for internal use
• brown – contents for external use
• blue – contains something very nasty

except in very early bottles, blue and brown bottles are usually embossed Not to be Taken, and ribbed to aid identification in poor light. (incidentally it’s because of this ribbing we could say with some degree of plausibility that green pharmacy bottles are an alternative to brown bottles)

So, you get the idea, it’s quite simple to build up a classification model, and because we’re not encumbered by any previous sets of terms used, make up something that is human readable as well as machine readable.

The point about it being machine readable is that the standardisation of terms makes it easy to import and convert object descriptions into a more complex schema (as well as auto generate catalogue entries in the standard house style.)

So why did I use a folksonomy rather than pillaging an existing controlled vocabulary?

Well, folksonomies are simple, make sense to the humans doing the cataloguing – in this case it was only me, but if someone else had joined me on the project it would have been fairly simple to write down a set of definitions so that everything was classified the same way.

I’ve found in the past that using a controlled vocabulary doesn’t really work – the people actually doing the cataloguing tend to find them too complex to work with, and as a consequence you tend to find one person’s bottle is another person’s jar.

So, in cataloguing as in so much else in life, keeping things simple pays dividends...

The costs of citizen science (part ii)

Until very recently I've been volunteering as, what I'm not sure - something between a cataloguer and a curator - to document the contents of Dow's pharmacy in Chiltern.

Back in 2020 I blogged about the costs of being a volunteer.

While they're not substantial, they do exist, but equally I've spent just as much money on my other interests - researching Victorian murderers, old cameras and family history, so I can't really complain.

However, coincident with finishing up on Dow's I filled in this year's tax return. 

I don't work, I'm retired and we live on our superannuation and aged pension payments, but I also get a small pension from the UK Department of Work and Pensions.

The fiction is that this is treated as if it was earned  income and taken into account by both Centrelink and the Australian Tax Office. It normally sits comfortably below the thresholds for tax or being penalised for working while claiming Centrelink benefits, but recently our dollar has not being doing that well against the pound,  its value has increased.

So, I wondered if there was a way of offsetting expenses incurred as a volunteer against tax, just as I did when I was working.

The answer's utterly unambiguous. 

No.

The ATO has the perfectly reasonable viewpoint that if you are a volunteer, you are donating your time freely, and cannot be deemed an employee or self-employed. Interestingly the ATO do recognise that you may have out of pocket expenses as a volunteer and that rather than reclaiming petty cash payments for things like rubber gloves and notebooks, it's perfectly acceptable to be paid as small honorarium, ie an ex gratia lump sum payment in lieu of any petty cash expenses incurred.

In fact it's a pretty sensible approach.

However, we have a little problem here. In both the ATO's view, and  organisation such as Volunteering Victoria, a volunteer is a volunteer, no matter what they do. 

So, if you go along to an archaeological project, say, and wash pottery fragments, you'll have a great time and probably won't have much in the way of out of pocket expenses. If you volunteer as a finds officer on the same project, collecting and documenting these fragments, you'll need gloves, tweezers, magnifying glasses and access to a computer, and perhaps some cloud storage for data backup.

Again the costs are minimal, but may be a barrier to some people lending their expertise.

Having done the whole volunteer thing I think there regrettably needs to be a bit more formality about the process of becoming a volunteer with some sort of dummy contract that as well as rights and responsibilities, covers how minor expenses will be handled, hopefully in a way that does not cause a bureaucratic overhead.

Digitisation - what is it good for?

I'm sure everybody who works on digitisation projects has at some point worked with material so obscure that you wondered 'what's the bloody point?'

I certainly have. Not the big ticket stuff like Trove, but boring stuff like the correspondence of an obscure, and clearly personality challenged Victorian botanist whose private diary includes such gems as 

'Matilda came to tea today and we discussed saxifrages'

Yeah, exactly.

However, I have a personal story to show that all data is valuable.

Twenty years ago, when  I was (just) still living in England, I had an operation for varicose veins.

It's something that runs in my family, like my having slightly high blood pressure, my brother had them, my father had them, I had them.

And it wasn't due to lifestyle. My father swam, went walking, rode his bike well into his seventies and played golf as long as he was able to. My brother played cricket well into his forties. I went bushwalking and rode my bike, as well as running a decent distance three or four times a week.

As I say it's genetics, and unfortunately the cards you're dealt aren't always the best.

So, shortly before I moved permanently to Australia I had quite a radical procedure to strip out the damaged veins. Given the genetic component, it wasn't a guaranteed fix, and there was a 10-20% risk of recurrent varicosities associated with the procedure.

