[PRCo] Re: Generic Description

[Edward H. Lybarger]

The number is 621.33 -- Electric Railways.

And I'd like to remind that there are other parts of the collection that are
of equal or greater importance than the photos...those documents which
explain how the trolley company was a business and operated accordingly.  Or
how the trolley company encumbered itself with so many liabilities up front
that it could have never been financially successful.  Think nickel fare,
for example...they became very beholden to local government for the
franchise grant and the guaranteed nickel fare, but this occurred at a time
when inflation was non-existent.  Fifteen years later, when it was a big
issue, the trolley company was trapped.  Another bit of genius involved
never writing off all the capital costs of the horsecar and cable lines and
then issuing watered securities backed by those "assets."  When they needed
to raise capital in the early part of the 20th Century, they couldn't,
because of tricks like this and because of the lack of earning power.

No photo library will tell you these things! 

-----Original Message-----
From: pittsburgh-railways-bounce at lists.dementia.org
[mailto:pittsburgh-railways-bounce at lists.dementia.org] On Behalf Of Fred
Schneider
Sent: Friday, May 20, 2011 7:18 PM
To: pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org
Subject: [PRCo] Re: Generic Description

Jim:

I was trying to throw out the complications.

Ed Lybarger, with his fabulous sense of humor,  explains how complicated it
can really be by placing a number on the door of the library at PTM.   The
number on that door is the Dewey Decimal System number for railways.  He is
telling us that everything in that room is one number in the time honored
library cataloging system and by inference that the standard system doesn't
work at all when you have 10,000 square feet of floor space covered with
stuff all meeting the same definition.   (Actually Dewey used 385 and 625
and we probably would not know how to split them.    The first was
transportation; the second was technology.  Can you visualize the guys
arguing over which is which?  He had no separate category for trolleys; just
railroads, although the on line reference I have only shows the first three
digits ... railroads and highways all are in 625.  After the decimal we
might split it into trolleys.     

Now you have to find a new system and it needs to be a system that works not
only for the aficionados who collected that crap but for the people who know
absolutely nothing about it.   The hired educator for the museum who has to
teach children about trolleys has to be able to find what she wants in the
library without becoming discouraged.   The director needs to be able to use
it to answer a newspaper's query.   The librarian needs to be able to find
the pictures we have from Williamsport when someone wants to do a book.
Hopefully the library will also be a resource that contains more than just
pictures and an occasional engineering drawing; wouldn't it be nice if it
also contains financial and business records about the industry?  

I can tell you a lot of the problems but I personally cannot be there much
of the time because I live four and a half hours away.  If I were five miles
away, I would probably be there two days a week but I'm not there.

The ideal way of archiving collections is to put everything in a standard
data base.   Sometimes you simply don't do what you know you should because
you have so little free time that you must attack those things that were not
done in any way at all and ignore those that were done.   

For example ... my trolley negatives are there.   They are already in
individual glassine envelopes with the negative and the envelope each
bearing a file number.   Perhaps it is not the best storage medium but it is
workable as long as they are all safety film (and all except a handful are).
All have been numbered from T-1 up to T-3000 something.   There is a loose
leaf index that describes each one in numerical order.   There is also a
file of photographic proof sheets in order by company, i.e. all of the
Pittsburgh negatives were pulled out and proofed and then those 8x10 proofs
are in a Pittsburgh folder.   All the Washington negatives were proofed and
in a Washington folder.  And so forth.   Now, even if that does not meet
your standards, do you mess with it or do you simply leave Fred's filing
alone?   Answer, until everything else is done, you probably wisely leave
Fred's system alone because you don't have the money to redo it.    You
spend precious resources on th!
 e negatives that are not identified and those that are not in acid free
envelopes.   So what do you do with Fred's?   You probably put an FS in
front of his number (or something else unique to help you find them) and
then copy his file into a data base as simply as possible and scan them ...
you make it a KISS project because there are too many other projects
screaming for help.  

More important might be to take all of the thousands of negatives I brought
over from the Goldsmith and Watts collections that are mostly on non-safety
film (highly combustable) and refile them in open sided, acid free envelopes
and then build a concrete vault away from the main building to house all the
combustible negatives....  Can you see the need for millions of dollars?   

If you are not familiar, remember the words SAFETY FILM on the edge of films
produced in the 1940s and 1950s?    As long as there were still some older
combustable materials produced, the newer cellulose acetate materials were
labeled SAFETY FILM.   When we moved from glass plates to flexible
materials, the films were made of cellulose sodium nitrate.   It will, if
stored in stacks, spontaneously combust.  It needs to breath.  If you get
enough of that crap, it will blow the roof off a building.   Theater movie
projectors were designed with very sophisticated light baffles so that if
the motor quit running, the light would also be shut off to prevent
combustion of the film.   My father remembered a major theater fire in
Cleveland in the late 1920s.   I've been told that an entire 800 foot, 20
minute reel of 35mm film could easily go up in smoke in seconds.   The
Hippodrome in Lancaster was gutted in the early 1920s ... same reason.
Eventually it became law that projection !
 booths in theaters had to be surrounded by concrete!   

By the late 1930s we were producing films on cellulose acetate ... but some
photographers still bought the cheaper stuff.   I know my father still found
some nitrate base 35mm film right after World War II ... he had that 35mm
film rolled up and it basically turned to jello.  

That should give you a clue that a lot of the collections from older
railfans are time bombs.    

Those images on sheet films made of cellulose sodium nitrate are largely
lost because the thicker the base, the more likely it was to decompose.   I
remember Harold Cox telling me that most of the Philadelphia Rapid Transit
archive from the end of the glass era until the beginning of the safety film
era had virtually vanished because it was professionally done on thick sheet
film negatives and they simple decomposed to flammable dust!  (Thinner roll
film negatives were more permanent.)   

So, Jim, do you worry about what Fred did with his collection?   I don 't
think so.  It is not done in a fashion which I believe suitable for future
users.   I wrote it like a railfan.   The journal reads:  "Company, car
number, direction, location, date and any other relevant items we might
like.   If I were redoing it today for a new generation of users, I would
probably put city, county, state, date right in the first position.    But
there is a record that someone can work with in a few years when I'm gone.


Fred

(Only proof read once ... if you don't understand something, ask.)   



On May 20, 2011, at 4:29 PM, Jim Keener wrote:

> 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
> 
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