Much activity in the Shed

There is much activity in the Shed. There is a new bay at the back, behind the peppercorn tree in this photo. You can just see where it starts if you look at the slightly newer roofing.

Inside the shed, there is chaos. But only in the front section, where George is working his usual miracles as he sorts. The new bay is the other side of the internal roller-door.

In the new section, the shelving is slowly going up, and our storage boxes are going into order. These contain objects only, as they are not archivally safe, so we are slowly moving paper-based items into better boxes, and hopefully soon the textiles as well. But these have been wonderful for sorting.

And the chairs! Aaah, the chairs. To have them in order like that is heaven! And will be even better when we hang labels off them with large numbers written on them. Next step - issue a letter to each bay, and stocktake the items on the lower levels.

New Cataloguing Year

Happy New Cataloguing Year!

We keep our figures according to the financial year - it is too busy at the end of the year.

This is one of the latest items catalogued:

This toy dog was recently donated by Peter Vranek of Stratford, in response to our call for loans and donations for our current display of toys. Peter carried him away from his home as a displaced person, aged four, during WWII, taking it on a long walk through the mountains, and had it with him in the DP camp, and on his final journey to Australia. It has now found a new home at Stratford Historical Society. We are still working on the final catalogue entry - as we have to obtain details of his country of origin, how far he was carried, and on what ship he arrived.

Looking at our figures, Stratford now has 3257 items in its catalogue, 2093 have photos attached (625 are scans of archival photos, 161 of them are digital photos only).

We haven't posted our stats for a while - the last time was on 14 November 2009, when we had 2808 items in the catalogue - an increase of 449 entries for the year, which is pretty good.