We have added the first of a batch of videos to our collection database.
The first one features Tom Crawford, a former train driver who drove one of the locomotives in our collection discussing his experience.
Rather serendipitously Tom’s family made contact with the Museum and Irma Havlicek from the Web Services team organised for Tom to come in and for his story to be filmed and recorded for posterity.
There are many many stories of objects about which the Museum knows more about as a result of public contact generated by the collection database and through visitation to the physical museum, but this is the first object for which we have been able to add a personal story to in such a way.
For those wanting to know how this is done technically, we store the video in our kEmu collection database in its multimedia table, just like all the images, which is then harvested periodically. We currently use Flash Video (FLV) as a preferred format to balance size and quality.