Logistics and Other Frightening Ideas

As of today, I have officially put my hands on all the materials. The lion’s share of the items is printed photos, some with accompanying negatives, some without, as well as slides, contact sheets with and without negatives (or negatives with and without any kind of printed image), and even a small handful of CDs with digital images (I presume – I haven’t loaded them into a ‘droid yet). My next goal is to focus on one particular group (probably faculty) and begin to determine how they should be stored – regardless of medium - with the aim of ease of search and retrieval. I’ve started a spreadsheet with headers that I think might be of value (medium, data, event, individuals, etc.), but I’m starting to think about the possibility of programming a simple database in MySQL and PHP, as that might facilitate future materials logging, searching, and report generation. Upon initial consideration, reports might seem like overkill, but say (for example) someone of significance to the school passes away, receives a major promotion, or something of similar import . Running a report to generate a list of photos that person appeared in and where they are stored might give the Communications Department an easy tool to help them create press releases or stories for various publications.

I’ve also looked over the results of the Survey Monkey survey I created and half of the Communications staff has responded. The preponderance of need appears to be for actual photographs, with negatives and contact sheets next in importance, and slides bringing up the rear. In some ways, this will make the slides easier to deal with, as they are all of pretty much the same size (aside from a few medium format slides) and slide storage could be fairly quickly calculated. On the down side, most of the slides have no identifiers, so I might have to see if I can get hold of a loupe (easy) and a light table (not so easy).

I’m also starting to think about an efficient manner of physically labeling these items. Photos can be (and some have been) labeled on the back with a brief description and perhaps a unique identifier that will link it back to the database (or spreadsheet). Slides could also be labeled this way, but the labels would have to be much smaller, possibly requiring an abbreviated description (or none at all). PrintFile has 35mm archival slide labels (amongst many other very useful photographic storage solutions), with 84 labels per sheet, so it’s definitely a possibility. They also carry archival quality general purpose labels, which would work for the individual photos. For contact sheets (with or without accompanying negatives), perhaps a larger label could be used to identify significant images and also include a unique identifier for the sheet. Negatives alone might be a stickier wicket, as even identifying individuals would be more difficult than it would on slides. I will attempt to match up orphaned negatives with photos, but failing that, perhaps it might be worthwhile to see if the Communications Department would want to invest in contact sheets for those negatives (provided it’s not cost prohibitive).

More later - as I have been writing this, my brain is incubating more ideas (h/t to LB for suggesting that I’m an incubator and not a procrastinator).