Investigations of a Dog

Do academic historians or PRO staff have a better knowledge of the public records? For records of the civil wars I suspect that academics have the upper hand. SP28 is not very well catalogued and sorted. Only researchers who have spent years working on it really know what’s there, and even now the source hasn’t been used to its full potential. Things are different with records of First World War soldiers. Amateur researchers seem to know far more about these than either academics or archive staff.

PRO/NA staff are increasingly aware that other people know more about their records than they do. One way they have responded is by launching Your Archives, a website running on wiki technology which allows anyone who has specialist knowledge of archival sources in the UK to contribute what they know. The site first opened to the public in spring 2007 and has continued to grow since then. I first started using it in October, and I’ve noticed an increase in activity in recent months. As well as the First World War stuff that I mentioned before, I’ve created a British Civil Wars category and started to populate it with my PhD notes, mostly taken from SP28.

There’s far more information that could be added, by me and by other people. Although contributions have been steadily increasing the number of regular contributors is still relatively small. I managed to encourage a few people from the Great War Forum to get involved, but not very many. Maybe one of the problems is that contributors need an unusual combination of specialist knowledge of archives, IT skills, and confidence with Web 2.0 ways of thinking. Or maybe Wikipedia has given all wikis a bad name that they don’t deserve.

If anyone who is reading this has relevant knowledge of PRO documents but hasn’t contributed to Your Archives, what would make you more likely to contribute?

Since my last post I’ve been doing some more experiments to see how Zotero can be used for cataloguing previously uncatalogued administrative records from the English Civil War. I’ve now put some more of my ideas into practice in demo form and they seem to work. Linking images to Zotero items and adding metadata went very smoothly. The idea of adding extra data by putting XML tags in notes also works, although this is just a stopgap until they implement custom fields. Once you have data in Zotero it’s very easy to export it as XML and do whatever you want with it. More details below, but it gets a bit technical and even includes some sample code (formatting code in WordPress is hard, and it’ll probably screw up the layout for some people). If you’re not A. Nerd and you’re not doing the shopping for your mum you might want to stop reading now.

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In a previous post I mentioned experimenting with taking photos at the Public Records Office/National Archives. Getting good photos is only part of the problem. The real work starts when you get them home. How do you organise them and make sense of them? It should be no surprise that Zotero is really useful for this, but I’ve discovered a few tricks to make it even better.

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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.