Glass Message Board
Glass Identification - Post here for all ID requests => Glass => Topic started by: Bernard C on September 10, 2007, 07:14:33 AM
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Recently, on starting to use GlassGallery, I thought I would "improve" how I identify my glass, by including the maker and pattern number in the filename/identifier.
It all went wrong. My second piece of Sowerby turned out to be Bagley, but then I was trapped into the erroneous name by GlassGallery and the GMB. One of my most mobile pieces of glass, my ruby and amber threaded tazza, started life as S&W "Moresque", and has been rambling around Stourbridge ever since, paying visits to Webb, Richardson, and Boulton & Mills, before finally settling on Stuart a few days ago, so thank goodness I did not "improve" its filename.
Many years ago in pre–PC days, I identified my books and maps by a simple stock/collection number, and carried on when I moved to glass. I genuinely improved things with my first PC by prefixing this with a sortable acquisition date (yymmdd). When I take any photographs, I change this to the photograph date, which gives me a quick link back to my ex-camera images, leaving the important stock/collection number unchanged.
This has faults, but it seems to work.
What do you think, and how do you do it?
Bernard C. 8)
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Hi Bernard,
A good question.
Images I use a set manner, suggested by Frank.
All images now use this style of recording (SUR_69_1502_200_Urban.JPG) where SU = Sklo Union or other company, R=factory id lettering, 69=year of introduction, then pattern number, then size, then designer.
Better than the anarchy that went before.
That helps, certainly in conjunction with an increasingly unwieldy data-base in Excel, which will be changing in the near future.
Regards,
Marcus
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Yup, for unknown maker, I use UNK followed by tape then date(ish) and a number. Which keeps this largest area in some sort of order. I have to keep order as I have many sites and tens of thousands of images...
The problem of changing ID is something else and renaming the files is not always expedient, nor practical. Everything is now going into one of four on-line databases and each item is identified there by categorisation as well as a product code. I try to number things by date so that anyone browsing a particular glassworks by SKU will get something 'close' to date sequence. Although if I have factory issued codes I try and use those as primary.
e,g. On Scotlands glass Caithness paperweights are numbered in various ways with an L or U prefix for limited, unlimited followed by a 2 digit year coded and then a sequential number. In some years the year code was last. Obviously this will not always work so I standardised to U 0r L prefix, year code nn until 1999 then xnn 2000 on, then code, then a letter to differentiate additional views and finally an image owner code. In general I limit file names to 30 characters using under_line to replace spaces. If I have multiple examples of one design they are numbered before the view letter and owner name.
On Ysart Glass it never occured to me in the early days and while most files have the owner name, there are no other standards - Chaos. As I now have to rework all those images for Scotlands Glass they will be getting into a similar sequence.
The important thing is that the system uses easily recalled short codes and has been proven over two years now.
With my present exercise of digitising glass catalogues it is a lot easier as I can use maker, maker code, catalogue year and page number and while there are maybe only a hundred or two catalogues, they represent something like 200,000 images so a simple system pays off. The benefit of the database system can be seen very much in the Glass Zoo where each figurine can appear in many categories. The same to a lesser extent on Scotland's Glass, particularly Caithness Glass where items can be viewed by date, designer, type and subtypes. The Glass Catalogue again uses this approach of multiple category so that an item can be found by factory or date or type and by shape - this is still evolving as I am only on the 4th catalogue - but the target is to use the file coding again to create some sense of order within the categories as with so many images finding a match still needs to be fast.
What I really struggle with is not categorising and filing individual images but the texts that are being digitised for the Glass-Study. Here I lack the categorisation power of the image database and need to group things more simply and by language too. Currently I have one level of folders beneath language folders but as I cannot put things in more than one folder it is a less than satisfactory solution. Although I had expected most users to use the text search facility to find information rather than browsing, although browsing seems to be a popular way of using it. I toyed with using the Dewey system but it might not be possible on-line due to copyright :huh: and in any case that is unknown to most people.