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PART B: Individual Institutions
Systems:
The Library's central role in fostering standards and resource-sharing in the Australian library community and its status in international librarianship as a window between Australian libraries and the world's library system are well-known.
The Library has achieved widespread respect for its facilitation of shared cataloguing and document delivery services through its Australian Bibliographic Network (ABN) system. There are very few libraries in Australia which do not either contribute to this national effort or which do not rely on the Library and its various services for support.
The Library and the National Library of New Zealand have jointly defined specifications for a new generation ABN system. The project is known as the National Document and Information Service (NDIS).
Videodiscs:
The "Apollo Videodisc Project" was a demonstration videodiscing project undertaken by the Library's Pictorial Section in 1992 and was designed to achieve maximum utility within a limited fixed budget. As a result, priority was given to items which had already been fully catalogued and, in the case of original art works, to items for which colour transparencies already existed. A total 6,000 art works and 6,000 photographs, mainly from large formed collections such as the Gundagai and Tilba Tilba collections were videodisced. The system is accessible on a single videodisc player and terminal in the Pictorial Section and on two other players in the Visitor's Centre and Main Reading Room. The system uses Search Tech's Just Imagine search software. Copies of the disc have been made available to 10 other Australian institutions.
The Library's Pictorial Section has been keen to extend the project to include all the original art works in the collection but funding has not been made available for this.
Art Works:
The Library holds over 40,000 art works, the nucleus or "jewel" of the collection being the two outstanding collections of Australian and Pacific works collected by the art dealer and connoisseur Rex Nan Kivell. Portraits are a particular strength of both the art and photograph collections. The art collection is growing at the rate of a few hundred items per year.
All art works have been catalogued onto ABN using AACR and LCSH standards supplemented by participant headings to facilitate retrieval of groups like oil paintings or portraits. Records are consequently accessible by all ABN users as well as by users of the Library's OPAC. A sample record is as follows:
Main entry: Dent, Aileen (1890-1979)
Title: Portrait of the Hon. King O'Malley,
founder Comth {i.e. Commonwealth} Bank
{picture}
Imprint: {ca. 1938}
Collation: 1 painting : oil on canvas ; 92.5 x 71.6
cm
Subjects: O'Malley, King (1858-1953) - Portraits
Politicians - Australia - Portraits
Notes: Exhibited: Homes and haunts, NLA 1989
Participant Picture - Portrait - Oil
Headings: Picture - NLA exhibition 1989
Photographs:
The Library holds an estimated 500,000+ photographs relatively few of which have been catalogued (see below) or videodisced.
An estimated 400,000 prints of the photographs are accessible through a self-indexing filing system. Exceptions include some recently acquired collections which have not yet been copied, some specialised collections deemed to be of limited interest and approximately 20,000 photographs which are still effectively unsorted.
The Library has hard-copy lists of nearly all collections at the item level and has recently begun the task of writing detailed one page descriptions of the various photographic collections. About 30 of the estimated 150 collections have been described to date. There is also a card index of approximately 2,000 cards to the collections which started as an index to photographic albums and which lists most but not all collections. It provides access through photographer and subjects.
Under the filing arrangement, photographic prints are filed in three sequences under portraits (arranged alphabetically); under topical subjects; and less frequently, under the name of a collection. Two further index sequences exist for reference photographs of original art works held in the collection. Duplicates of the same print are sometimes but not invariably filed under both collection name and under topical subject.
Arrangement by topical subjects is governed by a list of headings comprising both place names and relatively broad topics, eg:
with some headings further subdivided by name of state or further topical subdivision.
The Library has catalogued all of its 900 photographic albums and selected collections at the collection level onto ABN. Newly acquired photographs and photograph collections are also being catalogued onto ABN. One of the considerations in prioritising cataloguing has been that expensive items should be listed on ABN to facilitate rational acquisitions policies across the ABN network. Present plans are to progressively add collection level records for all collections.
The Library is one of very few libraries that have catalogued either art works or photographs onto ABN and its bibliographic records represent good examples of the standards that would be followed if institutions generally were to follow suit and contribute records to a centralised database under AACR and LCSH standards.
A sample record for a collection of photographs follows:
Title: Flying doctor service, Charleville,
Queensland, 1954-1957 {picture}
Imprint: 1954-1957
Collation: 256 slides : col. ; 35 mm.
Notes: Subjects covered include aircraft, air
taxis, aerial views of the Channel
country, sandhills, bush racing
carnivals, scenes of towns and properties
and various people including pilots. The
slides were donated by Dr Joe Bloggs
Notes: List available
Notes: Some copyright restrictions apply
Subjects: Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia.
Queensland Section
Aeronautics in medicine - Queensland
Queensland - Pictorial works
Posters:
The Library does not actively collect posters yet has a collection of about 4,000 items, growing at the rate of about 300 p.a.
All the posters have been sorted and are stored in broad subject categories, and more than half of these subject groups have been catalogued as collection level records on ABN (Australian Bibliographic Network).
Systems:
The Library is unique among the institutions surveyed in having deliberately decided to operate two different large-scale strategic systems: the record-based URICA integrated library management system for its traditional MARC-based collections and the relational database AWAIRS for its pictorial and archival materials. It is also the only institution surveyed where image data is currently being made available remotely using telecommunications.
Multimedia Library Link (ISDN) Project:
The following is a direct transcript of a Library leaflet about the project, quoted in full because it best encapsulates the Library's planning for image networking and the relationship between image, CD-ROM and text data dissemination:
"Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) represents a new generation of telecommunications in which all transmissions are digital. The present telephone system, Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), transmits analog signals. Digital transmission is superior in that it is faster, more reliable and versatile. Telecommunications is undergoing a revolution, the switch from the old way of communicating by analog transmission to the new way, digital communication. ISDN may provide the framework for a global communications network, capable of simultaneous high speed transmission of voice, data, facsimile, image, and video all over the same twisted pair lines that the PSTN has used for decades. Telecom Australia's Microlink (Basic Rate) ISDN splits the phone line, providing two 64Kbps digital information channels and one 16Kbps background control channel, enabling the user to send not only voice information but also images, in full colour, as well as data and text, and even some video down the telephone line at the one time.
"Since January 1991 the State Library of New South Wales has been developing a multimedia image transfer system using ISDN as the transmission tool. The Library has already stored some 300,000 photographs on videodisc and continues to collect vast amounts of electronic information on CD-ROM. The Project, known as the Multimedia Library Link (ISDN) Project, was initially set up to investigate the use of ISDN as the medium by which full colour images could be transmitted over the phone line to another library in an interactive manner. Since then it has progressed beyond the trial phase and is now undergoing implementation into the State Library's Document Delivery Service. It is expected that the ISDN image transfer system will be used as one of the document delivery tools for inter library lending and access to image and text databases.
"How it works:
"Pictures, maps, text and colour information are placed either under a video camera or over a colour flat bed scanner and are captured onto an ISDN-equipped computer for transmission to another site. The present system is made up of a Personal Computer, a terminal adaptor card from Jtec Pty Limited, an Australian company designing and manufacturing ISDN equipment, and an image capture and compression technology, Super Video Windows (SVW). Using an international compression standard, JPEG, large image files can be compressed down to a fraction of their original size. For example, a 1-2 Megabyte image file can be shrunk to a more manageable 20-40 Kilobyte file size, a twentieth of its original file size, for faster transmission and more efficient storage. A full screen compressed image file can then be transmitted down the ISDN system to anywhere in Australia in approximately 11 seconds. It is then decompressed and viewed on the receiver's computer screen all for the cost of less than a postage stamp.
"At present, the system requires library staff to manually select, digitise and compress images, either via the video camera or a flat bed scanner, then the operator sends the digitised item to another site via ISDN. In the not too distant future it will be replaced by a system which will enable remote users to directly access the Library's computer catalogue to identify an item then select the appropriate picture or text database to view the identified item. The State Library intends to store its entire pictorial collection in electronic format to ensure preservation as well as accessibility. Off-site users will one day have access to the Library's 1 million plus pictures, oral history recordings, music, CD-ROM databases, newspapers and manuscripts on microfilm, text in journals and books, video and film all via a computer and an ISDN telephone line installed in their local public library.
"The pilot project with four NSW public libraries:
"To encourage the development of this system the State Library has selected four NSW public libraries to act as test sites in a pilot project. Wyong and Warringah have been chosen as the metropolitan sites and Tamworth and Cooma are the country sites. The main objective of the pilot project is to gauge the general public's response to the new service: How various industry, education, business and government groups will benefit from greater access to the resources of the State Library of NSW. The pilot project with the four public libraries will also serve as a valuable testing ground for the development of the remote access system and its integration into the public library network.
"With ISDN business people could search and access information, be it text and colour illustrations or graphs, stored on a CD-ROM or another type of database in a library, via an ISDN linked terminal, and retrieve visual, up-to-date information in a matter of seconds, without stepping out of their office. In the future an advertising agent could dial into an image library database and browse through various pictures, select the image, then download the picture into the advertisement he is preparing on his desktop computer ready for printing. Engineers and architects would be able to transmit drawings, plans of a house to a client anywhere in Australia and eventually over seas.
"Public libraries and the community will no doubt benefit from faster and more efficient access to the resources of a library such as the State Library of New South Wales. The people behind the Multi-Function Polis, the city of the future, anticipate that many of us will work from home, and computers and telecommunications will play a very important role in allowing this to happen. Your local public library may be the first step in this process."
40,000 images from the Library's videodisc project were digitised from videodisc by Telstra for a pilot project. Remote access to these images is now available on the Library's World Wide Web server via ILANET.
In 1994 the Library established an internal working party on digitising its Australian research collections, ie, not only pictorial material but also documentary textual material.
Photograph Collection:
The three elements in access to the State Library's photographic collections are (a) traditional, manual vertical files and card catalogues; (b) videodisc; and (c) the PICMAN database.
Manual systems:
50,000 individual photographs are on open access in the SLNSW and held in vertical files arranged primarily by place, sometimes subdivided by broad subject, eg "Newcastle - Social life" and occasionally, where place is incidental to the photograph, under a broad subject heading. A more detailed description of the filing arrangement can be gleaned from the entry under State Library of Queensland whose system was modelled on that of the SLNSW.
Access to nearly all other important pictorial material including art works is via a series of card catalogues arranged by artist, general subject, portraits and ships. Many of the items have been copied into bound volumes for easy reference. Since June 1992 all processing of pictorial works has been onto the PICMAN database.
Videodiscs:
The Library's videodisc was made with funding from the NSW Bicentennial Council using the facilities of the Laser Picture Studio at the NSW Government Printing Office. In addition to the Library's Bicentennial videodisc At work and play the four Government Printing Office videodiscs were transferred to the Library when the Office closed in 1989. The Library has since produced a second videodisc, Home and Away, based on six of its significant photograph collections and a third, comprising images from the Australian Photographic Agency is currently in production.
Some 300,000 of the library's estimated 800,000+ photographs are consequently accessible on videodisc via players in the SLNSW reading room, using the Just Imagine search software. As described above, a number of these have also been converted to digitised format under the ISDN trial. The Library has decided not to continue videodiscing its pictorial collections but instead to devote its resources to digitised image data.
PICMAN Database:
The Library uses the AWAIRS information retrieval system to manage its original materials including pictures and manuscript collections ("PICMAN" system). Data from the videodisc projects is replicated on PICMAN.
PICMAN supports a relational data structure designed to accommodate and relate collection groups with subcollections and individual items. As such it provides the links required for manuscript and pictorial collections that are difficult to provide with record-based database structures.
The following is an example of a relational primary, secondary and tertiary level description of a collection of photographs:
Primary Level:
Title: Robert Hallum collection of kodachrome
slides of streetscapes, buildings,
houses, gardens and landscapes of Sydney,
Sydney suburbs and New South Wales.
Heading Notes: This collection has been arranged by
geographical areas. You can navigate to
these records from this collection
record.
Date of Work: 1962-1983
Date Range: 1962-1983
Physical Photographs - 1871 slides, col. - 35 mm.
Description:
Subcollection: Robert Hallum slides of the Southern
Sydney Region
Robert Hallum slides of the City of
Sydney
Robert Hallum slides of the Illawarra
Region
Robert Hallum slides of the Blue
Mountains Region
(and 13 other subcollections)
Confidential Mrs J. Bloggs, 1A Smith Road, Jonestown
Source: 2944 15/8/93
Public Source: Presented 1993
Secondary Level:
Title: Robert Hallum slides of the Blue
Mountains Region.
Heading Notes: This subcollection has been arranged by
geographical areas in the Blue Mountains
Region for e.g. Katoomba, Leura, Mount
Bowen, etc. You can navigate to these 19
individual records from this
subcollection record.
