Same attitude as the Chester Hospitals or the Horizon scandal or OFSTED. Fortunately the consequences have been somewhat less serious.
Indeed, though (a) he did resign rather more quickly when the manure hit the aircon, but (b) this does open up the museum to new lines of attack on another front: it - and/or the opponents of restitution of cultural objects - have been relying on the argument we-know-best-how-to-look-after-the-objects-than-the-Johnny-Foreigner-they-were-theived/extorted-from, with predictable results already happening.
Osborne’s entertaining defence this am on R4 was the Elgin Marbles are fine because they’re too big to nick, or ‘mislay’. That’s the Tzadziki munchers put in their place.
If I understood Osborne correctly this morning one of the real problems is that the BM doesn't possess a complete list of everything they are supposed to hold. This of course may prove mighty convenient.
How the hell does a museum not have a database of artifacts, and a tracking system to follow them around?
Presumably they have some sort of paper records (though institutional collections don't always have complete paper records). But paper records don't magically turn into databases. The British Library certainly doesn't have computerised records of its own archives; nor do a lot of institutional collections.
I did intern stuff at the Ashmolean many years back. This was cataloging the tons of old stuff in the basement - reboxing in modern materials, photo, barcode linked to an ID (all linked to the various old ids)
Boring as hell and would take years to finish. Which is why I ask why this wasn’t started 10 years ago? Or 20?
An obvious possibility is that they didn't have infinite resources, and had other calls on the resources they had.
I was an unpaid 16 year old. Aside from the new storage boxes, the bar codes were printed off a small label machine. The whole operation cost peanuts.
On that basis, perhaps the whole of our public services could be run without cost by unpaid, untrained teenage volunteers organising their own activities.
But I don't think that's very realistic.
Volunteers exist. I did.
Or you could hire some students cheap.
The kind of box and label stuff I was doing wasn’t rocket surgery*
I know this doesn’t feel Professional and we need to spend 100 million on consultants to make us all feel Pro.
Same attitude as the Chester Hospitals or the Horizon scandal or OFSTED. Fortunately the consequences have been somewhat less serious.
Indeed, though (a) he did resign rather more quickly when the manure hit the aircon, but (b) this does open up the museum to new lines of attack on another front: it - and/or the opponents of restitution of cultural objects - have been relying on the argument we-know-best-how-to-look-after-the-objects-than-the-Johnny-Foreigner-they-were-theived/extorted-from, with predictable results already happening.
Osborne’s entertaining defence this am on R4 was the Elgin Marbles are fine because they’re too big to nick, or ‘mislay’. That’s the Tzadziki munchers put in their place.
If I understood Osborne correctly this morning one of the real problems is that the BM doesn't possess a complete list of everything they are supposed to hold. This of course may prove mighty convenient.
How the hell does a museum not have a database of artifacts, and a tracking system to follow them around?
Presumably they have some sort of paper records (though institutional collections don't always have complete paper records). But paper records don't magically turn into databases. The British Library certainly doesn't have computerised records of its own archives; nor do a lot of institutional collections.
I did intern stuff at the Ashmolean many years back. This was cataloging the tons of old stuff in the basement - reboxing in modern materials, photo, barcode linked to an ID (all linked to the various old ids)
Boring as hell and would take years to finish. Which is why I ask why this wasn’t started 10 years ago? Or 20?
An obvious possibility is that they didn't have infinite resources, and had other calls on the resources they had.
I was an unpaid 16 year old. Aside from the new storage boxes, the bar codes were printed off a small label machine. The whole operation cost peanuts.
On that basis, perhaps the whole of our public services could be run without cost by unpaid, untrained teenage volunteers organising their own activities.
But I don't think that's very realistic.
Volunteers exist. I did.
Or you could hire some students cheap.
The kind of box and label stuff I was doing wasn’t rocket surgery*
I know this doesn’t feel Professional and we need to spend 100 million on consultants to make us all feel Pro.
But then that is why shit can’t get done
This is shit getting done
Real life, literal, actual rocket surgery.
Quite possibly the public services could make more use of volunteers. But if you think all our public services could be run for free by volunteers and we wouldn't have to pay taxes, you're in cloud cuckoo land.
Or maybe you should apply to be Nigel Farage's Shadow Chancellor.
Same attitude as the Chester Hospitals or the Horizon scandal or OFSTED. Fortunately the consequences have been somewhat less serious.
Indeed, though (a) he did resign rather more quickly when the manure hit the aircon, but (b) this does open up the museum to new lines of attack on another front: it - and/or the opponents of restitution of cultural objects - have been relying on the argument we-know-best-how-to-look-after-the-objects-than-the-Johnny-Foreigner-they-were-theived/extorted-from, with predictable results already happening.
Osborne’s entertaining defence this am on R4 was the Elgin Marbles are fine because they’re too big to nick, or ‘mislay’. That’s the Tzadziki munchers put in their place.
If I understood Osborne correctly this morning one of the real problems is that the BM doesn't possess a complete list of everything they are supposed to hold. This of course may prove mighty convenient.
