Hello, Once Again,
If you haven’t already fallen asleep at the sight of another blog, then good. Because that would be hurtful and it means I can tell you about all of the progress that we have made recently. We have managed to set up two new sites; one on Flickr and one on SoundCloud. As well as this we have been selecting our images for the exhibition from our collection and I’d like to talk about a couple that stood out to me this week.
When Roisin and I first started this internship, a whole nine weeks ago, we spent a lot of time in a small room with no windows so that we could digitise a lot of photos. A lot. We now have a portfolio of around 350 digitised images of animals from various books and periodicals in the special collections. This entire portfolio then needed to be thematised and the information needed to be collected in a metadata form. Boy, am I glad that we reluctantly completed this task. Only yesterday, Roisin and I were talking about how much we have used the metadata form – it’s pretty much in use every day, so here’s a pro-tip: make metadata!
Moving on, the images were supposed to be used as a student resource but we needed to find a way to get them to the students. (This is where Flickr comes in). We made a Flickr account! The images do really look amazing now that they have been uploaded and we can see them in a size larger than a thumbnail. I suggest you take a look at the range, simply because they are interesting, and some are funny. In order to do this head to our page here.
Not only this, but we also managed to finally record and upload a couple of sheets of music from The Children’s Friend that I may have mentioned back in week 3. Or 4. It really does sound like a small child would play this at home on the piano with their parents. It’s rather fascinating. It’s almost surreal. Knowing that some children, somewhere did this. The initial aim of recreating the music was for this blog as a weekly addition to the puzzles and other stuff that I talk about but time and planning made it so that we couldn’t do it. The aim, then, was for the songs to be used to accompany the audio tape from the exhibition and we finally did it! A weight was lifted off our shoulders and we could move on. These were later uploaded onto our shiny-new Sound Cloud account so if you wanted to hear them, then follow this link here.
Now for the Willows: The Wind in the Willows, to be exact. As I mentioned, this week we have also been selecting and captioning the images that will be going into the exhibition boxes and posters. Three of these happen to be from our Wind in the Willows book and it just brings me closer to the history.
The three images are paintings by various artists with India ink. Although The Wind in the Willows was originally published in 1908, the images were not created until later. Despite this they are still relevant as they are illustrations of the book. They stood out to me as they are the last step in the timeline and they remind me of my childhood, though it was not so long ago, it is clear that these stories of anthropomorphism (the personification of animals) have been and will be staples of childhoods of many generations. They brought a sense of nostalgia because I remember my mum talking about them, which in turn made me smile.
As always, we can’t end a blog without a visit from The Children’s Friend… here is this week’s puzzle page which will also be featured in a small booklet that will contain all 12 of the volume’s puzzle pages!
Thanks for reading! Till next week!
Jade x
LJMU Special Collections & Archives 