[PRCo] Re: Generic Description

[Fred Schneider]

1)   The title that includes company and car number is bad because you might have, in a museum such as ours, a hundred identical titles.   

2)  That description: "West Penn.  FT 3.  Connellsville Shops."  is apparently what Frank put on the slide and it means nothing to the average person.   If you come to the museum from Pocatello, Idaho, what does Connellsville shops mean?   But a descriptor that reads "Company car repair facility in Connellsville, PA" might be understandable.   And what does that FT 3 indicate.   Be damned if I have a clue. 

A description should probably start with a file number or archive number.   Next we probably need to figure out who the user is and what he wants.   Does he want to find West Penn Railways?   Or does he want to find trolleys from Uniontown, PA?   Or might he be interested in trolleys from Fayette County, Pennsylvania?   Or Southwestern Pennsylvania?   All of these are possible descriptors that we might wish to use to help the user find something.   Remember guys, we're looking at this as rail fanatics.   The ultimate user might not be one of us.   He might simply be a transport historian or a historian in general 50 years from now.  Incorporating the car number into the descriptor might be a minor thing for the user we will be serving.   (I am a railway historian trying to think how someone else might want to use our files when we are not here.   I can look at the declining number of hobbyists in groups like the NRHS or the ERA and understand that we won't be here.)    

Countless hours?   Again, nothing is impossible for those who are not doing it.     If you have 200,000 photos that need to be captioned and it takes an average of 15 minutes to do a caption, we are talking 24 man years.  Is that a safe number for the collection.   Might be.   My own collection is close to 50,000 prints and I am simply extrapolating from the number of file cases.
I have not hauled the other file cases out to Washington yet.   I might add that PTM also has my albums already and that might include another 5,000 prints or six months worth of full time data entry.   Did I hear anyone volunteering?   

And what about slides?   And what about the hundreds of thousands of negatives that need to be cataloged and scanned?  

I already gave them my negatives and the Frank Goldsmith collection and Bill Watts collection ... that's probably on the order of magnitude of 20,000 negatives.   Most of them were at identified which is more than I can say for a lot of the material that comes over the transom.   

Ray, a simple description is fine.   One that reads West Penn 700-type car on the Fairchance line believed to be near Hopwood about 1948 is OK until you refine it.   But it requires historians willing to write such words as "believed"  or "unknown" or "suspected" or "circa" or "about" when we do not know for certain.

Perhaps trolley near Hopwood, Fayette County, Pennsylvania circa 1948 might even be better for the future user with the railfan details buried farther down in the description.   

Regardless, what is written needs to be correct and there are thousands of pictures and slides which were never captioned.  The guys that volunteer simply look at Ed and say what's this.   Then he throws them in a pile and waits for Fred to appear.   There are still going to be a large number that I don't know.   We need more resources.   

When I edited Headlights magazine 40 years ago and someone gave me a picture that they couldn't identify, I used it to fill space.   It became a Can you identify this? feature.   But we had national circulation.   We usually found out.   Unfortunately doing the same in Trolley Fare probably won't get us the same following.   

fws


On May 20, 2011, at 1:26 PM, Lattner, Raymond wrote:

> 
> What's wrong with a generic description of a photograph?
> 
> Taken from,  Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation - Historic Pittsburgh Image Collection
> 
> Title: West Penn Railways 293
> Date: August 7, 1949
> Creator: Fairbanks Jr., Frank B.
> Description: West Penn. FT 3. Connellsville Shops.
> Subjects: Transportation--Pennsylvania--Pittsburgh,
> West Penn Railways.
> Identifier: 411-293-22
> Additional Information: Image Collection Homepage
> Rights: Copyright of the Frank B. Fairbanks Rail Transportation Archive.
> 
> Lets Try to write our own shall we:
> 
> 
> Title: Pittsburgh Railways Company 1765
> Date: August 7, 1949? or unknown
> Creator: John Smith or from The PTM Collection
> Description: Pittsburgh Railways Company. PCC 1765 On street. Possibly Forbes? Unknown.
> Subjects: Transportation--Pennsylvania--Pittsburgh,
> Pittsburgh Railways Company
> Identifier: 411-293-22
> Additional Information: Image Collection Homepage
> Rights: Copyright of the PTM Rail Transportation Archive.
> 
> The top one is a description for the Frank B. Fairbanks Rail Transportation Archive
> photographs. Now, how many of you enjoyed looking at those pictures with a simple
> caption? I know I did.
> 
> I think people can still enjoy photographs with simple descriptions, how about you?
> 
> 
> Also someone said we would have to "spend countless hours writing it down before turning someone loose
> scanning." Aren't countless hours spent restoring the trolleys, aren't countless hours spent on track and
> overhead maintenance, and so on.  With that attitude why have a museum at all.
> 
> 
> Ray
> 
> 
> 
>