Cataloging T-shirts and baseball caps

 I've had a fun morning up at the Athenaeum cataloging some t-shirts and baseball caps.

I basically used the same methodology as I used to document the contents of Dow's.

I photographed the object, in the case of a t-shirt, laid flat with a 30cm ruler in shot to give an indication of size

I photographed it front and back - in this case there was a larger version of the logo on the back, took close ups of the logo, the label and the internal label - you know, the itchy irritating one that's sewn into the seam.

I transcribed all these details onto an excel spreadsheet - size, gender, material, colour, details of logo and content of the labels. There's no particular reason to use excel, Libre Office or Google Sheets would have done as well, but excel is the default application and the people I'm working with expect everything to be done using Microsoft products.

In the case of baseball caps, it was more or less the same procedure, except I used a bit of white card as a background.

In retrospect, I should probably add a small photographic backdrop to my documentation kit for photographing larger objects.

All the images are stored together in a directory called Reference Images.

And then the fun part - packing the items. Prior to being placed in an archive box the items were wrapped in acid free paper. Multiple items were placed in a single archive box. In time the archive boxes will be given an accession number.

Besides this I also created a little markdown based reference guide. This is particularly useful as it allows us to record which items are stored in which archive box - this information is also added to the spreadsheet.

The items were donated by individuals in response to a community history event, with the exception of one t-shirt which came via a local op shop. Unfortunately no one thought to write down who donated what, (not quite true - people did make notes on scrap paper but it's not clear to which item which note refers) but I'm hoping that if I ask enough of my colleagues someone will remember who donated what which will allow us to record some provenance information.

It's also worth noting that there's no archive lab or anything involved - like at Dow's everything is carried in and out for each session - the portable surveying mode of working - and which I'm also adopting for Lake View ...

A sudden scurry of activity ...

 I suddenly seem to be getting busy.

I've been going up to the  Athenaeum on a Friday morning for some fun cataloguing and archival work.

And it actually is fun in a strange sort of way. Lots of little problems, like how to create a structured and reusable list of the copies of a fruit growers magazine from the early 1960's. Not having a cataloguing system in place I decided the simplest thing was use BibTex, strictly BibLaTeX, as I used the @periodical object type, to create a lowest common denominator format list.

The thinking behind this is that anyone can then take the files and see what copies we hold - our collection is most definitely incomplete but might help someone in future researching the fruit industry to put together a unified list of which copies are where, and and our having used BibTex, which is a well described and understood format, it would be a fairly simple task for someone to write a little bit of perl (or anything else) to extract the volume and issue numbers we hold.

And I've got a bit of an archival curve ball to archive and describe - some CFA baseball caps handed out to volunteer firemen at a post bushfire barbecue and some t-shirts printed up by the local pub for a village festival cum sports day.

Probably it will simply be a case of documenting them, photographing them, and then wrapping them in acid free paper and putting them in a polypropylene archive box.

At the same time I've just had the background documentation for starting back with the National Trust working on the contents of Lake View House.

Unlike Dow's Pharmacy, which was basically a fairly unstructured project where I made up my own methodology this is a more structured project, with requirements not only how the information is to be recorded - basically so it can be imported more or less directly to a CMS - but also how items should be photographed.

In the case of Dow's I never expected the photographs I took to be anything other than an aid to identification as one bottle looks much like another, and for that reason I didn't worry overmuch about photographing the object against a plain background or with a scale in place, this time we're going to be a little more formal about how objects are photographed, this time using a white background.

I'm going to start simple with a couple of A4 sized bits of white card until I get a feel for the complexity of the task.

At the same time the popularity of Instagram, Etsy and other online market places has made items such as light boxes to use as a stage to photograph small objects much more widely available than they once were. For much the same reasons, white reusable vinyl photographic backdrops with support frames are also much more available making good quality archival photography considerably cheaper than it once was, with the average phone camera giving a decent enough image.

