Postcard collection bequeathal to libraries and museums

[Moonraker]

 

From time to time some of us have discussed the fate of our collections and notes after we pass on, with general agreement that it's important that we leave instructions behind for executors of our estates.

 

I'm minded to scan my postcard collection and offered the results to several museums and libraries. (A personal website would have to be maintained in perpetuity, as presumably would Cloud storage.) Initially the task seems formidable, not least because in cases of interesting messages and postmarks both sides of the card would need to be scanned. So I intend to be selective and concentrate on truly unique and scarce items, not bothering with cards that are readily seen on the Web.

 

Lodging CDs or some other storage device with libraries etc means that only visitors could access them. Were the institutions to make the images available via their website, there might be the issue of them claiming "copyright" fees, which has aroused some indignation here on the GWF! And I wonder if one or two smaller organisations would be geared up to displaying low-resolution images and providing better copies on request?

 

I am not bothered by the thought that someone might occasionally help themselves and copy an image, but I don't like the idea of multiple images being copied and offered for sale (an increasing trend on eBay). Watermarking copies might prevent this (as recently discussed), but I would still like unwatermarked copies to be available on application.

 

Given that only occasionally might someone want a quality image, what dpi should I consider? I find that 200dpi suffices, though people requesting copies and publishers usually specify 300.

 

All this is a bit waffly, but I would welcome comments. I hope that we do not re-visit the matter of "copyright" fees charged by institutions on photographs – or copies of photographs – that are in their possession but are actually out of copyright.  I would have no problems with them charging a processing fee. And I recall the thread on the best ways of scanning multiple images.

 

Eventually I shall approach some of the organisations in question for their advice.

 

Moonraker

[Sepoy]

It is something that has been on my mind, but I have not come to any conclusion.

To be honest, I am wondering whether it would be best to sell them, so that my family would have the benefit. Are there any Libraries/Museums that would be interested in taking on digital copies of photographic collections????

To be honest, I am more concerned about my family research and collection of family photographs, because there is no one in my family who shows any interest.

I shall watch this thread with interest, to see what others think.

Sepoy

[Gardenerbill]

Have you considered a book? Perhaps something on the lines of Michael Young's Postcards of the Army Service Corps.

[Alan24]

My small collection of Winchester is about 500 now. I started scanning both sides at 400 dpi when the collection was very small on the work's photo copier/scanner. I then tweak the scans on photoshop which can really benefit some of the RP ones.

My whole collection is on a tablet and therefore very portable.

 

Alan.  

[Moonraker]

11 hours ago, Sepoy said:

... Are there any Libraries/Museums that would be interested in taking on digital copies of photographic collections????

I would like to think that CDs (or whatever) of my collection of 2,500 items (mostly cards, but a few contemporary maps, large photos and so on) would be a useful reference source for several institutions to house, and preferable to just one of them finding three feet of shelf space for albums that might not take kindly to handling.

10 hours ago, Gardenerbill said:

Have you considered a book? Perhaps something on the lines of Michael Young's Postcards of the Army Service Corps.

Quite apart from those postcards already reproduced in my own books, many more similar cards have been the primary content of books about Salisbury Plain by Peter Daniels and about the Warminster area and its camps by Danny Howells. Then there are books about Wiltshire airfields and military railways that feature postcards.

 

As a dealer has recently remarked on a postcard forum about topographical cards: " you can ... view shed loads of pictures [about your favoured locality] for free on Flikr, Pinterest etc".

 

Moonraker
 

[johnboy]

I think your problem will be finding somewhere that appreciates the historical value.If offering them to museums/ organizations my first question would be what would they intend to do with them? A permanent display, available for viewing in a reading room or put in a box and put in storage.Be a shame if they did not see the light of day,Selling could b the best option. Maybe put them on CD's and sell  copies of the disc, Or try someone like Archive,org, 

[Moonraker]

I think your problem will be finding somewhere that appreciates the historical value.If offering them to museums/ organizations my first question would be what would they intend to do with them?

