[PRCo] Re: Generic Description

[Jim Keener]

Sorry for my naivité.  I guess I'm trying to jump into a discussion I
haven't been involved in before and might not know pre-existing
protocols.  I've done databasing and cataloguing of things, but never
really archiving before.  I'm also not familiar with how other museums
arrange their archives.
> 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. 
>

While not an ideal situation, it's at least something.  For instance,
"West Penn.  FT 3.  Connellsville Shops." doesn't really mean much to an
outsider.  However, someone can come along later and flush it out
later.  Especially if these are all scanned in and in database, it's
trivial to change the captions and keep track of the changes.  Even if
they are captions on paper, it can be changed later, but at least
something is there and initial time can be spent towards ones with
poorer captions (e.g.: company and car number with no location).
> 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.)    
Will the database be electronic, or do you want a lot of information on
the physical slide and in the record number?  If its electronic a record
Id on the slide might suffice?  Otherwise, the identifier on the slide
could contain encoded information. <map grid> <company> <car #> <year>
<record id>.  The map grid could be designed to flow so that someone
looking through the physical archives wouldn't have to skip around all
too much to view someone geographically close. Lexically sorting by the
order suggested would have the records sorted in a psuedo-geographic
manner and then grouping by company and car.

> 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?   
>
I'd be near useless identifying places outside of the city, but I would
be able to scan and/or enter descriptions into a database.  Doubly so if
I could take a small deck of slides home each week and do them at nights
and mornings when I have small bits of time to spare, though I don't
have a slide scanner at home.
> 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.
Is it uncommon for people to mark their captions with uncertainty? Do
they just refuse to write them or write them with certainty?
> 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.   
>
A friend of a friend did this: http://retrographer.org/  I don't know
how useful it would be in helping us though.  I'm not sure of their
traffic volume.

Also, wouldn't it be OK to scan in slides and negatives as-is and
caption them with all the information on the slide (if any) and caption
them later?  It would be easier on the physical media to not have to be
handled as people try to figure out where it was taken and what is in
it.  It would also make it easier for the general public to browse.

I could also imagine some computer vision (CV) or artificial
intelligence (AI) students at CMU or Pitt having fun (doing a school
project) trying to guess locations, which would then have to be approved
by a human.  It'd only be useful with a reference of some kind in part
of the picture, however, but there are good/decent archives of much of
what's in the city as well as how extensive Google Street View is around
the city which could help. Just a thought ::shrug::

Jim


-- Attached file removed by Ecartis and put at URL below --
-- Type: application/pgp-signature
-- Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
-- Size: 901 bytes
-- URL : http://lists.dementia.org/files/pittsburgh-railways/02-signature.asc