How the hell does a museum not have a database of artifacts, and a tracking system to follow them around?
Presumably they have some sort of paper records (though institutional collections don't always have complete paper records). But paper records don't magically turn into databases. The British Library certainly doesn't have computerised records of its own archives; nor do a lot of institutional collections.
I did intern stuff at the Ashmolean many years back. This was cataloging the tons of old stuff in the basement - reboxing in modern materials, photo, barcode linked to an ID (all linked to the various old ids)
Boring as hell and would take years to finish. Which is why I ask why this wasn’t started 10 years ago? Or 20?
An obvious possibility is that they didn't have infinite resources, and had other calls on the resources they had.
I was an unpaid 16 year old. Aside from the new storage boxes, the bar codes were printed off a small label machine. The whole operation cost peanuts.
On that basis, perhaps the whole of our public services could be run without cost by unpaid, untrained teenage volunteers organising their own activities.
But I don't think that's very realistic.
Volunteers exist. I did.
Or you could hire some students cheap.
The kind of box and label stuff I was doing wasn’t rocket surgery*
I know this doesn’t feel Professional and we need to spend 100 million on consultants to make us all feel Pro.
But then that is why shit can’t get done
This is shit getting done
Real life, literal, actual rocket surgery.
Quite possibly the public services could make more use of volunteers. But if you think all our public services could be run for free by volunteers and we wouldn't have to pay taxes, you're in cloud cuckoo land.
Or maybe you should apply to be Nigel Farage's Shadow Chancellor.
What does PB think of a prospective one on one debate of SKS vs Rishi Sunak? Should both leaders agree to it.
Dullish bore draw?
Yep. Throw Ed Davey into the mix, and have the whole thing sponsored by Horlicks. Give the nation the best night's sleep it's had in years.
That's not even a criticism - I rather like the "grey is the new technicolour" that has taken over British politics more recently.
Of course there will never again be a 3-way debate. It’ll either be all comers, which just descends into shouting and catch phrases, or one on one for the 2 main national parties.
Which is a shake, because - and others will doubtless disagree - I think those 3 men, pale male and stale as they may be, would all emerge from a debate with reputations enhanced.
Rishi was actually OK in the Tory leadership debates. He was more energised and borderline charismatic than he is in journalist interviews, which seem be his weakest format. He would be forced to go beyond meaningless strap lines like stop the boats, and without braying backbenchers behind him would probably give up on the silly lefty lawyer jibes after a while because the audience would groan.
Starmer would benefit from being able to show his human side, and would I expect score some points victories over Sunak on policy record. Of the 3 he probably has most to lose from a debate though, as there’s a risk he may get stuck on a non-answer to an important question. He’d need to focus on delivering plain English replies.
Davey would get the benefit of equal footing and profile like Clegg did, but I expect his avuncular and benign personality would come across too. He would seem likeable.
He was dreadful in the leadership debates. Cringe worthy. The fact that he's even worse when being interviewed is hardly a good yardstick.
Same attitude as the Chester Hospitals or the Horizon scandal or OFSTED. Fortunately the consequences have been somewhat less serious.
Indeed, though (a) he did resign rather more quickly when the manure hit the aircon, but (b) this does open up the museum to new lines of attack on another front: it - and/or the opponents of restitution of cultural objects - have been relying on the argument we-know-best-how-to-look-after-the-objects-than-the-Johnny-Foreigner-they-were-theived/extorted-from, with predictable results already happening.
Osborne’s entertaining defence this am on R4 was the Elgin Marbles are fine because they’re too big to nick, or ‘mislay’. That’s the Tzadziki munchers put in their place.
If I understood Osborne correctly this morning one of the real problems is that the BM doesn't possess a complete list of everything they are supposed to hold. This of course may prove mighty convenient.
How the hell does a museum not have a database of artifacts, and a tracking system to follow them around?
Presumably they have some sort of paper records (though institutional collections don't always have complete paper records). But paper records don't magically turn into databases. The British Library certainly doesn't have computerised records of its own archives; nor do a lot of institutional collections.
I did intern stuff at the Ashmolean many years back. This was cataloging the tons of old stuff in the basement - reboxing in modern materials, photo, barcode linked to an ID (all linked to the various old ids)
Boring as hell and would take years to finish. Which is why I ask why this wasn’t started 10 years ago? Or 20?
Money?
I remember 20 years ago when I was at uni a major project had just begun to catalogue the British Library Newspaper Archive. Aled Jones (who was Aber's big expert on newspaper history) was asked by a 19 year old student how long it would take.
'Well,' he said. 'It might happen in your lifetime. And then again, it might not. It depends on how long they're willing to keep paying for it.'
'How long will it be?' asked the student.
'Well, if all goes right, maybe 65 years,' Aled replied.
Was that not *scanning* for the britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk and the British Library British Newspapers databases, rather than cataloguing? Librarians tdend to be pretty hot on cataloguing, as well as bananas etc.
Yes, although it involved indexing it.
