Testing, testing ...

Well. this is it! After months of working out the logistics we're finally meeting with the designers today to test the app in all its glory! It's really exciting wandering up and down Guildford Street seeing it in action. Got a few weird looks from passers by, and felt a bit like The Dr. with his sonic screwdriver, holding up the phone to random buildings. It has been constructive though, as it has highlighted the difficulties with accurately pinpointing the location using Google maps. It isn't possible to rely on the locations given by the internet, you really need to know what building you're looking for - simple when you know what business is in the shop now, not so easy when the building has been demolished!

Exhibition installation

It's always a mad panic when it's exhibition change over time, but this one seems more so than usual. Unfortunately the new picture frames we ordered with the grant have been delayed by 10 days, which means we have 2 days to install the exhibition ahead of the private view. Whose idea was it to put up over 100 photos, especially when they are have new frames which need mirror plates added before installation - that's a total of 400 holes to drill in 48 hours!

So, it's all hands on deck. Volunteers have been brought in to help clean old backing paper off display cases, the gallery smells of Windolene and vinegar, and the sound of drilling is constant.

But, finally, after a truly team effort the exhibition is up and open to the public.

Funny how it's never so simple!

It’s funny how the smallest things can have a knock on affect – regardless of how well thought out you thought they were! The implications on having the museum app have started to hit home. The most significant one involving changes to our Adlib collections database.

Chertsey Museum has had a computer collections database created by Adlib for the last 15 years or more. In recent years we have started adding images of objects to their computer record and 3 years ago we completed the digitisation of all our photographic archive. We have now photographed all our art and social history objects, the majority of our costume collection and we have started scanning documents. This work is part of a long term project to have a publicly accessible version of the database online some time in early 2013.

As with other museum databases, the information recorded is pertinent to the object, but some of the records are more detailed than others. When the museum first opened in 1965 we were inundated with objects to sort thorough and catalogue. Procedures were different back then, and the museum was run solely but volunteers. As a result, only basic information was recorded on the record cards. Over time, however, staff became paid professionals and museum standards improved and so now we know we have to record as much information as possible. It’s helped that we tend to get given small groups of objects and not thousands all at once!

As we are a small museum we haven’t had the time to go back through all the photographs, for example, and add extra information to the record. As a result there are photos which just have “black & white photo of Guildford Street, Chertsey”, for example, as the object description. Whilst a generic database search for Guildford Street would bring up this object, it might well have a specific shop in it which wasn’t noted at the time. So, this project is a great opportunity to fill in some of that detail, to identify the shops in street scenes, and thereby be better able to date the image too. This will make our working database, and the online public version, much more useful.

However, for the purposes of the app users are not going to want to know about the photograph as an object, they are going to want to know about the history of the building shown. So more information will be needed. Thankfully we have that information at hand as for the past 20 years we have been undertaking a shop survey of Chertsey every year or two, and a contentious volunteer when through historic trade directories to fill in the gaps. So we have a record of what businesses occupied which premises over time together with information about some of the people and businesses in the town. This makes the task at hand relatively easy as it’s just a case of collating all this information for each photo used on the app.

The quandary arose as to where to place this additional information so that it can be accessed by app users. The app will run as an add-on to the public access database on our website so all the additional information has to in-putted there, but as we will continue to add objects to the museum collection we need to be able to upload a new version every so often and therefore the additional app information will have to put on the main database too. This fundamentally alters the nature of it as, up until this point, the database has purely been for information relating to the actual object and not about the subject of the object. Whilst it can be argued that all additional information will beneficial to us when using Adlib in the museum to help researcher, it would cease to be a collections database.

After much discussion with the guys at Surface Impression and at Adlib it has been decided that we should create new fields will be used for just for the app. So, the photo of Cartwright’s jewellers shop at 106 Guildford Street, for example, will be available with two different descriptions: one for the online database with a description of the photo, and one for the app with information about Cartwright and the shop. Phew – dilemma solved!

Help is at hand

The enormity of the project is just beginning to hit me. You know how it is when you're discussing something with an expert and they make it sound oh so easy? That little phrase, 'and then you just get the longitude/latitude marker' - makes it all sound so simple! Thankfully, Aoife Hegarty, a history MA student at Royal Holloway University, came to us last month and offered to volunteer.

Luckily for us, and Aoife, Chertsey Museum has been recording shop details for the past 15 or more years. Every year one of our volunteers walks up and down Guildford Street and London Street making a note of the names and trade of each of the shops. This has been supplemented at some point in the past by research from trade directories and other sources in our collection to give an idea of the changing shops of the town right back to the 17th and 18th century. So, researching the businesses wasn't quite as time consuming as it could have been. However, it turns out that 'just' getting the lat/long marker isn't as quick as it sounds, made all the more tricky by some of the building having been demolished! Still, it's all part of the process and the more people working on the project we're making good progress.

Initial thoughts

Well, soon after we received notification of the grant we got ourselves down to Brighton where our web developers, Surface Impression (www.surfaceimpression.com), are based. It was good to hit the ground running and discuss initial thoughts about how it will work. Now all we have to do is provide Surface Impression with 10 text records by the end of the year

Right up our street

We are very pleased to announce that The Friends of Chertsey Museum have received funding for an exciting new Chertsey Museum App.

Work has already started on developing a app which will enable users to view items in the museum’s photographic collection whilst on the move. The project has been made possible by a Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) All Our Stories grant enabling us to increase public engagement with the museum collections. As part of the grant appliation we have promised to keep a digital record of the project - hence this blog!

The project will initially focus on the shops and offices in Chertsey and the app will be free to download and users will be able to click on the link and instantly see how the shops in the town have changed over time. We aim to have the app available in mid May 2013 to coincide with an exhibition on shops and shopping - so watch this space.

www.chertseymuseum.org.uk