BallasttrustUnderstanding Technical Archives

Annual Review2012-2013

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Key achievements in 2012-13

• Publication of A History of the Ballast Trust to mark the 25th Anniversary

• Visit from Annabel Goldie MSP and a motion in support of the Ballast Trust raised in the Scottish Parliament

Image: Bill Lind and workforce at Morefield Quarry in Ullapool, 1060

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Contents Directors Report 4About Us 5Work in Progress 6Projects 8Awareness Raising 10 Presentations, Participations and Publications 13

Image: Midship Section plan for SS Magpie built by A & J Inglis, 1898

Director’s Report

December 2012 marked 25 years since the foundation of the Ballast Trust by Dr Lind. This milestone has appropriately been celebrated by the publication of a brief history of the Ballast Trust compiled by the Archivist and Director. This has had a wide circulation and has been favourably received. The foundation of the work of the Trust remains the apparently inexhaustible supply and volume of technical business archives to be house, described, classified and returned to a parent repository. At the present time, some 43 separate collections are held by the Ballast Trust. Work on five of these has been completed, and work is in progress on another 14 collections. This volume of activity stretches our manpower and resources, and inevitably leaves work yet to be undertaken on another 19 collections. A further three collections are held pending a decision on action to be taken when agreed between the Trust and the owners.

In the course of the year we accepted 17 new accessions, five of these being small additions to the large Ferguson Shipbuilders collection. Of the five collections on which work has been completed, four are the responsibility of Glasgow City Archives with whom we are in negotiation for their return. The remaining collection is of Cody Images which will be collected by the firm once the processing report has been completed. Our working and storage space has been eased by two successful deaccessions. An estimated ten tonnes of marine engine plans and documentation has been transferred to Tyne and Wear Archive Services, since the collections were of north-east coast firms that had been part of British Shipbuilders Clark-Kincaid engine builders based in Greenock after nationalisation. In addition the Clifton & Baird collection has been substantially returned to Glasgow University Archive Services. This high level of activity has been possible through the core staff being supported by seven regular volunteers and a further six temporary volunteer and student placements. Student placements seeking work experience with technical archives is becoming an increasingly popular and important source of volunteer labour for the Trust. The work in progress for each staff member and volunteer is detailed below in the report.

This year has been one of great activity for our Archivist, Kiara King. She has made nine presentations to various conferences, seminars and local history groups, in addition to her continuing high level of involvement in implementing the National Strategy for Business Archives in Scotland. This also involves her with the Data Mapping Project and the new initiative of the Working Archive awareness campaign. She, her staff, and the volunteers are to be congratulated no their commitment and professionalism. The Trustees have once more been supportive and encouraging of all the work at Walkinshaw Street. The director gratefully acknowledges their support.

Professor A SlavenDirector

The Ballast TrustApril 2013

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About Us

The Ballast Trust is a charitable foundation that provides a rescue, sorting and cataloguing service for business archives with an emphasis on technical records such as shipbuilding, railway and engineering plans, drawings and photographs.

The Director of the Ballast Trust is Professor Anthony Slaven.

The Ballast Trust has three members of staff; Kiara King (Archivist), Delaine Colquhoun (Archive Assistant), and Duncan Winning (Archive Assistant).

We are supported by our regular volunteers Campbell Cornwell, Andrew Swan, Stephen Hall, Stuart Rankin, Andrew Eadie, David McDonald and Nicola Maksymuik.

Placements & Temporary Volunteers during 2012/13 included Heather Anderson, Stacey Kerfoot, Rebecca Lough, Dawn Sinclair, James Sloan and Adele Tamar.

Image: Rolled shipbuilding plans at the Ballast Trust

Work in Progress

Kiara KingSurveying the records of Andrew Kay & Co. Ltd, curling stone manufacturers in Mauchline.

Delaine ColquhounEstablishing provenance for Lind Ship Models Sorting and listing Lind Correspondence for Glasgow University Archive Services. Rolling and numbering Montague Smith plans for National Records of Scotland.

Duncan WinningCataloguing British Rail civil engineering plans for National Records of Scotland. Developed detailed retention guidance on Doxford marine engines for Tyne & Wear Archive Services.

Campbell CornwallCataloguing Caledonian Railway drawings from the collection of pre-1923 railway drawings for the National Records of Scotland. Appraised and listed locomotive photographs for Cody Images (a private stock photography archive located in Beith). Sorting and listing the Kenneth Kirkwood McKay slide collection (a private collection of transport photography).

Andrew Swan Cataloguing Caledonian Railway drawings from the collection of pre-1923 railway drawings for the National Records of Scotland.