So. as an experiment, I've invested the princely sum of $22.50 to order a cheap folding light box from Temu purely to see how it goes, and if I find I need something larger I'll invest in a photographic backdrop sheet.

Even if the light box doesn't prove useful at Lake View, I'm sure I'll find a use for it on one of my other projects ...

ReText, again

Ten or so years ago, if you'd asked me what my preferred markdown editor was, I'd have replied ReText.

And I did use it on an earlier implementation of  the distraction free writing machine which was based on the my old 7" Eee.

And it worked really well, until it didn't. I really liked the simplicity of the interface

and the way you could toggle between edit and preview mode - something that I found valuable when working on a comparatively small laptop screen

(both these screenshots come from my Lenovo IdeaPad 1 running Ubuntu,

 

but trust me, it works just as well with Crunchbang ++ on my distraction free machine - here showing ReText with live preview mode turned on)

As I say, I used to like ReText, but then the authors upgraded it and the new version did not play well on the Eee's eccentrically sized small screen - to be fair they were not the only application with that problem, and I did correspond with the authors about the problem. To be fair, they did try to fix it, but it didn't prove possible to produce a stable version.

I had much the same problem a bit later when I converted a windows MSI netbook to Linux, so I stopped using ReText, and more or less forgot about it.

Up till now, I've been using Ghostwriter as a markdown editor, but I've kind of missed the simplicity of ReText, so I decided to try it again, and it's an excellent note taker, and as I've said elsewhere, you really don't need an in depth knowledge of markdown to create reasonable structured text ...

Poo in nineteenth century York

 For Proust it was a madeleine, but for me it was nineteenth century scoria bricks.

I mentioned how sometimes in the walls of back lanes you could still sometimes see hatches, like oversize cat doors, that were associated with pail closets in the nineteenth century..

Well, I must have seen them somewhere else in the north of England, because apparently York never implemented a collection system for poo buckets. Which, given  that Ouse has propensity to flood in winter, and the very bad cholera outbreak in the 1830s, is surprising.

But perhaps that's not so surprising. When I first moved to York in the mid 1980's the railway works was still a major employer, as were Rowntree's and Terry's confectionery businesses, and the glass works - that made glass jars for the confectionery business had only just closed, so you would have expected that York had developed as an industrial centre as did other towns in Yorkshire.

However, that really wasn't the case. despite the arrival of the railway in the 1840s, York was, for a good part of the nineteenth century solely an ecclesiastical and administrative centre.

Industry, and the accompanying population growth, only really began in the 1880's, and so, while the middle classes of mid-Victorian York would have had access to flushing toilets that either dumped their contents in the river or in a local cesspit, the poor would have made do with a bucket and a midden at the end of the street that was probably periodically removed for sale as manure, or alternatively washed down the river when it flooded.

(This is why fieldwalking in England, especially with the aid of a metal detector, often turns up nineteenth century small change. Poor they may have been but not poor enough to search the poo bucket for a dropped farthing.)

However, the slow growth of the city in the Victorian era probably means that quite a few houses in York, especially those dating from after the 1880s when the city began to grow and sewerage provision improved, probably only ever had a flush toilet, even if it was one in the back yard. 

Certainly, our house in Darnborough Street, which dated from early Edwardian period had a brick built coal shed and disused outside flushing toilet that probably dated from when the house was built.

Even though it must have been excruciatingly cold in the depths of a bone chillingly cold foggy York winter, it would have represented a major improvement over pooing in a bucket and periodically emptying the contents in a midden somewhere ...

Scoria bricks

 In the early 1990s I lived on Lower Darnborough Street in York, in England.

The house was at the lower end of the street, and even though it never flooded due the river overtopping the staithes while we lived there, we had a few close calls when the Ouse had risen substantially after snowmelt on the Moors.

When there was a risk of flooding I would always walk down before bedtime to the junction between River Street and Clementhorpe to see how high the river was getting.

