Project Completed!

This week marks the end of the project to digitize the Joseph Hardman Archive. All of the scanned glass plate images are now viewable on the Hardman Photo Library accessible through the Museum of Lakeland Life website. I hope that you have found my blog interesting and thank you for taking the time to read it!

Online Image Library Live!!

The Hardman Online Library is now Live! Which means you can search through the library and purchase prints. The library can be accessed via the Museum of Lakeland Life website. New images are still being uploaded and will continue to be over the next few weeks.

'Small Blessings: Amulets at the Pitt Rivers Museum'

This is a project to catalogue and make accessible one of the museum's significant collections of amulets. A special project team created more than 2500 individual records for the amulets, allowing them to be accessible via an online database. The new website created for the project also shows videos of the different stages to the project, from meeting the new project staff to documenting and conserving the amulets.

In my view a wonderful website with beautiful photography- take a look!

http://web.prm.ox.ac.uk/amulets/

The Increasing Popularity of Digitisation Projects in Museums

Over the past few years, I have seen a clear increase in the popularity and development of digital media use in museums. Technology now allows the museum walls to be broken down, improving both communication with museum staff and public access to the collections.

Social networking and the Internet allow members of the public to see what goes on behind the scenes in museums, whilst online 'blogs' allow museum staff such as curators and conservators to produce a diary of what they 'get up to' on an average day at the museum. The use of online collections databases by museums is not as new as social networking, but I feel is vitally important to improving access to the collections. These online databases can contain detailed information about objects in the museum's collections and also images of the objects, all of which can be excellent resources for researchers.

Museums are not always able physically to display all of their collections and can sometimes be criticised for not displaying material in stores. Online collection databases allow those objects currently not on display or not able to be displayed, to still be accessible to the public.

It appears that digitising museum and archive collections is becoming increasingly popular at present. Producing online databases or libraries of collection material does take time, but when no physical access to the objects is required, volunteers can provide invaluable assistance in this area.

I have personally volunteered on a very interesting online project run by the Australian Museum called the 'Atlas of Living Australia' in which volunteers all over the world are able to transcribe specimen collection labels online. When working on this project I felt like I was contributing not only to the work of the museum, but in producing a database of information that would be a brilliant tool for further scientific research. See below for access:

Atlas of Living Australia- Volunteer Portal
http://volunteer.ala.org.au/

Scanning archival material and photographing museum collections also serves as a historical record of these objects, so that when they are too fragile to be handled, access and research can still be made using this material. Below are some museum collections currently online and articles on museum digitisation projects:

The Manchester Museum Collection Database

http://emu.man.ac.uk/mmcustom/narratives/

Digital Collections from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries

http://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/

http://www.digitalmeetsculture.net/article/israel-invests-in-digitizing-museums-collections/

http://blog.nmai.si.edu/main/2012/08/digitizing_the_photo_archives.html

Some of my favourite images...

Canoes on the Lake

Joseph Hardman and his Wife

Stepping Stones



Walker looking across Lake



Yachts Racing



Less than 1000 scans to go!

I am  pleased to say that I now have less than 1,000 plate negatives left to scan for the project.

The images captured in the scans this week have been really interesting and very varied. I have seen pictures of William Wordsworth's Dove Cottage in Grasmere, of what appears to be a domesticated fox labelled on the plate sleeve as the 'Borrowdale Fox', photographs of Joseph Hardman and his wife and paintings from John Ruskin's art collection.

A number of the scanned images have now been sent to the media department at the Lakeland Arts Trust so that they can then be loaded onto the online image library.

Some of the images in the 'Joseph Hardman Archive: Series 1' have already been uploaded and can be viewed at the link below:

http://www.lakelandmuseum.org.uk/hardman

More images from Series 2 should be uploaded very soon so keep your eyes peeled!

Answer to which army Joseph Hardman photographed

With the help of the Border Regiment Museum  I can now identify the army photographed by Joseph Hardman (image previously posted on this blog). The image shows the Annual Camp of what is thought to be the Yorkshire yeomanry unit between the early and mid 1930s. The yeomanry unit were a cavalry arm  of the territorial army.