Although I did ask this in a post I thought I would ask it on a new thread.
Given all the recent fabulous stuff on Blondins, pitwork, Hathorn Davey engines and stuff like the Hunter Tunneler would it perhaps be worth just setting up a folder for diagrams in photo form so that these can be somewhere that is easy to access without searching back thru old posts/albums... I say this as given a fairly simple label it would make the stuff an easily accessible and make this an even better resource.... Just an idea... :flowers:

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Sounds a great idea in principle. The questions would be –

1. What material to include. Engineering drawings obviously, architectural drawings? survey drawings? OS location plans? Etc.

2. Search tool. I’m professionally involved in drawing and asset management and if you were to use a library resource like this seriously you would ideally require more that one search thread for retrieval. Viz: Location (already available) and Author and Title are the other most obvious ones. This would require some setting up and tagging of files but it could be a very exciting information source. Thus Location: ____ Colliery – Author: Hathorn Davey - Title: Pumps

3. Do we know how many drawing we have?

Sorry I missed this thread.

Would it not cover it is I simply added some new classifications to the document upload facility for both personal files and mine/quarry related files.

Then they'd be tagged in the normal way, but classified differently.

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I think that might be the most pragmatic solution given time and resources.

My idea would be a tad top-heavy for what we want to achieve for the time being, possibly.

Another thought - does anybody have CAD surveys/drawings that could be uploaded?

Nick

Simon thats all I wanted a simple way of storing it and the ability for admins to move images to it if the person uploading hasn't time or forgets.... 🙂

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It won't be able to take images I'm afraid. Files submitted as documents will always need to be PDF. I couldn't see a mix of JPEGs and PDFs working as an archive? Standardising on a format is the only viable options I feel.

We could have a tick box against uploaded images 'this is a drawing', but this could end up 'this is a map', 'this is a photograph' but then we're just complicating things. and for every email I get asking for a new feature I get another one asking me how to use a feature and suggesting the site is already too complicated.

Plans have the same problem, some get uploaded as photos, some as downloadable PDFs. how do we collate them given the mix of formats?

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That is always the stumbling point when setting up this sort of thing. Mixed formats are not so much of a technical problem, I think, as being able search for the subject content.

Unless there is some very sophisticated file/document reading software which I haven't heard about that can distinguish between photos and drawings, it would require some poor s_d to go through the archives to tag the files - not an impossible task, just a very tedious one.

You're right, there is no problem mixing file formats in a library. it's neater if it's standardised, but a library of, say, 'drawings' could collate all photographs of type 'drawing' and all uploaded documents of type 'drawing'.

The PDF upload process could be modified to create a JPEG thumbnail so that these could be shown with the image thumbnails.

But that's the issue, all document view pages would need complete re-coding to provide this.

Is there enough demand to justify the work this would require? There are some incredibly generous contributors of some really high quality material on here. Would improving (and I quite accept this would be an improvement) the way drawings and plans are catalogued encourage more use of the site? After all the main reason this site exists is as a permanent resouce and archive of relevant information so I am quite happy to entertain more improvements if there is a concensus that it would encourage more material to be submitted.

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Sounds like an excellent idea to one (such as myself) who has no idea of the administrative hassle involved. 🙂

Same here

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