There are nearly 350 posts and over 1300 comments on the blog. We’d like to say Thank You to everyone who visits, reads, guest posts, comments…and lurks. Yes, you! You know who we’re talking about.

Birthday day is also the official Archives Outside Annual Lurkers Day

Wikipedia has updated their definition from last year:

In Internet culture, a lurker is a person who reads discussions on a message board, newsgroup, chatroom, file sharing, social networking site, listening to people in VOIP calls … or other interactive system, but rarely or never participates actively. Research indicates that “lurkers make up over 90% of online groups”

So hello to you, you 90 percenter! Come and join the 10% who, as you have seen, are really very lovely and friendly. Try a comment in the box below and see what happens :-D

If you’d prefer to stay a lurker, don’t worry, you still can. One day you may feel that de-lurkification is possible.

Now, who’s helping to blow out the candles?

Post from: Archives Outside@State Records NSW

3 Years for Archives Outside – Happy Birthday! And hello lurkers

Also of interest:

• Archives Outside is now 2 years old
• Happy 80th Birthday Sydney Harbour Bridge!

Can you date this photograph?

Larger version on Flickr

We have many other undated photographs in Photo Investigator and on our Flickr account. If know the dates or any other interesting facts about these images please let us know.

Post from: Archives Outside@State Records NSW

Can you date this photograph? [Hyde Park, Sydney]

Also of interest:

• Can you date this photograph? [Hyde Park, Sydney]
• Can you date this photo of [not Hyde] Victoria Park?
• Can you date this photograph? [Corrimal (NSW)]

Articulating the vision. Note the good-looking Aesthetics Committee

The streaming thoughts on this morning at 3am ran something along these lines:

• We have a great public space out at the Western Sydney Records Centre (WSRC) and have been looking for ways to use it to promote our collection.
• So why not re-visit an exhibition that had previously hung at the State Records Gallery in the city office?
• This Gallery space will no longer exist once the city reading room closes on June 30.
• All this lovely past exhibition material is starting to make its way to the WSRC…how can we use it rather than store it?

Making the vision a reality

Step 1

Send an email out to all victims, sorry volunteers, congratulating them on their new membership to the “Aesthetics Committee” (carefully omitting the “Exhibition” word).

Committee Meeting (Meet the "Volunteers")

Step 2
The committee meets to discuss this vision, some feeling a little trepidatious. They were not wrong to feel this way; there was a two week deadline for “vision realisation”.

Step 3

Scare the bejesus out of a member of the conservation team by turning up in the Conservation Lab with a humungous poster measuring two and a half metres long with a large dent punched almost all the way through from the back.

Humungous Feature Poster

Step 4

Conduct an expedition to discover and locate items from previous exhibitions (no small matter given the size of the complex at WSRC; it’s so big our retrieval staff clock up roughly 14km a day.

Store room of forgotten dreams

Step 5

Take supplies for long trek to store room…aha, we found display cases and a lounge, too!

Tally Ho! Lots of goodies unearthed

Step 6

The awesome team in digitisation work their magic and find some previously unused images for the exhibition. Blowing up postcard sized images to A3 sized posters proves challenging…

..but not impossible! Wonderful images

Step 7

The amazing team in conservation work their magic to fix holes and inadvertently become experts in double-sided tape application to mount posters onto thick card.

Our conservation team at work

Step 8

More members of the Committee convince a lovely roofing guy (who happened to be here with a drill, a level, and a tape measure) to hang the pictures and posters.

Lovely Roofing Guy

Other Committee members tackle the double-sided tape posters.

Easy said….right?

Smartphone levelling (yes, there's an app for everything) ...risky?

Yes, but successful! Go smartphone

Roof repairs also tackled.

Step 9

Clean out display cases and start filling them with items. Print out labels for all items.

Hands at work...careful now

And look what one committee member had hiding at home! Now proudly on display

Step 10

Go all out crazy and get a transparency poster printed up to hang on one of the front windows.

Transparent Vision

Installation in progress...bubbles prove to be persistent

Transparency Complete. Hasta la vista Bubbles

Step 11

Sit on lounge and rest

Vision Realised. No, don't sleep...not again...didn't she say this was just Phase One?

Date of Vision: 27 April 2012

Installation Complete: 14 May 2012

This was a great collaborative effort across the whole organisation with “Aesthetics Committee” members coming from the Executive, Digitisition, Conservation, Information and Communication, Archives Control and Public Access. Special mention to our Facilities Manager, everyone’s go-to guy. Oh, and the lovely roofing guy!

And yes, it was fun.

Go team!

