Quekett Microscopical Club Archives
The Club has archives and collections that includes equipment, books, slides (20,000+), photographs (c. 2000), members’ notebooks and minutes. Phil Greaves wrote up his 2011 lecture on the archives for the Journal, and you can read the paper here:
We are planning to make a lot of this available on the Internet, but it is a huge job and we will need advice and assistance from our members.
Some material, such as the slide collection, will need to be accessed via a searchable database. Other material, such as members’ notebooks, will probably be made available as PDF files. Photographs can be made available in galleries or via an index.
To help with planning and with making decisions, we are preparing some examples of how we might proceed. Your comments are welcome.
The data on the labels of some of the slides have been transcribed into Excel, and we have photographs of several trays of slides. The data needs to be checked and put into a standard set of fields. We want to have photographs of individual slides, not trays of slides. We should have the facility to add photomicrographs as these become available.
Steve Gill has combined the data and photographs into a database that he has designed that can be searched or browsed:
Paul Smith has been investigating an inexpensive database program called Recollector. This can produce a report that consists of a collection of HTML files, but it does not have a search interface, only a large table with 3 fields for each record.
We have lots of photographs of members, some as prints and some as glass lantern slides, and it would be convenient to access them via an image browser with an index. Here is Alan Wood’s attempt (using a frameset and lots of HTML files) at an index for the few photographs that have been digitised:
Here is Steve Gill’s more elegant solution using JavaScript and only one HTML file, and including obituaries and lists of papers published in the Journal:
Here is a modern implementation using Steve’s JavaScript and Alan’s Flexbox CSS (only works with recent browsers):
Using an index instead of a database means that search engines such as Bing and Google will be able to include the names and photographs in their indexes, and this should increase the number of visitors to our website.
We need to decide how big the displayed photographs should be, and what our policy should be on adding more recent photographs.
Photographs with several people could be shown in image galleries in the main website, with several small images + captions per page. Perhaps they could be grouped into excursions, events, groups, locations, photomicrographs, etcetera. Click any image and you see a larger version, and you can click left and right arrows to browse all the larger versions.
Last updated 26th November 2018