Month: October 2007

Elephants Never Forget: The Elephant of the Pagoda

/ Jane Stevenson

Illustration of elephant
Above: Illustration from the 1840s, showing an elephant in the Cirque National, Paris. Submitted by Jan Pimblett of London Metropolitan Archives.

THE BIG DRAW. The Campaign for DrawingThis October the Archives Hub is taking part in The Big Draw. We want you to make drawings inspired by archives – or by elephants! – scan them or photograph them, and then email the digital versions to us. We’ll give an Archives Hub notepad and propelling pencil to everyone who sends us a drawing, and the first name out of the pith helmet will receive some paper made from elephant pooh! If you send us your postal address, we won’t use it for anything else.

Elephants Never Forget: Grace

/ Jane Stevenson

Elephant drawing
Above: elephant drawing by Grace Wild, aged 9.

THE BIG DRAW. The Campaign for DrawingThis October the Archives Hub is taking part in The Big Draw. We want you to make drawings inspired by archives – or by elephants! – scan them or photograph them, and then email the digital versions to us. We’ll give an Archives Hub notepad and propelling pencil to everyone who sends us a drawing, and the first name out of the pith helmet will receive some paper made from elephant pooh! If you send us your postal address, we won’t use it for anything else.

Elephants Never Forget: Elephant Boy

/ Jane Stevenson

Elephant and Sabu
Above: Submitted by Jenny Clark of Loughborough University: "This is a sketch based on a photograph from the Norman Swindin Collection in Loughborough University Archives. Swindin was a chemical engineer. The photograph the drawing is based on was taken during the making of the film Elephant Boy, (London Films, 1937), starring Sabu. At Swindin’s suggestion the vulcanised rubber spray made by his company, Nordac, was used to produce suitable rubber ‘elephant hide’ for a life size model elephant to be used in the rampage scene. 400 miniature rubber elephants were also made to represent a distant herd. When Swindin went to the first showing of the film he couldn’t spot a single fake! Nordac was later asked to make a rubber whale for Moby Dick but, sadly, had to decline."

THE BIG DRAW. The Campaign for DrawingThis October the Archives Hub is taking part in The Big Draw. We want you to make drawings inspired by archives – or by elephants! – scan them or photograph them, and then email the digital versions to us. We’ll give an Archives Hub notepad and propelling pencil to everyone who sends us a drawing, and the first name out of the pith helmet will receive some paper made from elephant pooh! If you send us your postal address, we won’t use it for anything else.

Elephants Never Forget: Here be elephants

/ Jane Stevenson

Elephant drawing
Elephant painting
Above: Two elephants, by Brook Community School Hackney. Submitted by Jan Pimblett of London Metropolitan Archives.

THE BIG DRAW. The Campaign for DrawingThis October the Archives Hub is taking part in The Big Draw. We want you to make drawings inspired by archives – or by elephants! – scan them or photograph them, and then email the digital versions to us. We’ll give an Archives Hub notepad and propelling pencil to everyone who sends us a drawing, and the first name out of the pith helmet will receive some paper made from elephant pooh! If you send us your postal address, we won’t use it for anything else.

Hub contributors are on the map!

/ Jane Stevenson


Here at the Hub we have been working on creating a Google Maps mash-up for the past few weeks, and it is finally live on the Hub and accessible from our repositories page at http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/inst/index.html

It uses an XML document that lists each contributor with their latitude and longitude in order to create the markers – you can see the XML page at http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/inst/locations.xml if you are interested in such things.

The main HTML page simple links to the XML page and includes the script and information about the map itself.

I tried doing this first of all just using the instructions and examples given on the Google Maps API but after a fairly lengthy process of creating the document (I didn’t find the instructions that easy to get my head round) I ended up with the mystery of the disappearing markers…I found that when I displayed the map random markers would appear at different times. So, i would refresh the page and Exeter disappeared, refresh again and Aberdeen disappeared!

After struggling with this problem and posting to the web-support jiscmail list to get some help, which was unfortunately not forthcoming, I abandoned that approach and found another site that offered a better Google Maps API tutorial. This showed me how to create a simple XML document with each element containing the label, link and co-ordinates for the contributor.

I ended up with a lovely map, displaying all the information correctly…but I had been viewing it in Firefox browser, and when I tried in Internet Explorer I got half a map that was centered around the middle of France! So unless we quickly introduced some contributors from the continent, it was looking rather odd. I could only seem to solve this by abandoning part of the Hub navigation in order to lessen the number of tables that the map was contained within, and that did the trick for IE.

We can add further information and images to the map if we want to, and if we find we have the time to do this, but we are quite pleased with our first attempt.