Blog at the Ballast

~ Jennifer Brunton, archives assistant (graduate trainee).

The main workroom at Walkinshaw Street

Our Surveying Officer Chris looking over shipping plans.

Our Director Professor Tony Slaven and our Archivist Kiara looking through a ledger from Glasgow City Archives Clyde Navigation Trust collection.

The campaign is being officially championed by the Scottish Council on Archives, to support the ongoing National Strategy for Business Archives in Scotland, the campaign aims to encourage archives, their users and the public at large to celebrate the unique stories behind individual Scottish businesses; the records of products that were produced or manufactured in Scotland and exported around the world; and the archival legacy of working Scots of all kinds - whether in business, farming, healthcare, education, the church or government.

The Working Archive campaign will celebrate the people behind the records - whether the workers and staff of businesses, the communities within which businesses are based or trade or the archivists and curators who work to preserve these records today.

At the Ballast Trust we see some great examples of working archives and from our own small collections we've create this flickr set and also contributed some of these images to the gallery.

On the 4th of December, I gave a talk as part of a joint training day organised by the Business Archives Council of Scotland (BACS) and Archives and Records Association Scottish Region and hosted by Glasgow City Archives to introduce members of both organisations to procedures and processes for handling technical records within their archive collections.

Here at the Ballast Trust, we specialise in processing technical records. Which we consider to be the plans, drawings, maps and photographs (often found in construction, engineering, architectural, design and manufacturing businesses) that provide evidence of the creation and development of products or sites within business and organisational collections.

For my presentation I have tried to explain our approach to technical records, the importance of background research and understanding your collection and then an awareness of plans and the use of 'core lists' or retention guidelines for certain industries. We will be publishing core lists that we use for shipbuilding and engineering collections in the new year.

Our annual reports are now available in a snazzy online reading format over on Issuu.  This means that you can read the 2012 Annual Report and also our 2011 Annual Report.
 

Some shameless self-promotion this afternoon with an image of the Meet the Archivists poster that I have designed for this November event. The Meet the Archivists event will take place on November 9th 2012.

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.

One of the model railways at HMRS

On Saturday I gave a talk about the work of the Ballast Trust as part of the Archives, Artefacts, Amateurs and Academics workshop organised by the Business Archives Council and the Historical Model Railway Society.

It was a very interesting two days, very useful from our point of view to hear how other organisations manage and use technical records and has given me lots of things to think about.

There is a full write-up of the conference over on Turnip Rail (a blog written by PhD student David Turner about railway history).

One of the most interesting developments we heard about was the Transport Archive Register. This is an online register that aims to "describe archives containing railway and canal records which are not linked to national databases and which might otherwise escape notice. Local libraries, societies and individuals often have collections about which information is hard to find. Anyone is welcome to use the information provided and equally anyone can contribute."

This week I have been pulling together statistics on our Flickr views for our annual report which needs to be ready for the Trustees' meeting in May.  This year views of our Flickr photostream increased by 56% to 20,695 all time views.  This is on top of last year's increase of 65% so it's great to know that there's an audience for the images we have.

The most viewed image by a long lead with 991 views is HMS Candytuft.  The next closest is Campbelltown and Machrihanish Light Railway Locomotive with 426 views.

There are several handy services for identifying fonts, my favourite is what the font.  Which on my first run gave me 8 potential matches to investigate.

Rear Shelves

Side Shelves

Wrapped Plans

I'm very pleased to say that the Ballast Trust now has an official entry on the Archon Directory which is a list of UK archive repositories.

Although, we are very much not a traditional repository with collections and operating a public searchroom, we do have some collections that are part of the Trust and are not held by us for processing.  Being part of Archon and the National Register of Archives means that we can make information about those few collections which will be staying with us permanently more easily available and improve the chances of people finding out about them.

Today is follow an archive day on twitter, its a chance for archives who are using twitter to promote themselves and their collections and get everyone tweeting about archives.

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 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.