Date of Work: 1964-1978
Date Range: 1964-1978
Physical Photographs - 110 slides, col. - 35 mm.
Description:
Parent Collection: Robert Hallum collection of kodachrome
slides of streetscapes, buildings,
houses, gardens and landscapes of Sydney,
Sydney suburbs and New South Wales.
Public Source: Presented 1993
Primary and secondary levels always relate to tertiary level entries and so do not include subject access points.
Tertiary Level:
Creator: Hallum, Robert
Title: Katoomba
Date of Work: 12 Feb 1964 - 19 Sep 1974
Date Range: 1964 - 1974
Physical Photographs - 5 slides, col. - 35 mm.
Description:
Collection: Robert Hallum slides of the Blue
Mountains Region.
Description: Contents: 608. The Three Sisters
Contents: 609. Skyway Car
Contents: 610. Scenic Railway
Contents: 611. The Three Sisters and
Jamieson Valley
Contents: 612. View from Echo Point
showing Narrow Neck
Public Source: Presented 1993
Topic: cableways
lookouts
railways
Place: Katoomba (N.S.W.)
Three Sisters, The (N.S.W.)
Entries at the tertiary (or item) level may be for individual works or a group of related works if a more detailed hierarchical division into primary and secondary levels is not required.
The example "Album of photographs donated by Lady Mary, widow of the former state governor, Sir Percival Percy. Album contains about 200 formal photographs relating to the opening of state parliaments and to the swearing in of cabinet ministers during the 1950s and early 60s. The album contains detailed captions for each photo, giving the names of parliamentary officers and the names of ministers. Album also contains official programmes of ceremonies" would be catalogued something as follows:
Title: Album of photographs relating to the
opening of state parliaments and to the
swearing in of cabinet ministers during
the 1950s and early 1960s
Date of Work: ca. 1950-1965
Date Range: 1950 - 1965
Physical Albums - 1 album (210 chiefly silver
Description: gelatin photoprints + 20 programmes) - 30
x 28 cm.
Description: Contents: The album contains detailed
captions for each photograph, giving the
names of parliamentary officers and the
names of ministers. Album also contains
official programmes of ceremonies. SEE
contents list in the Mitchell Library
Reading Room at PXD 207
Confidential Presented by Lady Mary Percy....
Source:
Public Source: Presented 1994
Topic: Ministers of the Crown
official events
Parliament
programmes
public servants
Place: Parliament House (Sydney, N.S.W.)
Interiors: Interior - Y
Persons: Persons - Adult Males
The terminology shown above under "Topic", "Interiors" and "Persons" is derived from the social history thesaurus originally developed by Alan Walker and his team as part of the Government Printing Office videodisc project.
Interesting features include the use of the "Interiors" check tag, used because interior shots of buildings are relatively uncommon and of particular interest to designers and architects. Not shown in the examples above are other tags to restrict searches to broad geographic regions, eg Far North Coast.
Posters:
The Library holds approximately 4,000 posters which are accessible via a card catalogue and which are being catalogued onto the PICMAN database.
A typical PICMAN record for an individual poster, bearing in mind that some posters are being catalogued as sub-collections in a similar manner to the example shown above for photographs, is:
Title: The Siege of Pinchgut : an escaped
convict - : in his gunsights a shipload
of dynamite - and the city of Sydney :
his terms - freedom or annihilation :
Associated British presents a Michael
Balcon production : Aldo Ray, Heather
Sears.
Imprint: Manchester, [U.K.] - [s.n.]
Date of Work: [1959]
Date Range: 1959 - 1959
Physical Posters - 1 poster, col. - 101 x 68 cm.
Description:
Notes: At foot of poster : "An Ealing film,
distributed by Associated British Pathe :
directed by Harry Watt : associate
producer Eric Williams : screenplay by
Harry Watt and Jon Cleary. Original
colour movie poster for the last film
produced by Ealing before its closure.
Poster shows in background a very
stylised picture of the Sydney Harbour
Bridge.
Confidential Purchased from Joe Bloggs for $nnn
Source:
Public Source: Purchased 1993
Topic: film posters
Place: Fort Denison (Sydney, N.S.W.)
Sydney Harbour Bridge (Sydney, N.S.W.)
Name: Ealing Films.
Associated British Pathe.
Siege of Pinchgut (Motion picture)
Art Works:
The Library holds over 100,000 art works accessible via the manual card indexes. Since June 1992 all pictorial works are processed onto the PICMAN database.
Formed by an amalgamation of the State Library of the Northern Territory and the Parliamentary Library.
Systems:
NTL, like all other NT government agencies has computing services provided on the government computer bureau's mainframe. This system is widely networked through the Territory to a range of government departments, special libraries and high schools. DOBIS/LIBIS is currently used as an ILMS for general library collections, but NTL is in the process of evaluating a new system to replace DOBIS/LIBIS.
The STAIRS information retrieval system is currently used for the Library's Territory newspaper indexes. It was also used for the photograph index, but this has ceased with the introduction of Territory Images.
Networked OPAC capabilities throughout the Territory give access to both DOBIS and STAIRS systems.
Pictorial Collection:
The main part of the collection is a collection of c.50,000 photographs of the Northern Territory. NTL has a general policy of collecting items relating to Northern Australia (Port Hedland to Mackay and Central Australia) but restricts itself to the Northern Territory in the case of its pictorial collections. "Northern Territory" is, however, defined as including Christmas Island, Cocos (Keeling) Islands and Ashmore and Cartier Islands, which are part of the Federal electorate of the Northern Territory.
Postcards are integrated into the Photographs collection. NTL staff estimate there may be a few hundred postcards included.
Laserdisc: "Territory Images":
Some 47,000 of the total 50,000 photographs have been transferred to laser disk drive Search Tech's Just Imagine software. The old STAIRS indexing data has also been converted to Just Imagine. A further 3,000 photographs are about to be forwarded to Search Tech for imaging, and the entire collection will then be on the disk.
A total of 18,000 photographs have been fully described and indexed on Territory Images.
The remaining 35,000 photographs are in a limited state of bibliographic control, with some ready to be added to the system and others with either inadequate captioning and indexing or with none at all.
Upgrading these records is viewed as a high priority but staff resources are tight. During 1995 2 staff will work on photographs approximately 50% of their time. However supervised volunteers with long Territory experience will continue to be the backbone of this project for some time. Other avenues are continually being sought to push the project along, and a recent Heritage grant saw complete data for some 3,000 photographs added to the database. An application for a further grant has been submitted.
With the introduction of the laser disk public access to the prints (stored in filing cabinets) has ceased. Territory Images provides a thermal copy of the image (cost $1.00), and prints will be produced by a commercial photographer if required.
To supplement the data on Territory Images there is a small subject catalogue of approximately 1,000 cards, which provides access via place names and broad subject categories (eg Aviation, Cars, Ships).
Plans to network Territory Images through the Territory are still in their infancy. A new library system to replace the aging DOBIS/LIBIS is currently being evaluated, and there is a possibility that the new system will have imaging capabilities.
At present NTL has two public access workstations and one staff station. Each station consists of:
Copies of the disk can certainly be made available to other libraries which have the capacity to use it.
Data Standards:
LCSH is strictly followed in database subject cataloguing though attempts are made to offset the less intuitive aspects of LCSH via natural-language text. For example, with an item catalogued "Railroads - Trains", an effort would be made to ensure that the caption contained the phrase "railway train(s)". NTL also uses hierarchical devices to assist retrieval, eg:
Restaurants----Retail stores----Buildings
Darwin---- Fannie Bay
A typical (STAIRS) photographic record is as follows:
Description: Bombed hangars at RAAF 'drome, Parap
after 19th February raid.
Taken: Day: Month: Year: 1942
Acc no.: PH0035/0030
Photographer: Lorna Laffer
Colour: BW Size: 08x06cm Negative Size:
x cm
Format: PH
Collection ID: Lorna Laffer Collection
Copyright: State Reference Library
Localities: Darwin Fannie Bay
Index terms: Hangars Air bases Airports
Buildings World War 1939-1945
Destruction Aerial bombing War
damage
Notes: Donated by ......
A typical worksheet entry for a portrait is:
Description: Tony Powell, Director, Darwin
Reconstruction Commission
Taken: Day: Month: Year: 197?
Accno: 0416/0186
Colour: BW
Format: PH
Collection ID: ABC TV
Copyright: NTL
Index terms: Portraits
Note that this record would be expected to be upgraded with the Index terms:
Powell, Tony Darwin Reconstruction Commission
NTL's policy is to catalogue all photographs individually.
Posters:
There is no legal deposit legislation in the Territory. NTL is, however, actively collecting posters. The collection numbers a little under 500 and is growing at the rate of about 100 p.a. The poster collection is housed in map cabinets, arranged into broad categories such as "Health, Theatre, Sport, Wildlife, Ayers Rock". Additional cataloguing of posters is not seen as a priority.
Other Pictorial Material:
Art works are not collected at all by NTL and are the responsibility of the Northern Territory Museum of Arts and Science. The Territory Archives collects both private and government archives and is believed to hold significant pictorial collections.
Staff indicated a willingness to contribute either collection-level records for the pictorial collections (c. 500 records, average collection size 100 photographs, and "depending on resources") to a national database or individual items "provided there was a capacity for doing retrospective conversion on existing holdings". Staff also indicated strong interest in a nationally-standardised thesaurus though with some misgivings about its practicality, particularly its retrospective applicability and compatibility with existing investments.
Systems:
State Library of Queensland runs the proprietary ORAQLE system as its ILMS and OPAC for its general book and serials collections and operates a Fujitsu M760/4 mainframe via a Novell LAN. ORAQLE can also be accessed via dial-up from anywhere in Queensland and the Library has recently joined AARNet. The Library has not yet automated its pictorial collections.
Photographs Collection:
The Oxley Library photograph collection numbers approximately 750,000 items and is growing at the rate of approximately 8,000 items p.a. It includes postcards. It is a closed-access collection with files accessible from the reference desk. Prints are attached to a cardboard sheet giving captions, subject headings, negative number (where it exists) and availability for reproduction.
The self-indexing filing system is modelled on the general principles followed by the SLNSW in the early 1970s and is governed by a systematic list of subject headings of approximately 3,700 terms, about 3,000 of which are place names. Names of towns are subdividable by pattern subheadings as follows:
- Accidents
- Airports
- Apiaries
- Arcades
-
Archives
- Arrowroot mills
- Art galleries etc.
Photographic prints are overwhelmingly filed in a single file only and primacy in filing for most subjects is given to place. Where place is secondary or irrelevant or unknown, they are filed under a subject, eg:
These files are frequently subdividable by decade and, for some special subjects, eg Aborigines, by place.
In addition, there are a few hundred file names for corporate bodies, eg:
There are two additional filing sequences for Portraits and Ships.
As with other manual systems of this type, the arrangement works well on the utilitarian basis that "place" is a focus of a majority of queries. The general restriction to a single filing point causes occasional retrieval difficulties. As an indication of these difficulties, the Photographic Librarian suggests that photographs would ideally be catalogued with between four and five subject headings.
Captioning of photographs is regarded as having been of a high standard between 1974 and 1986 and as having fallen away after 1986 under staffing pressures. Volunteers have been used extensively.
Oxley Library has systematically sought material from district historical societies over the years by acquiring negatives and making copies in return. It consequently has good coverage of local photographs though at the expense of some copyright issues. The Library also has a large number of photographs acquired from government departments.
The Library conducted a study into imaging the collections during 1993 but concluded that the technology was too fluid to warrant immediate action. In particular, videodiscs were ruled out and a decision made to move directly to digitised imaging. The Library is committed to imaging but timing will depend on technology and funding. The Library also believes that improved subject description is an essential pre-requisite to the success of any imaging project; ie, that "documentation is as much a key issue as information technology".
Art Works:
The Library holds about 4,300 art works:
Art works have not been catalogued and are accessible only on request to the Pictorial Librarian who maintains listings of items in the collection. A small proportion of works have been photographed and are accessible as part of the Photographic collection. Imaging of art works is regarded as a longer-term goal but as a lower priority than imaging and improved documentation of the photograph collection.
Other Pictorial Material:
The Pictorial Librarian is responsible for a collection of about 700 posters which are, as in many of the libraries surveyed, uncatalogued and stored under broad subject categories.
The Manuscripts Section of the Library also holds notable collections of posters, for example of the Queensland Branch of the Australian Labor Party. Estimates of the numbers held were unavailable as were estimates of the numbers of architectural drawings held in the Manuscripts Section.
The Library holds about 600 illuminated manuscripts.