Stephen Hall Cataloguing additions to the Donaldson Line collection for Glasgow City Archives. . Catalogued the records of George Stewart & Co. Ltd for Edinburgh City Archives. Box listed and appraised the Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering Co. Ltd negative collection for Glasgow University Archive Services.

Stacey KerfootCatalogued drawings for the Caledonian Railway Association.

James SloanVolunteered as part of the Project Scotland scheme and carried out a variety of tasks. This ranged from data entry of the index cards, design of publicity materials and reports, researching collections and producing reports and case studies on them, digitisation of archive materials and promoting collections via social media.

Dawn SinclairCatalogued drawings for the Caledonian Railway Association.

Stuart RankinCatalogued Highland Railway and Great North of Scotland drawings from the collection of pre-1923 railway drawings for the National Records of Scotland. Catalogued Andrew Barclay plans for Glasgow University Archive Services. Identified and catalogued photographs from Andrew Barclay collection for Glasgow University Archive Services.

Rebecca LoughVolunteered as part of the Project Scotland scheme and carried out a variety of tasks. These included creating new and updating existing datasets, communicating with our user community via Flickr and our blog, answering enquiries and providing support with tasks related to a National Strategy for Business Archives in Scotland.

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Andrew EadieListing and appraising the business headed notepaper collection to identify items for digitisation.

Adele TamarPlacement volunteer for the University of Glasgow archives course. Catalogued the Hanna, Donald & Wilson collection for Glasgow University Archive Services.

Heather AndersonPlacement for post-course experience. Catalogued items in the Edinburgh City Engineers collection for Edinburgh City Archives.

David McDonaldPlacement for pre-course experience. Catalogued items in the Edinburgh City Engineers collection for Edinburgh City Archives.

Nicola MaksymuikPlacement for post-course experience. Boxlisting the Scott Sinclair papers. Catalogued items in the Edinburgh City Engineers collection for Edinburgh City Archives.

Deposits and accessions• George Stewart & Co. Ltd (1.5 lm) – PricewaterhouseCooper • Hanna, Donald & Wilson (5 lm) – GUAS• Ferguson Photographs (2 lm) – Fergusons Shipbuilders for GUAS• Rigging Plans for MacKenzie & Niven (0.5 lm) – GUAS• Papers of Mr Macleod relating to North British Locomotive Works (0.5 lm) – GUAS• Sinclair Scott Papers (2 lm) – private individual• Scottish Machine Tool Corporation plans (3 lm) – GUAS• A F Craig plans (1 lm) – GUAS• Andrew Barclay Plans (1 lm) – GUAS• William Cunningham Books and Papers (2 lm) – private individual• Tommy Lusk Papers (2 lm) – private individual

Returns and deaccessions• George Stewarts & Co. Ltd to Edinburgh City Archives• Clifton & Baird Ltd to University of Glasgow Archive Services• Ten tonnes of engineering plans transferred to Tyne and Wear Archive Services.

Four collections belonging to Glasgow City Archives remain at the Ballast Trust completed and ready for collection.• GD1326 Fairfields/Kavaerner/BAE• TD 1347 McAlister• TD 1306 Fairhurst• McKie & Baxter

Image: Engineering plans transferred to Tyne and Wear Archive Services, October 2012

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Projects

National Strategy for Business Archives in ScotlandThe Ballast Trust continues to take a lead role in the implementation of the National Strategy for Business Archives in Scotland throughout 2012/13. The second year of implementation saw the completion of the first stage of the data mapping project, the creation of more case studies to inspire businesses and archives to make the most of their collections and importantly the first ‘meet the archivists’ workshop in Scotland. This workshop was a free event organised to encourage students and academic researchers to make the most of business archive collections.

Working on the strategy and its implementation continues to provide an excellent opportunity for the Ballast Trust to work with partner organisations, make a contribution to strategic thinking about how the business archives sector and places it in the best position to help preserve business archives. One of the first fruits of this initiative has been the Data Mapping Project.

The report and methodology for the Data Mapping Project was published in August on the website of the Scottish Council on Archives. The project identified 6,122 Scottish business archives collections. Subsequent stages of the project are dependent on additional fundraising by the Implementation group. A further initiative stemming from the National Strategy for Business Archives in Scotland is the Working Archive.

The Working Archive is a year-long archive awareness campaign for Scotland launched in April 2013. It is being championed by the Scottish Council on Archives, to support the National Strategy. The Working Archive campaign aims to encourage archives, their users and the public at large to celebrate the heritage of Scotland’s businesses; the records of the products and services they delivered; and the legacy of working Scots of all kinds - whether in business, farming, healthcare, education, the church or government.

