Blog at the Ballast

I've mentioned before that the National Maritime Museum had put some of its collections online.  Well, I discovered at the weekend that this website by Surface View also has images from the NMM available to order as large-scale wall murals, prints or blinds.

This means that you can have an images from the plans for the Mauretania (1907), HMS Fearless and even the Bounty amoung others on your wall.  They also offer images from other archive collections, museums and photography collections.

I was in Calais last weekend (13-15 November) for the E-Faith conference.  It's a get together of volunteers and volunteer associations to discuss and share information about the safeguarding of industrial and technical heritage.  The meeting was held at the Museum of Lace in Calais, which is a beautiful building that combined an original factory with a modern extension that incorporated a jacquard card design onto the front.

The first half of the day had presentations from about half of the attendants.  These covered a variety of topics and organisations, from online resources for industrial history, oral history trails to the development and repurposing of industrial buildings and industrial history festivals.

My presentation from the day is available on slideshare:
The afternoon was a chance to hear about projects planned by E-Faith, such as better training of industrial volunteers, textile trails, online exhibition about industrial heritage for Europe and cross-border twinning projects between associations to share best practice and experiences.  A summary of the presentations and projects are available here.

So, I forgot to put a photo up on Friday but there was a reason.  David Powell the BACS Surveying Officer and I were putting the final touches to a National Strategy for Business Archives in Scotland before it goes out to consultation.  More information about the strategy is on the Business Archives Scotland blog.  It explains why we are developing a strategy and how we've been going about it.

I also haven't talked about my trip to Calais and all the new ideas I came back with.  I think that deserves a separate post though.

My final piece of news is that the EAD files that the Archivist's Toolkit produces as xml outputs was successfully imported by the NAS into their database.  This is great news as it means that we can produce electronic finding aids that can with a little bit of tweaking be imported into the NAS's system and hopefully that of others.  It should mean no more paper lists and no more cutting and pasting for our colleagues when we complete a collection.  Most importantly, it means that collections processed by us are more accessible for users via online databases more quickly.

This week I'm off to Calais on Friday for the E-Faith weekend on Industrial and Technical Heritage (programme here).  I'll be talking briefly about how the Ballast Trust works and the way in which we have been able to make use of volunteers and staff with specialist knowledge to process technical records.  Details of other papers and reports are available here.

I'm also attending the Heritage Volunteer Managers Network meeting in Inverness on Thursday.  This will be a good opportunity to find out about how other organisations use volunteers and learn from their experiences. 

So, its going to be busy but I'll report back here next week when I return.  I will still be able to post a Friday photo thanks to the wonders of technology.