Systems:
The Library uses INNOPAC as its integrated library management system and currently uses Inmagic to maintain several small special databases under a strategy to load these progressively onto INNOPAC. The Library has established a fibre optic network within its main building in anticipation of supporting the display of images over a local area network (SALINET) and is exploring options for a gateway between SALINET and the Public Library Network (PLAIN).
Mortlock Library of South Australiana Videodisc Project:
The Mortlock Library holds over 80,000 photographs of South Australian subjects, of which approximately 45,000 were transferred from South Australian State Records at the time of the Library's establishment in 1986. The Library also holds a little under 200 art works on paper.
Images of many of the art works and of 54,000 photographs have been captured on one side of a videodisc. The Library uses a custom-built Macintosh-based search system developed by AVK Systems of Adelaide and has a single videodisc player for public access and another for system maintenance. The Library uses Inmagic for cataloguing new records and has catalogued a further several thousand photographs onto Inmagic in readiness for remastering the videodisc. These are available on supervised open access with subject indexes adjacent to the videodisc. An estimated 20,000 of the 80,000 photographs are contained in about 500 albums and there are no immediate plans to include information about these albums on the videodisc.
The videodisc largely supersedes a card subject index in six sequences, three of which relate to place:
Data Standards:
Subject cataloguing is based on LCSH but with modifications, eg:
A small card authority file is used to document these decisions and as an authority file of a few hundred entries to document name authorities, eg "AIF see Australian Imperial Force".
The example "6x8 photograph showing a violent confrontation between anti-Vietnam War protestors and the police on the Town Hall steps in December 1968" would have been catalogued something as follows:
Group No.: B60933
Provenance: Mr Joe Bloggs, Port Adelaide
Accession Date: January 1994
Description: Acre 203: Anti-Vietnam war protestors
attempt to take over the Town Hall
offices in December 1968. A police cordon
surrounds the building and forces the
crowd back down the steps to the main
entrance using batons and shield as
protection against stone throwing.
Date: 1968
Format: Size: 6 x 8
Donor: Mr Joe Bloggs, President, Peace Society,
Port Adelaide
Index: 1. Vietnam Moratorium Campaign (S.A.)
2 Peace Movement 3. Police
Photographer: Jane Bloggs
Remarks: Not to be reproduced without permission
from donor.
The example "Album of photographs donated by Lady Mary, widow of the former state governor, Sir Percival Percy. Album contains about 200 formal photographs relating to the opening of state parliaments and to the swearing in of cabinet ministers during the 1950s and early 60s. The album contains detailed captions for each photo, giving the names of parliamentary officers and the names of ministers. Album also contains official programmes of ceremonies" would be catalogued something as follows:
Group No.: B60935
Provenance: Lady Mary Percy, Bermuda
Accession Date: January 1994
Description: ALBUM: 210 views of ceremonial events and
programmes relating to the opening of
South Australian State Parliaments and
the swearing in of cabinet ministers,
1950-1963. Each photograph is fully
described, identifying the officers and
ministers.
Date: 1950-63
Format: 1 vol: 30 x 35 cm
Donor: Lady Mary Percy, Elizabeth II Retirement
Village, Bermuda
Index: 1. Politicians 2. Governors
3. South Australia. Parliament
Photographer: Government photographer
Remarks: Copyright transferred to the State
Library
Other Photographic Collections in the State Library:
The Rare Books and Named Collections section of the Library holds several formed collections of photographs none of which have yet been imaged. The collections fall broadly into "Australiana", "shipping and maritime"; "anthropology" and "miscellaneous" categories:
Shipping and maritime:
Arbon-Le Maistre Collection - an Australiana collection of over 80,000 photographs, very many of them postcards, of world-wide merchant and naval ships, 1900 to present. Much of the collection has Australian interest but the collection is not limited geographically. The collection is growing at the rate of about 4,000 items a year. One of the donors has been provided with a copy of Inmagic at his home and has made substantial progress in documenting parts of the collection as an alternative to the present card index. Subject control of the collection is through the name of the ship.
Edwardes Collection - a collection of about 8,000 shipping photographs, 1880-1925, mainly of wind-powered ships. Access to the collection is via a card index arranged by name of ship. Photographic captions are brief but are supplemented with additional information about each ship (rather than about each photograph) in loose-leaf folders giving such detail as tonnage, dates and owners.
Godson Collection - a collection of about 12,000 photographs of 500 different paddle steamers. The collection is currently accessible via a manuscript index with entries under each of the vessels. Considerable research work is still required to accurately caption the photographs.
Garbutt Collection - an Australiana collection of about 3,000 photographs of lighthouses. This again is not limited geographically though the collection contains photographs of all Australian lighthouses. Accessed through a card index, arranged by location.
The Section also maintains a card index to illustrations of shipping in books, arranged by name of ship. This has been maintained sporadically and consists of 3-4,000 cards.
Anthropology:
Mountford-Sheard collection - an archival Australiana collection of Aboriginal anthropology which contains about 45,000 photographs , 1935-1960, currently accessible by a card index developed by the ethnologist-photographer.
Laver collection - a small Australiana collection of about 700 photographs taken in the Alice Springs area in the early 1920s. Currently accessible only through a typed subject index (similar to a back-of-book index).
Australiana collections:
These four collections are described above:
In addition there are about 13,000 Australiana colour slides, many dealing with natural history and most of which have not been indexed. Access at present is effectively limited to Library staff using incomplete listings.
Miscellaneous:
Searcy collection - 44 volumes of approximately 18,500 mostly pictorial items, recently purchased from SLNSW. The collection is in approximate chronological order with material dating from 1862, covering various themes.
Total Photographic collections of the State Library of South Australia consequently comprise about 260,000+ items, of which:
c. 54,000 Imaged and on videodisc
c. 20,000 In albums, and not proposed to be imaged
at this stage
c. 80,000+ Arbon-Le Maistre collection: significant
progress in adding to Inmagic database,
no progress with imaging
c. 80,000 Manual access only, overlaid by problems
with poor present documentation practices
in many cases.
Posters:
The Mortlock Library of South Australiana has a collection of an estimated 5,000 posters with particular strengths in the performing and visual arts. The collection is managed by the Ephemera staff of the Mortlock Library and is actively developed, particularly in such subject areas as the Adelaide Festival and Australian Grand Prix. The collection is growing at the rate of c. 300 items p.a.
Most posters received before 1989 have been catalogued onto Inmagic (about 2,400) and work is proceeding on the remaining backlog. The Inmagic data structure and a sample record are shown overleaf.
Other pictorial material:
As described under the Videodisc Project entry, cataloguing records and images for many of the Library's art works on paper have been added to the videodisc.
The Library holds an estimated 1,500 postcards, mostly published before 1950. These are arranged largely by Place.
The Library also holds extensive collections of pictorial ephemera in the form of wine bottle labels and newspaper banner headlines.
The holdings figures reflect only those discrete collections that have been sized and the total holdings figures are far greater. Generally across Australiana and South Australiana definitions there is no accurate figure of the total numbers of pictorial holdings.
Mortlock Library: Inmagic Poster Database Record Structure:
Number: ZPS 472
Issuing Body: 5MMM-FM (RADIO STATION : ADELAIDE,
S.AUST.)
Title: Thursday night at the Tivoli. 5MMM-FM
presents this month's bands
Venue: The Tivoli, Pirie Street, Adelaide
Designer:
Year: {1979?]
Size: 75 x 35 cm.
Colour: colour
Subject:
Copies:
Notes:
Update provided by the State Library of South Australia:
There is now no intention of employing analog technology for application to image holdings. Any further conversion developments will be in digital format and will be made available on the SALINET (or any future system). The 54,000 images currently on videodisc would also be added to the digital pictorial library.
Automation of archival holdings information is being tested currently, using a III solution. Provision has been made for pictorial holdings information to be added to the archival database on SALINET.
The Library and Archives are described simultaneously for several reasons: the Archives was for many years administratively responsible to the Library while being statutorily responsible to the Minister for Education and the Arts. Archives headquarters is located in the State Library building in Murray Street, Hobart and, importantly and uniquely, the Archives collects private and government photographs, a function that in all other states is a state library function. Described differently, the Archives is responsible for unpublished material, (manuscripts and photographs) including private archives while the Library is responsible for published items.
Within the State Library, local publications are handled by the Tasmaniana Library. The WL Crowther Library is related organisationally to the Tasmaniana Library though it contains items relating to whaling and medicine and other of Sir William Crowther's special interests that go beyond a Tasmanian interest. The Crowther Library also contains photographic and other pictorial resources.
Systems:
The Information Technology Branch of the Tasmanian Department of Education and the Arts provides technical, co-ordinating and advisory IT support to the Library, the Archives and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) as well as to school libraries. The Department is committed to open systems and networking concepts which will allow ready access to educational and cultural information across the state. The TALIS (Tasmanian Automated Library and Information System) is widely networked to public libraries and schools. The State Library operates Dynix as its integrated library management system and is progressively loading its special collections (eg the Crowther monograph collection) onto Dynix. The Library, Archives and TMAG are exploring a joint strategy of making databases available under TALIS and running under Dynix. Shared authority files or thesauri are also being explored.
Specific systems are described below and under the entry for the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.
Generally speaking, progress with the automation of pictorial materials has been limited. No start has been made with imaging of pictorial material though there is broad interest within both the Department and the institutions surveyed in moving in this direction.
Photographs:
The Archives Office holds an estimated 70-80,000 Tasmaniana photographs. In the 1950s, much material was donated by the Archives to the University of Tasmania (which was not covered in this survey and which is reported to be no longer actively collecting Tasmaniana photographs). Impetus for the Archives to collect photographs started with the acquisition of Van Diemen's Land Company records including photographs and has developed since then.
The Archives operates the State Microfilm Bureau and, as a consequence, is in the unique situation where it provides viewing access to an estimated 30,000 of the photographs via microfilm. Archival principles apply in that provenance largely governs the sequence of microfiliming so that a particular microfilm contains photographs acquired from xxx rather than photographs about xxx.
Access to the collections, which is restricted to the public search room only, is primarily via a card catalogue (and occasionally via subject listings). The catalogue is divided into sequences for places, people and ships. Users identify subjects of interest and staff retrieve the relevant microfilm(s). Users can then make a copy of the individual image via a microfilm copier or order a reproduction or research quality print.
Pressures of time on both the State Archivist and the consultants at the time of the visit prevented other than a cursory inspection of the bibliographic standards applied in the card catalogue. It is, however, probably reasonable to say that archival rather than library principles have applied in that emphasis has been on minimal description, sufficient only to permit identification by date, place and the briefest of captioning. Catalogue entries are usually at the individual image level except where a series of photos deal with essentially the same scene, eg "Sequence of 20 photographs showing hop picking near Launceston in 1958". The Archivist regards the catalogue as inconsistent, particularly since much of the cataloguing was done by a Community Employment Program team.
His view is also that in any automation or imaging project, resources permitting, significant attention would need to be paid to subject documentation and thesaurus control.
The Archives also hold an unknown but large number of postcards, viewed as manuscripts. Very occasionally, a postcard is identified as pictorially interesting and is microfilmed.
The Library's 4,000-item collection of photographs from the Crowther collection is accessible via a card catalogue arranged by broad subject, eg "Lighthouses" and by Place.
Art Works:
The Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts is based on the collection bequeathed to the State Library by Henry Allport in 1965. In addition to rare books and prints, watercolours and other art works, it contains magnificent examples of decorative arts - furniture, ceramics and glassware. It is an oustanding collection.
Staff of the Library have catalogued an estimated 1,900 of the 3,000 art works in the Allport collection onto worksheets in readiness for their loading onto an as yet undetermined system. A specimen record is shown below:
Dates:
Artist: ALLPORT, Curzance Frances Louise
Nationality:
Title of Work & Pear blossom, Bagdad, Tasmania. Dated
Date: Lower right 1923
Reg. No: HA 429
Medium & Support Watercolour on paper
Size: 14 1/2" x 10 1/4", framed. 363mm x
262mm, framed
Signature: Lower right: C L Allport
Inscriptions:
Labels:
Condition: April 1991: Image has signs of yellowing
from acidic mount
Frame: Generally good order. Minor chipping
How Acquired:
Trustees Price:Copyright:
Approval:
Insurance Value:
Provenance:
Correspondence:
Other Curator has been told that this was in
Information: Felix Hamilton's orchard at Bagdad,
Tasmania [son of Sir Robert G. C.
Hamilton, Governor of Tasmania
The Crowther collection contains some 300 art works. These are currently accessible through a card catalogue under artist and subject. Catalogue entries are brief but are supplemented by detailed descriptions contained in a loose-leaf register.