Well, for about fifteen years everything was fine, but one day when were at the beach J noticed a knotty purple patch behind my left knee. It wasn't painful, and if I rode my bike a bit more than usual it seemed to diminish, but it was clear that it wasn't going to go away.

So, I arranged to go and see a specialist. 

Didn't happen, the pandemic intervened and all treatment for non life threatening conditions was postponed.

Now I couldn't remember the precise details of the procedure, or the date. But I had read that you could ask the NHS in Britain for a copy of your case notes as a freedom of information thing.

So I emailed the hospital where I was treated and asked them if they still had my case notes as I wished to pass them to my specialist in Australia.

I fully expected that they would say no, they had long since been pulped, but to my great surprise, they said yes, they still had some of my records and even better, they had been digitised.

So after some to and fro over how I was to prove I was me - we settled on a scan of my passport and my UK national insurance number - they packaged up what they had for me to download as a password protected zip file.

They didn't have everything, but they had the details of the procedure, the results of the pre operation diagnostic tests, and the post operative assessment, which is probably all my Australian specialist will need when I see her next week.

So, key takeaway, digitisation and digital archiving is a good thing - it might just save you some pain and discomfort down the track...

Well we've finally got an FTTP connection ...

 

Well, we've finally got a working FTTP connection.

The NBN technicians came and installed our FTTP box yesterday - unfortunately they couldn't put it where we wanted it so it ended up under one of the study windows on the wall without power sockets and is currently connected to power via an extension lead and to the modem via a 10m cat5e cable I just happened to have.

Ideally this should probably be a cat6 cable, but being country, you can't just nip out and buy a 10m network cable, you need to order one and wait for it to come in the mail. However swapping the cable is incredibly straight forward and the NBN people even give you a little guide as to how to pop the top of the FTTP box to swap the cable, so I don't think it's going to be a drama.

Apart from having to end up on the 'wrong' wall the physical installation was fine. Any confusion in the process came from the NBN and Telstra people using different scripts.

For example, Telstra called me the day before and checked if we were ready to go ahead (we were), and explicitly said that after the physical installation, I should keep everything connected to the (old) FTTC connection.

The NBN people of course swapped everything to the new FTTP connection, which even though physically connected didn't work as there has to be a migration process by Telstra.

Our modem, which has automatic failover to 5G, did exactly that, much to my surprise.

Normally it just complains about a poor signal - I'm guessing we must have finally have got coverage, even if it's not officially in production yet.

Anyway, I swapped it back to the old FTTC wiring for the afternoon and was duly rewarded with a working connection.

In their usual helpful way, Telstra then sent me an email to say that they were going to transfer the service from FTTC to FTTP, but to stay connected to FTTC, closely followed by one say they couldn't see the modem on the FTTP service.

I'd already got the cables in place to swap over between the connections and plugged in the FTTP connection, and hey presto!, it worked.

There's still a few minor details to be sorted out, including what to do with the old NBN FTTC box that has a sticker on it saying it belongs to NBNco and should not be removed from the premises, but we'll get there ...

I might actually have finished ...

 If you've been following this blog, you'll be aware that I've spent the last six years documenting  the contents of Dow's Pharmacy in Chiltern for the National Trust.

Due to the pandemic, the whole exercise has taken longer than it should, but even so, four and a bit years of work has gone into it.

Well I'm finished now. Possibly not finished finished, as there were a couple of ambiguities in the brief that might see me back to document some unprovenanced material, but even so, it's more or less done.

I've had a lot of fun doing it, but now that it's over, I'm strangely relieved ...

An unexpected plus with the lightweight machine

 As I'm sure you're all to aware, a lot of modern software tends to assume the presence of an internet link, if only to sync local filestore contents to a cloud service in real time.

The prime example is Apple's Pages, especially when used on an iPad, but a lot of Microsoft office products are heading that way as well

On the whole this is a plus, but sometimes it can be a pain if you are working somewhere with poor connectivity, such as a hole in a paddock, otherwise known as an archaeological dig.

One unexpected benefit of my current iteration of the lightweight research machine is that it doen't require an internet connection to do its stuff.

Sure it's useful, but not necessary.

I'd like to say that this was a deliberate design feature, but I didn't really think about the zero connectivity scenario, I'd become so used to having connectivity, if only over a 4G modem link.

Dumping everything in ~/documents and then running deja dup when one gets back to base, or even a coffee shop with decent wifi, meets the requirements to back up work in progress, but allows you to work offline when required.

For the really paranoid, or really remote, work in progress data can be written to a usb stick as a backup.

Simples really.