Trawler Plans Now Digitally Archived
When delivering a project it’s important to never lose sight of its legacy. The goal of fulfilling your short-term objectives can easily become all-consuming and mean that you lose sight of the long-term ambitions. Fortunately, on ‘Trawling Through Time‘ we have constantly had our ‘eye on the ball’ as regards where we wanted to go with the legacy of our hard-working staff and volunteers. The ultimate endgame has always been to ensure the long-term continuity and preservation of our digitised general arrangement plans to the highest digital preservation standards and, as part of the wider work being done at East Riding Archives to preserve all of its digital holdings, we can now say that this goal has been met.
In 2021, we secured a digital archive repository provided by Preservica, which allowed us to upload our digital archive and automatically render each document, photograph, video, and sound file, to the best recommended format for permanent preservation, all backed up and stored on servers that meet the highest international security standards. Since then, the gradual process has been underway of migrating the digital archive onto the Preservica system and, finally, it was the turn of the digitised ships plans that were painstakingly captured and stitched together in multiple images by our volunteers, under close supervision and guidance from our Conservator, Kat Saunt.
This means that there are now 149 images, or 32 gigabytes (GB) of digitised maritime heritage content from the project now securely preserved for future generations, not to mention publicly accessible via our new digital archives access portal at https://eastriding.access.preservica.com .
It’s a great feeling to know that all the achievements of the project team can continue to have impact and inform about the story of Cook, Welton and Gemmell, both locally and in terms of global maritime history.
You can browse the digital general arrangement plans directly via the digital archives access portal .
or navigate to a specific plan using the online catalogue to search for ‘general arrangement’ plans under Finding No. ‘DDCO/5/1’ and clicking the ‘Preservica Universal URL’ link.
by Sam Bartle
(Digital Archivist & Editor)
Trawling Through Time 