 

I was thinking that a couple of national military museums and several local institutions might be interested in some comprehensive sets of cards, with my appended comments, of all the military activities and each camp in  Wiltshire between 1897 and 1920. Some of the images can easily be found on the Web, but often in isolation or twos & threes.(Not that I indicated  that it was this sort of collection in my opening post.) Four of five CDs or whatever would take up little room and would prove a useful source; in  some cases my cards show how individual camps (eg Lark Hill and Bulford) developed. And copying the CDs would mean that half-a-dozen institutions might benefit.

 

A permanent display, available for viewing in a reading room

 

I don't think that any institution would have the floor- or wall-space for even a hundred of the best cards to be displayed.

 

or put in a box and put in storage.Be a shame if they did not see the light of day,

 

They would take up space.  Several of the albums are already delicate.
 

Selling could be the best option. Maybe put them on CD's and sell  copies of the disc,

 

I won't be around to sell them!

 

Or try someone like Archive,org,  

 

That's an idea worth looking in to. Thanks.

 

Moonraker

[MaureenE]

Regarding the suggestion to upload to the Internet Archive, I refer to my previous post

"Upload your transcriptions to Archive.org (Internet Archive)".

The same considerations would apply to your postcards.

Most files are uploaded to Archive.org in pdf format.

 

You make your file, and upload it.

 

Cheers

Maureen

[spof]

Most libraries/museums would want the original items and not just scans for provenance and copyright reasons. They can then be acesseed via reading rooms and when funds allow, be digitised to their standard format and put online.

 

If you don't mind breaking up the collection, I'm sure cards identifiable with troops from the Dominions - Aus, NZ and Canada etc - would probably find more welcoming homes in those countries rather than somewhere lrge like IWM. In the case of AIF, if the battalion (and hence state) is identified then the relevant state library would love to have them even if we are now at the wrong end of the centenary. For the same local interest reason, regimental museums and the Wiltshire reference  library/archives would be the first places to contact.

 

Archive.org would be a good place for your scans to make them more available but it won't be long before they're on sale online if their copies of things like the Illustrated London News are anything to go by.

[Guest]

2 hours ago, spof said:

Most libraries/museums would want the original items and not just scans for provenance and copyright reasons. They can then be acesseed via reading rooms and when funds allow, be digitised to their standard format and put online.

 

If you don't mind breaking up the collection, I'm sure cards identifiable with troops from the Dominions - Aus, NZ and Canada etc - would probably find more welcoming homes in those countries rather than somewhere lrge like IWM. In the case of AIF, if the battalion (and hence state) is identified then the relevant state library would love to have them even if we are now at the wrong end of the centenary. For the same local interest reason, regimental museums and the Wiltshire reference  library/archives would be the first places to contact.

 

Archive.org would be a good place for your scans to make them more available but it won't be long before they're on sale online if their copies of things like the Illustrated London News are anything to go by.

 

    Spof- I think we keep hitting the same problems of copyright again and again-  with the added complication that "postcard" can usually mean anything from a commercially produced image sold in multiples through to one-off real photographs that just happen to be postcard size. Most collections,I would hazard a guess, contain a mixture of both. Which presents problems.  Libraries and archives usually want  transfer of copyright as well as transfer of ownership-and the old old legal rule applies-You cannot give better title than you have. Thus, libraries and archives get twitchy about such things and might-it comes as a surprise to me- turn down gifts if the copyright and provenance is not crystal clear.

    In the case of online  reproduction, it's good to remember that there is a world of difference between "online" meaning Internet and everywhere to all-comers -to intranet where the materials are under some sort of control to prevent abuse. Intranet seems to be popular with the more copyright paranoid librarians and archivists-it takes the edge off arguments about "publication"

[Moonraker]

On 24/09/2018 at 11:54, spof said:

... If you don't mind breaking up the collection, I'm sure cards identifiable with troops from the Dominions - Aus, NZ and Canada etc - would probably find more welcoming homes in those countries rather than somewhere lrge like IWM. In the case of AIF, if the battalion (and hence state) is identified then the relevant state library would love to have them even if we are now at the wrong end of the centenary...

