Blog at the Ballast

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.

The National Maritime Museum is looking for help with its Warship Histories Project.  They are looking to harness the knowledge their users have about their collections to enhance the existing information they have on over 20,000 British warships from about 1500 to 1950. This information includes:

The data includes the name, type and launch date of almost every British warship in the time period concerned. For many ships there is also data on the shipyard which built a vessel, and details of the service history and captains of the ship concerned. For some ships further technical details (for instance, construction materials or dimensions) are available.

However, it is not complete and they are going to work with wikipedia to capture knowledge from experts in the wider community.

You can read more about it on their blog.

A while back I got a request via our flickr pages to use an image from the Dan McDonald collection.  The request came from Danny at Queensferry Passage website.  This website features lots of interesting information and images about the four ferries who worked the route.

The image in questions was of the Robert the Bruce ferry, which I've featured on this blog before and it now appears in this gallery.

Thanks to Danny for finding us and the nice credit to Dan McDonald and the Ballast Trust.