The campaign also seeks to illuminate how archivists and archives work. It is an opportunity to raise awareness of the special role that archivists play in communities, and on behalf of the organisations and users they serve. As a member of the implementation group, the Archivist has been involved in the planning and launch of this campaign.

Crisis Management TeamThe Archivist continues to be the Scottish representative on the Crisis Management Team. The team represents all parts of the archive sector to organise agreed responses to business archives under threat and it exists to monitor and assist in steering records at risk into suitable homes.

This year administrators have been approached about the records of six companies. It has not been necessary for the Ballast Trust to take practical actions for any of these collections. The records of George Stewart & Co. Ltd that were saved last year were catalogued and transferred to Edinburgh City Archives.

Knowledge captureThis project aims to document and capture the working practices of the Ballast Trust to share our knowledge of industrial and technical records with others. This year following the transfer of engineering records to Tyne and Wear Archive Services, Duncan prepared for them retention guidelines for Doxford Marine Engines. This company specific guidance will be adapted to create general retention guidelines for engineering records.

We have also shared our experience of cataloguing technical records at an Archives and Records Association training day for archivists in December. The presentation for this can be viewed online via the resources for archivists page of the National Strategy website http://www.scottisharchives.org.uk/projects/business_archives/resources/for_archivists

Electronic cataloguingOur cataloguing software database, the Archivists’ Toolkit continues to work well for us and all new volunteers received training in using it to catalogue collections. Recently there has been a growing community of users in Scotland that we are part of and the archivist has given demonstrations of the Toolkit to several archive repositories in Edinburgh.

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Images: Items from the George Stewart & Co. Ltd collection.

Raising Awareness

Ballast Trust HistoryTo mark the 25th anniversary of the Ballast Trust the Trustees commissioned the director and archivist to write a brief history of the Trust. This was published in January 2013 and has been widely circulated. There has been a very welcome reception and the publication has attracted many very favourable responses and requests for additional copies.

Annual ReportThe annual report was circulated more widely and produced a number of helpful responses. The most positive response came from Annabel Goldie our local area member of the Scottish Parliament. Her interest led to a site visit together with her researcher, and her interest in our work was notably enthusiastic. It was her initiative to seek to raise our profile by submitting a motion to the Scottish Parliament inviting its members to recognise and support the Ballast Trust activities:

Doors Open DayBuilding on last year we participated in our second DOD on Sunday 9th September 2012. On this occasion we created a display to illustrate the stages and procedures followed by the Trust to deal with a collection from its rescue and/or deposit, through to selecting, describing and classifying the material prior to its return to a repository where access could be arranged for its consultation.

Some 44 visitors attended, six of whom were members of the Johnstone Local History Society. They had attended the Archivists’ talk to the society earlier in the year. This response produced another volunteer to assist in the work of the Trust.

That the Parliament notes the work of the Ballast Trust, which is a Renfrewshire-based charitable foundation that provides a rescue, sorting and cataloguing service for business archives with an emphasis on technical records such as shipbuilding, railway and engineering plans, drawings and photographs; understands that, since its establishment in 1987, it has processed technical records on behalf of national and local archive repositories and museums; believes that this has resulted in the Trust, in conjunction with National Records of Scotland, carrying out the vital processing of a huge range of industrial and business archive material; commends its continuing referencing and retention of what it considers a diverse base of historic material that chronicles both industrial and business and social and community activity; applauds what it sees as the dedicated and committed efforts of the Trust’s director, Trustees, staff and volunteers, and praises it on its determined efforts to educate business and professional communities to be mindful of the archive treasures that might be found throughout business premises the length and breadth of Scotland.

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Online PresenceBoth the website and blog have seen a continued increase in visits, with a particularly large increase in visits to the website (statistics shown below). These rose by 63% for visits to the website and 40% for the blog. This year volunteers have been encouraged to blog about the work they are doing and interesting finds. The two sites continue to serve different purposes and their different levels of visitors can been seen in the statistics for the period 1 April 2012 to 31 March 2013.

Visits Unique Visitors Page ViewsWebsite 1,051 804 2,797Blog 3,304 2,744 6,856

We also joined twitter this year @ballasttrust and found it to be a very useful tool for promoting our blog and flickr images.

We continue to receive enquiries via the website or by email and have had a 25% increase in the number of enquiries we received this year with 62 requests for information.

FlickrHaving completed the digitisation and upload of Dan McDonald prints to Flickr last year we have focused this year on uploading images from some of Bill’s miscellaneous collections. We have seen a 42% increase in views of our photostream.