Posters:
The Library holds an estimated 6,000 posters with particular strengths in the visual and performing arts. Posters are housed in map cabinets arranged by broad subject, eg:
The Library also holds a comprehensive collection of apple and pear box labels.
Brief cataloguing records have been created using a Microsoft Works database for the visual and performing arts posters (as well as programmes, catalogues and other ephemera). A specimen record is:
Poster: PP/1973/003
Title: Messiah
Author: Handel
Company/Artist: Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, Launceston
Philharmonic
Venue: ABC Odeon, Hobart
Type: Concert
Sponsor: A.B.C.
The Archives Office, as might be expected of a state records office, holds a number of posters on its files. Again the number is unknown.
Postcards:
The Library actively acquires postcards under legal deposit legislation and by purchase and donation and has a collection of 7,000 postcards. Postcards are filed overwhelmingly by Place (about 200 different Place headings) with some subdivisions under major towns and cities, eg:
Other postcards without a place focus, eg "Shipping" and "Fauna" are filed under one of 37 different topical subjects.
Architectural and Engineering Plans and Drawings:
The Archives Office holds an estimated 30,000 plans and drawings including an estimated 20,000 on microfilm. Plans and drawings of buildings still in official government use are held by the Public Works Department and not by the Archives.
Videodisc Project:
The "Pictures in Victoria" videodisc project is the result of a 1989 grant to the Library by the Sidney Myer Fund of $309,000 over a five year period. 108,000 images have been captured on videodisc by Search Tech Pty Ltd and the Library's Pictures Section is currently focused on indexing the images. The grant provided the funds for initial videodiscing and provides the resources for the employment of five part-time indexers. The costs of cleaning, preparation, supervision, technical support and preliminary listing of items are being borne by the State Library. Data is being added via a pictures cataloguing module onto the Library's Dynix integrated library management system.
Priority in selecting images for the project was given to high use, important, fragile and inaccessible pictorial material or a combination of the above and not necessarily in the order shown. As a result, some 2,000 art works on paper and 150 oil paintings have been imaged but so too have 15,000 postcards which are regarded as highly informative.
Basic "Level 1" records had been created at the time of the consultants' visit for all 108,000 images and fuller records created, usually at the individual item level, for 48,000 items. New records are being added at the rate of 80-100 per day per FTE indexer, and it is estimated that the indexing will be completed in about April 1995. These were represented via 40,000 Dynix records with some images grouped. For example, five different views of the same building taken from different angles are represented as a single record with five different videodisc frame numbers. In other cases, artificial subcollections are formed, for example, to group a series of a dozen photographs of gas supply infrastructure taken from a larger collection.
A public copy of the videodisc forms part of the Melbourne Exhibition, a permanent exhibition located in the Old Treasury Building, Melbourne.
Pictoria: the Image Database of the State Library of Victoria:
Subsequent to the consultants' visit, the Library has (in association with Search Tech) successfully digitised all the images captured for the videodisc project using the JPEG image compression format. Using a product called Co-Star, images can be called up on Dynix via Windows-based workstations. Three workstations are currently in operation, in the Pictures Section, the La Trobe Library reading room and the General Reference reading room with plans, funds permitting, to add more workstations generally.
The Library's strategic direction is to cease using videodisc and to capture digital images directly using a reference quality data compression standard. Funding now seems likely to be made available to continue work on imaging, and it is expected that, beginning in April 1995 and extending over the next four years or so, work will be undertaken to digitise and index another 200,000 images from the Library's collection.
Manual Systems:
The emphasis given in this entry to the videodisc project reflects the over-arching priority being given by the Pictures Section to the project and it is fair to say that, partly as a reflection of this but partly as an oversight, the consultants did not explore the mechanics of existing manual systems as closely as they did in other institutions surveyed.
The Library acknowledges significant backlogs in documentation. Figures given by the Library for classes of pictorial material are as follows:
Oil paintings: 700 items, of which:
Art works on paper:
Posters: 21,000 items, of which:
Architectural and engineering plans and drawings:
Postcards: 27,500 items, of which:
Photographs: 387,000 items, of which:
Other pictorial items, ie illuminated addresses, bookplates and labels:
The card index in Pictures Section is organised according to the La Trobe Thesaurus which, incidentally, provides some useful inverted and hierarchical collocation features to aid users, eg:
Cabbages see Vegetables. Cabbages
Cabinetmakers see Occupations. Cabinet
makers
Cable trams see Tramways. Cable trams
Cabmen see Occupations. Cabmen
The same style of heading has been used to some extent in cataloguing onto Dynix in addition to the more usual use of LCSH.
Bibliographic Standards:
A typical Dynix record for a photograph is as follows:
Videodisc Frame No: 01a 34253
Corporate Creator: Rose Stereograph Co. photographer
Title: Montrose, from the Dandenong Ranges
[picture]
Date: [n.d.]
Physical Description: negative : glass
Size: 8.8 x 13.8 cm. approx.
Contents: Shows land clearance
Collection: Rose series
Collection: Rose postcard collection of negatives
Collection No.: P. 1090
Subject(s): 1. Dandenong Ranges (Vic.)
2. Montrose (Vic.) -- Residences
Genre/Form: Postcards
Physical Glass negatives
Characteristics:
A record for an art work, in this case one of the few posters that have been fully catalogued, is:
Creator: Jonas, Lucien 1880-1947 artist
Title: Le Journee du Poilu 31 Octobre 1er Nov
[i.e., Novembre 1915] [picture]
Date: 1915
Physical poster : colour lithograph on buff paper
Description: laid down on book linen
Size: 120.6 x 78.1 cm
Imprint: Paris :
I. Lapina Imp. Edit.,
Collection: World War I posters
Notes: Signed in image l.r.
Printed I.I.I. LAPINA, IMP. EDIT. PARIS
Subject(s): 1. European War 1914-1918 -- France
Genre/Form: Posters.
Physical Lithographs
Characteristics:
A. General Description
Systems:
LISWA presently runs the URICA integrated library system for its general book and serials collections but has not yet automated its pictorial collections. LISWA is in the process of acquiring a replacement system for URICA and this is expected to be acquired during 1994-95. Initial priorities will be to migrate the collections to the new system after which attention will be paid to the pictorial collections and to the possible use of imaging systems both within the J. S. Battye Library of Western Australian History itself and, in the longer term, possibly directly from public libraries.
Pictorial Collection:
The Battye Library collection contains an estimated 250,000 images of Western Australia or by Western Australians, including not only photographs but also postcards and illustrations from published material. An unknown number of pictorial items are also contained in the Manuscripts collection. The Battye Library does not catalogue its pictorial items but it indexes and lists them for public access. This reflects the hybrid of library and archival principles which have been used in collection management.
Access to the bulk of the collection is via a card index which gives subject access to individual images and formed or large photograph collections. A large number of photographs, estimated at 70,000 are undocumented and unprocessed.
As with many other similar collections, entries in the index focus around places (subdivided as necessary), topical headings and the names of people and ships. A typical card follows:
Subject Heading PERTH - HOTEL - CENTRAL HOTEL
Date of Photo c Neg. No. 12092P Acc. No.
1920 816B/A3519
Notes: Double storey brick hotel on
crnr Forrest Place and
Wellington St
People, bicycle, horsedrawn
carriages
Historically, interest in the collection, as with other similar collections, has focused on local history and genealogical subjects. No thesaurus has been used. Indexing is primarily undertaken by volunteers and the Pictorial Section is staffed by a single librarian supported by a library technician. The librarian was on leave during the site visit but provided briefing notes in advance. Discussions were held with the Manager: Battye and the library technician.
There is limited standardisation of data although some of the formatted cards used in the index promote standardisation, eg as in the card shown below for portraits:
Name: Male Female
Date of photo Neg no. Acc. no.
Single/Group Name of group:
Position in
group:
Age: Formal/Informal
Standing/Seated/Kneeli
ng
Notes:
A selection of subject entries in the card index follows:
One weakness in my view of the manual system is the use of see also references from topical subjects to Place entries instead of direct entries under both Place and Topic, eg:
Automating the collection will require subject indexing the collection more or less from scratch and would support doing this using a standard thesaurus if one was deemed acceptable.
Physical access to representations of the images themselves is primarily through photocopies of the images, bound in a large series of volumes in accession number order. Viewing copies have been made for items unable to be photocopied. Viewing copies have been made for 15% of the glass plate negatives and some others have been videotaped for access but the videotapes have not gained public acceptance.
The Battye Library has recently acquired a copy of WamFoto (see description under Western Australian Museum) and at the time of my visit had just begun to use it to manage data such as donor information at the formed collection level. Battye Library indicated a willingness to contribute collection level data to ABN if requested.
Other Pictorial Collections:
Battye Library holds an estimated 1,000 art works on paper of which 300 are undocumented and 700 accessible through the general Pictorial subject index and via artist and art form indexes.
4,500 posters are held, 1,700 of them listed by subject and provenance and the remainder undocumented.
An estimated 3,000 architectural and engineering drawings and plans are held in private manuscript collections plus an estimated 30,000 in State Archives.
5,000 of the 7,000 item postcard collection has been listed by producer or series with the assistance of the Card Collectors Society and their illustrative matter photocopied for reference. The remainder are undocumented.
In addition to its Canberra National Office, Australian Archives has offices and repositories in all state and territory capitals as well as Townsville.
The Archives operates an online network which provides access from all these offices and from the Australian War Memorial. Dial-up access is also available from some selected Commonwealth government departments and Archives is planning to use the AARNet/Internet to provide wider access. The Archives has moved its databases from BASIS Plus running on a VAX machine to ORACLE on a SEQUENT minicomputer.
The Archives operates three databases:
Photographs:
The Archives holds very large collections of photographs and of architectural and engineering drawings and plans. It is considered impossible to give a close estimate of the number of items held since the bulk of items are described as series. Collection sizes (at least for the larger collections) are described in terms of shelf metres.
Two typical RINSE records follow, the first showing all data fields:
Series: C3896
Series Title: Rural (television) photographs, chronological
series
Series Date ?01 Jan 1968
Range:
Series Contents ?01 Jan 1968 -
Date Range:
Agency CA 251; Australian Broadcasting Corporation,
Recording: Head Office
Quantity in 6.21m held by Australian Archives, New South
Archives Wales Regional Office as at 27 April 1993
Custody:
Size of Record Various
Item:
System of Items: Alphabetical
Arrangement/ Contents: Chronological
Control:
Range of Control Items: A Big Country
Symbols: Contents: 1968 - (extant as at 27 April 1993)
Retention/Disposa Retain permanently
l:
Related Series: C612; Photographs and written material,
alphabetical series
Summary Note: This series is a collection of photographic
stills, prints and;transparencies taken during
the making of various rural television series
and is used for publicity and some
publications.
The following record shows "subject" fields only:
Series Title: Negatives of photographs of Norfolk Island
Series Date ?27 Dec 1914 - ?16 Jan 1915
Range:
Agency CA 7, Department of External Affairs [I],
Recording: Melbourne
Full Note: The series consists of one box containing nine
glass plate negatives of Norfolk Island. Most
of them appear to be views but there is one of
the interior of a church. On the box is written
"Norfolk Island JAC" in the handwriting of J.A.
Carrodus, who is known to have taken
photographs of Norfolk Island when visiting
with a Parliamentary party between 27 December
1914 and 16 January 1915 (see reference to CRS
A1, item 15/1837, in CRS A82 under the heading
Photographs)
Some descriptive notes can run to several pages.
An ANGAM II record for an item containing photographs is as follows:
Series /
Accession
Number: A1
Item Number: 1917/13438
Item Title: Photographs of prominent Australian men
for publicity purposes, for High
Commissioner's Office
Item Date Range: 1917-1917
Access Decision: OPEN
Date of 19 Feb 1982
Decision:
Dossier 0
Reference:
Location: ACT
Database 36131
Accession
Number:
In trying to estimate the size of the photographic collections, the following queries in the RINSE database yield the following number of series:
photograph(s) 576 photographic 216 album(s) 67 slide(s) 85 photo(s) 2 0
Allowing for some overlap, the fact that albums are not always photographic and that there are other words (eg, negative(s)) that could be searched, there are probably about 700-1000 series retrievable through one of these words and an unknown quantity of other series which might contain occasional photographs.
Some typical examples of photographic series are:
The largest collections are believed to be those of the Australian Overseas Information Service, the ABC, Film Australia and Australian National Rail. There are also several collections dealing with the development of Canberra.
