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Project Narrative - Stage two: 1994-1997:
originals into "deep storage", first experiences with comprehensive
cataloguing
At the end of the first stage new sources of financial
support had to be found for the work. Partly because of the
size and potential significance of the project, and partly
in order to pursue the search for funds, an Academic Advisory
Board (Table 3c) was set up under the chairmanship of Professor
Martin Schaffner (History Department, University of Basel),
and this body was, indeed, able to secure substantial support
for our work from foundations promoting teaching and research
in the University of Basel. It was at this stage, too, that
we were very much heartened to receive substantial support
from the Getty Grant Program in California.
On their return
from the rephotographing process the original photographs
were rearranged according to their archival shelf-marks and
returned to our air-conditioned strong-room. Our new conservation
and access policy was implemented (see chapter 4 below). In
the second stage of the project we began work on the more
detailed cataloguing, including all the dimensions of information
which were to be included in the final database (see chapter
3 below). Responding to the University of Basel’s concern
to build up teaching and research in African History we decided
to carry out this cataloguing in the following sequence: Cameroon,
Ghana, China, India, Europe, Indonesia. However, at an early
stage we also catalogued a substantial body of China photographs,
in order to be sure that cataloguing criteria, which were
being developed in an intensive process of study of the African
photographs, could be applied to images from Asia also.
The cataloguing process was supported by constant reference to
written materials in the Basel Mission Archive. This made
it possible to aim at precise and detailed identifications
of the photographs and their contents. However, this link
with the MS archive did present us with three considerable
problems. Firstly the MS archive is large - there are, for
example, ca. 50 metres of shelving containing the main series
of missionaries’ reports from overseas up to 1914. It is also
a record created under difficulties in a bygone age - its
data is sometimes inconsistent, and often needs careful interpretation.
The danger was clear: exhaustive searches for information
on photographs and the situations they record would take too
long. We had, therefore, to restrict the cataloguing process
to clear procedures using certain classes of information only,
above all, the registers of mission personnel with their dates
of overseas service.
The second problem was that the Basel
Mission archive has always attracted a large number of readers,
and the new facility for studying photographs increased this
attractiveness. The networking which developed between project
staff and visitors to the archive, with their special fields
of expertise, was interesting. But measures had to be adopted
to control the flow of the latter in order to allow project
work to continue at an appropriate speed.
Thirdly the interests
of users of the archive are wide, and we realised from the
start that our access tools would have to be designed to be
used (a) by people from many different academic disciplines,
(b) by academics and non-academics, and (c) by people of very
different cultural backgrounds. Thus on the one hand we decided
to use English as the language for the cataloguing. But we
also realised that existing keyword systems for anthropology
and art history in English were not adequate for our purposes
(see chapter 3 below). Not least for this reason, stage two
of the project started with an exploratory period of free
and open cataloguing. This moved, however, into a sometimes
difficult period of systematisation once the database was
large enough to allow preliminary editing.
In this second phase of the
project we continued to use the flat-file database
Q&A. It proved to be stable and to perform well
within the parameters it offered, but its relatively primitive
editorial functions slowed us down severely once we began to
attempt to systematise our use of place-names, keywords etc.
This motivated us, from 1994 on, to evaluate alternative
software, including special applications which existed for
museums. We decided eventually to commission Thomas Arnold,
who had already done work of this kind for the Cantonal
Archive in Basel, to design an application of Microsoft
ACCESS for our purposes. Our choice fell on
ACCESS because this software costs relatively little,
but fulfilled our needs, and is a widely recognised standard
in the computer industry. It is also clearly no cul de
sac. Its scope of activity can be extended
via an SQL Server into an internet application, for example.
The finished database system, containing the cataloguing work
which had been done up to that point and which had been transferred
into the new software, was handed over to the project leadership
in the spring of 1997.
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