We continue to have an active audience for our images with 86 comments to date on images and nearly 40% of them marked as favourites. As a result we continue to find Flickr to be a valuable tool for sharing images from our collections.

What 2011 2012 2013 IncreaseUploaded images 321 419 621 33%Photostream views (to date) 9,140 20,659 36,106 42%Favourited images 90 160 253 38%

IssuuWe started to use a digital publishing website called Issuu to upload and share pdf versions of the annual reports and also the history online.

This allows us to embed links in the text and provide a more attractive way of reading documents which has been useful for the Ballast Trust history to create links to organisations mentioned in the text. The history has had 1,308 views since it was published online in February 2012.

- 12 -Image: Engine K23 built by John G. Kincaid & Co., Ltd, 1928

Presentations, Participations and Publications

Professor Tony Slaven

Presentations• Attended Business Archives Council of Scotland event - ‘Meet the Archivists’ unlocking the research potential of business archives, Glasgow. 9 November 2012. Paper presented; using business archives for academic research

Participations • Attended opening of the "Marine Technology Special Collection", in School of Marine Science and Technology, University of Newcastle, 23 May 2012.

Publications • Professor A Slaven and K King A History 1987-2012, 2012• Forthcoming British Shipbuilding, 1500-2010: A History, Crucible Books, Carnegie Publishing, June 2013 • Forthcoming with Hugh Murphy Crossing the Bar: An Oral History of British Shipbuilding 1956-1900, Memorial University Newfoundland Research Publication No. 51, June 2013

Kiara King

Presentations• Attended Workshop Archives, Artefacts, Amateurs & Academics, Derby, 20 - 21 April 2012. Spoke about the work of the Ballast Trust,• Attended the Archives & Records Association (Scotland) Conference The Born (Digital) Identity, Stirling, 1 June 2012. Spoke about using Twitter for Archives.• Attended University of Dundee CAIS study school, Dundee, September 2012 to speak to students about business archives.• Spoke at a session about business archives for the University of Glasgow masters’ students, Glasgow, 9 October 2012.• Attended 5th Annual STICK Conference: Cultural Heritage Policy and its impact on industrial and transport heritage, Glasgow, 20 October 2012. Spoke about implementing the National Strategy for Business Archives in Scotland. • Attended Business Archives Council of Scotland event - ‘Meet the Archivists’ unlocking the research potential of business archives, Glasgow, 9 November 2012. Spoke about finding business archive collections online.

Image: Cover of the Ballast Trust history

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Presentations cont.• Attended and organised a training day for the Archives & Records Association (Scotland) on the subject of Technical Records, Glasgow, 4 December 2012. Spoke about how the Ballast Trust catalogues technical records.• Attended the Higher Education Academy Working on Teaching economic and business history in the 21st century Glasgow, 31 January 2013. Spoke about The Scottish Business Archive: Understanding Business Collections.• Spoke to the Glasgow Genealogy Club about the University of Glasgow’s Business Archive Collections, Glasgow, 8 February 2013.

Participations • Attended and organised four National Strategy for Business Archives in Scotland Implementation Group meetings.• Attended three STICK Committee meetings.• Attended three Business Archives Council of Scotland Executive meetings.• Attended International Council on Archives’ Section for Business and Labour Conference Crises, Credibility and Corporate History: tackling the archive’s conflict between scientific history and marketing, Copenhagen, 14-16 April 2012.• Attended the 2nd BEAT Workshop Business in Europe and Asia in the 20th Century, Glasgow, 20 September 2012.• Attended the 2012 Business Archives Council Conference, Born This Way: Business Archives and the Digital Record, London, 8 November 2012.

Publications • Articles on the Ballast Trust anniversary and National Strategy for Business Archives in Scotland submitted to Broadsheet (Monthly magazine of Scottish Council on Archives).• Professor A Slaven and K King A History 1987-2012, 2012.

The Ballast Trust18-20 Walkinshaw StreetJohnstone, PA5 8AB Scottish Charity Number SC008790t: +44 (0)1505 328488 | e: ballasttrust@gmail.comw: www.ballasttrust.org.uk | b: www.ballastblog.blogspot.com | f: www.flickr.com/ballasttrust

TrusteesDr Kenneth Chrystie, ChairmanProfessor John HumeLesley RichmondDouglas Corner

Director: Professor Tony Slaven

Archivist: Kiara King

Secretary: Gordon Shearer McClure Naismith LLP, 292 Saint Vincent Street, Glasgow, G2 5TQ

Scottish Charity Number SC008790