The working life of Museum of London

Since my last post back in December a lot has happened in the world of digital preservation at LAARC (London Archaeological Archive and Research Centre). We have taken in several large archive deposits, including a great deal of digital images relating to a number of Olympic development sites, and I’m currently busily processing the deposits in order to make them accessible through our online catalogue.

We’ve also had a number of enquiries regarding our collections, ranging from a request for information on fish bone samples from archaeological sites, to questions about plans and standing building drawings of a church in the City of London which we hold in our collection. While these are standard enquiries for a collection like LAARC, they do sometimes involve the investigation of our legacy data to find out exactly what information is available.

So, what exactly is legacy data I hear you ask? Well, in the context of digital preservation it is often used to refer to files or data stored in old or potentially obsolete formats, which as a result can be difficult to access and even harder to interpret. As a result, and in particular when dealing with enquiries relating to archaeological excavations which occurred in the 1980’s and early 1990’s (when digital records were being created, but the idea of digital preservation hadn’t really entered our consciousness), it is sometimes necessary to conduct searches across this legacy data, extrapolate the required information, and manipulate and migrate the data into a more accessible format, while ensuring that the data itself has not been altered in the process.

Part of our legacy toolkit at LAARC!

Our standards and guidance for deposition, and our work with current depositors of archaeological records, aims to ensure that we are not faced with these problems for current and future digital deposits. However, for digital records that were created before such standards were in place, we simply have to deal with the data in whatever form we have it, and work to the best of our abilities to extract the required information. Our long term goal is to process and migrate all of the legacy data we currently hold into accessible formats which we can then provide access to online, but with legacy data from over 670 sites, it will take some time!!

I was lucky enough to get an opportunity to talk about some of these issues when I was invited to give a short presentation at the Digital Preservation: What I Wish I Knew Before I Started event, organised and co-hosted by the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and the Archives and Records Association (ARA) back in January. The event aimed to give ideas and practical advice concerning digital preservation to current archive and records management students, and hopefully inspire them to get involved in this particular area. For anyone interested, all the presentations from the day are available at the DPC event page and comments from the day can be found on Twitter by searching the hashtag #dpc_wiwik.

Finally, I can’t write a blog about my work at LAARC without mentioning that it’s our 10th anniversary this year – and we are running a number of events and hands on activities both at LAARC and the Museum of London to celebrate. I had my first experience of these when I participated in the Archaeology Up Close day on the 20th January, when we put on a display of finds and records on the theme of ‘Made in London’. Various finds were on show which provided evidence for shoe making in the Roman period, medieval glass and ceramic making, and post medieval clay tobacco pipe manufacturing. It was great to be able to share our collections, and passion for archaeology, with visitors to the museum, and for my part it was certainly nice to get away from my computer for a day! Various LAARC staff will be at the Museum every Monday, Tuesday and Friday for the next 8 weeks, talking about our archive collections and archaeology in general, so come and say hello when you are on your next visit, and follow the LAARC VIP blog for more info.

LAARC staff talking to (hopefully) interested members of the public about archaeology

Vauxhall, 1785 by Thomas Rowlandson

Pleasure gardens competed for visitors, vying with each other to offer evermore exciting entertainments. Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens offered a wide variety of entertainment, including lion-tamers, trampoline clowns, fortune tellers, ventriloquists, monkeys, dogs, jugglers, horses who danced to a waltz and fire walkers.

Tournaire's Equestrians, Vauxhall Gardens, 1846

Costumes from the Museum of London’s pleasure gardens

The Museum of London’s pleasure gardens

As part of our collections online programme bringing greater online access to our collections over the next three years, including the addition of over 90,000 objects. Project Assistant, Ed, talks us through his work with the Museum’s Roman coin collection:

The Museum’s Roman collection boasts some very fine examples of bronze, silver and gold coinage, and traces the history of Rome from the Republic, through the rise and eventual decline of the Empire, and culminates in the ascendancy of Byzantium.

The collection spans a period of no-less than seven centuries and represents over 100 different emperors, empresses, princes, rebels and usurpers.

The biggest challenge in working with this collection stems from the sheer volume of coin designs that the emperors could produce.

