Blog at the Ballast

This week we were challenged on twitter by the Irish Jesuit Archives in Dublin to participate in #archivelife. Over 7 days we are sharing a new image of the Trust in black & white with no humans and no explanations.

So for this weeks Friday photo, here's a look at what the photographs we've been sharing of inside the Trust with no humans and no explanations...

As the new Graduate Trainee, I've been tasked with carrying out some social media related activities as part of my role and for the blog I've decided to resurrect the regular Friday Photo slot. 

On the 4th of December, I gave a talk as part of a joint training day organised by the Business Archives Council of Scotland (BACS) and Archives and Records Association Scottish Region and hosted by Glasgow City Archives to introduce members of both organisations to procedures and processes for handling technical records within their archive collections.

Here at the Ballast Trust, we specialise in processing technical records. Which we consider to be the plans, drawings, maps and photographs (often found in construction, engineering, architectural, design and manufacturing businesses) that provide evidence of the creation and development of products or sites within business and organisational collections.

For my presentation I have tried to explain our approach to technical records, the importance of background research and understanding your collection and then an awareness of plans and the use of 'core lists' or retention guidelines for certain industries. We will be publishing core lists that we use for shipbuilding and engineering collections in the new year.

Our annual reports are now available in a snazzy online reading format over on Issuu.  This means that you can read the 2012 Annual Report and also our 2011 Annual Report.
 

A great new resource for shipping research - the marine news contained in Lloyd's List has been indexed by the Guildhall Library in London (available here)

And an academic called Michael Dun has recently scanned in the marine news and both it and the link to the index are available here

{image of 1797 February 3rd edition from here}

Thanks to Iain Flett for the posting to archives-nra about this.

As part of the National Strategy for Business Archives in Scotland which is being launched tomorrow, the Ballast Trust has prepared a case study which you can read here.

This is the postcard version of the case study that has been created to give away at the launch (excuse the rubbish phone pictures):



There are seven other case studies featuring Tennent's, G. L. Watson & Co. Ltd, the Scottish Business Archive, Lloyds, Diageo, the Sir Basil Spence Archive at RCAHMS and the Capturing the Energy project. You can read them all here.

I have uploaded the Catalogue for the Dan McDonald collection to our website.  It is in spreadsheet format which although not as easily searchable as a database you can still perform a search across all the sheets using the find function CTRL+F.

Information about Dan McDonald himself can be found here and the catalogue has been arranged into sections as follows:
Section 1. Miscellaneous Vessels 1930-1980. Comprises a list of all types of vessels for which a basic index and reference system was used.

Section 2. Miscellaneous Steam and Motor Vessels. 1920-1950 which were not indexed or identified.

Section 3. Clyde steamers and other passenger vessels trading on the river.

Section 4. Sea going sailing vessels.

Section 5. Coastal sailing vessels.

Section 6. "Views” of scenery, buildings, boatyards etc.

Section 7. Exposures taken during voyages on puffers 1949-1972.

Section 8. Negatives of the yacht AILIE and other miscellaneous yachts, 1925-1930.

Section 9. Fishing negatives. TO BE ADDED

Thanks to a tip, I discovered a new site today called Marine Traffic which has a live ships map that lets you see what ships are where, like so:

The National Maritime Museum has put online its Admiralty collection of sailing warship plans, commonly known as the 'Sailing Navy collection'.  This means that 711 plans are available to look at online covering the period from 1700 to the 1900s. The collection can be viewed here.

You can browse through the entire collection or by maker or century if you wish to narrow it down.  Once you've found an image you like, you can enlarge it so that the detail on the plan can be clearly read and images can also be emailed to friends or ordered up as prints.

The Aberdeen built ships project aims to make information about Aberdeen's shipbuilding heritage accessible to the widest possible audience through their website (here).

They have also started series of podcasts to act as an introduction to the collections held by the Aberdeen Maritime Museum. You can subscribe to the feed here.

I'm personally a big fan of all things web 2.0 and I think this is an interesting idea that perhaps the Trust could explore sometime in the future.