Our Picture Archive is now Online - Dartmouth Museum

By: Dartmouth Museum
Added: 14 May 2012

It's been no end of a slog. New web projects often are. Since we went live on 29 July 2011 on our very own web site we've been "going to get our picture archive online", and we've just completed phase 1.

We have put a representative sample of pictures from our five main archive boxes online. That meant choosing valid pictures that aren't just another view of a South Devon Town, working out if we knew enough about them to say something valid about them, crafting the text and also finding useful or at least interesting links to put in the articles about the pictures.

More than one picture has thrown up a mystery, so we've asked for folk to hep us when we're out of information. One picture shows what is probably the start of the first ever Tall Ships Race. That isn't obvious in our archives. We found that out when we researched the picture online.

Some pages have become references for items in Wikipedia articles because of the extra citable information we hold. Other pages have used Wikipedia to flesh out what is in them.

Some pictures link together to make a trail around the town. We'll try to get one of our trail experts working in that. Or, maybe you would like to volunteer to do that? You'll be more than welcome. Just get in touch.

The final stage of phase 1 we completed at half past midnight on 14 May! We realised that our photo archive index was unwieldy. It worked fine as a tool for us and you while we were putting stuff online, but as a finished page it was poor. So our hardworking volunteer web gurus split ot down into manageable chunks and provided navigation between the chunks.

It's good fun. Come and take a look.