My collection of Canadian postcards runs to 100+ items, but inevitably includes a significant number of common items. I don't have so many of ANZAC troops, and units are hardly every identifiable.

 

Categorising my collection means that some of the cards would sit happily with those of individual camps. I've also hived off "camp construction workers" and "medical services" into their own groups, away from  the camps they relate to. (Such logic suggests that I should have done that with "YMCA", but I haven't.)

 

In due course I'll approach the six most obvious possible recipients to see what they have to say. I'll probably get six different opinions ...

 

Thanks for all your comments to date.

 

Moonraker

[Waggoner]

Moonraker,

 

Do you have any CASC themed cards?

 

All the best,

 

Gary

[Moonraker]

Sadly none captioned as such, Gary. My Canadian postcards relate only to Salisbury Plain between October 1914 and February 1915 and the photographs were taken mostly by local people with a limited knowledge of how the First Contingent was structured.

 

Moonraker

[Waggoner]

Thank you!

 

All the best,

 

Gary

[Moonraker]

Earlier this month I emailed six libraries and museums that I thought might be interested in scans. After a fortnight, two local to Wiltshire have yet to respond, though I do appreciate that they greatly depend on volunteers. The Imperial War Museum acknowledged my offer but warned that it might take some time to reply - I suspect that it has great many offers that need to be sifted.

 

The National Army Museum replied that my post cards

 

sound really interesting. Unfortunately we're not able to accept digital copies of postcards, but would be interested in acquiring the originals if they were available. Similarly we would be interested in receiving copies of your files of notes on military Wiltshire." (I had said any such copies would probably be on a DVD.)

 

Wiltshire & Swindon History Centre replied that

 

We would be delighted to have copies of your collection and in due course to take on the originals. I personally would not scan at 200dpi as when you zoom in you lose a lot of detail – 300, or preferably 600 dpi, is better. DVDs are the best form of temporary storage, you can fit just over 4 gb on a DVD so that’s not too bad. We would then recommend moving from that portable media onto corporate server which is going to be backed up. I do wonder whether you might like to consider ‘out-sourcing’ the copying to another organisation rather than doing it all yourself – I know from personal experience that scanning can get a bit tedious.

 

A volunteer at Salisbury Museum advised

 

"We have over a million images.  We have scanned over 5,000 glass plates and a number of negative film archives including those of the local newspapers and some late local photographers.  We have a postcard collection that we have also scanned. We use the software Vuescan for scanning. Vuescan enables us to scan a number of postcards at once and then crop them individually so that each is stored as a separate jpeg computer file.  We scan both the front and the reverse of each postcard.  We use at least 600 dpi as often the postcards were photographically produced and have incredible detail.We do not use DVDs or such but USB3 connected  4 terabyte external hard disks.  These cost about £100 each and will store several million images with very rapid retrieval.  We have a master database and three identical disks for backup;  two stored off site. It is really important to use long filenames with information in the filenames.

 

For example see the following line: 'SBYWM-2010-39-20a Early Tintometer circa 1910 with red yellow & blue colour standards.jpg'. The start of the filename is Salisbury Museum’s MODES database name - part of the national database system.  Salisbury Museum is SBYWM.  The 2010 is the year the museum acquired the image.  The 39 is the 39th item acquired that year.  The 20 is the 20th image of this item.  The ‘a’ is the front and if there is a reverse there would be ‘b’ (Negatives don’t have a reverse but postcards do). Now for the really powerful bit, we store all the other information about the image in the jpeg files metadata.  This can even include audio!  Thus there is no need to cross reference the image with a Word file, Excel spreadsheet or other items.

 

We have developed our own software for volunteers to use to populate the metadata fields.  The volunteers can see on the screen the ‘a' side the ‘b' side and the metadata window at the same time.  They can zoom in and rotate the ‘a’ and/or ‘b’ views.

 

Both Apple Mac and Microsoft Window's systems look at filenames and the files’ metadata and index this on the disk where the files are stored.  This means that searching is around 10,000 times faster than conventional database software!"