Recently I have been working with the coins of Emperor Domitian (81-96AD). Domitian alone was responsible for producing over 400 different coin designs during his 15 year reign. This is obviously a huge amount, but such numbers are not uncommon, and indeed such an output is dwarfed by that of others, such as Hadrian, who introduced nearly 1100 different coin designs during his rule, 117-138AD.

It may initially seem surprising that the emperors put so much thought into their coinage.

However, in a period before mass media, coins offered the perfect opportunity for the emperors to ‘meet’ their public. The minting of coins was the greatest source of propaganda available to the emperors.

They range of designs is astonishing. Coins were issued to commemorate great military victories, grand building projects, the quelling of rebellions and to celebrate the might and history of Rome.

They also gave ample opportunity for the emperors to associate themselves and their rule with a particular god, goddess or virtue by depicting them on the reverse.

In this respect the coins offer a real window into the ideology, principles and concerns of the emperors themselves. They could choose to depict themselves as philosophers, facilitators of peace and prosperity, or conversely, they could adopt a very different stance and associate themselves with Mars, the god of war, showing that they were prepared to hold onto their power with an iron fist if circumstances required it.

With such a vast array of coins being minted, correct identification offers a significant challenge.

Fortunately much of the collection is very well preserved. Some of the coins appear as if struck yesterday, and are identified and read as easily as they would have been millennia ago. However, time has taken its toll on many others.

The portraits are worn and reverses corroded, inscriptions are obliterated and details reduced to little more than a few lumps and bumps. In a few cases, identification is simply impossible. However, more often than not, identification can be made from the slightest of details. Until the fourth century the portraits of the emperors are very distinctive; subsequently, little more than the curve of the nose or the curl of a beard can give away their identity. Similarly the flick of a wing or the angle of an arm can all help identify the figure on the reverse.

I feel incredibly lucky to be able to handle these objects on a daily basis, and think of the many hands they may have passed between in their long history and the day to day transaction they may have been involved in. Yet, they are not simply discs of metal used to buy bread, wine, clothing or even be exchanged for possible brothel tokens! They can give us a real insight into the minds of the emperors themselves and the state and character of the empire.

I hope that when these coins are made available online to the public  in the summer of 2012 you will find them as interesting as I do.

It is hoped that by opening up of this collection online it will not only help the Museum engage with a wider public audience, but also offer a considerable contribution to the understanding of Roman numismatics in London, and provide increased opportunity for further enquiry, study and fresh analysis.

All images copyright Museum of London.

To mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II the Museum of London will be staging an exhibition in June 2012.

Celebrating the capital’s enthusiasm and affection, ‘At Home with the Queen‘, will feature Londoners photographed in their own homes with their cherished souvenirs of Queen Elizabeth II.

Here, exhibition curator, Julia Hoffbrand, updates us on the search for people and souvenirs to feature:

“Right. Just back from a very extended Christmas and New Year break. Mince pies and lie-ins behind me, I sit down, coffee in hand, to look at my inbox. Lots of enquiries, some general briefings for the Museum’s collections online resource, and some stray spam asking if I want strange things I’ve never heard of. And then on to the ‘At Home with the Queen’ inbox and post pigeon-hole.

Hurrah! Several new submissions have arrived whilst I’ve been away. They’re great! I print them out and put them with all the others received so far to review after the closing date for submissions on 31 January.

The exhibition’s beginning to look good.

I’m really pleased and excited by the range of Londoners who’ve sent in photos of themselves so far – a real mix of ages and backgrounds, some quite unexpected. Older people who remember the Coronation, people in their 20s and 30s who’ve inherited their grandparents’ commemoratives, and kids with books about the Queen which their parents read aloud to them before bed.

It’s fun working on an exhibition where Londoners themselves provide the content – you have no idea what’s going to arrive next and, barring the obscene and offensive, anything goes in this exhibition. It’s what Londoners make it – my role is to bring everything together and with the exhibition team create a display people want to visit and enjoy.

I’ve been really encouraged by the positive reactions I’ve had from people whenever I mention ‘At Home with the Queen’.  A brief chat at my local fish and chip shop where I put up a poster reveals that the owner once met the Queen when he was a kid and will hunt out his photo for the exhibition. A conversation at the library (and another poster later) uncovers a woman who has two Golden Jubilee shot glasses bought she says, at a petrol station on the way to Devon in 2002 (she says it’s a long story ….).

