Author: Jane Stevenson

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.

Elephants Never Forget

/ Jane Stevenson

Elephant manuscript collage
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.
Above: Elephant. Submitted by A Diamond and P Todd: "No original documents were damaged in the making of this image…"

Elephants Never Forget

/ Jane Stevenson

Little Elephant
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.
Above: Little Elephant, Jacquelene Harris, 18 June 1977. Submitted by Paddy: "this is one of the drawings we found on the plasterwork when we stripped the wallpaper from the bathroom."

Good teaching wins over technology!

/ Jane Stevenson

A news entry on Inside Higher Ed this week refers to students’ use of technology. The fact that they are using ‘more technology than ever’ will come as no surprise, but a report by the Educause Center for Applied Research looks more closely at how students use information technology in college and how it can be harnessed to improve the learning experience.

I was particularly interested in the conclusion that ‘students appear to segment different modes of communication for different purposes.’ The report suggests that e-mail, Web sites, message boards and Blackboard are viable ways of connecting with professors and peers, but this is not so for chat, instant messaging, Facebook and text messages, because students ‘want to protect these tools

EAD: your super flexible friend

/ Jane Stevenson


I’ve just come across the Smithsonian Archives of American Art online collections. This is a wonderful source, with all the archives digitised and available to view. The navigation available on the site is great, with an image viewer allowing the user to scroll through images, enlarge them and navigate through the folders. It seems to me to be a very well designed site, with a clear information architecture enabling the user to drill down to different levels and get a good sense of exactly where they are. I like the way that they have used the mix of text, photographs and drawings. The site is not perfect though – it does fall down on the use of XHTML, which is not valid. I suspect that the Smithsonian have rather more resources available for this sort of project than many of us are lucky enough to get (although the project did receive external funding from the Terra Foundation for American Art).

I was particularly interested in this site because it uses EAD, so it is a great example of the way EAD descriptions can be re-purposed. Whilst for many of us, simple EAD descriptions are all that we have the time and resources to create at present, this shows how using EAD means that we retain the flexibility to create more ambitious sites in the future.

If you go to the ‘finding aid’ link you can see the more traditional EAD description.

Image from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art website, under fair use (for non-commercial purposes).

A diversion into Lakeland

/ Jane Stevenson


Having just returned from a week in the Lake District, I can’t resist digressing somewhat from archival themes. I always use the Wainwright guides to the fells, and this time in particular I really got into reading them. They are really quite an astonishing achievement – seven books covering all of the peaks, with detailed information, sketches, views and charming and amusing anecdotes. My favourite of the moment is a description of a route up to Pike o’Stickle, ‘a continuously steep and unpleasant scramble in prickly, unstable scree, and of interest only to searchers after stone axes…In a buttoned up plastic mac, the ascent is purgatory.’ (A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells: The Central Fells, originally published 1958). I wonder about this observation, as Wainwright wasn’t the plastic mac type – more the tweed jacket and pipe type. I should say that in general he writes very movingly about the beauty of the hills – but if a walk is dull and lacks interest he is happy to say so! Anyway, the books are true works of art, and the astonishing thing is that right from the start he planned how long each book would take, decided that the whole labour of love would take 13 years, and he finished one week ahead of schedule! When you think about all the plans and charts and meetings and reschedulings and so forth that so often happen with work projects, I think it is a wonderful achievement that he just made a decision and carried it out so remarkably punctiliously and successfully.

I did fall to wondering whether there is an archive of Wainwright’s papers. I believe that the Kendal Museum have many of his ink drawings, but I don’t know whether there are any papers in existence. That would surely be a great archive to have.

Image taken from Jack’s Rake overlooking Stickle Tarn