Author: Carole Leith
As of September 2009 the University of Kent at Canterbury have made available online thousands more images from their resources. The Versatile Digitisation Framework project [VERDI] was funded under the Enriching Digital Resources strand of the JISC Digitisation Programme.
Whew… well that’s the official description, but actually the VERDI launch was one hell of a bash – champagne and delicious eats – and lots of very interesting chats with staff interested in newspaper cartoons, archaeology and of interest to our readers – mills and milling.
As the chap who did the introduction to the launch, John Sotillo, Director of Information Services, explained that with the explosion of the world wide web the university was challenged to develop ways of enabling access to images by academics, students and the general public. How to describe a photograph for retrieval was considered the biggest problem; to see how this was resolved go to http://www.kent.ac.uk/is/projects/verdi/ and follow the Muggeridge link to the Templeman Library and the wind and watermill collection.
Thanks are particularly due to Susan Crabtree (Special Collections Librarian) who scanned and prepared for the website photographs of wind and watermills taken by William Burrell Muggeridge and Donald Muggeridge. This extraordinary collection of over 6000 images make up a unique compilation dating from 1904. Several of these were enlarged for the launch and were impressive in the quality of their composition and detail.
You will find other mills and milling resources – photographs, notes, correspondence and receipts – on the Templeman site including the CP Davies collection; John Holman memorabilia and the Don Filmer collection donated on the dissolution of the East Kent Mills group.
(amended following feedback)