Of course - yes, it would, now you explain it. Though it seems to go on OCR and word search these days.
Same attitude as the Chester Hospitals or the Horizon scandal or OFSTED. Fortunately the consequences have been somewhat less serious.
Indeed, though (a) he did resign rather more quickly when the manure hit the aircon, but (b) this does open up the museum to new lines of attack on another front: it - and/or the opponents of restitution of cultural objects - have been relying on the argument we-know-best-how-to-look-after-the-objects-than-the-Johnny-Foreigner-they-were-theived/extorted-from, with predictable results already happening.
Osborne’s entertaining defence this am on R4 was the Elgin Marbles are fine because they’re too big to nick, or ‘mislay’. That’s the Tzadziki munchers put in their place.
If I understood Osborne correctly this morning one of the real problems is that the BM doesn't possess a complete list of everything they are supposed to hold. This of course may prove mighty convenient.
How the hell does a museum not have a database of artifacts, and a tracking system to follow them around?
Presumably they have some sort of paper records (though institutional collections don't always have complete paper records). But paper records don't magically turn into databases. The British Library certainly doesn't have computerised records of its own archives; nor do a lot of institutional collections.
I did intern stuff at the Ashmolean many years back. This was cataloging the tons of old stuff in the basement - reboxing in modern materials, photo, barcode linked to an ID (all linked to the various old ids)
Boring as hell and would take years to finish. Which is why I ask why this wasn’t started 10 years ago? Or 20?
An obvious possibility is that they didn't have infinite resources, and had other calls on the resources they had.
I was an unpaid 16 year old. Aside from the new storage boxes, the bar codes were printed off a small label machine. The whole operation cost peanuts.
On that basis, perhaps the whole of our public services could be run without cost by unpaid, untrained teenage volunteers organising their own activities.
But I don't think that's very realistic.
Volunteers exist. I did.
Or you could hire some students cheap.
The kind of box and label stuff I was doing wasn’t rocket surgery*
I know this doesn’t feel Professional and we need to spend 100 million on consultants to make us all feel Pro.
But then that is why shit can’t get done
This is shit getting done
Real life, literal, actual rocket surgery.
Quite possibly the public services could make more use of volunteers. But if you think all our public services could be run for free by volunteers and we wouldn't have to pay taxes, you're in cloud cuckoo land.
Or maybe you should apply to be Nigel Farage's Shadow Chancellor.
I just had a brilliant idea!
Bring back National Service ...
The complete antithesis of volunteering, of course. By definition.
Same attitude as the Chester Hospitals or the Horizon scandal or OFSTED. Fortunately the consequences have been somewhat less serious.
Indeed, though (a) he did resign rather more quickly when the manure hit the aircon, but (b) this does open up the museum to new lines of attack on another front: it - and/or the opponents of restitution of cultural objects - have been relying on the argument we-know-best-how-to-look-after-the-objects-than-the-Johnny-Foreigner-they-were-theived/extorted-from, with predictable results already happening.
Osborne’s entertaining defence this am on R4 was the Elgin Marbles are fine because they’re too big to nick, or ‘mislay’. That’s the Tzadziki munchers put in their place.
If I understood Osborne correctly this morning one of the real problems is that the BM doesn't possess a complete list of everything they are supposed to hold. This of course may prove mighty convenient.
How the hell does a museum not have a database of artifacts, and a tracking system to follow them around?
Presumably they have some sort of paper records (though institutional collections don't always have complete paper records). But paper records don't magically turn into databases. The British Library certainly doesn't have computerised records of its own archives; nor do a lot of institutional collections.
I did intern stuff at the Ashmolean many years back. This was cataloging the tons of old stuff in the basement - reboxing in modern materials, photo, barcode linked to an ID (all linked to the various old ids)
Boring as hell and would take years to finish. Which is why I ask why this wasn’t started 10 years ago? Or 20?
An obvious possibility is that they didn't have infinite resources, and had other calls on the resources they had.
I was an unpaid 16 year old. Aside from the new storage boxes, the bar codes were printed off a small label machine. The whole operation cost peanuts.
On that basis, perhaps the whole of our public services could be run without cost by unpaid, untrained teenage volunteers organising their own activities.
But I don't think that's very realistic.
Volunteers exist. I did.
Or you could hire some students cheap.
The kind of box and label stuff I was doing wasn’t rocket surgery*
I know this doesn’t feel Professional and we need to spend 100 million on consultants to make us all feel Pro.
But then that is why shit can’t get done
This is shit getting done
Real life, literal, actual rocket surgery.
Quite possibly the public services could make more use of volunteers. But if you think all our public services could be run for free by volunteers and we wouldn't have to pay taxes, you're in cloud cuckoo land.
Or maybe you should apply to be Nigel Farage's Shadow Chancellor.
You are aware that museums use a lot of volunteers, right now?
Hell, in the various areas, you could get students queuing up to get a chance to dive through the collections - a lot of stuff is in the basements of museums and never comes up for air....
We are talking about cataloguing the contents of a museum's collection, not the NHS. Have a sense of proportion.
