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!