One of my recent tasks has been to list the contents of some photograph albums. It has made me reminisce about ‘the good old days’ when we would send the film off to be developed and then patiently wait to see the end result. There was always that slight annoyance at the shots wasted due to a stray finger, a strand of hair or were blurred; and wonder why you had taken some of them, who on earth were you standing next to?! Individual photographs were precious, after all you could only take so many per film. You would then take those photos in to school or work and recall the memories all over again with anyone listening, whether they wanted to or not! You would glare at anyone who dared to mishandle them, after all you didn’t want your memory spoilt by someone’s errant fingerprint. Nowadays some of that is lost, photographs are taken and shared on social media in an instant, bad photographs are quickly deleted, edited, filtered or re-taken. It does mean, however, that more than ever we have access to photographic images.
The albums record day trips, holidays, family, friends and of course some pets too. Updating the catalogue with their contents is very much a team effort. The staff at the Archives are still working partly at home and in bubbles when in the office. This means that things do take longer than ‘normal’. One of the team dealing with digitisation took individual images of each photograph as well as the whole page of an album so that as much information about the people and places represented can be captured whilst listing at home. As well as content, unique references are added to the catalogue for each image; these individual references are bulk uploaded at a later date behind the scenes so that the image becomes visible to the end user via the online catalogue on the Northumberland Archives website. In the office reference numbers are added, the digital version is cross-checked with the original photograph to ensure they match and then stored in accordance to archival standards.
The most recent albums that I have worked on are from a collection of eight albums from Mary Hanington who lived in Ponteland in the 1930s. It was difficult to narrow it down, but here are a couple of my favourites so far, a picture from ‘the Hoppings’ on Newcastle’s Town Moor and a lady having fun on the swing being described as “trying to be an ‘Ovingham School Child’ (it was their playground)”.