The next step for me is to start writing the design brief for ‘At Home with the Queen’. This outlines the exhibition’s content, structure and ‘feel’ for the designer to work from. After this, I’ll revisit our stores to choose a small selection of the Museum’s commemorative objects to display alongside Londoners’ photographs (I have had a quick look already and had these by my desk):

We’re hoping to also display some of the objects that appear in people’s photographs so I’ll need to speak to our design department to find out what display cases we can use …

A blog post from Jon in our conservation team on the work looking after and preparing our objects for display.

As this years’ intern within the applied arts section of the conservation department at the Museum of London I am very grateful to have been given the exciting opportunity of experiencing the build-up and installation of the Museum’s major new exhibition – Dickens and London.

In the months before installation began, conservators were busy ensuring all the objects and artefacts were suited to being placed on display. Within the new exhibition objects of a range of materials are installed including shop signs from Dickensian London, documents written in Dickens’ own hand and furniture from Dickens’ house.

This required the knowledge and expertise of our whole conservation team, particularly specialists in paper, textiles and the applied arts.

Within the Applied Arts section we work to conserve many artefacts of Victorian social history; however, as an admirer of Dickens it has been incredibly rewarding being able to work on objects with a particularly close connection to the man himself – such as this chair he was often photographed in.

Dickens’ chair is on open display within the new exhibition, so work was required to stabilise and secure the aged leather upholstery, predominantly around the back rest, where the degraded material had begun to laminate and fall away.

In addition to this, surface cleaning was conducted to remove dust.

Modern ethics within the field of conservation maintain that minimal intervention should be practiced when conserving artefacts – this means altering the original material and structure as little as possible, whilst ensuring the object is sturdy enough to be displayed or stored. We also aim to make every process and alteration reversible, so our changes could be ‘undone’ if needed in the future. For Dickens’ chair this meant adhering loose leather with a removable adhesive to consolidate the fragile material.

Historic leather can suffer acidic degradation due to reactions with sulphurous pollutants in the air. Testing the pH of the leather of Dickens’ chair revealed the leather had become particularly acidic – it was therefore thought appropriate to treat the leather with an aluminium compound – a process that effectively re-tans the leather – neutralising acidity and reversing some degradation processes.

Preventive conservation is also a key role of the museum’s conservators and collection care staff. With regards to this we have been carefully monitoring light levels (particularly important where objects such as Dickens’ handwritten manuscripts are displayed!), ensuring the environment within the gallery is suitable for the collections and that the cases are dust free – the latter involving several days spent cleaning the inside and outside of display cases!

It has been brilliant to see the culmination of many people’s knowledge, ideas and skills work together to create such an exciting and enchanting exhibition.

You can hear more about the conservation work at the Museum’s next free ‘meet the expert’ event at 2pm on Wednesday 25 January.

As part of our collections online programme bringing greater online access to our collections over the next three years, including the addition of over 90,000 objects, today sees our collection of tinsel prints go live on our website, just in time for Christmas.

Either search “Theatrical tinsel portraits” to browse the collection or you can access them directly using this link.

Here our Project Assistant, Ellie, provides her perspective on some of the prints she has recently been working with:

During the nineteenth century, London’s theatres were a popular medium. Whole genres of popular plays would develop and protests were carried out when theatre prices rose. Theatre-goers could buy prints of actors playing various roles and soon tinsel prints also became available. Many of the plays included spectacular combat and dramatic sequences, and by adorning prints with paint, fabric and metal foil, theatregoers could convey some of the spectacle of the stage.

One of the collections the museum is putting online is its collection of theatrical tinsel prints. These have been carefully photographed and their museum database records updated. The prints could be intricately detailed, which suggests that they were made by adults. The majority of subjects of tinsel prints are male actors, and a high proportion of these are depicted in combat. Figures in chain mail and armour offered ample potential for the keen tinseller, as the metallic elements of their costumes invited tinsel adornment.

They could use metal foil and fabric, such as these velvet ‘monstrous beasts’. Often tinsel prints depict spectacular moments of drama within a performance. The earlier ones give information about roles, performances and actors. Later on the activity of tinselling became an established pastime and the information about specific performances is printed infrequently.