 

Sounds very impressive - not that I understand a lot  much of it! The chances are remote of my being able to produce accurate file names for each item in my collection.

 

I don't quite know where this leaves me when it comes to DIY scanning - it rather depends on what if any replies I get from the remaining three organisations and whether their needs are simple. Perhaps it would be best to leave everything to Salisbury Museum and let them get on with it after I die.

 

Moonraker

[David_Underdown]

CD/DVDs are not good long-term storage media, particularly ordinary (re)writeable ones - in these there's basically a dye layer in the disk and the laser changes the colour of that when writing, and this will decay over time, not to mention scratches etc giving physical damage and causing read errors.

 

As Salisbury have said, 600 ppi would be the minimum resolution most institutions would recommend for photographic material, I'd be inclined to push higher if possible.  Also master images should not have any processing done on them really (crop to size and maybe deskew would be all I'd recommend).  I'm a bit surprised Salisbury talk about jpeg for masters, tiff would normally be preferred.

 

In Windows you can see the metadata they are talking about by just right-clicking on an image file, select "Properties" from the image file, and then the "Details" tab.  There will be something similar on Macs too.  I imagine they are primarily using the tags field, but possibly also title, subject and comments.  If original photographer/publisher and date of the postcard are known, these could be put in author and date fields in the origin section, date acquired might be used for the scanning date.  Scanners/cameras will often automatically populate some of the metadata further down with tehcnical data.

[Moonraker]

Just had a reply from the IWM to my enquiry of November 13:

 

I am afraid that the Museum is generally interested only in original items and would not be interested in the scans that you are offering. We already hold a copy of your book [sic -singular] and are, therefore, also declining your offer of the notes.I hope that you will understand that we have to be increasingly selective with regard to acquisitions because of limitations on storage space and other resources.

 

I'm OK with that, though I have 440 pages of word-processed notes (with far more information than in my books) that could easily be copied to a DVD, and a further DVD of illustrations. These would hardly tax the IWM's storage space! However, I've always recognised my interest to be very niche and parochial.

 

Over the recent Festive break I overhauled my Death File (some of you will know that I do not enter wholeheartedly into seasonal celebrations) and had already amended suggestions about what to do with my notes and collections to say they could be offered to Salisbury Museum and/or Wiltshire & Swindon History Centre. Of course between now and then their polices could change.

 

The IWM's response does confirm what others have warned about, that a legacy donation might not always be appreciated, especially it's great granddad's  war medals.

 

Moonraker

[Moonraker]

I'm 27 months older since I wrote the last post and recently had to refresh my arrangements for the Inevitable Day and thereafter.  A new thought is that for me or anyone to scan the entire collection would be very time-consuming and would include a large proportion, perhaps a majority, of cards readily found on the Web. A better idea might be scanning the rarer items, bearing in mind that a common card can be made more desirable by a postmark or message. I've just acquired a bland view of Netheravon High Street with a brief message from someone who turned out to be the paymaster of a Canadian hospital, and a very early acquisition was another Netheravon card with a message addressed from Grovesy Barn, quarters for a range party on the Plain.

[Moonraker]

Looking back through this thread, the comments of four years ago suggesting CDs now seem very dated, as I gather that they are now "so yesterday" and my latest car and PC, both acquired last year, don't cater for them.

I was prompted to re-visit this thread to make a tiny whinge that might also have gone into the Rants thread in Skindles (the off-topic section of the GWF, available to established members). Some of my postcard albums are full, so I sought to buy two new  similar ones , only to find that they were no longer available. Back in 1996, I started off with W H Smith "two-up, two-peg" albums (two PCs to each side of a loose leaf page), but found the quality poor, so switched to something very similar from Stanley Gibbons. A couple of hours of searching the Web came up with nothing suitable, new or used. I'm a little OCD about uniformity, so am wondering what to do next.

Looking ahead to a more sedentary life that is inevitable, I was already planning to work through my collection, re-arranging some of the cards within their sections, and improving some of my captions in the light of knowledge acquired over 26 years. This would be an opportunity to mount the cards in new albums, opting for those with better-quality archival-standard pockets; those in cheaper albums can in time affect the cards.

