While we've been closed to the public, the archivists at MOSI have been working on uploading digital image files to our collections management database for publication online. The images now available online represent a small proportion of the approximately 275,000 images we hold. We plan to add more of our existing digital surrogates to the catalogue over the next two years, before moving on to new digitisation projects.

The work started last summer, when we realised we had 15-year old Kodak PCDs that we could no longer access. A frantic install of Photoshop CS2 on one of our machines meant that we could at least convert the image files to tiff format and burn them to new CDs. Over a period of five months we resized, uploaded and catalogued the images. Since then, we've worked on other existing digital surrogates to create jpegs that are good enough quality to view online, but not so good that researchers can just pinch the images! The last four months has seen us uploading the files and creating the catalogue entries.

Obviously, having put the image files up there, we'd now like to encourage people to use them. Our Collections Online catalogue isn't the easiest thing to navigate so, at the same time as letting people know that there is some image content on the catalogue now, I've done some notes on how to search to get the best results.

If you, or any of the visitors to your archive service, are interested in the collections we've covered so far (Beyer, Peacock & Co. Ltd (locomotive builders), Metropolitan-Vickers Electrical Co. Ltd, and Ferranti Plc), please feel free to use or share the notes below.

Beyer, Peacock & Co. Ltd
1. Go to http://emu.msim.org.uk/htmlmn/collections/online/search-the-collections.php
2. Choose Image collections
3. Choose “Beyer, Peacock & Co. Ltd” from the drop-down list for Collection Name
4. If looking for works photographs or general arrangement drawings, enter the Order No (not the Works or Progressive number) or the name of the railway company which placed the order, in the Object Summary box. (N.B. You have to do a separate search for each order number).
5. Click on search
6. To view the image details, click on the image. To view the catalogue details click on the item description (e.g. photograph – negative or engineering drawing)

Metropolitan-Vickers Ltd
1. Go to http://emu.msim.org.uk/htmlmn/collections/online/search-the-collections.php
2. Choose Image collections
3. Choose “GEC - Alsthom” from the drop-down list for Collection Name
4. Click on search
5. To view the image details, click on the image. To view the catalogue details click on the item description (e.g. photograph – negative or engineering drawing)

Ferranti Plc
1. Go to http://emu.msim.org.uk/htmlmn/collections/online/search-the-collections.php
2. Choose Image collections
3. Choose “Ferranti” from the drop-down list for Collection Name
4. Click on search
5. To view the image details, click on the image. To view the catalogue details click on the item description (e.g. photograph – negative or engineering drawing)

This is the easiest way of searching. The Object Summary box can be used to free text search our item descriptions to narrow searches down. The Subject box can be used to search using LCSH I thesaurus terms (it's a bit hit and miss though).

If you start from http://emu.msim.org.uk/htmlmn/, you can do more advanced searching using the Research the Collections link, but the interface is more geared towards object collections, so isn't necessarily any better for searching for archive items.

Sorry for the long message, but hopefully some of you will be interested in what we've been up to! If anyone wants to know more, feel free to get in touch off list.

Jan Hicks
Senior Archivist
MOSI

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