Other important considerations in archival "bibliographic" access are:
(a) coded values as follows::
Commonwealth Agency control numbers, eg:
CA 2972 Australian Embassy,
Japan (Tokyo) 1952-
CA 8 Department of Home
Affairs [I], Central
Office, 1901-1916
"Organisation" or whole of government/administration codes, eg:
CO 1 Commonwealth of
Australia, 1901-
CO 15 Territory of Papua,
1906-1942
Persons associated with the Commonwealth, eg:
CP 51 John Malcolm Fraser
CP 99 Edward Gough Whitlam
(b) The use of a thesaurus of "functions" linking each government agency to a broad level of public administration/policy at the following level:
An important archival consideration is that material is stored in whatever order it was originally received from the contributing agency. Some material has associated finding lists. Other series require considerable fossicking on the part of users. There is no system-wide facility that would allow a user, for example, to locate "All 1950s photographs of Commonwealth hostels" and a search of this type would require some intelligent and possibly frustrating detective work. The system is geared, on the other hand, to finding all archival material emanating from agencies responsible for administering hostels and it is often a case then of deciding which series might yield pictorial materials.
Manual systems and search aids in Search Room, National Office, Canberra:
A small number of important photographic collections have been specially treated:
W.J. Mildenhall Collection of 7500 glass negatives of Canberra in the 1920s. Prints are held in loose-leaf albums with captions list and subject index. (The National Library, incidentally, holds other Mildenhall photographs, taken in his capacity as a non-official photographer.)
Australian Overseas Information Service photographs. A bound captions list (typically 5-12 word captions) arranged under classified subjects to an estimated 80-100,000 photographs. The classified index is arranged as follows:
Aborigines and Torres Strait - archaeology
Islanders - art
- dance
- education
- general
- health etc etc
Agriculture - Aerial crop dusting
- Barley
- Bee keeping
- Conservation and Settlement etc.
Prints of 728 Papuan ethnographic photographs taken by F.E. Williams, 1922-1943 are held in binders in the Search Room.
Other Pictorial Materials:
Similar standards and considerations apply for other pictorial collections.
Searching the RINSE database for (plan(s) or drawing(s)) retrieves about 2100 archival series, many relating to Commonwealth buildings, post offices, Commonwealth Bank buildings, engineering drawings for RAN ships etc. etc.
Searching for "poster(s)" retrieves 37 series, of which the following are fairly typical:
Imaging:
The Archives is experimenting with a PC based system to capture selected images from the Mildenhall collection and, conscious of the national importance of its pictorial materials, is keen to do something to improve access to important individual images. Planning for this is probably best described as being in the "very early stages".
Systems:
The Institute maintains four separate databases for (a) printed (library) materials; (b) sound material (including language and music); (c) photographs; and (d) a biographical index. All databases are currently run on a minicomputer LAN network using the Corporate Retriever text retrieval system.
Pictorial Collection:
The photograph collection comprises c. 500,000 images, half of them b&w negatives and half colour slides. The primary source of material is photographs taken during field work by Institute grantees and it is a condition of grants that grantees submit captioned photographs. The documentary and photographic quality of these varies. The Institute retains b&w negatives as a matter of policy but it culls some colour slides. The collection is growing at the rate of c.15,000 items a year.
Although there is a small proportion of the collection that has not been accessioned or catalogued, most photographs are represented in the database and an estimated 80% have captions at the individual frame level. In addition to keeping abreast of the current intake, the curator hopes to accession 20,000 unaccessioned photographs in the next year. Some sensitive material awaits cataloguing while issues relating to its accessibility are resolved. Generally speaking, however, the bulk of the collection is under complete database control.
Data Standards:
The cataloguing style used by the Institute is not MARC based.
The primary entry is at the collection level where a group of photographs deposited simultaneously may become a "collection". A very detailed list of contents of all places and people photographed and of subject matter in this "collection" is attached to this collection record. Also attached to this "collection" record will be records of the captions themselves for individual frames, or where the subject matter of, say, an individual reel of film is essentially identical, for individual reels of film.
The following is an extract of a collection-level record for one of several different Winifred Hilliard collections:
Collection: Hilliard.W1.CS
Number(s) 85913-87173 (Indicates c. 1250 items in this
collection)
Photographer: Hilliard, Winifred
Depositor: Hilliard, Winifred
Restriction: A1 B6 (Coded)
Place: Ernabella region; Fregon; Kenmore Park; Mount
Davies; Woomera region; Everard Park; Granite
Downs; Todmorden; Oodnadatta; Indulkana; Amata;
Betty's Well; Adelaide (and 41 more place
names)
State: S.A.; N.T.; W.A.
Names: Giles, Ernest; Yuminiya; Lanky; Nguykana;
Tjalara; Ungakini, Dolly; Ingklatji, Gordon;
Elliott, Bill; Turvey, Donald; Makinti;
Edwards, Rev W H; McGarvie, N; Nyanningu, Peter
(and 115 more personal names)
Group: Pitjantatjara
Date: 1950-1983
Description: Art, body decoration, wall mural, school
children's, batik and craft industry, floor
rugs, loom weaving; Animals, camels, donkeys,
puppy, sheep, horse; Artefact, spinning sticks,
grindstones, making spear, making woomera,
spear heads, stone axe (and 67 more subject
headings)
To this general "collection" record are linked individual caption records, as follows:
Collection: Hilliard.
W1.CS
86229 1955 Ernabella, SA Winifred Hilliard with
craft girls, outside
original craft room
86296 1963 Ernabella, SA Winifred Hilliard and
infant admire design
86353 1981 Kenmore Park Group of craft workers
with Winifred Hilliard
86342.01-04 1970's Ernabella SA Winifred Hilliard outside
Ernabella Mission Church
(four photographs of same
subject)
Initially, the Institute made no attempt to control subject description so that searches for, say "Housing" involved searching for "Hut or House or Dwelling or Shanty or Shack or Humpy" etc. etc. In 1987, a decision was made to attach terms from a list of twenty broad subject categories, eg: "Animals, Artefact, Art, Education, Health, Housing, Religion, Sport, Transport". The stylistic result can be seen in the example above where the broad subject category term is used, followed by specific, free-text subject descriptors.
CD-ROM:
At the time of my visit, the Institute was close to completing its multimedia "Encyclopedia of Aboriginal Australia". This is a hypertext CD-ROM encyclopedia which contains about 1,000 photographs, a small number of video images and sound.
The Institute views its photograph collection as a specialist research collection and is considering the further use of CD-ROM to publish a smaller core set of perhaps 5,000 photographs of general interest. There are no other immediate plans to digitise images.
Other Pictorial Material:
The Institute has small collections of posters and rock art tracings and a very samll collection of Aborginal art works on paper, some of which are on permanent loan to the National Gallery of Australia.
Systems:
The Memorial uses two Advanced Revelation (A-Rev) based systems: a) Vernon System's Collection Management System as an integrated museum inventory and curatorial management system for its non-library collections; and b) Catalist for its national collection of books and serials and staff library collections. All systems are run on PC client servers and visiting users have access to all databases in the Research Centre. A local area network links staff and users in the Memorial's four different Canberra buildings.
Videodiscs:
The Memorial is unique among organisations visited (and possibly in Australia) in that it has parallel data and optical networks. This permits videodisc images to be displayed on video monitors situated adjacent to data terminals and it overcomes two key obstacles to disseminating video images - the requirements to provide a videodisc player at each enquiry point and a player for each videodisc. Rather, the Memorial simply links one videodisc player for each videodisc to its servers and the network provides the facility for disseminating images throughout the organisation.
The Memorial currently has two videodiscs with images of about 150,000 items, predominantly photographs but also artworks and posters. Plans are in hand to add video images of the approximately 60,000 realia objects in the collections and to investigate the application for material such as postcards and maps.
The Memorial has its own cameras and production facilities for videodisc capture and is committed for the time being to continuing its videodisc program while maintaining a keen interest in digitised image technology as a strategic alternative.
The Memorial has made significant progress in the last several years in automating its collections though the sheer size of its photograph collection leaves much work to be done. Ancillary collections such as maps, postcards, ephemera and press cuttings remain accessible only by traditional means.
Thesaurus:
The Memorial has developed a purpose-built common thesaurus for its non-library collections while retaining LCSH and full AACR2 standards for its book collections.
The thesaurus is constructed on hierarchical principles and is divided into four main categories:
The contents of the thesaurus are largely historical as reflects the charter of an organisation dedicated to commemorating Australians in war. Its style departs from LCSH practice in many important respects, most notably a) it has no superordinate corporate body components, eg "1 Battalion" is preferred to "Australia. Army. Battalion 1st" and b) it uses its own hierarchical arrangement to provide context and definition, eg:
Automatic Indexing:
The Memorial's initial automation strategy was to give selected accessions registers to a data entry firm for keying into collection specific databases. This proved a quick way of automation but also proved that accessions registers in museums could throw up some tricky problems of vocabulary control. For example, the 12th Australian Field Artillery Brigade might be referred to as:
12 FAB
12th Aust Fld Arty Bde
12 Brigade AFA
12th
A.F.A.B.
12 Bde Fd Art
and many many more.
The Memorial engaged its thesaurus consultants to write a system that automatically assigned thesaurus terms to most of the items in its databases. This is the only known case in the Australian library and museums sector of a significant machine-assisted indexing project and it permitted the assignment of thesaurus terminology to approximately 200,000 items in the space of a single year. The same system has subsequently been used to index a further 30,000 photographs.
OPAC:
The Memorial's OPAC (Online Patron Access Catalogue) is based on the same text recognition rules as were used for the machine-assisted indexing. The system, known as "Textpert" provides automatic synonym substitution, automatic generic searching, automatic assumptions about Boolean logic and a number of other features that provide for expert searching by uninitiated users. (The author has a pecuniary interest in the system.)
B. Specific formats:
Art Works:
Approximately 21,400 works of art, mainly by official war artists (eg George Lambert, Arthur Streeton, Will Dyson) but also including eg Gallipoli series by Sidney Nolan and cartoons.
Comprises approximately:
Oil paintings 10,900
Works on paper 9,800
Cartoons 200
Prints 500
Most items are represented on the OPAC via a relatively simple database structure, usually comprising the database fields: Artist, Title and Classification (ie, Painting, Drawing etc.) and, for works on paper, Medium, eg "Pen and ink and wash". Thesaurus terminology has been applied only to a small proportion of items and further work in this area is regarded by the Memorial as a priority.
Posters:
The Memorial has a collection of 9,000 posters which have a thematic coherence seldom found in other poster collections as well as immense popular appeal. They deal largely with recruitment, civil defence, rationing, fund raising and the anti-war movement.
All items are represented on the OPAC and all have been indexed with thesaurus terminology. In fact, many of them were initially catalogued in accordance with AACR principles and this AACR data has been retained in the database records though without authority control values.
Photographs:
The Memorial holds two distinct collections, a research collection and a "public events" collection.
The "Research collection" is one of the largest surveyed, comprising a little under 1 million b&w negatives and colour transparencies.
A core collection of 150,000 photographs has been captured on database and videodisc and is accessible to visiting users on the OPAC. Selection of items has been guided predominantly by conservation needs with nitrate-based photographs already captured and work proceeding on deteriorating acetate-based photographs. Overlaying this is an attempt to balance the collection so that it fairly represents the history of the different armed services.
An estimated 70% of the collection has been acquired through official sources, particularly the Department of Defence and the individual armed services though other material is acquired by gift or donation. The Memorial actively develops its collection, for example, it provided film for a cameraman attached to the Australian contingent in Somalia. 99.99+% of the Memorial's photographs are crown copyright, the only exception being a handful of iconic images by private photographers, eg Max Dupain.
The preferred database description is one where most significant data is entered in a single data field via a formalised caption of the form: Date - Place - Subject - Associated information - Detail, eg:
"1946-05-08. Heidelberg Victoria. Men of the 2/3rd Australian Motor Reserve Transport Company playing a game of whist in the grounds of the 115th AGH. They had recently been repatriated from Changi. Identified personnel, from left to right, are (1) Pte R. Goldsworthy, (2) Pte K. Benson, (3) Sgt P. Phillips and (4) WO1 R. Sharpe.
Thesaurus headings are added automatically into separate fields:
Places: Heidelberg Changi
Units: 2/3 Reserve Motor Transport
Company 115 Australian
General Hospital
Topics: Card games
Conflict: W2
The Memorial is fortunate for the most part in having fairly explicit accessions and captions lists to work from. Much of the work in creating database records is undertaken by high-level data entry personnel working under guidance to ensure that accessions data is turned into caption data of the standard shown above.
Work is supplemented, where necessary by a) part-time work by two paid historical consultants; b) recently having two historians from the RAN seconded to work on captioning RAN historical photographs; and c) the regular use of volunteers with a particular historical or technological expertise.
