I've spent much of today reading through Bill's correspondence files from the late 1980s when the Ballast Trust was set up and had begun the mammoth task of processing the Scott Lithgow records on site in the Joiners' Shop at the Kingston Yard.
This is for a case study I'm putting together about the Ballast Trust and its contribution to Scottish business archives for the National Strategy and I wanted to find out more details about the work to sort, (occasionally rescue) and catalogue the records.
I had already seen the pictures from that time and put them up on the blog here but reading through the letters and some of the figures involved has added to my understanding of the scale of the project - in the first 6 months alone 45 tons of records came through the door. Rather helpfully, there are also the notes from a talk Bill give in December 1988 which outline the whole process of how the Ballast Trust got involved and the different stages to the job.
You also get a great sense of the kind of man Bill was - in response to a letter from Trafalgar House who state that they hope to appoint a "Divisional Archives Manager who will be responsible among other things for the archives of the RGC and of the Scott Lithgow yard on the Clyde", Bill writes that the sooner the Scottish Record Office, the Ballast Trust and Scott Lithgow get "our show in place the better - even divisional archives managers will need guidance!"
This will all help make the case study more interesting I hope and it will appear in due course here.
It has been a very busy week here at the Ballast Trust so I thought it would make a slightly more interesting post to give folks an idea about the variety of things we are involved in.
On Monday, we had a new volunteer start work on the Edinburgh City Engineer's Plan Project and a visit from the Glasgow University Archive Trainees
On Tuesday, I attended the first meeting of the Implementation Group for the National Strategy for Business Archives in Scotland. We have agreed a plan of actions for the first year and are making plans for a public launch of the strategy. In the meantime you can read the strategy here and get more news about it on the blog.
On Wednesday evening I gave a talk to the Central Scotland Family History Society on the use of business archive records for family and local history research. I was fortunate to be able to include many images from the Glasgow University Collections and the slides from my talk can be seen below.
On Thursday, we had a visitor from the Scottish Railway Preservation Society in to look at drawings we have processed from the Montague Smith collection and those belonging to the Caledonian Railway Association. The society is in the process of re-building a Class 439 Caledonian Railway locomotive and it is hoped that some of the drawings in the collection will assist with this major undertaking.Our new graduate volunteer, Stacey also started back with us this week and was shown the art of rolling plans by Delaine.
Today I have been listening to the rain and writing up my notes from Tuesday's meeting, revising the action plan and I'm about to head across the storeroom to do some box listing this afternoon.
Tomorrow I will be attending the STICK conference at Kelvingrove. This year's topic is the sustainability of industrial heritage provision in Scotland and there is an interesting mix of archive and museums based talks. If you are interested in attending it is £5 entry (including lunch) and starts at 10am.
Today's photo is of the Hebrides built by Ailsa Shipbuilding Company, Troon in 1898.
From the flags and information provided by flickr users I think that this photo probably dates from around the time of the Festival of Britain in 1951.
BBC4 had a great programme on last night called "All our working lives - Shipbuilding"
It told:
The story of the British shipbuilding industry, told with rare archive and interviews with the people who worked in it. The programme features the original 1980s documentary on the industry, followed by a new film which brings the story of our shipyards right up to date.It can be viewed on the iplayer until the 24 October here.
Today's photo is the first of the H's I have uploaded and will be using for October's photos. It was built in 1967 by Barclay Curle & Co., according to the Clydebuilt site it was actually their last ship.
Specification details are available here.
In the original brief for the Pacesetter project we hoped to be finished in October. However, because of the extra information that needs to be captured for the Montague Smith collection this will result in a delay to the inputting of the Montague Smith collection. For this reason I have decided to extend the formal project by 5-6 months.
This should give us enough time to input the 3000 entries and once complete to allow the National Archives of Scotland to test import it into their system.
In the meantime, we have now had three different volunteers working on the Edinburgh City Engineer's collection which is progressing well with around 250 items catalogued.
So look for our evaluation report sometime in April/May 2011.
Originally uploaded by ballasttrust
A great picture of the Glenfinlas surrounded by cranes. Check it out on flickr for a bigger version.
She was built by John Brown & Co in 1966 and was the fourth Glenfinlas built and operated by the Glen Shipping Line.
Specification details available from clydebuilt database here.