Online Databases

Online databases are a great way for Historical Societies to promote both their collections and their organisation. 

Including records in a online database allows researchers to know about the range of items held by your organisation as well as specific items that may be useful for their research. In some cases the use of an online database may be the first time researchers become aware of the existence of your organisation. Researchers can then contact you for information on viewing or obtaining copies of items.

Participation in an online cataloguing project encourages standardisation of cataloguing in the use of fields required to adequately catalogue items. Using a thesaurus when selecting subjects makes it easier for researchers to locate items on a specific topic. One such online thesaurus is the Australian Pictorial Thesaurus.

Further discussion on this topic can be found here.

Old Gippstown Cataloguers

Happy Cataloguing New Year

Not only is it the start of the New Financial Year, it is also a time whereby the Collection Management Team stops and takes stock of its stats.

But first, here is one of the photographs that we have catalogued recently - babies are a bit on our minds.

We would like to think this is a first photograph of Dr J.M.Andrew of Yallourn - but we are not quite sure. But we do like the pram.

Now to the serious stuff - the stats.

Last year, at this time, we had 7763 items in our catalogue. This year we have 8361, an increase of 598. Of those items, 5274 have a photograph attached to the record. Overall pretty jolly good. We have a team of eight specialists - five who catalogue, a specialist curator, a specialist photographer and a very specialist logistics. We could not survive without logistics! Plus a couple of "associates" like Rob and Glenn, who we almost count as ours.

Well done, Team.