Editing
Sal is currently engaged in another heavy round of editing in the transparency files so some of you will be getting some old material back. It is not that the pictures are no good, though some that have become dated may be removed, it’s just that as virtually all submissions to clients are now digital we no longer have to keep several similars. These pictures will have been edited at least twice already so they are good pictures and any of you with the facilities, inclination and time can scan and submit the pictures digitally if you wish, but check what is already online, we don't want to duplicate. Do not send scans if they are dated, old cars, high streets with long defunct stores, buildings that have been demolished, altered or obscured by new ones, unless there is some historical interest in the picture.
Captions
Please could any contributor sending digital submissions note that the online database only allows for 255 characters in the caption. I know that Photoshop allows much longer captions and it is possible this restriction may change in the future, but for the present captions longer than 255 characters will have to be edited. If you are one of the few who do write long captions and baulk at having to do a character count then you could write your captions in a text editor that includes a character count and cut and paste to the caption box in whatever programme you use for the purpose. If you are using Photoshop then you could also write a script that warns you if a caption is too long, if you want to know how to do this please ask.
More captions
I don't know if any of you are put off supplying digitally because you don’t have the appropriate software to do all the captioning and keywording. I can now import captions and keywords from a spreadsheet file, it is essential that you format it correctly though. There must be three columns. Column one must be the file name, with the extension and it must match exactly. Column two is the caption, avoid double quotes and hard returns. Column three is the keywords, these should be separated by a semi colon and again should not have double quotes or hard returns. Save the file as a CSV (comma separated value) delimited with double quotes if possible, but I should be able to convert from a native Excel or similar file if necessary. The finished file ought to look something like this:
"filename1.tif","Caption","Keyword 1; keyword 2; keyword 3; ..."
"filename2.tif","Caption","Keyword 1; keyword 2; keyword 3; ..."
"filename3.tif","Caption","Keyword 1; keyword 2; keyword 3; ..."
"filename4.tif","Caption","Keyword 1; keyword 2; keyword 3; ..."
Customs
As some of you have possibly already noted (well you should have if you have actually looked at the web site), a large pillar of our library is Brian’s collection of Traditional Customs of Britain. Now, over the years he has managed to get to customs from Mousehole in Cornwall all the way to Shetland, but that doesn’t mean he could do everything. These customs have a habit of happening on the same days and it’s not easy (or cheap!) to trek several hundred miles for a custom unless you happen to be in the area. Many of you will have traditional customs that happen close to you and if you felt so inclined we would be happy to look at anything you can send us. Most towns and villages these days (especially in the home counties!) will have troupes of bankers and stock brokers who don their cricket whites and strap bells to their ankles to make idiots of themselves on the village green. This is probably not that interesting from our point of view and if you happen to live in Padstow you probably time your holiday to avoid May Day, but there are plenty of quirky local customs that could be interesting. A look at our custom calendar will show some gaps we know about, but there are many many more and new versions of things we do have would be just as useful.
Simon Shuel
