Mill writing

VERDI Launch Report

October 01 2009 by Carole Leith (1064 views)
Kent & Events & Windmills | 4 comments

As from September 2009 the University of Kent at Canterbury have made available online thousands more images from their resources. The Versatile Digitisation Framework project [VERDI] was funded under the Enriching Digital Resources strand of the JISC Digitisation Progamme.

Continued below ...

Whew… well that’s the official description, but actually the VERDI launch was one hell of a bash – champagne and delicious eats - and lots of very interesting chats with staff interested in newspaper cartoons, archaeology and of interest to our readers - mills and milling.

As the chap who did the introduction to the launch, John Sotillo, Director of Information Services, explained that with the explosion of the world wide web the university was challenged to develop ways of enabling access to images by academics, students and the general public. How to describe a photograph for retrieval was considered the biggest problem; to see how this was resolved go to http://www.kent.ac.uk/is/projects/verdi/ and follow the Muggeridge link to the Templeman Library and the wind and watermill collection.

Thanks are particularly due to Susan Crabtree (Special Collections Librarian) who scanned and prepared for the website photographs of wind and watermills taken by William Burrell Muggeridge and Donald Muggeridge. This extraordinary collection of over 6000 images make up a unique compilation dating from 1904. Several of these were enlarged for the launch and were impressive in the quality of their composition and detail.

You will find other mills and milling resources – photographs, notes, correspondence and receipts - on the Templeman site including the CP Davies collection; John Holman memorabilia and the Don Filmer collection donated on the dissolution of the East Kent Mills group.

(amended following feedback)

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Messages & comments

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Fri, October 02, 2009

Jim Woodward-Nutt commented on Facebook:

"Such a shame that they have only put on line 35mm-size contact prints of most of the pictures, and that larger digital versions are not available. The small size pictures are just too small to make out details, making them useless for research purposes"

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Mon, October 05, 2009

I am reliably informed that the work of scanning the mill images was done by Mandy Green and Chris Ward under the supervision of Spencer Scott, the photographer. The cataloguing was done by Maria Centrone and Julia Chambers supervised and edited by Sue Crabtree.

It is a while since I spoke to Sue, but she is the person to contact about the splendid mills collection they hold at the Templeman Library

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Thu, October 08, 2009

Only since this thread started, have I heard that Donald Muggeridge's wife Vera died at the turn of the year.

Although they moved to California many years ago, Donald has kept an eagle eye on what the Templeman Library is doing with his collection.

His many friends in the UK will be sad to hear of Vera's death and will perhaps pause for a moment to think of Donald and what he has given to molinology.

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