Downstairs before installation

Downstairs - BEFORE

Downstairs after installation

Downstairs - AFTER

Upstairs before installation

Upstairs - BEFORE

Upstairs after installation

Upstairs - AFTER

Finishing touches

Finishing touches

Post from: Archives Outside@State Records NSW

So our boss woke up at 3am … and this is what happened (an exhibition revival)

Also of interest:

• Beauty from Nature – art of the Scott Sisters [An Exhibition from the Archives at the Australian Museum ( @austmus )]
• In Living Memory exhibition – last stop on the road, for now

Post from: Archives Outside@State Records NSW

The more things change …. (classic advice from the Archives c.1979)

Also of interest:

• August links post

There are quite a few clues pointing to the date of this image.

Can you date this photograph?

Larger version on Flickr

We have many other undated photographs in Photo Investigator and on our Flickr account. If know the dates or any other interesting facts about these images please let us know.

Post from: Archives Outside@State Records NSW

Can you date this photograph? [Corrimal (NSW)]

Also of interest:

• Can you date this photograph? [Hyde Park, Sydney]
• Can you date this photograph? [unidentified street]
• Can you date this photograph? [Redfern]

You might remember last year we had a guest post from the friendly folks at Historypin who wrote about this exciting new way of viewing and sharing history.

From the post:

Historypin is a public history collaboration working with individuals and communities, in partnership with Google and over 100 institutions around the world, to share their collections and build community around local history.

One of the initiatives on Historypin for this year is to create a ‘global interactive archive’ of the Diamond Jubilee celebrations of Queen Elizabeth II. Libraries, museums and archives dove into their collections looking for photos, documents, audio and video to pin the Queen’s history. Including us! You can see our contribution to the Jubilee here.

Diamond Jubilee ‘Tour’

Overlaying photos onto Google streetview

We’ve been adding non-Royal items, too. Being able to match, or almost match old photos onto Google streetview is quite a feat. A warning though: if you’re too heavy-handed in clicking through streetview, most likely due to over-enthusiasm, you may find you get a little sea-sick as you get through streetview at a rapid pace. For instance, it took a while pinning this image below of Bourke Street, Sydney – and it’s not even a perfect fit as I kept getting thrown into the Eastern Distributor tunnel if I clicked a little too far into the /streetmap.

By the way, this photo was a recent Moment in Time which has been identified as Bourke Street…thank you!

Matching topography…

Where streets have changed considerably over time the topography might help to match up content and the transparency slider comes in very handy for this.  Below, is a 1929 view of Tamworth – Google maps showed just one original building still remained. So the building and the mountains in the background could be used as markers.

 …and finding new information to update our catalogue

We also managed to determine the street in which this photo was taken (Brisbane Street) and update our catalogue as a result.

So far, joining Historypin has been a great experience.  We’re also thinking of ways in which we can use this tool to create new types of exhibitions, ones that we have not had the technology to do undertake thus far. We’re very much looking forward to increased functionality which will allow us to overlay old maps onto the Google maps. Maps are one thing we have a lot of in our collection – can you imagine, with the transparency slider, fading in and out the old to the new.

Watch this space…

More about Historypin

• Historypin website
• Historypin blog

Post from: Archives Outside@State Records NSW

We’re on Historypin

Most Commented Posts

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Future Proof wants your ‘digital’ feedback

We receive many enquiries from NSW public offices about digitisation of records. People often search our website for information on this issue and our blog posts on digitisation are consistently popular.

As a result, we have put together some draft guidance on both business process digitisation programs and back-capture digitisation projects.

• Read the post here

Preserving Your Personal Digital Photographs – The Library of Congress

Do you wonder if cloud storage is a good option for your personal digital photographs?  Do you have questions about metadata and file formats?  Are you uneasy about the prospects of keeping your digital photos available for yourself and your family into the future?

…presentation discussed how to identify the different places where personal photographs might lurk, as well as how to decide which images are most important and ways to organize your collection.

• See the presentation by the Library of Congress

Some archival career advice from The Smithsonian

The Smithsonian Institution Archives receives dozens of inquiries every year from students and recent graduates about the archives profession and how to become an archivist. Since this is such a popular topic, we decided to make our responses to the most common questions available to a wider audience.

Read the FAQs

Pragmatic approaches to the semantic web

Though I have been an advocate of linked data going back to 2006, one of my main theses was that linked data was an inadequate focus to achieve interoperability. The key emphases of my talk were that the pragmatic contributions of semantic technologies reside more in mindsets, information models and architectures than in ‘linked data’ as currently practiced.

• Access the presentation from Mike Bergman

“Big data for books”: Harvard puts metadata for 12M library items into the public domain”

Harvard University has today put into the public domain (CC0) full bibliographic information about virtually all the 12M works in its 73 libraries. This is (I believe) the largest and most comprehensive such contribution. The metadata, in the standard MARC21 format, is available for bulk download from Harvard. The University also provided the data to the Digital Public Library of America’s prototype platform for programmatic access via an API. The aim is to make rich data about this cultural heritage openly available to the Web ecosystem so that developers can innovate, and so that other sites can draw upon it.

• Learn more about this project

Wikipedia founder to help in government’s research scheme

The government has drafted in the Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to help make all taxpayer-funded academic research in Britain available online to anyone who wants to read or use it.