What does PB think of a prospective one on one debate of SKS vs Rishi Sunak? Should both leaders agree to it.
I think that political debates are a rather tawdry politics-as-entertainment spectacle that obscure as much as they illuminate.
Rather, both should be subjected to an hour or an hour or half of questioning, by a rigorous and informed interviewer.
The rather admirable Danish system (with their 10 or so parties contesting PR elections) is (or was when I lived there) that each party gets a long PPB (30 minutes?) to set out their staff, followed by a long (40 minutes?) quizzing by a panel of well-informed independent interviewers, not attacking them but trying to find out exactly what they meant, and whether they accepted the likely consequences of their policies. The smallest party goes first and during the campaign they all get a go up to the largest contenders, but there is no other bias for size, and the Trotskyists and xenophobes get the same length of the time as the Social Democrats, Liberals and Conservatives - the idea being that even small parties are entitled to have their ideas heard and tested. Then just before the election, all 10 party leaders debate together. It sounds messy but when I was there it always worked pretty well, and people were exposed to ideas they'd not really thought about before.
You do need 20K signatures to stand at all, and my modest contribution to world revolution when I was 18, before I sold out to social democracy, was to collect 2000 signatures for the Danish communists single-handedly. I eventually met a group of actual party members doing the same thing - they viewed my freelance effort with great suspicion and I think decided I must be a CIA agent. Sigh!
Same attitude as the Chester Hospitals or the Horizon scandal or OFSTED. Fortunately the consequences have been somewhat less serious.
Indeed, though (a) he did resign rather more quickly when the manure hit the aircon, but (b) this does open up the museum to new lines of attack on another front: it - and/or the opponents of restitution of cultural objects - have been relying on the argument we-know-best-how-to-look-after-the-objects-than-the-Johnny-Foreigner-they-were-theived/extorted-from, with predictable results already happening.
Osborne’s entertaining defence this am on R4 was the Elgin Marbles are fine because they’re too big to nick, or ‘mislay’. That’s the Tzadziki munchers put in their place.
If I understood Osborne correctly this morning one of the real problems is that the BM doesn't possess a complete list of everything they are supposed to hold. This of course may prove mighty convenient.
How the hell does a museum not have a database of artifacts, and a tracking system to follow them around?
Presumably they have some sort of paper records (though institutional collections don't always have complete paper records). But paper records don't magically turn into databases. The British Library certainly doesn't have computerised records of its own archives; nor do a lot of institutional collections.
I did intern stuff at the Ashmolean many years back. This was cataloging the tons of old stuff in the basement - reboxing in modern materials, photo, barcode linked to an ID (all linked to the various old ids)
Boring as hell and would take years to finish. Which is why I ask why this wasn’t started 10 years ago? Or 20?
Money?
I remember 20 years ago when I was at uni a major project had just begun to catalogue the British Library Newspaper Archive. Aled Jones (who was Aber's big expert on newspaper history) was asked by a 19 year old student how long it would take.
'Well,' he said. 'It might happen in your lifetime. And then again, it might not. It depends on how long they're willing to keep paying for it.'
'How long will it be?' asked the student.
'Well, if all goes right, maybe 65 years,' Aled replied.
Was that not *scanning* for the britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk and the British Library British Newspapers databases, rather than cataloguing? Librarians tdend to be pretty hot on cataloguing, as well as bananas etc.
Yes, although it involved indexing it.
Of course - yes, it would, now you explain it. Though it seems to go on OCR and word search these days.
Would be fairly easy to write some code to read all the text, including labels, and categorise the object/text in a number of dimensions for the catalogue. Just take a hi-res picture of the item...
Same attitude as the Chester Hospitals or the Horizon scandal or OFSTED. Fortunately the consequences have been somewhat less serious.
Indeed, though (a) he did resign rather more quickly when the manure hit the aircon, but (b) this does open up the museum to new lines of attack on another front: it - and/or the opponents of restitution of cultural objects - have been relying on the argument we-know-best-how-to-look-after-the-objects-than-the-Johnny-Foreigner-they-were-theived/extorted-from, with predictable results already happening.
Osborne’s entertaining defence this am on R4 was the Elgin Marbles are fine because they’re too big to nick, or ‘mislay’. That’s the Tzadziki munchers put in their place.
If I understood Osborne correctly this morning one of the real problems is that the BM doesn't possess a complete list of everything they are supposed to hold. This of course may prove mighty convenient.
How the hell does a museum not have a database of artifacts, and a tracking system to follow them around?
Presumably they have some sort of paper records (though institutional collections don't always have complete paper records). But paper records don't magically turn into databases. The British Library certainly doesn't have computerised records of its own archives; nor do a lot of institutional collections.
I did intern stuff at the Ashmolean many years back. This was cataloging the tons of old stuff in the basement - reboxing in modern materials, photo, barcode linked to an ID (all linked to the various old ids)
Boring as hell and would take years to finish. Which is why I ask why this wasn’t started 10 years ago? Or 20?
Money?
