I had a really exciting meeting with Susan Connole of Friends of the Ballard Locks FOBL today. I got some books and papers outlining the construction history, and I saw some of the boxes of thousands of old photos they have. All phases of the construction of the locks, all sorts of historic events. They have digitized most of the photos, but they don't have a website yet to upload them to. One solution would be to use Wikimedia Commons to host all the photos, since its free and permanent, and comes with the kind of file structure they need to let people access the content.
The meta data for the photos is on paper tables, so I'm thinking that if we could use OCR to read the metadata, then create a bridge program to fill in the data fields for a mass upload of the images. Do we have anyone who would want to do that kind of project?
Coming along for the drained locks underground tour might be as easy as signing an injury waiver. It sounds like I just need to stay in touch and show up on the right day, approximately when the tide is low in the first weeks of November.
For the August FOBL meeting, they can invite members of the historical societies in Ballard, Magnolia, Wallingford, etc to come and listen to us give a recruiting/training new editors presentation. So we should plan something to present.
There's tons of history to cover on all the public debates over if, when and where to build the Ballard Locks going back to the 1880s. They had a number of lawsuits. The project includes the Ship Canal, lowering Lake Washington, draining the shoreline around Renton, reversing the river flow around the Duwamish, leaving the Georgetown Steam plant high and dry. There's so much to write about, and the historical photos are there if we can go get them. No article yet on Carl S. English, and several other figures who built the Locks.
And they have a whole room of antique tools and equipment used to build the locks, giant rivets and rivet guns, tongs, gauges and instruments. It all needs to be photographed.
That's only the beginning. So we need an outline plan, and we need to assign tasks.
Dennis