Most of the items in the museum’s collection come from Jonathan King, who ran a stationary shop in Essex road, Islington. His collection of tinsel prints was especially illustrative, as it gave an account not only of the material cultures of enthusiasm, popular craft and souvenir collecting, but because the prints themselves also include a printed record of London’s theatre during the middle of the nineteenth century. The collection is also significant because it includes items relating to the production of tinsel materials.

This illustration shows how sample sheets were used to decide which colour adornments would be used. The way the imaged is repeated reminds me of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn series (external link).  The repetition of shapes and colours pre-empts the ways that Warhol’s colourful, printed images would later depict the actress as iconic.

The museum’s collection includes a number of actresses, such as this print, which have been adorned. Women feature less often in tinsel prints, perhaps because their costumes didn’t offer as much scope for the tinsel-mad enthusiast. Writers have also speculated that the scarcity of actresses suggests that tinselling was an activity for young boys, who were more interested in dramatic and heroic scenes.

The collection also includes some of the printing plates used to make the penny prints and this one also shows Mrs Daly as Poll Maggot.

Initially tinsel pieces were sold to match the prints, and this stock sheet shows how they were fastened and bundled in packages.

 Dies like these would be used to cut out individual pieces. This bow stamp is from the collection, and looking along the side of the stamp you can see evidence of how hard it must have been struck to shape the metal foil pieces.

The museum’s collection of the tools for tinsel production is very rare. Collections online makes it possible to see the stamps, the tinsel pieces made from them and then to find the pieces on the finished tinsel print.

You can read Ellie’s first blog post on her work here.

Hello, my name is Andrew Fetherston, and I have just started working at the London Archaeological Archive and Research Centre (LAARC) as the new Archaeological Records (Digital) Officer, having spent nearly two years as the Digital Archivist at The National Archives. I’ll be taking over from Joanna Wylie, who is heading back to New Zealand in the new year after 3 and a half years of accessioning, archiving and preserving London’s digital archaeological collections. Which means I’ve got exactly 3 weeks to try and distil over 3 years of Joanna’s knowledge, skills and experience into something I can understand!! Still, New Zealand’s not that far away really, when you think about it, and you can do wonders with Skype nowadays, so I’m sure it will all be fine.

Anyway, as part of my training, I’ve been let loose on the LAARC blog, possibly just to see if I can use a computer (so far so good), but also to say a little bit more about LAARC and the role of Archaeological Records (Digital) Officer.

An archaeological archive differs from a traditional archive as it includes both records (in various forms and formats: paper, photographic, digital) and finds. At the LAARC, we accept archives relating to archaeological projects undertaken in the Greater London area, and I will be responsible for managing the digital records that are received as part of these archives.

Archaeology (old stuff) and digital (new stuff) seem odd bed-fellows, but in reality modern archaeological excavations can generate huge amounts of digital data. These can include relatively common digital records such as reports, spreadsheets and digital photographs, to more specialised formats such as GIS (Geographical Information Systems), Geophysics and CAD files.

As well as managing and providing access to these records, I will also be involved in assigning site or ‘project’ codes to new archaeological projects in London, assisting in responding to external enquiries about our collection, keeping our website and collection databases up-to-date, blogging about our work, and helping with the LAARC’s outreach activities.

However, my very next task is to help decorate the traditional LAARC Christmas gingerbread house – an Archaeological Records (Digital) Officer’s work is never done!

Previous incarnation of the traditional LAARC Christmas gingerbread house

The Museum has a collection of over 4,000 17th century trade tokens, 1,800 of which Verity, one of our team of Project Assistants , is getting ready to go online:

Trade tokens were issued between 1648 and 1673 at a time when there was little low denomination coinage being issued by the crown.

As a result traders and business proprietors began issuing tokens as an alternate coinage with equivalent denominations of usually of a farthing, half penny or penny.

On rare occasions higher denominations were issued, in the collection we have two-penny tokens and a sixpence.

On the token could be represented a variety of things including, the issuers name, business (written or depicted as a sign- buildings didn’t have numbers, so signs were used to recognise them), and the date of issue.

Tokens would be accepted by other businesses in the area which would be collected and then exchanged for the equivalent silver coinage from the issuer.

Part of the process of getting the collections online included having all the trade tokens scanned. We were lucky enough to have an excellent team of volunteers that scanned the trade tokens, as well as weighing and measuring them. This has allowed us to gather and display a lot more information about them than we otherwise would.

