Phase three of the DataVault project is now earnestly underway.  Two weeks ago we held the first of our monthly DataVault project meetings, with Mary McDerby and Thomas Higgins (University of Manchester) visiting us in Edinburgh.  One of the changes we are making to this final six month phase is to move to fortnightly development sprints.

We’re now almost at the end of the first sprint, so reviewed the outputs during a Skype call today.  We use Trello to manage a backlog of tasks, which then get selected for the next sprint. Most of the development tasks are now completed or almost finished.  We also started planning the stories to be tackled in the next sprint, however due to Easter, this will be a little shorter than normal:

In the first sprint (sprint 1) we undertook some rationalisation of the API (as it has grown arms and legs over time), added an enhanced auditing feature (using the PREMIS ontology), added an improved runtime configuration option, and provided better error reporting for a problem that occurs when the CSRF tokens timeout.  As always, all of this can be seen in the project’s github account.

In the next sprint we’ll be fixing a few bugs and some of the terminology used (replacing ‘restore’ with ‘retrieve’ when getting some data from the DataVault), and adding better application logging.

I was recently asked to rehouse a new accession to the CRC special collections; a beautiful belt previously belonging to a Scottish Suffragette made from a strip of ribbon, embroidered with enamelled motifs, with a metal buckle. You can find out more about this belt in this blog post.

Suffragette Belt

Due to the huge amount of attention this item received on social media, I knew that it would be very popular, and likely to be requested multiple times for seminars, tours and researchers. As such, I wanted to create a housing solution that would reduce the handling of this item, as well as protect it whilst in storage.

Repeated handling can be very damaging to objects as the bending and flexing causes mechanical stress, which can lead to fractures at stress points. It is often assumed that white cotton gloves are worn when moving all archival collections. But that is not the case. Cotton gloves tend to reduce manual dexterity, and can get caught on tears on paper. Here is an excellent article on the misperceptions of wearing white gloves.

Handling certain objects, such as gilt frames, photographs and bronze sculptures without gloves, however, can be detrimental as the salts and oils on our fingertips can cause metals in corrode and leave marks on photographs. Normally nitrile gloves are worn when touching these items. Clean, dry hands that are free of creams and lotions are usually the best for most other objects, but ideally they should be handled as little as possible.

To reduce handling of the belt, I made a box with from unbuffered card and two rigid base boards that were padded with domett wadding and calico cotton. One base board can be used to lift out the belt from the box. The other can be placed on top and used to flip the belt over, so that the reverse can be viewed without touching it at all.

The slide show below shows the stages of taking the belt out of the box.

This new storage will allow the Suffragette belt to be safely consulted for years to come.

Emily Hick

Special Collections Conservator

Latest time lapse video from Malcolm Brown from the Digital Imaging Unit at the Centre for Research Collections captures the progress of works at St Cecilia’s Hall.

For those who know our location, the building site is tight, so Malcolm has had to be creative in capturing his videos and images. Malcolm has persevered through hours of standing on the pavement of Niddry Street and South Bridge as well as eating countless roasted chicken dinners at Zuhus restaurant in order to capitalise on various views of our building.

Look for more videos to come of the construction of the new entrance to St Cecilia’s Hall.