A couple of times the junction was under water and I cut down the back lane between Colenso and River street to get down to Clementhorpe.

The back lane was a normal, quite unremarkable back lane of the sort that are found all over England between streets of terrace houses that allowed access from the street to people's back yards and were often used by night soil collectors in the days before sewage, and more recently by bin men collecting rubbish as well as providing access for the men delivering coal in the days when coal fires were the main source of heat in homes in England.

Sometimes you can see still hatches like oversize cat doors in the walls of people's back yards - the idea was that the night soil collectors would open the hatch, remove the poo bucket and (hopefully) replace it.

I can't remember noticing any poo bucket hatches but I do remember that the lane was paved with these incised pattern hexagonal ceramic bricks that  looked a bit like engineering bricks.

 

Back lane behind Colenso St - Clementshall Local History Group

At the time remember noticing them and thinking that they looked pretty unique, and I started noticing them poking out in a number of places round about in the kerbside gutters that hadn't been fully tarred over.

Given my insatiable curiosity about such things, you might have thought I would have researched them at the time, but this was just before the internet became a thing, and there was no google, no wikipedia, and no search engines - even altavista was a year or two in the future, so I pigeonholed the topic, meaning to come back to it, but never did.

York, is of course short of local sources of building stone - which is why most of the old city is built of local brick, and I just sort of assumed that it was a sensible Victorian response to a shortage of hard stone to turn into cobbles, and probably made in the local brickworks.

It turns out I was wrong on both counts - unlike engineering bricks which are made of clay and fired at a high temperature, the scoria bricks were made on Teeside of slag from blast furnaces that resulted in a hard, durable and waterproof brick.

Apparently they were also used as ballast on ships and exported to the Netherlands, Canada, the West Indies and other places.

I havn't been able to find any record of their use in Australia, but when Launceston was debating the introduction of tram system in the early 1900s,  one of the city engineers wrote to a number of similar sized towns in Britain for details of their tramway systems.

One of the cities that replied was Darlington, which commented on the use of scoria bricks to surface the tramway between the tracks.

Historic photographs of the Launceston tram system suggest that they used a fairly standard infill, so they obviously decided not to follow Darlington's lead.

Postcards, chess and encryption

 I've written from time to time about cryptography and postcards. and how in the nineteenth century especially, some people would try and obfuscate the content of what was essentially an open medium to conceal what was being said, perhaps to conceal an assignation or other private arrangement.

Sometimes they would write the message in Latin or Greek, or use a simple substitution cipher, or else use some agreed set of code words to convey meaning.

However there is a subset of postcards that at first sight look to be encrypted but aren't.

People would sometimes play chess against each other by writing their moves on postcards and mailing them to their playing partner - for example, think of a clergyman in an isolated parish who had no one to play with, might play chess by post with a former playing partner now living elsewhere.

After all postcards were cheap to send, and provided the postal service was reasonably efficient it would be possible manage a couple of moves a week. Usually these postcards contain a couple of lines of conventional greeting and a chess move in algebraic notation.

You used to be able to see examples of chess notation in use in the chess columns of the more heavyweight newspapers, but nowadays chess columns have mostly gone the way of all flesh.

However, people still play chess with remote partners, but usually today they use a dedicated chess server, although some people have played chess by email or text message using chess notation.

Besides postcards with a little string of algebraic notation there are other more complex specialist postcards, often with a chessboard grid, produced by chess clubs for people playing chess by post.

Searching on ebay and etsy for examples, most seem to originate from the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe - no surprises there, the communists always took chess seriously, and date from before 1989.

I'm going to make a wild surmise here, that people in Eastern Europe playing chess by correspondence during the post war socialist period (a) felt it was safer to belong to a recognised chess club and (b) use an 'official' chess postcard to avoid attracting the attention of the security apparatus - after all no one would have wanted a visit from the Ministry of Certain Things as a result of an innocent chess game ...