Blog at the Ballast

One of the more unusual collections that we have inherited from Bill Lind is a collection of letterheads from various businesses, mainly shipbuilders but lots of smaller assorted businesses are included.  Delaine has gone through and organised them all into alphabetical order by business name.  We now need to decide what to do with them, whether they will make a collection that an archive would want or if we should hold onto them and make a project out of them for flickr perhaps.

Some of the examples include this one from Babcock & Wilcox in 1928:



Lastly, this example from Slingsby in 1941 who are still on the go now supplying office equipment:


Perhaps some of our examples might even end up on this blog letterheady.  Update: we did, see here!

As the Ballast Trust carries out work for several different repositories finding cataloguing software that would suit everyone was never going to be possible.  Instead we have opted to install and use the Archivists' Toolkit which will allow us to output catalogues as EAD xml files.  This should mean that for those repositories using CALM or uploading their catalogues to the Archives Hub they will be able to take the xml file and import it into their system straight away.

For those repositories who don't use a database system that can accept xml files then we will provide word documents as we have done in the past.

We will also be using Archivists' Toolkit for general archival management purposes like recording new deposits/accessions and managing locations.  It has worked well for these purposes and we hope that it will be a success for cataloguing as well.

As with the Baron Haig and Baron Vernon, it was built for H Hogarth & Sons of Ardrossan.  Specification details are available on the clydebuilt database here.

They are sitting in front of the Corinaldo and the Norwegian is across the way.

The National Maritime Museum has recently added films to its Flickr pages.  They are collected in a set for films which can be browsed here.  My particular favourite is this film of weekend steamship cruising from the 1930s and the shots of people playing cricket at sea on board the SS Vienna.

At the end of last year, I wrote a post about the article on the Ballast Trust that I'd done for the Italian online journal Culture e Impresa.  At that time, the article was only available in Italian but now the english translation is available here.

This means that you can all read my article but it also means that the other articles in the journal can be read.  There's an interesting one about cataloguing industrial photographs here plus lots of others.