The Memorial has effectively closed access to the 850,000 photographs that have not yet been captured on its database and videodisc. These images are generally retrievable at the broad subject level by curatorial staff but can only be viewed by users in highly exceptional circumstances. Various card catalogues exist to facilitate finding these images. The reason for closing access to the uncatalogued items is to allow work to concentrate on adding items to the database.
In recent years, between 15,000 and 30,000 photographs p.a. have been added to the database and captured on videodisc. It is expected that this rate of progress will be maintained into the future, making the task of capturing all images a long-term one.
The Memorial does not create any "collection level" records for its photographs and merely creates a separate database record for each of its images. Some accession numbers are structured mnemonically and function unsystematically as "collection groups" but this feature, where it exists, is not one which is readily amenable to searching by end-users.
The "Public events" collection of photographs is in fact the collection of photographs taken and maintained by the Memorial's Photography Section and contains an estimated 36,000 negatives. While it includes the usual in-house record of corporate activities such are found in nearly all organisations, it also contains significant numbers of images of Anzac and Remembrance Day ceremonies as well as photos of visits by royalty and other dignitaries. Access to the collection has not yet been automated.
As mentioned above, the Memorial plans to capture videodisc images of its realia for display via the OPAC. As with many other museums, the Memorial recognises the value of photographs of realia for collection security, inventory control and general information. Formal steps have not yet been taken to photograph all items of realia in the collections.
Other Pictorial Material:
The Memorial has a collection of approximately 6,000 postcards and is currently investigating options for imaging these.
The Memorial holds an estimated 8,000 plans and drawings and about 10,000 items of pictorial ephemera such as Christmas cards, menus and social programmes.
Systems:
The Archive uses a custom-built ORACLE relational database management system known as MAVIS (Merged Audio Visual Information System) to manage its collections and operates this via a LAN from a SEQUENT minicomputer.
The Archive is releasing in April 1995 a CD-ROM of its copy of its MAVIS database. This is a text-only system without images in the initial issue. The database chiefly comprises accession records for moving image, recorded sound and documentation materials.
Collections:
The Archive has very large collections of film and sound material which includes recorded music; original feature, documentary and newsreel films; radio and television serials and programming; cinema posters and advertisements; film and sound technology, eg examples of early radios and gramophones; archival material, eg papers of prominent figures associated with the entertainment industries; and a variety of ephemeral material including such things as promotional stickers, invitations to premieres plus much more.
The Archive documents an industry that is largely dedicated to the production of pictorial and visual material. In this sense, it differs in purpose from other institutions surveyed. For example, many of its photographs are stills of (fictional) motion pictures, television shows or radio programs. Advertising of the industry's own products via posters and cinema intermission advertisements in the Val Morgan tradition are features of the collection. The Archive's posters collection may possibly be bigger than the combined posters collections of the other collecting institutions surveyed. Even with its sound recordings, there is an interesting visual component, eg record sleeves.
Data Standards:
The Archive's database construct rests on a relational parent-child concept of cover item and content/version, where, for example a "Cover" might be a newsreel containing various news items. Alternatively, a "Cover" might be an LP containing various tracks, eg an album of Judith Durham singing selections from Broadway musicals where the tracks are cataloguable concepts in their own right and might have various attributes referring back to composers, lyricists, instrumentation etc.. As with the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, this results in a database that will appear strange to readers more familiar with MARC or record-based constructs. The database is intellectually related to AIATSIS's photographs database where records hang off "Collection" level records rather than being structured around item-level concepts.
The bulk of the collection, which runs into the millions of items, depending on definition of what constitutes an "item", is still only manually accessioned or is under an elementary form of "accessioned" control in the Archive's database. Much work remains to bring the collection under full intellectual, ie "catalogued" control. All items, whether film or sound, are being catalogued onto a single database.
Most progress has been made in cataloguing newsreels and a subject cataloguing approach which was initially based on the APAIS thesaurus has been used to catalogue these. AACR2 approaches govern the cataloguing of personal and corporate names. The Archive is in the process of reviewing its existing subject cataloguing practices and of defining practices for material like photographs, posters and music.
Pictorial Collection:
Photographs and posters are managed by the Archive's "Documentation Section". The Archive holds an estimated 427,000 photographs of which 2,000 have been catalogued onto the MAVIS system. The photographic collection includes a collection of several thousand glass slide cinema advertisements for forthcoming attractions and consumer products The Archive holds 65,000 posters, 200 of which have been catalogued onto MAVIS. Documentation Section is also responsible for an estimated 7,300 items of ephemera with significant pictorial interest, eg decorative invitation cards to premieres etc, flyers and stickers. It has collections of postcards and art works on paper numbering in the low hundreds but these have been acquired as part of larger formed collections and are not actively collected.
Most pictorial material is stored in filing cabinets and arranged under the title of a feature film or television programme, the name of an event (eg, an award presentation), a production house, individual producer, artist (in other words, almost invariably by title, corporate body, individual and very seldom by subject). The only significant exception to this is in the case of cinema advertisements where some work has been done to provide access via product category, eg advertisements for cars.
As described above, the Archive is presently reviewing its subject cataloguing practices but this is occurring in a situation of tight competition for resources. The Archive's response to the questionnaire describes the situation well:
"The NFSA does not strictly 'catalogue' pictorial material. Rather, it is accessioned to the point that it is identifiable at least by title (or subject) and can be physically located. Standardisation of bibliographic practice may well provide a logical boost to the next logical stage of development for the NFSA, if more detailed descriptive control is deemed appropriate. Retrospective re-indexing is not a likely option for the NFSA pictorial collection, given its size and resource limitations."
Similarly, although the Archive recognises image-based systems "as a definite eventual goal", resource considerations leave this as a matter for the future.
The Museum, at Darling Harbour in Sydney, was established in 1985 and officially opened in 1991. Its collection of objects numbering approximately 18,500 is relatively small by the standards of other institutions surveyed though some of its objects such as its fleet of vessels, which includes the destroyer HMAS Vampire, on loan from the Department of Defence, are individually relatively large!
The Museum is in the process of upgrading its basic inventory-level register of its collections and is using the relational R:base, which is encountered frequently in museums, as its database management system. The Museum has a local area network linking a variety of Apple and IBM-compatible PCs.
Pictorial items are not a focus of the Museum's collections but are collected where they serve to document the primary object collections and maritime activities. The Hood collection of 11,000 photographs taken by a professional photographer of Sydney Harbour and related maritime subjects is the most extensive of the Museum's pictorial collections. The Museum also holds the Hall collection of 3,000 maritime photographs and other collections of archival material such as the P&O company publicity archive, and the Lou d'Alpuget collection of yachting items which contain photographic items. The Rice collection of shipping memorabilia, eg treadplates and crockery, is also supported by some photographs. It is reasonably estimated that there are something close to 20,000 pictorial items, overwhelmingly photographs in the Museum.
A typical record for a (Hood collection) photograph is as follows:
Title: "Morts Dock launching"
Assigned HMAS WARRNAMBOOL, BATHURST CLASS,
Title: MINESWEEPER, LAUNCHING, MORTS DOCK.
IMAGE OF CROWD ON SLIPWAY WATCHING SHIP
SLIDE
Subjects: HMAS WARRNAMBOOL BATHURST CLASS
MINESWEEPER SLIPWAY
Places: MORTS DOCK, SYDNEY, NSW
Persons:
Place MORTS DOCK, SYDNEY, NSW
Created:
Date:
1941/05/06
Inscription:
Size: Copyright: ANMM
Plus other data fields for Condition, Association, Notes, References, Date Compiled and Compiler.
The Museum also holds an extensive number of photographs taken for museum administrative, exhibition and registration purposes. The Museum's active Photographic Services Section aims amongst other things to provide a comprehensive record of colour slides of all objects in the collection, a program which is well-advanced and the Museum, like most other institutions surveyed, hopes to provide image access to enhance its databases. The Museum has acquired CD-ROM mastering equipment which it plans to use for developing interactive exhibitions.
The National Museum uses Vernon System's Collection Management System as an integrated museum inventory and curatorial management system. The system is operated on an IBM-compatible 486 PC server and is networked via a local area network.
The Museum has three curatorial departments which reflect the broad thrust of its collecting policies:
The Museum's Registration Section is responsible for coordinating documentation arrangements and standards.
The National Museum has an estimated 170,000 objects and is in the process of documenting to accession level its collections backlog. It is estimated that this will be a two year programme and will result in text and image access at the individual item level to all documentary pictorial collections incorporated into the national historical collection.
An estimated 30% of the collection has been accessioned at the inventory-level of description (about 50,000 items) and 12% catalogued (about 20,000 items). As a general rule, progress in accessioning and cataloguing pictorial materials is on a par with progress made for the collections generally. (For librarian readers, the distinction between accessioning and cataloguing is distantly analogous to the difference in libraries between interim and full cataloguing records.)
The Museum undertook a programme, involving 30 specialist consultants to catalogue specific collections and the bulk of the Museum's catalogue records were produced at this time. Cataloguing will in future consist of adding to the accession records whatever contextual data is available from the curator's initial research
The Museum can provide broad estimates of the numbers of pictorial items in its collections although some estimates are hampered by the lack of accessioning data, for example many of its photographs are contained in albums accessioned at the album level. The following are consequently broad estimates.
Photographs:
An estimated 15-20,000 photographs are held and are collected, not only to support documentation of other objects, but as artefacts in their own right. Photographs cover a wide range of subjects and range from large collections (eg, the Child collection of about 3,000 19th century wedding photographs) to donations of individual photographs.
An example of a catalogued photograph follows:
Accession No: 1990.0044.0004
Collection: Joanna Bloggs
Object Name: Photograph
File No: 90/430
Brief Framed b/w photo of the 1937 Australian
Description: Women's Cricket Team, England, June 1937.
Timber frame stained teak colour.
Dimension: L 220 mm x W 170 mm
Production
Details:
Method: Photographic reproduction
Person: Photopress Photographic Agency
Place: England/Great Britain
Date: Jun 1937
Association
Details:
Person: Ms Mollie Flaherty; Ms Amy Hudson; Marie
Jegust; Mrs Alice Smallman (and 13 other
names)
Event:
Date: Jun 1937 Jul 1937
Place: England/Great Britain
Subject Details:
Subject Terms: Sports; Cricket; Women's cricket; Photographs
Notes:
Plus other data fields for documentation sources and collection management. The example above gives a reasonable idea about the style of cataloguing followed for other pictorial materials and for objects generally.
The Museum has a strong commitment to cataloguing photographs at the item level.
The Museum employs a professional photographer on contract, and during the last three years an estimated 400 objects were photographed.
Art Works:
The Museum holds an estimated 1500 Aboriginal bark paintings, all of which have been photographed onto slides, and has collections of 3-500 Aboriginal paintings and of several hundred prints and drawings. In addition, it holds 4,000 works of art by Aboriginal children, a collection formed by the Australia Council in the 1960s and 1970s. Most of this collection has been accessioned, and important contextual information has been gained from research undertaken for an exhibition involving a selection of these drawings.
The Museum actively collects Australian political cartoons and has a collection estimated at about 2,000 and growing at the rate of about 200 p.a.
Postcards and Posters:
The Museum actively collects Australian postcards (scenic, Aboriginal and humorous) and has a collection of about 6,000. It also has a collection of about 1,000 posters with strengths in protest movements - Aboriginal, peace, anti-apartheid and green movements.
Thesaurus:
The Historic Records Search thesaurus (National Library) has been used in some cataloguing (as in the cricket team photograph shown above).
The Museum has, however, developed its own thesaurus and a brief extract of this is shown overleaf. It is designed to be broadly compatible with the Art and Architecture thesaurus and employs the same faceted structure.
Thesaurus terminology will be applied to objects in the Museum when the thesaurus is loaded into the Collection Management System. Collection supports hierarchical thesaurus searching.
