An exciting day at the PRO
Yesterday I went down to the Public Records Office (call it by its name!). I think I picked the wrong day. As well as the disruption from the building work, the ordering system broke down so I couldn’t order any documents for the first hour.
One consolation of the delay was that I had plenty of spare time to look at the First World War service records on microfilm. This time I was lucky to find a record for Thomas Wenham, my great-grandfather’s older brother (those for William and Charles hadn’t survived, which is exactly the ratio you’d expect from the burnt papers). Tom joined the reserves in 1915 but wasn’t called up for active service until 1916. He was initially in 19th Sherwood Foresters, a reserve battalion recruited in Lincolnshire, but then he was posted to 8th North Staffordshire Regiment, with whom he went to France. On 7th June 1917 he was wounded in the head by a shell at Wytschaete and was sent to hospital in Etaples, then returned to England. He survived but wasn’t fit for combat any more so served at home with the Royal Defence Corps. In 1918 he returned to France with the Labour Corps to guard prisoners of war. So out of three brothers known to have served in the war, all three were wounded in action, one died, and one was captured.
Then on to the real work: SP28 aka the Commonwealth Exchequer Papers. I tried photographing a whole account book to get an idea of how long it would take. The book was about 150 folios with writing on both sides, so about 300 images altogether, which took about an hour and a half. Quality is a bit variable because I didn’t use a camera stand (usually I find they’re all in use; this time there was one free but I then realised I couldn’t attach my camera to it!). Some images are perfect but others are so blurred that I can’t read them. It was also totally exhausting, but not as bad as copying them out by hand. I’m looking into the feasibility of a project which might involve photographing 20 or 30 entire boxes. That looks like it could be long, difficult and expensive.
Comment by Brett — 9:22 am, 1 December 2007 [permanent link to this comment]
How much do the stands cost? Does the PRO (yeah I don’t know about this “National Archives” biz either) allow you to bring your own?
I didn’t make it out to Kew when I was in London this summer, and most of the archives I visited didn’t allow photography. But the one place I did use my camera, wow — just under 1600 photos in a day and a bit! It would have taken me two weeks to go through that at my normal rate, two weeks which I then able to spend elsewhere looking at other things. Of course, the downside is that I’ve got just under 1600 photos I need to go through at some point … and yes, a few of them are blurry and probably unusable. Hopefully nothing important!
I noticed, while I was there, that the BL was running a trial with digital cameras — you could sign up, go through an induction, and then make appointments to photograph materials (not sure if it was just books or archival materials too). Hopefully they found it to be a success and introduce it more widely, as it’s a very good thing.
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 12:56 pm, 1 December 2007 [permanent link to this comment]
You’re not allowed to bring your own stands. They’re free to use but it’s first come first served and there are only 3 in the map room. Some kind people at the Great War Forum have explained to me how to screw a camera to a stand so I’ll give it another go next time.
That’s really good news about the BL. If it applies to manuscripts it could save me a lot of trouble. Having to make an appointment sounds a bit awkward but definitely better than having to transcribe things on the spot.
Comment by Mike Cosgrave — 10:05 pm, 1 December 2007 [permanent link to this comment]
What camera do you use and what size of page are the documents?
Most cameras will not focus properly if you are closer than 3 feet from whatever you are shooting. In most cases, to fill the frame with a normal page, you need to be closer than 3 feet, so you get a blurry image. The macro function allows you to focus properly when the camera is closer to the object.
Camera shake is the other common problem. If it is dark, a camera on ‘auto’ will use a slow shutter speed, and if you can’t hold it steady, you’ll get shake. Since you really can’t use flash in archives, you need to set the camera to mimic a faster film speed - ISO 200 or even 400. The faster the speed, the faster the image gets captured and the less shake — but the image may be slightly grainier.
Most cameras allow you to zoom in on an image when you are reviewing it in the LCD screen - I use that to do a quick check to make sure my images are sharp if I’m not sure.
I can usually shoot 1000 handheld images in day - I got over 1,100 last weds between 10 and 4 in the Military Archives but those were nice A4 typescript pages which are easy to get through. Practice is the key - once you get a feel for what distance you need to be from the document to get a sharp, full frame image, and get used to judging from the preview what is sharp and what is not, you can rattle through them really quickly.
My advice is get some old essays, find a desk and spend some time messing around until you are confident you can do it right. Read the camera manual and play around with the settings until you get the right ones for your camera, and note them down!.
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 10:56 am, 2 December 2007 [permanent link to this comment]
Thanks for the tips, that all sounds really useful. I’m using a Canon Powershot A510. It’s 3 megapixel (which I find is adequate - the normal setting gives images at 2048×1536 pixels). For a cheap camera it does give quite a lot of control over the settings so I’ll try playing around with it. I do use macro, although in previous experiments I’ve found that it doesn’t make a huge amount of difference. The camera manual says it should be used at less than 1.5 feet, but for SP28s I’m often further away than that, especially for the big ones. I had no idea that I could zoom the display in playback mode - I really should have read all of the manual!
SP28s are awkward as they come in lots of different shapes and sizes. Most commonly they’re somewhere between A4 and A3. Some are loose documents, some are account books in original 17th century bindings, and some are bound volumes created from loose documents in the 20th century. Setting up the document and arranging the weights usually takes longer than taking the photo. There can be up to 1,000 folios in a box, so the most I can expect to get through is one box per day.
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