The initiative, which has the backing of No 10 and should be up and running in two years, will be announced by the universities and science minister, David Willetts, in a speech to the Publishers Association on Wednesday.

• Read the full article at The Guardian

John Peel’s record collection: the first look

Peel’s is probably the most celebrated record collection in Britain: 26,000 albums, 40,000 singles and countless CDs, which spread out of Peel’s office and took over a variety of rooms and outbuildings in the home near Stowmarket he invariably referred to as Peel Acres. The singles and CDs, Ravenscroft says, were filed alphabetically, but the albums were a different matter. “They are all filed numerically and cross-referenced with a very old filing cabinet, full of small filing cards that John hand typed himself on his old Olivetti typewriter. The way you access them is that you look in the filing cabinet, find the file card alphabetically, and on the top corner there’s a number.”

• Discover more about the collection and the user interface designed for it

For a laugh

Pinterest

Everyone’s doing it these days but are you doing it right?

Post from: Archives Outside@State Records NSW

April 2012 – Link Roundup

Also of interest:

• Breathing life into history with #LODLAM
• What is #LODLAM ?
• Stitched up

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

We will remember them.

Some archive themed Anzac links

Railway employees join the AIF

Nurses: from Zululand to Afghanistan

Hidden Stories: Acknowledging World War One Nurses as Soldier Settlers

Diary of an Anzac

Linking collections – from Anzac to Armidale

Women’s Emergency Signalling Corps (Wagga Wagga)

Post from: Archives Outside@State Records NSW

Anzac Day 2012

Most Commented Posts

• Can you date this photograph? [unidentified coastal residential landscape]
• Australian soldiers in black and white
• What are your tips for dating photographs?

Can you date this photograph?

Larger version on Flickr

We have many other undated photographs in Photo Investigator and on our Flickr account. If know the dates or any other interesting facts about these images please let us know.

Post from: Archives Outside@State Records NSW

Can you date this photograph? [unidentified street]

Also of interest:

• Can you date this photograph? [Hyde Park, Sydney]
• Can you date this photograph? [Corrimal (NSW)]
• Can you date this photograph? [Redfern]

This article has been prompted by a recent query from one of our blog readers.

Question: Can you give info on removing chewing gum on reverse side of an important document?  There is a small quantity of gum still in place – fairly fresh, a circle of about 1/2 inch.  Some stain has bled thru to front.   What is a safe cleaner?  Or is this a job for a conservator/archivist?

Answer:

Seek guidance

I think, as there is already a certain amount of staining, especially with coming through to the image side,  you will have to see a paper conservator for solvent treatment on the stain.

Manual removal

Depending upon the type of paper and the type of gum, nevertheless, you may be able to successfully remove the residue yourself.  I tried out a couple of methods to remove the gum manually.

The paper I used was a smooth photocopy paper.

Using a Staedtler Mars plastic eraser (the image shows a crepe rubber which was equally efficient), and gently working from the outside of the area affected to the inside you can roll the gum into little balls that can be removed. Keep gently working, it  can take a few minutes.

A crepe rubber also successfully removed the surface residue.

If your document has a fairly rough surface, you may find this is unwise to try as you could disturb the surface. In this instance a paper conservator would have to try removing both the residue and stain with solvents.

Freezing?

There are also a few references re removing chewing gum in the literature but mainly with reference to leather or carpets.

The general approach is to chill or freeze the gum. This renders it hard and brittle so it will pop off. A suggestion came from the preservation department at an American university where they have successfully removed gum from the pages of library books. The book was placed in a ziplock bag, made airtight, and placed in the freezer until the gum was frozen solid and released itself.

This may work with your document but the problem with condensation forming and possibly affecting any fugitive media, (felt tip pens marks or fountain pen ink), is an issue.

Often freezing is carried out for the killing of pests, in these cases the box or item is wrapped in paper and then again in plastic expelling as much air as possible. After freezing, it is left to come up to room temperature before opening, the wrapping having protected against condensation forming on the object.

In your case, the gum residue may well not come off if returned to equilibrium, and its sticky state.

 I placed a portion of chewing gum stuck to some paper in a domestic freezer and found the gum still seemed soft after four hours. I will look at it again later.

Research is continuing! Chewing gum used was Wrigleys (Sugar free), experiments using bubblegum and other brands may yield different results. Any suggestions? Have you tried similar experiments? We’d love to hear from you if you have.

Update: The gum was still sticky after a week in a domestic freezer. Will try a different freezer, maybe a floor freezer would deliver greater freezing capacity.

Edited to add: The chewing gum test sample used was Wrigleys (Sugar Free). Does this explain why it remained elastic?

Post from: Archives Outside@State Records NSW

Conservation Tip No 8: Removing chewing gum from paper documents

Most Commented Posts

• Can you date this photograph? [unidentified coastal residential landscape]
• Australian soldiers in black and white
• What are your tips for dating photographs?