Month 13 (July 2012)
One year down, one to go!
Landscape, Varallo' - a scene from Butler's Italian travels
Having passed the halfway mark in the Butler project, I’ve been planning our activities for the coming year. Dates have been set for future events, which will include a second Butler Day, this time themed on Butler's travels (in January 2013), and a celebration towards the end of the Project (in May 2013).
I’ve also begun work on our Butler Map – a brand new online resource that will enable you to view Samuel Butler’s iconic photographs on a real world map, and compare Butler’s individual take on the places he visited more than 100 years ago with images captured in our own time. To achieve this, we’ll be using Historypin, another Heritage Lottery Funded project, which already provides access to photographic collections from institutions all over the world. Our Historypin ‘channel’ is here, and we’ll begin uploading images in the coming weeks, so keep an eye on it.
The battered binding on Butler's family album (X/1)
This month we’ve also had two work experience volunteers, helping to digitize and catalogue Butler’s family photograph album (X/1). This is an important item in the collection, revealing much about Butler’s relationship to his family and acquaintances, but it’s in a very fragile state, with the album itself beyond repair and some of the pictures suffering from the acidic paper mounts they’ve been stuck in for over a century. Before sending the album for conservation we had to document its current condition fully, which involved photographing each page and cataloguing the contents in as much detail as possible. The album will now go to the Conservation Consortium, where the photographs will be carefully removed and rehoused in a new, conservation-grade album, and the remains of the original binding will be cleaned up and boxed for preservation. It’s likely we’ll find notes on the backs of some of the photos, which we haven’t been able to see while they’ve been mounted in the album – so I’ll look forward to discovering who some of the people are, and updating the catalogue accordingly! [See Month 17 for an update.]
A page inside the album (X/1/20)