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 ...