For the last eight or nine years I've been volunteering as a cataloguer for the National Trust of Victoria, first documenting the contents of Dow's pharmacy in Chiltern, and then Lake View House, also in Chiltern.
And the methodology I use has not changed much from the method I first described back in 2017.
There were some changes along the way, such as the use of One Drive directly rather than uploading the data from a USB stick at the end of the day but the procedure at the end of the project was still essentially the same, as is the procedure used at Lake View, except that the data is entered into a spreadsheet designed to ease the ingest of the data into the Trust's digital asset management system - so while the way I structure the data may have changed, the procedure is basically the same starting with a descriptive entry written in longhand in an A4 notebook which is transcribed into the appropriate columns of the data entry spreadsheet.
As a procedure it's robust and it works well - don't knock it, and longhand entries in notebooks have a certain permanence.
But yesterday, I tried a slightly different procedure.
I was working on the contents of the kitchen, which is a detached brick building separate to the main house. The kitchen lacks power sockets, and lacks any free surface on which to write, the available surfaces being covered in exhibits, and I didn't want to have to carry artefacts from the kitchen to the main house to document them one by one.
However, we have plastic chairs in store for outside presentations etc and a large brick floor area suitable for photographing artefacts on against a white sheet (and equally if I needed to use my lightbox, it can be run off a powerbank).
So, I thought, why not take a second laptop in, sit on one of the plastic chairs, and create a basic spreadsheet not unlike the original ones I made up at Dow's and then cut and paste the data as required into the bigger and more formal spreadsheet.
To do this I used my linux based IdeaPad 1 and created a base spreadsheet using Libre Office Calc
There's nothing magical about using Linux here, you could equally well use a Mac or a Chromebook, or even a second windows device.
I settled on the IdeaPad as it has decent battery life and can drive my endoscope if required to capture a makers name or serial number on an artefact. I did think about using my lightweight research machine but the lack of power sockets in the kitchen worked against it - it only manages two to three hours on a full charge, and can be slow to recharge. The IdeaPad usually manages a little over four hours on a charge and recharges fairly quickly meaning it can be charged over lunch for an afternoon session.
Likewise there's nothing special about using Libre Office Calc, Numbers or a Mac or Google sheets on a ChromeBook, the only special thing I did was save the spreadsheet in a recent Excel 365 format.
After documenting about ten or twelve artefacts - which roughly takes an hour I would upload the spreadsheet to a scratch work area on One Drive via the web interface.
Documentation sessions are separated on the worksheet by blank lines to make sure that we are copying the correct data - it would be a bit of a problem if objects were accidentally duplicated.
I would then go across to the main house and my desk, and on my main work computer - a Thinkpad running Windows 10 cut and paste data from the scratch spreadsheet to the main sheet, doing any editing and restructuring required along the way, and add in the photo data.
While it sounds a bit of a pfaff, I found that not having to retype the data entries from my longhand notes did speed the process up a bit.
Obviously I could have simply uploaded the data and taken it home to work on, but I did want to check the quality of the photographs as I went, and perhaps do a little basic photo editing to make a makers' name or feature clearer.
All in all, I think using a second machine like this was a win, even if the procedure sounds a little clumsy...