[jacks]

I don't know if these are any use to you.

 

https://www.preservationequipment.com/Catalogue/Archival-Storage/Photographic-Storage

https://www.my-history.co.uk/acatalog/Archive_Photograph_Albums.html

 

[Grovetown]

If you want something lost, stolen, damaged or sold: donate it to a museum.

Best, most recent, example was thre Gloucestershire regiment museum (Soldiers of Gloucestershire) unloading over 1000 items - some of which were truly historic - at auction.

The quality/ importance of some of the stuff was staggering which suggests, at best, they did not appreciate what they had.

Cheers,

GT.

[healdav]

42 minutes ago, Grovetown said:

If you want something lost, stolen, damaged or sold: donate it to a museum.

Best, most recent, example was thre Gloucestershire regiment museum (Soldiers of Gloucestershire) unloading over 1000 items - some of which were truly historic - at auction.

The quality/ importance of some of the stuff was staggering which suggests, at best, they did not appreciate what they had.

Cheers,

GT.

Or maybe they did and needed the money to stay open.

[TullochArd]

.....it's a sensitive subject.  Over the past 50 so years I have donated all sorts of bits and bobs to museums in the hope that they would find a safe repository.  I'm afraid that is no longer the case.  Museum storage space (£££) and changing tastes/opinions/perceptions have convinced me that 99% of these items should have gone to an interested collector/researcher who would provide a better home and actually appreciated the items. It's a fact that such items will change hands many times within the researcher/collector community, as individuals fall off the perch or move on to other areas, but at least the material is in circulation and available to those who will genuinely appreciate it.  

I would therefore offer that an organised research project or collection such as yours is better passed on to an interested collector/researcher (if you can identify one) for a fair and reasonable price ...... it will be particularly attractive if there is further research potential held within.  Don't break it down.

 

[FROGSMILE]

On 01/12/2022 at 09:50, Moonraker said:

Looking back through this thread, the comments of four years ago suggesting CDs now seem very dated, as I gather that they are now "so yesterday" and my latest car and PC, both acquired last year, don't cater for them.

I was prompted to re-visit this thread to make a tiny whinge that might also have gone into the Rants thread in Skindles (the off-topic section of the GWF, available to established members). Some of my postcard albums are full, so I sought to buy two new  similar ones , only to find that they were no longer available. Back in 1996, I started off with W H Smith "two-up, two-peg" albums (two PCs to each side of a loose leaf page), but found the quality poor, so switched to something very similar from Stanley Gibbons. A couple of hours of searching the Web came up with nothing suitable, new or used. I'm a little OCD about uniformity, so am wondering what to do next.

Looking ahead to a more sedentary life that is inevitable, I was already planning to work through my collection, re-arranging some of the cards within their sections, and improving some of my captions in the light of knowledge acquired over 26 years. This would be an opportunity to mount the cards in new albums, opting for those with better-quality archival-standard pockets; those in cheaper albums can in time affect the cards.

I was impressed by the response that you received from the Salisbury Museum, which seemed far better than any of the other institutions replies that you received.  It appeared to me to be somewhere that would look after your collection, as well as having the merit of being local and a logical place for such an archive, if the IWM and NAM seemed disinterested (which they did).

That said, I’m conscious from my own past experience that a lot depends on the enthusiasm and personal interests of the individual back then who wrote out the advice for you.  Whoever is there now might take an entirely different line.  Perhaps you might make contact again and visit, and consider donating your physical collection now, retaining for yourself just electronic copies.  That way you can, while you’re still on this mortal coil, actually see how they treat your much loved and painstakingly collected historical archive of images and associated data.

Edited 2 December , 2022 by FROGSMILE

[Moonraker]

Thanks to Jacks for the links to online suppliers of which I was unaware.

I doubt that any collector or researcher would be interested in purchasing the collection in its entirety, as they would be likely to already have the commoner cards. I do know of collectors of individual camps  - several regularly outbid me for postcards of sites in the Warminster area -  but there would be only a very few cards that they would want.