SCANNING PROGRESS
A 'stop press' in 'Omnibus' no.168 recorded the acquisition of a scanner following a grant from MLA West Midland (the Regional Council for Museums, Libraries and Archives), and a brief report followed in the last edition. Here, then, are a few more details about the project.
To start with, some readers might be wondering why acquiring a scanner is such a big deal, when they can buy one at PCs-R-Us for £30. Well yes, you can, and it would be perfectly alright for A4 sheets, but it would probably struggle with the old foolscap (13 inch x 8½ inch) sheets that A4 superseded, let alone full-size engineering drawings.
The scanner that BaMMOT has acquired is a large format machine capable of scanning drawings up to 1 metre wide by any length. It works on a roller principle, a bit like an electric mangle, with the image passing over nine cameras, all in a matter of a couple of seconds for an A0 drawing. It's about eight years old and would have cost over £12,000 when new. Thanks to scanning specialists, Allied Images of Northampton, we were able to acquire the machine and relevant scanning software for just under the £2,000 maximum grant awarded to us.
Initially the scanner has been set up in my office at Lichfield together with a dedicated PC for scanning and saving the images to hard disk. John Rollings initially spent three or four days at the office making a start on scanning the MCW drawings that have already been catalogued. These include vehicles at the Museum such as the Birmingham Standards and the Cheltenham Albion, plus vehicles at other museums or in preservation, such as the West Bromwich single deck Daimler. So far over five hundred drawings have been scanned but there are still thousands to go, mostly BMMO that are not yet catalogued either.
We have also worked out the best way to store the drawings in the space allocated in the new mezzanine. Pete Murphy will be constructing new shelves to hold the drawings in rolls rather than utilizing the old cabinets, which store less and tend to damage the drawing edges each time a drawer is opened. In all probability we will still have drawings left over that won't fit into the space and these will remain stored temporarily on the upper deck of Walsall 815, pending further space becoming available after the new Hall is completed.
Thanks are due to our own John Rollings, Phil Hassell of Allied Images, and Carl Franklin and Philip Kiberd (both of MLA West Midlands) for moving this project forward.
On a separate note, many other BMMO drawings outside of our collection have been catalogued and potentially made available by well-known local preservationist Alf Powick. Alf has also assisted with cataloguing the batch of our BMMO drawings that had previously been commercially scanned by Arrow Imaging of Tamworth. Many of the BMMO drawings are of mechanical parts without any specific indication as to which vehicle they relate to. Alf has been able to bring his considerable knowledge of BMMO vehicles and parts into play by cross-referencing many of these.
Dave Taylor
Chapel Lane, Wythall, Worcs B47 6JX
Tel : 01564 826471 e-mail us
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