Quite a productive week

 Despite a slow start, this has been quite a productive week.

I've finished documenting the master bedroom at Lake View - only another six rooms to go.

In the course of finishing off the  master bedroom I came across this quite nice late nineteenth century metal trunk

which interestingly had a number of Victorian Railways luggage labels on the end of the trunk including this one to Flinders Street

which is sort of interesting.

A couple of months ago I was puzzling over the possible date of a label on a Victorian tin hat box.

Well, while I have no idea to the actual dates I think I can say, on purely stylistic grounds, that the design of Victorian Railways must have changed sometime after World War One when the use of sans serif fonts became more common.

This is of course an exercise in extreme handwaving, as they could still have been using the old serif labels in parallel with the new design as they ran down stocks of the older ones.

Other than that I didn't find anything else particularly interesting other than a nineteenth century commode complete with a more recent dead spider

Up at the Athenaeum it's a little bit more serious.

Following on from my visit to Albury Library Museum to hear about e-hive, we're beginning to look at the possibilities of putting some of the collection online via a museum content hosting site, which would give us a content management system, and of course that also has implications as to how we manage our collections (and data) in the future.

I can foresee some interesting times as moving from our ad hoc collection of spreadsheets to something more formal has the potential to be a little disruptive to our workflows as naturally, if people have something that works for them, they understandably won't be enthusiastic about change ...

However its not all been toilets and archival solutions, I had a good day repotting various plants that we keep on the back deck to give the impression, in summer at least, that we live somewhere green and verdant.

I havn't planted out any tomatoes yet, in fact I've yet to source some decent plants - I decided to postpone things a little after a couple of surprisingly heavy frosts at the start of the week.

I did however plant out some radish seedlings - I forgot to put a wire cloche over them and unsurprisingly the possums found them - a reminder of last year's shenanigans when the possums destroyed my tomatoes and zucchinis three times over, as well as wiping out my chillies.

This year, hopefully, I'm better prepared ...