I remember 20 years ago when I was at uni a major project had just begun to catalogue the British Library Newspaper Archive. Aled Jones (who was Aber's big expert on newspaper history) was asked by a 19 year old student how long it would take.
'Well,' he said. 'It might happen in your lifetime. And then again, it might not. It depends on how long they're willing to keep paying for it.'
'How long will it be?' asked the student.
'Well, if all goes right, maybe 65 years,' Aled replied.
Was that not *scanning* for the britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk and the British Library British Newspapers databases, rather than cataloguing? Librarians tdend to be pretty hot on cataloguing, as well as bananas etc.
Yes, although it involved indexing it.
Of course - yes, it would, now you explain it. Though it seems to go on OCR and word search these days.
Would be fairly easy to write some code to read all the text, including labels, and categorise the object/text in a number of dimensions for the catalogue. Just take a hi-res picture of the item...
In handwritten Coptic, carved hieroglyphic, and inscribed Runic? You're braver than I am.
The Nottingham ones run for a distance outside the city to "effective suburbs", but then it's a small city. The distances are more like 7 miles than 15 miles. Per pop the ridership is about the same as Calgary, having gone down a little during Covid.
The extension to the western suburbs was hugely controversial and a major feature of the 2010 election in Broxtowe - I defended it as good for easy urban access and the environment, Anna Soubry opposed it because of local disruption and IIRC promised to potentially get it stopped. Once elected, no more was heard of that, and a couple of years later she opened the Beeston extension as a fine example of Conservative investment in infrastructure.
Same attitude as the Chester Hospitals or the Horizon scandal or OFSTED. Fortunately the consequences have been somewhat less serious.
Indeed, though (a) he did resign rather more quickly when the manure hit the aircon, but (b) this does open up the museum to new lines of attack on another front: it - and/or the opponents of restitution of cultural objects - have been relying on the argument we-know-best-how-to-look-after-the-objects-than-the-Johnny-Foreigner-they-were-theived/extorted-from, with predictable results already happening.
Osborne’s entertaining defence this am on R4 was the Elgin Marbles are fine because they’re too big to nick, or ‘mislay’. That’s the Tzadziki munchers put in their place.
If I understood Osborne correctly this morning one of the real problems is that the BM doesn't possess a complete list of everything they are supposed to hold. This of course may prove mighty convenient.
How the hell does a museum not have a database of artifacts, and a tracking system to follow them around?
Presumably they have some sort of paper records (though institutional collections don't always have complete paper records). But paper records don't magically turn into databases. The British Library certainly doesn't have computerised records of its own archives; nor do a lot of institutional collections.
I did intern stuff at the Ashmolean many years back. This was cataloging the tons of old stuff in the basement - reboxing in modern materials, photo, barcode linked to an ID (all linked to the various old ids)
Boring as hell and would take years to finish. Which is why I ask why this wasn’t started 10 years ago? Or 20?
An obvious possibility is that they didn't have infinite resources, and had other calls on the resources they had.
I was an unpaid 16 year old. Aside from the new storage boxes, the bar codes were printed off a small label machine. The whole operation cost peanuts.
On that basis, perhaps the whole of our public services could be run without cost by unpaid, untrained teenage volunteers organising their own activities.
But I don't think that's very realistic.
Volunteers exist. I did.
Or you could hire some students cheap.
The kind of box and label stuff I was doing wasn’t rocket surgery*
I know this doesn’t feel Professional and we need to spend 100 million on consultants to make us all feel Pro.
But then that is why shit can’t get done
This is shit getting done
Real life, literal, actual rocket surgery.
Quite possibly the public services could make more use of volunteers. But if you think all our public services could be run for free by volunteers and we wouldn't have to pay taxes, you're in cloud cuckoo land.
Or maybe you should apply to be Nigel Farage's Shadow Chancellor.
I just had a brilliant idea!
Bring back National Service ...
The complete antithesis of volunteering, of course. By definition.
PS In fairness, one could IIRC volunteer for a particular service, but asking certainly didn't automatically get, especially the RN. Though they were more humane to what were once called conchies - IIRC David Hockney asked to go CO and ended up as a hospital porter for the relevant period.
Same attitude as the Chester Hospitals or the Horizon scandal or OFSTED. Fortunately the consequences have been somewhat less serious.
Indeed, though (a) he did resign rather more quickly when the manure hit the aircon, but (b) this does open up the museum to new lines of attack on another front: it - and/or the opponents of restitution of cultural objects - have been relying on the argument we-know-best-how-to-look-after-the-objects-than-the-Johnny-Foreigner-they-were-theived/extorted-from, with predictable results already happening.
Osborne’s entertaining defence this am on R4 was the Elgin Marbles are fine because they’re too big to nick, or ‘mislay’. That’s the Tzadziki munchers put in their place.
If I understood Osborne correctly this morning one of the real problems is that the BM doesn't possess a complete list of everything they are supposed to hold. This of course may prove mighty convenient.
How the hell does a museum not have a database of artifacts, and a tracking system to follow them around?