It left me free to update the records, which involved using existing catalogues, as well as re-examining the tokens to check inscriptions and signs to provide the correct information about a token; it also gave me the time to do some additional research into issuers and the places of issue which provided some fascinating contextual information.

The location of issue for the tokens has involved some interesting research using a variety of sources; mainly the changing names of streets and areas around London over the past few hundred years. Whilst many street names have remained for centuries, some have changed to reflect the changing trades and ownership apparent in some areas. These need to be researched to allow us to place the location of issue of a token as accurately as possible.

We’ve already got a small amount of trade tokens online, in The Great Fire of London 1666 collection. The first batch of trade tokens I have been working on should be online soon and I will be getting the rest of the 4,000 ready to go online next year.

In the meantime I’ll be working on Roman samian ware, so look out for my next blog post about the variety of artwork on Roman samian.

Sue Neaves, Programme Manager (Family Learning) is just about to start reading (or rather re-reading) A Christmas Carol for our Dickens Book Club. Here are Sue’s initial thoughts:
With its message of hope A Christmas Carol is an obvious Christmas choice quite apart from the setting.
Some people don’t like reading Dickens. They say it is complicated, full of exaggerated characters and unlikely coincidences; just like real life, then.
Please persevere. If you doubt that life is full of colourful characters and people behaving in extraordinary and ridiculous ways then you must come from a somewhat sheltered background. I think many of us find the world both more ghastly and more hilarious than that of fiction.
Another charge levelled against Dickens is his sentimentality. Well, what’s wrong with that? Dickens was not afraid to appeal to people’s emotions, rather than intellect, and used any means at his disposal. If he was writing today, he would doubtless recognise that his audience was different and use lots of horror and gore, but back then he knew what would work best with his readers. He was happy to bring a tear to the eye. Today this is uncool, but Dickens was not in the ‘cool’ business. Hurrah! I’ve never been a fan of cool (fortunately for me, some would say).
So what am I expecting to find? Things I most remember are dark episodes that never make it into the films and shows; if anything these were my favourites.
I’m looking forward to thrilling to the tireless rallying call to arms in support of those in need. You can’t read Dickens and feel easy about institutions set up for the ‘benefit’ of society – either then or now.
And I’m hoping that, as I’m older and wiser, I’ll be able to stomach Tiny Tim this time.
If CC makes you feel Christmas-y, don’t forget to visit our Victorian Santa’s grotto at Museum of London Docklands, which transforms into Scrooge’s Grotto after Christmas. “God bless us….” no, can’t quite do it yet.
You can follow Sue’s thoughts as she progresses through A Christmas Carol via our bespoke Twitter and Facebook pages and share your thoughts and opinions here too!Our Dickens Book Club is in support of our new exhibition, Dickens and London, opening 9 December 2011.

Now that our reading of The Mystery of Edwin Drood has come to an end Records Manager, Sarah Demb, shares her final thoughts and experiences on completing this unfinished work.

In truth, I find Dickens a difficult read, although I’m a voracious reader of maximalist fiction and devoted to fictional London, which informs my immigrant experience of the city almost as much as my daily life. But I had to force myself through this short novel (I highly recommend Dan Simmons’ ‘Drood’- his fictionalisation vision of events that could have inspired the writing of the book as Dickens and his friend, author Wilkie Collins, confound each other in nightly escapades and attempt to identify the mysterious Drood, who us far more menacing than the innocent victim in Dickens’ story).

Reader, I was only truly interested in two characters, those whose relationship seemed to have tension and spark, namely Edwin and Rosa, betrothed at the behest and bequests of their respective deceased fathers.

I wanted so much to like the entire book, but only Rosa’s character really drew me in, with her passionate energy and desire to be honest in her emotional dealings.

Did Dickens do this on purpose? Discuss…

True to his serialist origins, the central mystery of Edwin’s disappearance (although to me the real mystery is what Jasper is up to and why his opium supplier shows up in Cloisterham) doesn’t occur until over half way through the book, which I think might drag even if it wasn’t unfinished, although the undercurrent of menace that Jasper exudes kept me hanging on.

As we know, Dickens died before completing the book, so perhaps it all would have made more sense had he finished the novel.

You can read Sarah’s blog post as she began her reading of The Mystery of Edwin Drood here.

Dickens and London, a new exhibition from the Museum of London opens 9 December.