Blog at the Ballast

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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.

Plans: a 'before' and 'after'

This Sunday saw our second year of taking part in the Renfrewshire Doors Open Days programme.

We focused this year on explaining the different stages of what we do with collections and had a series of themed displays based on the following stages:

1. Rescue/desposit
2. Processing
3. Return
4. Access
5. Use

We had 44 visitors in total and were delighted to welcome lots of new faces and people with an interest in Johnstone's industrial past in particular as we had some items on display from Clifton & Baird Ltd, machine tool manufacturers established in Johnstone since 1908.

We tried to get across the different uses of business archives by a variety of user groups such as model makers, artists, businesses, family and local historians.

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.
 

We've had a very busy week this week with 4 new accessions:

• Photographs from Ferguson Shipbuilders
• Rigging Plans from McKenzie Niven Ltd
• Material relating to North British Locomotive Company
• Papers from the Sinclair Scott family

[rigging plan]

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.

Here at the Ballast Trust we have a processed a collection which belongs to Glasgow City Archives.  It is the papers of R McAlister & Sons, Yachtbuilders based in Dumbarton.

It is a lovely collection, a great example of the work of a smaller firm of boat and yachtbuilders founded in 1857 to build small boats, including racing boats, gigs, canoes and other oared craft which were the main output of the firm. By 1886, expansion of the business meant that McAlister now built sailing yachts, lifeboats, steam yachts and launches. In May 1911 McAlister entered into an arrangement with Mr Valdemar Engelhardt (a Danish captain) to build his collapsible lifeboats and make the McAlister yard his British headquarters. By February 1912 they had delivered the 4 Engelhardt lifeboats that the Titanic carried which they built.

This image on the right of Order Book no. 4 (ref TD1347/10/14) that contains the order for the four lifeboats.  You can see some images of the boats at the end of the pages here (fig 5 and 6) which discuss the development of the Englehardt Collapsible Lifeboat.

The page from the order book is shown below.  It notes that the order is for Messrs Harland & Wolff Ltd Belfast for vessel no. 401 for four Englehardt boats measuring 28' x 8'6" x 3'1" to be delivered February 1912.  The opposite page then records the dates that the four boats were delivered from Greenock by G & J Burns Ltd.

[click to enlarge]

There is obviously a wealth of information online about the Titanic.  One of the advantages of this is that we can see how the four collapsible lifeboats were used.  This website records the names of each of the passengers the different lifeboats held and you can click through on their names to find some biographical information about them and details of their journey plans.  For example, collapsible lifeboat C rescued Joseph Bruce Ismay, the President of the White Star Line.

• Englehardt collapsible lifeboat A
• Englehardt collapsible lifeboat B
• Englehardt collapsible lifeboat C
• Englehardt collapsible lifeboat D

The McAlister collection is at present located at the Ballast Trust but once is it returned to Glasgow City Archives will be available for research and access.

The is a larger version of the order image available on our Flickr page.  Please contact us if you have any questions about the order book.

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.

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 spreadsheet.  This has now been remedied and you can download or view the catalogue from our collections page on the website.



It is a lovely collection of images of boats and ports like the fishing port of Pennan near Fraserburgh.

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.

A belated Friday photo.  The image is of one of the plans that we got scanned to go in our Ballast Trust history which will be published this year.  It turns out that 2012 is the 25th anniversary of the Ballast Trust, taken from its date of incorporation in December 1987 (although work didn't start until 1988).

The image is of a plan showing Dublin Street Lane, taken from the Edinburgh City Engineers collection that we are processing on behalf of Edinburgh City Archives.


More news about the history will appear here as get it all finalised, right now we've got about 30 images to fit in and make it all look pretty.

Rear Shelves

Side Shelves

Wrapped Plans

We had a wonderful 53 people battle through the miserable weather in Johnstone yesterday to visit us.  Thank you to everyone who came to see our display.

We had over 60 items out on display which have all been put back now so we've got about 50 metres of table space to work on again.  It was a lot quicker putting it away then setting it up!

It was really nice to have people in to get a preview of some of the collections that we work on and it got us all enthusiastic about processing some of the ones further down our list - particularly the British Corporation ship plans which are a complete mish-mash of vessel types but full of interesting things.

As well as writing an Annual Report for the Trustees and clients and friends of the Ballast Trust to receive.  I also put together a formal update for clients on what collections we have of theirs and what the status is of each of the collections.

Some of the collections we work on are pretty big and the work often takes years - particularly when we are relying on volunteers to help us process it.  Last week I wrote up the annual updates for 2010/11 for our current client repositories - National Records of Scotland, Glasgow City Archives, Glasgow University Archive Services, Edinburgh City Archives, McLean Museum, Cody Images and Caledonian Railway Association.  Some of the updates were a little disheartening as it seemed like not a lot had changed but I had to remind myself that collections with 1000s of items in them take a long time to complete.

So while, the majority of the collections we're working on are all still in progress there are a few here at the Ballast that are finished and ready to go back to their repositories.  I'm going to post about these later this week to highlight their value as collections.

It is Annual Report time of year and I have attempted to make it look a bit snazzier with some pictures.  You can read all about our past year (April 2010 to March 2011)

• Annual Report 2010/11 (large file, may take time to download)
• Annual Report 2010/11 (smaller file, poorer image quality)

The Ballast Trust is working with ProjectScotland to create a volunteering opportunity for a young person to give them an opportunity to an understanding of archives as a career and the role of an archivist.

The data entry part of our pacesetter project has been completed. This means that one of our volunteers has sucessfully inputted around 1500 entries to the Archivists' Toolkit to create an xml file that we will now pass onto the custodial repository for them to transfer to their database.

If that all goes smoothly we will be able to return that section of the collection (all the Caledonian Railway drawings) to the National Archives of Scotland and get on with the measuring, referencing and inputting of the other 1500 drawings.

In other toolkit news, I'm attending a training day on XSLT stylesheets which will help me to customise how the finding aid reports are produced so they can be altered to present the information in more pleasing manner.

We had an enquiry looking for information about the boiler of the shipwreck of the Renown which ran aground in 1887 in South-West France.

Although the Pacesetter project isn't finished, I recently filled in the official evaluation questionnaire for the Pacesetter team.