Presumably they have some sort of paper records (though institutional collections don't always have complete paper records). But paper records don't magically turn into databases. The British Library certainly doesn't have computerised records of its own archives; nor do a lot of institutional collections.
I did intern stuff at the Ashmolean many years back. This was cataloging the tons of old stuff in the basement - reboxing in modern materials, photo, barcode linked to an ID (all linked to the various old ids)
Boring as hell and would take years to finish. Which is why I ask why this wasn’t started 10 years ago? Or 20?
An obvious possibility is that they didn't have infinite resources, and had other calls on the resources they had.
I was an unpaid 16 year old. Aside from the new storage boxes, the bar codes were printed off a small label machine. The whole operation cost peanuts.
On that basis, perhaps the whole of our public services could be run without cost by unpaid, untrained teenage volunteers organising their own activities.
But I don't think that's very realistic.
Volunteers exist. I did.
Or you could hire some students cheap.
The kind of box and label stuff I was doing wasn’t rocket surgery*
I know this doesn’t feel Professional and we need to spend 100 million on consultants to make us all feel Pro.
But then that is why shit can’t get done
This is shit getting done
Real life, literal, actual rocket surgery.
Quite possibly the public services could make more use of volunteers. But if you think all our public services could be run for free by volunteers and we wouldn't have to pay taxes, you're in cloud cuckoo land.
Or maybe you should apply to be Nigel Farage's Shadow Chancellor.
I think it is more about the ethos.
I am currently involved in setting up a volunteer organisation to do something that a government agency has totally failed to do in 20 years but easily could have for very little money.
They have volunteers for other tasks and to be honest, most of them are more competent than the actual staff. Probably because they are retired and are now liberated from hierarchical nonsense to just get on with things.
Step 1: Buy a house in a location where you know that you will have to rely on your car to get about.
Step 2: Pontificate on how it would take an age for you to get anywhere by public transport, and it is so much quicker and easier to drive.
Bollocks. I bought a house literally within the Newcastle city boundary with good bus links which has got worse since as they have been progressively cancelled or reduced.
Rather amusingly, the protester interviewed at the end of the BBC report on the Spanish kiss incident is my niece - the product of my brother's short-lived marriage to a Spanish woman. As a bit of an activist himself, he is quite the proud dad :-)
Same attitude as the Chester Hospitals or the Horizon scandal or OFSTED. Fortunately the consequences have been somewhat less serious.
Indeed, though (a) he did resign rather more quickly when the manure hit the aircon, but (b) this does open up the museum to new lines of attack on another front: it - and/or the opponents of restitution of cultural objects - have been relying on the argument we-know-best-how-to-look-after-the-objects-than-the-Johnny-Foreigner-they-were-theived/extorted-from, with predictable results already happening.
Osborne’s entertaining defence this am on R4 was the Elgin Marbles are fine because they’re too big to nick, or ‘mislay’. That’s the Tzadziki munchers put in their place.
If I understood Osborne correctly this morning one of the real problems is that the BM doesn't possess a complete list of everything they are supposed to hold. This of course may prove mighty convenient.
How the hell does a museum not have a database of artifacts, and a tracking system to follow them around?
Surely maintaining a catalogue, is one of the most important activities a museum is supposed to do!
I have several times idly thought, how do museums stop staff making off with stored artefacts, when they might hold millions of these objects? Answer seems to be, they don't.
Cataloguing is an inexact art on that scale and going back a hundred years or more. The catalogue entry might just say "two swords, English, 17C". It doesn't help trace the swords if stolen, nor prevent the theft of the objects in the first place.
Just photograph the lot, surely, next to their barcode/qr code.
If the Bodleian can manage to catalogue all its books and fetch you one when asked, surely a museum can manage it.
???
If items aren't catalogued in a database, where do you suppose "their barcode" comes from? Magic?
And how on earth would a set of tens or hundreds of thousands of photographs of objects next to barcodes enable an institution to "fetch you one when asked"? Magic again, presumably.
Technology, not magic.
You could use RFID tags instead of barcodes - they are dirt cheap and easy to scan - though a printed label is probably better for long term use.
If it isn't catalogued then put it in the "uncatalogued" bin and filter it with AI for later.
Arriving into Warsaw now, two and a half hours for the trip of around 300km. Wifi was okay apart from a few very rural areas, it helps that the road and railway run close together for much of the route. More annoying was that it made you reconnect every 15 mins!
Impressive new station they’re building here, it’s slightly to the West of the city centre, and convenient for airport and bus connections. You can see the old two-platform station in the foreground, and the new structure behind it.
Same attitude as the Chester Hospitals or the Horizon scandal or OFSTED. Fortunately the consequences have been somewhat less serious.
Indeed, though (a) he did resign rather more quickly when the manure hit the aircon, but (b) this does open up the museum to new lines of attack on another front: it - and/or the opponents of restitution of cultural objects - have been relying on the argument we-know-best-how-to-look-after-the-objects-than-the-Johnny-Foreigner-they-were-theived/extorted-from, with predictable results already happening.
