Blog at the Ballast

Back in October we organised and shifted close to 10 tonnes of engineering plans. These were drawings relating to about 8 different engineering companies based in the North-East of England. They had come to the Ballast Trust along with other material for the Kincaid’s collection that had been cleared out of the premises of Clark Kincaids in the early 1990s.

Following discussions with colleagues at Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums, we had agreed that these items would be much better placed with them as a repository that is local to where those companies operated.

They sent up a great driver who amazingly drove all the way up from Newcastle, spent 3 hours loading plans and then drove all the way back down! You can see what they have done since with the plans (including some snazzy and essential freezing of the plans) and find out more about how they fit into their shipbuilding and engineering collections here.

This photograph from our Dan McDonald collection was used by the Scottish Council on Archives as the front cover for their August edition of Broadsheet.

When we provided the image, I was only about to tell SCA that our description for it was 'Man on Hopper 7' and that we knew that Hopper no. 7 had been built by Lobnitz and Co., Renfrew in 1911.

Since then and in response to an enquiry that the SCA got about the man.  We have looked at our photocopies of Dan's original negative registers (held by Glasgow City Council Archives) which had more information about the photo.  So I can reveal that the man in question is Captain Duncan MacLeod and the photograph was taken on the 24th May 1948.

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.

Rear Shelves

Side Shelves

Wrapped Plans

• Ballast Trust leaflet

I also ordered some postcards with a blurb about what we do and who we are on the back to give to people when they visit or when we're at things. They look a lot better in real life, lovely quality and feel to them and a nice way to show off some my favourite Dan McDonald pictures.

At the end of last year, I wrote a post about the article on the Ballast Trust that I'd done for the Italian online journal Culture e Impresa.  At that time, the article was only available in Italian but now the english translation is available here.

This means that you can all read my article but it also means that the other articles in the journal can be read.  There's an interesting one about cataloguing industrial photographs here plus lots of others.

Earlier this year, I wrote an article about the Ballast Trust for an Italian online journal called Culture e Impresa.  This is a journal that publishes articles related to culture and business and is linked to the Centre for Corporate Culture in Milan.  At the moment the article is only up in Italian but a full english translation of the journal will be available shortly.  In the meantime the previous edition is available to read online still.