Blog at the Ballast

As we're in the middle of having our offices painted, I still can't scan any new photos so here is an image Dan McDonald took of  a windmill in August 1930 from the set of pictures I put up this week.



**UPDATE** thanks to the power of twitter I found out on Friday that this windmill is called Oranjemolen and was a grain mill built in 1699.  Find out more about it on the Dutch Windmill Database.  Thanks to @MichielBaltusse for the information and @UKwindmills for retweeting our picture.

We are at the start of being redecorated so I'm unable to continue with the images of yards and workshops as planned because our scanner has been packed away.  Instead here are some images from the Dan McDonald collection taken in either Holland or Belgium in August 1930.



Although Dan McDonald's collection is best known for his images of ships.  There is also a series of views of places and we have been uploaded some of these images to our historypin channel.

Recently we have been adding some images from the Dan McDonald collection onto our page at HistoryPin. The website is a great opportunity to look to our past, by pinning pictures from years gone by on a map identifying the location. It's even more fascinating when we can locate a building on Google street view, which allows you to view the street as it is now, and how it was when the picture was taken!

However, some of the images from our collection are unidentified. A couple of distinctive images from the Dan McDonald collection have no location identified; so we would appreciate your help to add these images to HistoryPin. Pictured below is a town/city centre setting, and what appears to be a ruined castle. Recognise either of these? Then let us know!

Today's Friday photo is from a set of images we have for Beardmore's Dalmuir Yard.  One of the things we inherited at the Trust from Bill are a few filing cabinets full of prints of ships and yards that he collected over the years.  There is a whole drawer full of images from different shipyards and engine works and I've decided to make this my next project for uploading a selection of them to Flickr.

We have a new logo for the Ballast Trust which we are starting to use on everything.

It has been designed to be a simpler, cleaner version of the original logo which was put together very quickly when I started in 2009.

The first logo was created using wordle and was intended to get across all the different things that the Ballast Trust does.  However, three years later it seemed very busy and didn't include the tagline that we had started using 'understanding technical archives'.  So we have stripped it back and put together the logo above with a bit more thought, including choosing colours and a font.

The font is called 'British Rail Alphabet' and is based on the Rail Alphabet font developed by Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir in the 1960s and adopted by British Rail in 1965 as part of its corporate rebranding. The colours used are Battleship grey, Cunard red and a navy used by Glasgow University.

Today I'm giving a talk on the value of Twitter for Archives and Archivists as part of the ARA Scotland Born (Digital) Identity conference in Stirling.

I've previously thought that there was no point to the Ballast Trust being on Twitter mainly because we don't have our own collections to highlight.  However, while I was preparing my talk I realised that there are loads of other reasons and benefits to using Twitter would apply to us so we have officially joined!

Find us here.