Osborne’s entertaining defence this am on R4 was the Elgin Marbles are fine because they’re too big to nick, or ‘mislay’. That’s the Tzadziki munchers put in their place.
If I understood Osborne correctly this morning one of the real problems is that the BM doesn't possess a complete list of everything they are supposed to hold. This of course may prove mighty convenient.
How the hell does a museum not have a database of artifacts, and a tracking system to follow them around?
Surely maintaining a catalogue, is one of the most important activities a museum is supposed to do!
I have several times idly thought, how do museums stop staff making off with stored artefacts, when they might hold millions of these objects? Answer seems to be, they don't.
Cataloguing is an inexact art on that scale and going back a hundred years or more. The catalogue entry might just say "two swords, English, 17C". It doesn't help trace the swords if stolen, nor prevent the theft of the objects in the first place.
Same attitude as the Chester Hospitals or the Horizon scandal or OFSTED. Fortunately the consequences have been somewhat less serious.
Indeed, though (a) he did resign rather more quickly when the manure hit the aircon, but (b) this does open up the museum to new lines of attack on another front: it - and/or the opponents of restitution of cultural objects - have been relying on the argument we-know-best-how-to-look-after-the-objects-than-the-Johnny-Foreigner-they-were-theived/extorted-from, with predictable results already happening.
Osborne’s entertaining defence this am on R4 was the Elgin Marbles are fine because they’re too big to nick, or ‘mislay’. That’s the Tzadziki munchers put in their place.
If I understood Osborne correctly this morning one of the real problems is that the BM doesn't possess a complete list of everything they are supposed to hold. This of course may prove mighty convenient.
How the hell does a museum not have a database of artifacts, and a tracking system to follow them around?
Presumably they have some sort of paper records (though institutional collections don't always have complete paper records). But paper records don't magically turn into databases. The British Library certainly doesn't have computerised records of its own archives; nor do a lot of institutional collections.
I did intern stuff at the Ashmolean many years back. This was cataloging the tons of old stuff in the basement - reboxing in modern materials, photo, barcode linked to an ID (all linked to the various old ids)
Boring as hell and would take years to finish. Which is why I ask why this wasn’t started 10 years ago? Or 20?
An obvious possibility is that they didn't have infinite resources, and had other calls on the resources they had.
I was an unpaid 16 year old. Aside from the new storage boxes, the bar codes were printed off a small label machine. The whole operation cost peanuts.
On that basis, perhaps the whole of our public services could be run without cost by unpaid, untrained teenage volunteers organising their own activities.
But I don't think that's very realistic.
Volunteers exist. I did.
Or you could hire some students cheap.
The kind of box and label stuff I was doing wasn’t rocket surgery*
I know this doesn’t feel Professional and we need to spend 100 million on consultants to make us all feel Pro.
But then that is why shit can’t get done
This is shit getting done
Real life, literal, actual rocket surgery.
Quite possibly the public services could make more use of volunteers. But if you think all our public services could be run for free by volunteers and we wouldn't have to pay taxes, you're in cloud cuckoo land.
Or maybe you should apply to be Nigel Farage's Shadow Chancellor.
I think it is more about the ethos.
I am currently involved in setting up a volunteer organisation to do something that a government agency has totally failed to do in 20 years but easily could have for very little money.
They have volunteers for other tasks and to be honest, most of them are more competent than the actual staff. Probably because they are retired and are now liberated from hierarchical nonsense to just get on with things.
One problem is legalities. Being asked to undertake criminal records checks and so on is very disconcerting to older volunteers, and not just the ones who used to be tearawys etc. Working with children in any sense, e.g. as visitors, is one such area. It is often a completely unexpected shock - so much so that they just jack it in rather than bother. The delays in screening are a big problem.
Same attitude as the Chester Hospitals or the Horizon scandal or OFSTED. Fortunately the consequences have been somewhat less serious.
Indeed, though (a) he did resign rather more quickly when the manure hit the aircon, but (b) this does open up the museum to new lines of attack on another front: it - and/or the opponents of restitution of cultural objects - have been relying on the argument we-know-best-how-to-look-after-the-objects-than-the-Johnny-Foreigner-they-were-theived/extorted-from, with predictable results already happening.
Osborne’s entertaining defence this am on R4 was the Elgin Marbles are fine because they’re too big to nick, or ‘mislay’. That’s the Tzadziki munchers put in their place.
If I understood Osborne correctly this morning one of the real problems is that the BM doesn't possess a complete list of everything they are supposed to hold. This of course may prove mighty convenient.
How the hell does a museum not have a database of artifacts, and a tracking system to follow them around?
Presumably they have some sort of paper records (though institutional collections don't always have complete paper records). But paper records don't magically turn into databases. The British Library certainly doesn't have computerised records of its own archives; nor do a lot of institutional collections.
I did intern stuff at the Ashmolean many years back. This was cataloging the tons of old stuff in the basement - reboxing in modern materials, photo, barcode linked to an ID (all linked to the various old ids)
Boring as hell and would take years to finish. Which is why I ask why this wasn’t started 10 years ago? Or 20?
