{"id":1626,"date":"2023-07-29T13:14:56","date_gmt":"2023-07-29T13:14:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.courtauld.ac.uk\/digitalmedia\/?p=1626"},"modified":"2023-07-29T13:14:56","modified_gmt":"2023-07-29T13:14:56","slug":"researching-and-re-cataloguing-the-19th-century-print-collection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.courtauld.ac.uk\/digitalmedia\/2023\/07\/29\/researching-and-re-cataloguing-the-19th-century-print-collection\/","title":{"rendered":"Richard Cray: Researching and Re-Cataloguing the 19th Century Print Collection (including the 20th Century Russia box)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been engaged by the Courtauld on one of its digital internships since August of last year, and in the two and a half years prior to that, I was a volunteer on the Conway Library digitisation project, clocking up over 250 hours either side of the pandemic.<\/p>\n

My background is not what you might expect from someone in my position \u2013 I\u2019ve done two tours of duty in broadcasting, in both production and administration capacities, and I was a market research coder for more than a decade in the days when surveys were mostly completed on paper.<\/p>\n

Regarding the internship, the intention was that I would assist with preparing image metadata prior to the Conway Library being uploaded; however, very early on, Tom encouraged each intern to find a small project to work on.\u00a0 It was suggested that my small project could be the 19th<\/sup> Century Prints collection \u2013 and nearly a full year later I\u2019m still working on it.<\/p>\n

The first issue was locating the entire collection.\u00a0 A large part of it, covering about 140 boxes, had been accessioned to a degree some years back, but there were another 15 boxes of mixed content on another shelf that had barely been looked at.\u00a0 Then several boxes of unsorted prints from John Bilson\u2019s collection were located. Then some oversized prints in Melinex pouches were located a shelf or two down, followed by another bunch located just at the very moment when I thought I was finally ready to get everything in some sort of order.<\/p>\n

Then I looked at the spreadsheet containing the data from the prints already accessioned.<\/p>\n

Up to that point, accessioning had been done very literally \u2013 everything on the mount and on the image had been entered into the spreadsheet largely verbatim.\u00a0 Many descriptions that were not in English had not been translated, architects were frequently listed in the photographer column, and if there was nothing but a town or city written on the mount that was all that had been entered, even if the image was of a specific building. Photographic credits that were embossed on the mount or image had not been listed, presumably because nobody was looking out for them.<\/p>\n

Buildings such as ecclesiastical premises and town halls were listed under numerous names in anything up to four different languages. It was clear that, in order to ensure images of the same building were kept together, some standardization of the information on the spreadsheet would need to be performed before the missing images were added, well before any reordering or renumbering took place.\u00a0 Also, anything that made no sense or was incomplete was flagged for special attention.<\/p>\n

Aside from images in one city being split between two folders in different boxes \u2013 one listed under the city\u2019s English name and the other in its native form \u2013 there were other glaring issues with the way the collection had been boxed that required resolution.\u00a0 An entire collection meant to be ordered alphabetically began with a box marked \u2018Algeria, Morocco and Peru\u2019, for some reason.\u00a0 Another box randomly paired Holland \u2013 rather than the Netherlands \u2013 with Denmark.\u00a0 The part of the collection dealing with England veered from cities to counties and back again and the box marked \u2018England S-Z\u2019 had the helpful addition of the words \u201cexcluding Wales\u201d. Well, it would, wouldn\u2019t it?\u00a0 That said, the folder marked \u201cWales\u201d was, rather confusingly, to be found in that very box.<\/p>\n

The numbering of images went awry in the third box.\u00a0 There had been no standard method of numbering mounts with multiple images on one side or an image on both the front and reverse \u2013 sometimes they were given consecutive numbers, sometimes the same number with a alpha suffix.\u00a0 One particular folder contained 34 images, all of which had been given the same number with a numerical suffix from 1 to 34.<\/p>\n

After consulting with Tom, the decision was taken to start again. Not only would there be a need to add the many images that had not already been accessioned to existing folders and boxes, with images being re-ordered and renumbered accordingly, but some ground rules would need to be set about how individual buildings would be listed.<\/p>\n

As volunteers had already been adding biographies for photographers with content in the Conway Library to Wikipedia, it was decided that, wherever possible, a building should be listed on the spreadsheet by how it appears on English Wikipedia.\u00a0 If no entry existed for the building on English Wikipedia, it was decided to use the name listed on the native Wikipedia entry.\u00a0 In cases where a building was not listed on Wikipedia at all, it was decided to search for an official website or a listing on a local government website, or, failing that, establish a clear consensus from looking at other reputable websites.<\/p>\n

Sometimes an alternative name or a native name has been added to the spreadsheet in parentheses, and once the images are digitized and uploaded alongside the descriptions, it should be possible to add all alternative names for a building, particularly ecclesiastical premises and Italian palazzi, as well a full timeline of changes to building names or uses, to all applicable images with some form of global edit.<\/p>\n

At the end of January, with all located images accounted for in the spreadsheet, and three-quarters of the images previously marked as \u201cmissing\u201d located in various nooks and crannies, the reordering, renumbering, and re-boxing of the collection finally commenced.<\/p>\n

And that was where the fun really started.<\/p>\n

First off, it was decided that the collection would be split between prints that could fit in our standard red boxes without folding and oversized prints, which would be kept separate.\u00a0 Previously, some of these folded images were kept in the boxes, while others remained loose.\u00a0 Our thinking was that one photographic studio could handle the content in the boxes, without having to adjust the focal length, while the second studio could handle content where the focal length and focus would need to be adjusted for every shot. Currently, the boxed images outnumber the oversized ones by about five-to-one.<\/p>\n

It seemed to me that uploading an image of a building onto an internet database with only a city for identification may be considered somewhat inertial, so I decided early on to try, wherever possible, to locate and\/or verify the locations featured in every architectural image in the collection, which make up most of its total sample of 10,500 individual images. For example, if a named building was listed purely as an \u201cexterior\u201d shot, could a more precise description be added \u2013 a fa\u00e7ade, an angle of view, even the location from which the image was shot, if that could be determined.\u00a0 Was it worth pointing out other landmarks adjacent to the focal point of the image, or in the background?\u00a0 Could I determine a building from a close-up of a balcony or balustrade, a column or capital, a pier or a pilaster?\u00a0 Sometimes yes, sometimes no.<\/p>\n

With a little bit of searching, images featuring a specific frontage that were previously described as street scenes could be pinpointed, such as Dante\u2019s birthplace in Florence.\u00a0 An image previously thought to be of Rotterdam was proved to be of a canal in Amsterdam that has since been filled in, merely by locating a recent photo on, of all places, Trip Advisor, identifying a rooftop, a bridge and a particularly decorative street lamp, and then verifying the location on Google Maps, because, as any fule no, one shouldn\u2019t assume that what one finds on the internet at first time of looking is any more accurate than what one already has to hand.<\/p>\n

Aside from pinpointing locations and buildings featured in images that would have been close to impossible in pre-internet days, even for someone with a specialist knowledge of a particular geographical area, and possibly even for natives, it has also been possible to correct errors and confirm descriptions that have been adorned with a question mark, perhaps for several decades.<\/p>\n

Over the last couple of weeks, I\u2019ve been accessioning the last half-dozen boxes of Italian architecture, specifically Venice, which had more than its fair share of questionable filing and misleading descriptions.<\/p>\n

These included:<\/p>\n