#5 - Something Completely Different - Cataloging in the Time of Covid

Sometime around May of this infinite-year, I started to get bored. Sure, we'd been in quarantine for just a few months and I'd been working on-site the whole time, but I live in Los Angeles. I'm used to going out and doing things. Things don't happen in quarantine. I was so bored; I had nearly finished Netflix. I wanted to do something worthwhile, something related to history or archiving, maybe even something for my CV. Then, across my Twitter field came something interesting - a workshop on digital, online archiving. It was organized by the NAS - the UK's Nautical Archaeology Society, and it was about doing online archiving for their traditional boat record's archive. 

I immediately signed up. Then I remembered time zones are a thing. 

So, from 2am until 10am on a Saturday, I learned about the archival project. The people involved were great - students and PhDs from Southampton University. And the project seemed worthwhile - the boats were no longer part of the collection, but they had photographs, audiovisuals, paperwork, and architectural plans for nearly all of them. A collection of small traditional boats from all over the world, the most comprehensive collection in the world, including some examples of boats that are no longer made. Many of the records had been digitized, but there were no catalog records that would make them usable to researchers. Volunteers were needed to create entries and descriptions for all 50,000 or so files. They, bless them, thought this was an insurmountable task.  Even by utilizing domestic and foreign volunteers, they knew they had a major task. 

Except, I'm accustomed to managing collections with at least 50,000 assets. My current movie studio collection is projected to easily exceed 25 million photographs and negatives. So, I knew that NAS would be able to handle their project; and by volunteering on it, I hoped I could help them make the collection available to researchers that also lived all over the world.

I was originally planning to save this post for a bit later, I wanted to delve into my current work on the Ryves Holt house first, then transition to my other projects. But over the weekend of November 21-22, NAS is holding their annual conference online. Now, this is overnight to those of us in the States, but a few of the volunteers will be presenting on our project, we worked together to assemble a short presentation. There will also be many other amazing talks and presentations about marine archaeology and heritage management.  

*image from NAS website