All,

 

Recent postings concerning the UK National lottery and the complete set of
the Mining Journal (MJ) sold at auction last Tuesday [now apparently
residing in the Scilly Isles, according to Bernard Moore's posting today],
leads me to put forward a project idea which some on this mail list might
like to consider in more detail.  The idea arises from:

*	our lack of success to gain INTERREG 3A funding to create an
on-line, free word searchable, digitised version of the MJ several years
ago;  
*	the existence of at least two partial indices (e.g. those of Tony
Oldham, primarily for Welsh listings; and an index of Irish listings 1835 -
c.1870 compiled by the Geological Survey of Ireland under my supervision in
the 1980s, and linked to a micro-film archive of the catalogued entries); 
*	and the potential for UK Heritage Lottery funding.  

 

So now to the suggestion: to create a complete and comprehensive index for
the MJ, certainly for the period from 1835 - 1900, and, ideally, to link
this on a (subscription access?) website to a scanned archive of the entire
MJ for the same period. This resource has truly international value, as it
is a record of the international migration of finance, technology, peoples
and endeavours. 

 

I suggest that this could be achieved by:

*	Creating a UK led project management team to develop the idea,
within the framework of creating a bid for UK Lottery funding [or this could
be broadened into an international funding enterprise, by, for example,
involving members of Europamines, the newly founded European Mining Heritage
Network,  [www.europamines.com] to create an INTERREG or Culture 2006
project, with UK and other national funding contributing to the overall
match cost funding - now likely to be 50% for future EU funded projects]
*	Buy-in a complete set(s) of microfilm/fiche from the British NL [or
maybe scan from the original MJ set now, apparently, in the Scilly Isles?],
and seek copyright agreement from them and the MJ to re-publish a scanned
derivative on a web site
*	Design standard format index templates for each type of content,
e.g. news articles, share dealings, adverts and so on, as the content of
each varies 
*	Assembling a team of international volunteers, individual and
organisational, to take responsibility for perusing and indexing all
listings for defined years using the standard templates (and possibly to
receive an honorarium for this - which might help funding of a number of
mining history/heritage organisations?).  This index creation methodology is
used routinely by volunteer genealogists, and by sub-dividing the task into
small blocks it reduces the otherwise daunting task to manageable
proportions - in management speak, reducing the elephant to bite size
chunks.
*	to up load the index and scanned imagery progressively as chunks are
completed by the indexers
*	and consider off-line publications, e.g. in paper form, or data DVDs

 

That's it.  Now over to all of you for comment, reactions and so on.

 

Regards,

 

John Morris,

Mining Heritage Trust of Ireland Ltd.,

www.mhti.com <http://www.mhti.com/>