National Museum of Australia:
Thesaurus terms/alphabetic
display .. p. 167
control groups convict labour
broader terms broader terms
research methodology labour
<tests and questionnaires> <labour supply and employment>
related terms related terms
research convicts
facet agents people facet concepts & other
OCM 125 Chencode OCM 464 Chencode
source OCM source AIATSIS/annotation
controversial issues convict transportation
broader terms broader terms
political behaviour demography
pressure politics <immigration and emigration>
related terms related terms
facet concepts & other <execution of justice>; settlement patterns
OCM 664 Chencode migrants; convicts
source APAIS OCM 167 Chencode
source NMA
convention centres
broader terms convict tunics
<natural and built environment> broader terms
single built works personal artefacts
buildings clothing
related terms outerwear
corporate organisation uniform
facet objects prisons
OCM 473 Chencode 140 related terms
source AAT facet objects
OCM 697 Chencode 321
convents source NMA/misc
broader terms
<natural and built environment> convicts
built complexes broader terms
religious buildings justice
collective settlements <prisons and jails>
related terms related terms
monasteries migrants
nuns; ascetics prisoners
facet objects facet agents people
source AAT source NMA; APAIS
(The abbreviation OCM stands for Outline of Cultural Material; AAT for Art and Architecture Thesaurus and Chencode refers to Robert Chennall's Revised Nomenclature for Museum Cataloguing)
Part A Section 4 of the report: National Survey of Bibliographic Access to Documentary Pictorial Collections, 1994 conducted by Paul Hodgson of Informed Sources; describes differences in documentation practices between museums and libraries and describes some of the circumstances in which museums take photographs in support of curatorial field work and as part of the registration and/or interpretation of their object collections. Importantly, many individual curators or curatorial departments hold collections of photographs and are frequently left to their own devices to decide whether they want to use computers to help manage these collections and whether or not they will use a standalone PC-based product or an institution wide strategic database management system.
The consultants were made hospitably welcome by all state museums but the breadth of staff interviewed varied between museums. In some cases, interviews were limited to curators responsible for social history and ethnology collections. This section does not consequently pretend to give a comprehensive or even-handed description of all pictorial collections held in each museum but rather to highlight some of the different documentary approaches being taken. In particular, the role of museums in natural history pictorial documentation, for example the Australian Museum and the National Photographic Index of Australian Wildlife, is not something that this report will shed much light on.
The Museum has an estimated 8 million natural sciences and anthropology items in its collections and a variety of databases running under TITAN and DataEase to manage various collections. In addition, it uses a branched-logic expert system known as DELTA for morphological identification of natural history specimens, mentioned here because this is an area where imaging is thought to be of real potential in the natural sciences. Given the sheer size of its collections, the Museum is cautious about concepts of automating and imaging everything though it expects to make use of multimedia for public access and regards improved access to its anthropology collections as a priority.
The Museum holds small numbers of natural history drawings and watercolours. It does hold some important anthropological and ethnological photographic collections including Aboriginal, Papua New Guinea and Pacific Islander photographs by Thomas Dick, Frank Hurley, George Brown and others. At a best guesstimate these number 30-50,000 photographs.
The Museum's Photographics Section is building a simply-structured dBASE III database on a standalone PC. This contains data from some of the notable collections mentioned above as well as some photographs taken by the Section itself. In February 1994, 16,000 records had been entered into the database. A typical record follows:
Sheet: Frame/s: 01-2 A Date Accessioned:
8489.m Format 28/10/93
Job No. 44-0493 Y Category
ANP.VAN
Contact?
Reg. No. AP3:183
Subject: [VILLAGE, MAN, OUTRIGGER CANOE, WAISTBAND,
PUBIC COVER, BELT, ARMBAND]
Location: VAO, NORTHEAST MALEKULA, VANUATU. VAN
Photographer: Date: 0/ /1900
RE
Remarks: SYMONS ALBUM C.1900-1910 - COPY NEGATIVES.
Entered by: NN
Visits were limited to the curators of Social History and Australian Anthropology with a visit, in the absence of the Section Head, to the Museum's Photography Section. The Museum has a series of databases maintained as separate entities by individual curatorial departments. Most of these use the relational dbms R:base System V.
Cultural Heritage Program
The Cultural Heritage Program is responsible for all collections other than natural history and anthropology, in other words it is responsible for a broad range of technological, industrial, domestic, social and historical collections.
Works on paper and photographs have traditionally been passed to the State Library but the collections do include some important early hand-painted photographs of Queensland by Richard Daintree in the 1860s, several hundred art works including art works on T shirts and the Museum is taking an increasing interest in posters, particularly protest posters.
Data is being added to an R:base database using Patricia Summerfield's classification scheme for objects in small museums. Volunteers are used for data entry.
Ethnohistory Photographic Collection:
The Anthropology and Archaeology Section holds, in four separate collections, an estimated 25,000 photographs, about 5,000 of which stem from an active program of photographing objects in the collections. The other three collections are historical in nature. Detailed records have been created for many of the photographs and information on 5 500 of these is now available on a Claris Works database. Data from a typical record follows:
Registration EH150
Number:
Cataloguer: Date: JE : Oct 1990
Record Neg. Nos.: LP7412 : 35mm JB750
Classification: FUNERAL PRACTICES ; grave site ENVIRONMENT ;
sandy grassland
Description: A grave site with wood on top
Locality of Between Cooper Creek and the Diamantina R., E of
Photograph: Lake Eyre, Central Aust.
Region: Map S.A. SG54
Sheet:
Donor: Horne, Dr. G. : 04/09/1923
Association:
Notation: Old grave Wonkongur[a]... JF 1982. Wood on top
to keep off dogs burrowing
Size: Type: 4x3" : B&W Gelatin Print : POOR : Image - Fade
Condition: in Top Right Surface - Adhesive Tape Damage
Front & Reverse : Emulsion lifted. Top & Right
Edges : Creased ; Scratched
Photographic [Horne, G. & Aiston G. (1924) Savage life in
Research: Central Australia, Macmillan & Co, London] ...
JG 1990
Accompanying "Natives of Wonkongura Tribe, between Coopers
Documentation: Creek and the Diamantina R., E. of Lake Eyre,
Central Australia. Taken by Dr. G. Horne,
Melbourne. June, 1922."
Registration Numbered 1982 J. Findlay as PE742 : Re-numbered
History: 1990 J Graham as EH130
Registration [E1585. Collection of photographs (89)
Comments: illustrating the life of Australian Aboriginals
in Central Australia near Cooper's Creek & Lake
Eyre. Reg. 4/9/1923]...JF 1982
(Note the map sheet grid number to allow searching by broad geographical area.)
The Head of the Section was on leave during the consultants' visit but was reportedly exploring options for automating the extensive card indexes currently maintained by the Section. These cover "hundreds of thousands" of photographs held by the Section. The present system is a series of indexes arranged primarily by photographic format, eg 120 mm negs; 35 mm negs and secondarily by broad subject, eg Insects, Reptiles, Anthropology, Technology. Under these categories, cards are filed by subject, eg "Ravenshoe sawmill" but overwhelmingly there is only one card per photograph or photographic series and no corresponding entry, say, under Sawmills or Forestry. The collection is largely concerned with the natural sciences but is reported to contain important social history photographs.
Visits were limited to the curators of the Ethnohistorical and the Photography and Cinematography collections.
Systems:
The Museum has standardised its databases around the TITAN database management software from Knowledge Engineering. A number of different databases are maintained under TITAN (over 150 databases) each with database structures designed to meet specific curatorial requirements. A recent consultancy has recommended the establishment of a single multimedia database integrating information from the various specialist collections and work has begun to implement this recommendation.
Ethnohistorical Photographs:
The Indigenous Studies department of the Museum maintains three separate TITAN databases, of ethnographic and archaeological artefacts (c. 100,000 items each) and a more recently established database of historical photographs. The photograph collection itself (which has historically been considered a "poor relation" of the objects collections but which is now seen as politically and socially important) numbers about 40,000 photographs and is based to a large extent on important collections taken by Spencer Baldwin, Donald Thomson and Richard Seeger.
Documentation of the collection is proceeding with close inputs from Aboriginal communities who are providing a wealth of documentary detail. Some material is restricted; either altogether for access or for publication; for cultural reasons. All other images are being added to the Museum's videodisc.
The database structure is designed to ensure reasonable compatibility with the department's two artefact databases and also reflects standardisation with AIATSIS codes for geographic place (eg, the code "S" for Victoria) and with AIATSIS practice of classifying photographs into 20 major categories (as in "Subject" field in the sample record below) except that the Museum uses 22 categories. The database has also employed a home-grown thesaurus of about 800 terms (as in "Description" field in the record below) though the Curator believes that this is too specific and is taking steps to narrow the thesaurus to about 500 terms. A sample record follows:
Reg No: XP 1553
Medium: Photograph
Access for General
Viewing:
Put on Video Y
Disk?:
Subject: People; Recreation; Household; Mission
Description: Girl; Community, Aboriginal; Container,
metal; Playing; Washing
Country: Australia
State: Victoria
Region: Gippsland
Specific Locality: Jacksons Track, Jindivick
Latitude: Deg Min Sec
Longitude Deg Min Sec
AIATSIS Code: S
Local Name:
Individuals Cora Bruce (nee Hood)
Identified:
Acquired From: Bloggs, Joe (Estate of)
Date Acquired: 16/08/1985
How Acquired: Donation
Photographer: Bloggs, Joe
Date Taken: 1947-1960
Copyright: Museum of Victoria
Negative Format: 1. Original 6x7cm, Rack NNN/C, LaTrobe
Gallery - Condition: Good
2. 5x4" b/w, Storage: Rack NNM/D -
Condition - Good
Media Format: Print 10x8", Reference, Office
Previous Reg. No: J(a) 1
Reference to Other
Collections:
Primary Comments:
Secondary
Comments:
Exhibition
History:
Publication Usage:
Registered By: Curator's Name
Date Reg; 25/01/93
Photography and Cinematography Collections:
The curator was one of the pioneers of videodiscing projects in Australia and has undertaken a number of active collecting projects aimed at documenting the development of Victoria and particularly the development of its infrastructure and industries.
Of particular interest to the consultants was a project whereby 250,000 State Electricity Commission photographs were inspected and the most interesting 10,000 imaged onto videodisc. This involved an arrangement between the Museum, the Electricity Commission and the Public Record Office which gave the Museum copyright in the selected images. This represents to us a particularly interesting model whereby archival material can be opened up for wider access without the high costs of imaging everything and where the selection process reflects a close understanding of the documentary importance of the collection.
Similar projects have been undertaken with Melbourne Water in documenting the Pumping Station at the Science Works Museum at Spotswood and with Esso Australia where c.18,000 of a collection of 80,000 photographs were selected. The Museum also holds a collection of 75,000 photographs from International Harvester which it plans to selectively image next financial year and has an agreement with Isecki (which took over the agricultural machinery firm Massey Fergusson) to capture some of its images.
The section holds about 200,000 photographs (including the large International Harvester collection). The Museum uses WORM disks to master its own videodiscs and the section has images of an estimated 75,000 items, 24,000 of them images of museum objects and 50,000+ images of images from its own collections and from projects like the SECV and Esso projects.
The section also undertook a project starting in 1983 known as "The Biggest Family Album" to identify and copy photographs in private hands in twelve Victorian country centres. This yielded 15,000 photographs some of which have been published by the Museum. Many are used in research and commercial areas outside the Museum.
The section also holds 50 four-drawer filing cabinets of illustrated trade literature which the curator regards as important documentary pictorial material.
The Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT) has a broad range of collections which include Australian visual arts and crafts, Aboriginal art, ethnography and archaeology; Southeast Asian and West Pacific material culture; North Australian history, maritime history and archaeology; and geology, palaeontology and natural history (fauna). The collections have a strong focus on northern Australia and the SE Asian region.
Systems:
The MAGNT has a number of small systems, which include the TITAN database management software from Knowledge Engineering (Natural sciences databases) and Claris FileMaker, chosen because it could run on both Macintosh and IBM-compatible PC platforms. It also uses the coded Minark system for its historic sites register. Several of these databases have photographic components though, as is the case in many museums, the photographs are usually viewed as documentary material rather than as artefacts in their own right.
The MAGNT has completed a review of its information technology strategy and will adopt a single large-scale collections management database system. It is also in the process of establishing a centralised Registration Section which might be expected to influence the way it constructs databases in future. MAGNT, like most others, sees images as a potential source of income and has recently begun to address the commercial issues.
National Territory Sites Register:
This is a register of 4,500 historic sites, predominantly Aboriginal art sites, maintained by MAGNT using a coded database system called "Minark" developed at the Archaeology Department, University of Sydney. Although the system is not primarily photographic, it is supported by a large, uncounted number of documentary photographs.
It is described here as an example of a coded database structure of the type often used in scientific computing and because Minark is in relatively widespread use in Australian museum and archaeology collections. The Register provides the added twist that. it is partly confidential in nature: the precise location of some sites needs to be kept confidential to guard against unwarranted intrusion and vandalism. The same consideration underlies many museum natural history collections, where the locality that specimens of endangered species are collected is regarded as confidential.
