THE DRAWING REGISTER
It's now just over a year since we sadly lost John Rollings, who had been a driving force behind the scanning of our Midland Red engineering drawings. Although no more scanning has taken place, Andrew Turner has continued to catalogue the detail of the remaining drawings to the point where we have very nearly finished this part of the project.
To date, Andrew has catalogued 10,600 separate drawings in various states. Previously John had scanned 8,600 drawings, which were subsequently catalogued by Nigel Hall, making a total of over 19,000 drawings in the Museum's possession. In addition to this, Alf Powick has a separate collection of drawings that he has been cataloguing over several years, currently adding up to around 9,900, so at the end of the day we're going to end up with the records of close to 30,000 drawings.
Most of the drawings relate to mechanical parts such as crank cases, bearings, nuts, bolts and so on, which will prove invaluable in sourcing replacement parts for our vehicle collection. We have also turned up quite a few gems for vehicle prototypes and design changes, some of which featured in Malcolm Keeley's 'Midland Red Working Days' book.
Using the combined catalogues, I have been able set up a program on the Museum's PC that allows for drawings to be searched by part number or description and to view and print the relevant drawing where a scan exists. This has been used heavily by Dave Parry in connection with several recent projects but will be even more useful if we can complete the job of scanning the remaining drawings. The scanner itself will shortly be set up at the Museum and I would be pleased to hear from anybody with a bit of computing skill interested to take over this role.
In the meantime, we have been assessing the scale of our Metro-Cammell drawing collection so that Andrew has something to move on to.
Dave Taylor
LEARNING LINKS
The other big project that John Rollings began was the links with local schools. A new educational visits leaflet is now being produced, which, together with a display board in the Power Hall, will help to promote our facilities to schools. While Phil Ireland continues to be the main point of contact for these enquiries, an enthusiastic band of guides, led by Alan Shadforth, is on hand to look after the children on the day of their visit.
Chapel Lane, Wythall, Worcs B47 6JX
Tel : 01564 826471 e-mail us
A registered educational charity no 507191
