Blog at the Ballast

We've been trying to think about themes for what we scan and put up on Flickr and decided this week to get one of our volunteers to look for images of Royal Yachts ahead of May's jubilee celebrations. There have been 84 Royal Yachts since 1660 and in the Bill Lind Postcard collection we found several examples including this postcard of the Royal Yacht Victoria...

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This week at the Ballast Trust we have been using History Pin, which includes photos, videos, and audio clips.  We have been able to ‘pin’ photographs from the Dan McDonald Collection to their location. Here is a photo from the Whitby Harbour. Why don't you take a look at the other photos available here! ...

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Today's Friday photo is of one of the lifeboats from the steel sailing ship the Olivebank.  Built by Mackie & Thomson of Govan in 1892, she was known as an unlucky ship and was built for Andrew Weir & Co. There is a fab picture of her in full sail from the Australian National Maritime Museum on flickr here. Specification details available here and...

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We had an enquiry this week for plans of the Duchess of Hamilton, built by Harland & Wolff, Govan in 1932.   ...

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The Ballast Trust gets a name check in an article by Alisdair Northrop about the value of business archives in the March 2012 issue of Scottish Business Insider. It looks at why business history is relevant for today’s companies and discusses the strong position that business archives in Scotland hold and mentions the role that Bill Lind played in this and the work that...

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Today's Friday photo is an image of the Mairi Bhan a fishing vessel built in Fraserburgh in 1933 and registered in Wick as vessel WK176. This is one of the negatives that our volunteer Helen has recently finished added to the excel catalogue we have for our Dan McDonald collection.  For some reason the fishing vessels and ports weren't on the original excel...

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.. how to identify a 20 year old font so you can use it in a new logo for publicity materials. A bit of a random Friday photo post today but a view into parts of the promotion and publicity side of things here at the Ballast Trust. It was suggested recently that we think about simplifying our existing logo which I had...

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