An obvious possibility is that they didn't have infinite resources, and had other calls on the resources they had.
I was an unpaid 16 year old. Aside from the new storage boxes, the bar codes were printed off a small label machine. The whole operation cost peanuts.
On that basis, perhaps the whole of our public services could be run without cost by unpaid, untrained teenage volunteers organising their own activities.
But I don't think that's very realistic.
Volunteers exist. I did.
Or you could hire some students cheap.
The kind of box and label stuff I was doing wasn’t rocket surgery*
I know this doesn’t feel Professional and we need to spend 100 million on consultants to make us all feel Pro.
But then that is why shit can’t get done
This is shit getting done
Real life, literal, actual rocket surgery.
Quite possibly the public services could make more use of volunteers. But if you think all our public services could be run for free by volunteers and we wouldn't have to pay taxes, you're in cloud cuckoo land.
Or maybe you should apply to be Nigel Farage's Shadow Chancellor.
I think it is more about the ethos.
I am currently involved in setting up a volunteer organisation to do something that a government agency has totally failed to do in 20 years but easily could have for very little money.
They have volunteers for other tasks and to be honest, most of them are more competent than the actual staff. Probably because they are retired and are now liberated from hierarchical nonsense to just get on with things.
One problem is legalities. Being asked to undertake criminal records checks and so on is very disconcerting to older volunteers, and not just the ones who used to be tearawys etc. Working with children in any sense, e.g. as visitors, is one such area. It is often a completely unexpected shock - so much so that they just jack it in rather than bother. The delays in screening are a big problem.
True, volunteering to interact with the public is much more difficult, particularly now.
The tasks I'm thinking of are not really visitor related, though, more just doing stuff (scientific monitoring etc).
Same attitude as the Chester Hospitals or the Horizon scandal or OFSTED. Fortunately the consequences have been somewhat less serious.
Indeed, though (a) he did resign rather more quickly when the manure hit the aircon, but (b) this does open up the museum to new lines of attack on another front: it - and/or the opponents of restitution of cultural objects - have been relying on the argument we-know-best-how-to-look-after-the-objects-than-the-Johnny-Foreigner-they-were-theived/extorted-from, with predictable results already happening.
Osborne’s entertaining defence this am on R4 was the Elgin Marbles are fine because they’re too big to nick, or ‘mislay’. That’s the Tzadziki munchers put in their place.
If I understood Osborne correctly this morning one of the real problems is that the BM doesn't possess a complete list of everything they are supposed to hold. This of course may prove mighty convenient.
How the hell does a museum not have a database of artifacts, and a tracking system to follow them around?
Surely maintaining a catalogue, is one of the most important activities a museum is supposed to do!
I have several times idly thought, how do museums stop staff making off with stored artefacts, when they might hold millions of these objects? Answer seems to be, they don't.
Cataloguing is an inexact art on that scale and going back a hundred years or more. The catalogue entry might just say "two swords, English, 17C". It doesn't help trace the swords if stolen, nor prevent the theft of the objects in the first place.
Surely a picture is worth a thousand words and the secondary market for 17th century English swords, for example, should make tracing items stolen reasonably straightforward?
Comments
Or you could hire some students cheap.
The kind of box and label stuff I was doing wasn’t rocket surgery*
I know this doesn’t feel Professional and we need to spend 100 million on consultants to make us all feel Pro.
But then that is why shit can’t get done
This is shit getting done
Real life, literal, actual rocket surgery.
Or maybe you should apply to be Nigel Farage's Shadow Chancellor.
The Elizabeth Line from to Heathrow is much more edifying.
Bring back National Service ...
Hell, in the various areas, you could get students queuing up to get a chance to dive through the collections - a lot of stuff is in the basements of museums and never comes up for air....
We are talking about cataloguing the contents of a museum's collection, not the NHS. Have a sense of proportion.
You do need 20K signatures to stand at all, and my modest contribution to world revolution when I was 18, before I sold out to social democracy, was to collect 2000 signatures for the Danish communists single-handedly. I eventually met a group of actual party members doing the same thing - they viewed my freelance effort with great suspicion and I think decided I must be a CIA agent. Sigh!
I am currently involved in setting up a volunteer organisation to do something that a government agency has totally failed to do in 20 years but easily could have for very little money.
They have volunteers for other tasks and to be honest, most of them are more competent than the actual staff. Probably because they are retired and are now liberated from hierarchical nonsense to just get on with things.
You could use RFID tags instead of barcodes - they are dirt cheap and easy to scan - though a printed label is probably better for long term use.
If it isn't catalogued then put it in the "uncatalogued" bin and filter it with AI for later.
Impressive new station they’re building here, it’s slightly to the West of the city centre, and convenient for airport and bus connections. You can see the old two-platform station in the foreground, and the new structure behind it.
NEW THREAD
The tasks I'm thinking of are not really visitor related, though, more just doing stuff (scientific monitoring etc).
This looks like incompetence to me.