Cataloguing postcards

 

A few days ago I wrote about a procedure we had developed for cataloguing removable media at the Athenaeum.

I had been quite impressed by the sophistication of  the documentation provided by some of our contributors with human readable and self explanatory directory and file names, but inevitably there are going to be cases where the filenames and directory names are not human readable.

Now obviously we could rename the files and reorganise them but that's probably not sensible, as there may be references to the original filename in the files or accompanying documentation.

So I thought that probably the best solution would be to create a manifest file to be stored alongside the directory listings. 

As an experiment I thought I'd use as an example a German postcard from 1914 that I'd recently acquired

As with the original methodology for cataloguing removable media, making a manifest fil is actually quite easy if you use the command prompt (cmd.exe).

I'm quite systematic about how I document the various Victorian and Edwardian postcards I've collected over time and  store the scans and information about each postcard in a separate directory under an overall Postcards directory.

In this case the listing looks like this

Volume in drive C is Windows-SSD
 Volume Serial Number is 62F4-DEE9

 Directory of C:\Users\doug_\OneDrive\Victoriana\Postcards\Schwerin 1914


28/10/25  03:37 PM         3,141,869 2025_10_28 15_36 Office Lens.pdf
28/10/25  03:55 AM         1,905,786 IMG_0347.JPG
28/10/25  03:10 PM         1,851,390 IMG_0349.JPG
28/10/25  03:31 PM               377 schwerin.mkd
28/10/25  03:15 PM           545,497 schwerin.png
               5 File(s)      7,445,392 bytes
               2 Dir(s)  369,753,280,512 bytes free

Not particularly meaningful. 

However using the  tree command from the command prompt you can create a directory listing with 

tree /f > manifest.txt

This will give you a nice little tree listing in the directory which you can then annotate using Notepad or similar to create something like this

Folder PATH listing for volume Windows-SSD
Volume serial number is 62F4-DEE9
C:\USERS\DOUG_\ONEDRIVE\VICTORIANA\POSTCARDS\SCHWERIN 1914
    2025_10_28 15_36 Office Lens.pdf - pdf scan of postcard
    IMG_0347.JPG - face of postcard showing address
    IMG_0349.JPG - rear of postcard showing message
    schwerin.mkd - description of postcard in markdown format
    schwerin.png - montage of IMG_0347.jpg and IMG_0349.jpg

which gives you a human readable description of the contents stored in the same directory as the material you are documenting.

As always procedure is everything - if you always call the annotated file listing manifest.txt it will be consistent across all examples.

(And as a note for command prompt nerds I deliberately used tree/f rather than dir/b to create the directory listing. Using the tree command makes the process more general purpose and to take accounts of sub directories and their contents if present. 

As the Linux tree command works similarly it makes the procedure more general than relying on the traditional DOS directory command).

The actual procedure under Linux is slightly different

As the Linux version of tree creates its output file before enumerating the file list you can end up with manifest.txt appearing in the listing.

To avoid this use the command

tree -i > ../manifest.txt

which will create the file in the directory above the current working directory. The -i command suppresses the line drawing characters that give a representation of the directory structure. This creates a simple file that can be annotated as before, and once annotated the file can be moved to your preferred location.