Essentially, the Register is compiled using a system of codes. For each site, there is a questionnaire-like data entry form covering a number of variables, for example:
14. MATERIALS CONTAINED IN SITE:
1. Stone 5. Wood 9. Glass 13.
Concrete
2. Shell 6. 10. Ceramic 14.
Vegetable Wax/resin
3. Bone 7. Charcoal 11. 15. Tar
Synthetic
4. Ochre 8. Metal 12. 16. Coral
Other_____
15. ENVIRONMENTAL SETTING OF SITE:
1. Rockshelter 7. Hill crest 13. Stream bed
2. Vertical 8. Stream bank 14. Chenier
rockface plain
3. Plain 9. Waterhole 15. Beach ridge
bank
4. Alluvial 10. Swamp bank 16. Intertidal
plain flat
5. Valley flat 11. Beach dune 17. Reef flat
6. Hillslope 12. Desert dune
Thus an entry in field no. 15 of "4" means that the site is located in an alluvial plain.
It will be apparent that pictorial material documented in this manner would require either (a) translation into natural language to be of use to an outsider; or (b) that the outsider had access to the meanings of the coded values.
The point of describing this system is not to suggest that it would be appropriate to make the system publicly available: it is merely to show an example of an administrative, scientific database construct that differs significantly from the text paradigms familiar in libraries but which is quite frequently encountered in museums.
FileMaker databases:
MAGNT has several databases containing several hundred to a few thousand records each which are maintained by individual curators or individual curatorial departments. None of the databases have embedded image files.
Databases include:
Maritime Archaeology - database documenting slides and three photographic albums relating to historical and ethnographic boats and boatbuilding and historic shipwrecks;
Aboriginal Art - MAGNT holds about 1,500 art works and 3,100 ethnographic items which are documented on FileMaker;
Visual Arts - Approximately 1,200 art works and 1,500 craft items documented on FileMaker.
The previous two databases document the "state gallery" collections of MAGNT.
Ethnographic collection for Papua New Guinea and SE Asia. - The curator was unavailable at the time of the consultants' visit.
TITAN databases:
The MAGNT has eight TITAN databases containing several hundred thousand records of faunal collections. None of the databases has embedded image files. Curators maintain extensive photographic collections of general fauna and specimens, but there are no plans to capture these images as part of any of the databases.
Other Pictorial Collections:
MAGNT has an outstanding collection of photographs taken by its Curator, Rock Art, and which numbers in "the tens of thousands". Selections of the collection were published earlier this year as "Journey in time". The collection is mainly of Northern Territory sites but also includes photographs of overseas rock art, eg Irian Jaya, Papua New Guinea and India. It also contains photographs of Aboriginal communities and notable individuals and a number of Cyclone Tracy images. The collection has some supporting drawings on cartridge paper. Some data has been experimentally entered onto a FileMaker database but the collection is essentially accessible only through folders arranged by site. The collection lacks caption data.
MAGNT's Regional Museum program has also undertaken a program of duplicating negatives of photographs held in regional museums. These duplicates are held in Darwin for conservation purposes. Individual collections range from 1,000 to 2,500 items and include the Brother Pye collection (Bathurst Island); Fred Gray collection (Groote Eylandt); Tuxworth-Forward collection (Katherine); Laver collection (Alice Springs); Hermannsburg Heritage Precinct; Katherine Historical Society collection and Old Timer's Folk Museum (Alice Springs).
The History collection contains about 3,000 postcards (some of which have been listed) mainly of Darwin and of the south Pacific. The History Section also holds a small collection of photographs (number unknown but probably in the high hundreds to low thousands). MAGNT also holds a small number of propaganda and air raid precautions posters in support of its World War II collections.
The Powerhouse is in the early stages of automation having recently acquired the ARGUS collection management system. Work to date has concentrated on getting "inventory level" control of the collections, ie a brief description of the item, details of its provenance, physical location and broad subject category (eg "Clothing and dress", "Metal", "Ceramics".) As of May 1994, records had been created for 80,000 of the Museum's 122,000 registered objects. A registered "object" might in itself be a multi-thousand item philatelic, numismatic or photographic collection and The Museum actually holds millions of separate objects.
The Museum employed a consultant to develop its own thesaurus for objects in the collection. This is an extensive detailed thesaurus of domestic and industrial objects, eg tableware, musical instruments, machinery etc. Hopes to supplement this with a "subject" thesaurus, eg Recreation, Sport, Great Depression, Suffragette movement etc. and a thesaurus of personal names and places have not yet been realised. The ARGUS system was chosen partly because it supported hierarchical searching via hierarchical links provided by the thesaurus.
As described, however, priority has been placed on getting inventory-level control of the collections and data about maker, date and place of manufacture, use, ownership, design and subject has still to be added. The system supports images and though some records have an associated photograph number, the relevant images have yet to be added. The Museum has a Steering Committee investigating imaging and it was expected that adding images to the database of the 25-30,000 pictorial objects and 50,000 photographs of museum objects would be a priority.
The Museum has traditionally collected pictorial material not as artefacts in their own right but as documentation for its other collections. It holds an estimated 25-30,000 pictorial items using the definition of pictorial employed in this report as well as collections of labels, book plates, train tickets, football and cricket cards and the like that would qualify under a broader definition of "pictorial". Included in this number but reflecting an earlier role as a research centre for essential oils, The Museum has a large collection of photographs of trees which, given the Museum's present focus, would not be a candidate for extensive documentation.
Notable collections include fashion plates and photographs associated with the costume and fashion designer collections, a collection of Tooth's pub posters and original art work and the Tyrrell collection of photographs and postcards of New South Wales views.
The South Australian Museum Aboriginal photographic collections are outstanding and are believed to include about 70,000 items. The brevity of this entry reflects simply on the fact that although a start was made some years ago on cataloguing photographs onto a Q&A database, this was shelved in 1992 in the face of staff shortages after a few thousand entries had been added. The Museum has subsequently decided to use MS Access as a database tool and the curator is exploring ways of getting outside funding for assistance with cataloguing. In the meantime, access to the collections is possible only via reference queries to the curator and his assistant.
Subsequent to the consultants' visit, the Museum has embarked on a CD-ROM project in association with the Pitjantjatjara people using images and other items from its collection. If this is successful, the Museum would expect to use the same strategy to improve access to more of its collections.
The Museum Library also has a collection of images in various formats, 7,800 catalogued to date. Individual curators throughout the Museum also maintain collections of images pertinent to their areas of research.
The Museum, thanks to what appeared to the consultants to be a particularly tight funding situation, is a relative newcomer to computing, having acquired its first three Macintosh computers in February 1992. The Museum has pursued the strategy of using FileMaker Pro as a prototyping and familiarisation tool for establishing databases while remaining ready to collaborate with the Department of Education and the Arts in selecting a strategic system. The relevant section from the entry on the State Library of Tasmania is repeated below:
"The Information Technology Branch of the Tasmanian Department of Education and the Arts provides technical, co-ordinating and advisory IT support to the Library, the Archives and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) as well as to school libraries. The Department is committed to open systems and networking concepts which will allow ready access to educational and cultural information across the state. The TALIS (Tasmanian Automated Library and Information System) is widely networked to public libraries and schools. The State Library operates Dynix as its integrated library management system and is progressively loading its special collections (eg the Crowther monograph collection) onto Dynix. The Library, Archives and TMAG are exploring a joint strategy of making databases available under TALIS and running under Dynix. Shared authority files or thesauri are also being explored."
FileMaker databases have been established for several of the Museum's 26 collections, many using volunteers or employment program staff for data entry and cataloguing (bearing in mind that the Museum has a total staff of 36.) The State Herbarium which is run by the Museum uses an ORACLE database for its activities under the national ERIN (Environment Resource Information Network) program and has created about 40,000 database records.
The Museum holds approximately 65,000 photographs, 12,000 of which are represented on a database. Similar starts have been made with the collections of 2,000 oil paintings and 5,000 art works on paper. Manual public access to all art works is via a card index referenced to a series of filing cabinets containing photocopies of the images. A similar arrangement applies to about 20-25,000 photographs while an estimated 27,000 photographs are undocumented and require complete cataloguing.
Other pictorial collections include c.7,000 architectural plans and drawings, 3,000 of which have been minimally recorded on FileMaker; 2,000 postcards (poor manual accessibility), 3-5,000 items of pictorial ephemera (cigarette cards, labels etc.) and 100 undocumented posters.
The situation generally reflects the late start made with automation and a tradition where much information about the collections was stored in curators' heads. The strategy generally has been to establish an automation foothold across curatorial departments while deferring further database enhancements such as the use of common thesauri until an integrated strategy is reached in association with the Department of Education and the Arts.
The Museum comprises:
The Museum also operates the Museum of the Goldfields in Kalgoorlie and exhibition spaces in Albany and Geraldton
Systems:
The Museum uses the Ingres relational database management system for its larger scientific databases as well as a variety of DOS PC-based systems, eg Microsoft Access, dBase and FoxPro. Its Library uses Inmagic which is also used temporarily to manage the Museum's History collection while a further move to an as yet undetermined database is decided.
The Museum has established a working party to explore markets for its information and the development of image-based systems is viewed partly in this context as well as representing an opportunity to provide better access to the collection to the visiting public.
The consultants had a brief meeting with a group of senior curators and the Museum's librarian and were shown the "general" collection of photographs on the WamFoto system in Perth and the Maritime Archaeology system in Fremantle.
Photographs:
WamFoto (described below) is being used for several different photographic collections in the Museum, most notably a collection of c.30,000 "general" photographs which are the responsibility of the Photographs Curator. It is also used for other collections managed by curatorial departments of about 15,000 natural science photographs and an estimated 10,000 Aboriginal anthropology photographs. There is a further photographic database of Aboriginal rock art held by the Museum's Department of Aboriginal Sites. The total size of the various photograph collections held by the Museum is unknown.
WamFoto:
WamFoto (Western Australian Museum Photographs System) is a database management system for pictorial material written in the FoxPro language by Doug Elford, the WA Museum's Photographs Curator. It is being used by the Western Australian Museum and other regional museums for pictorial cataloguing and is supported by a cataloguing procedures manual. A typical photographic record is as follows:
Registration No: PH8507-006-09
Specimen/Object
No:
Photo Date 12-07-1985
Disc and Frame No:
Locality: Poona, near Coodardy Stn
State/Country: WA P
Keyfields: 17; 14; 37
Field No: PH 3
Description: Cyanide tin home of the late Morgan Ryan,
tin and emerald prospector; since 1920s.
Misc. debris scattered about on ground
Remarks:
Photographer: Elford, Douglas
Format: BN2
Film Type: S
Image Quality: G
Copyright: WAM
Restrictions: N
Cataloguer: DSE
Storage: PHI
Some of these fields are coded. "WA P" in "State/country" means "Western Australia - Pilbara Region". Interestingly, the system uses a restricted set of about 70 "Keyfields" or broad subject categories as an hierarchical classification and search device. As shown above:
17 means Mining 14 means Buildings 37 means Landscape.
Other examples of "Keyfields" are: Furniture and Interiors; Gardens and Parklands; Industries and Commerce; Religion; Rural life; Sports; Street scenes; as well as a number of natural history keyfields such as Arachnology; Carcinology; Entomology etc.
Database of Maritime Archaeology:
This is a remarkable database at the Maritime Museum which functions as an index to 250,000+ photographs taken during underwater archaeological exploration of shipwrecks and subsequent laboratory work on the objects recovered.
The database is maintained as an Excel spreadsheet on Macintosh computers and relies heavily on coded values as both a retrieval and filing device with the database giving access to both the location of the original photograph and to the associated file containing further data about the objects:
A printout of one view of the spreadsheet looks as follows:
Drawer Title Description File
C2 BATAVIA 21 - Stoneware BT/21
C2 BATAVIA 22 - Earthware BT/22
C2 BATAVIA 23 - Majolica BT/23
C2 BATAVIA 30 - Non BT/30
Ferrous
C2 BATAVIA 31 - Bronze BT/31
C2 BATAVIA 32 - Brass, BT/32
Copper
C2 BATAVIA 33 - Pewter BT/33
C2 BATAVIA 34 - Lead BT/34
In other words, photographs of objects from the wreck of the Batavia can be found in drawer 2 of filing cabinet C and corresponding files in a sequence at BT...
This gives a relatively simple view of the main data structures. Note that the description numbers are mnemonic and structured. Ceramic objects are all filed at a 2... number; non-ferrous metallic objects at a 3... number; Animal or vegetable material (eg Ivory; Bone, Fabric) at a 4... number, etc. The same pattern is repeated for all different shipwrecks and results in a system that, once understood, becomes very simple for retrieval.
This database is another example of a scientific database used to document field work in museums. An important consideration in this particular case is that the photographs are themselves an integral part of the archaeology of the wrecks.
Other Pictorial Material:
The Museum holds several collections numbering in the low hundreds of items each of:
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