[Nick Balmer]

Hello Les,

You make a very valid point, which has been exercising my mind as well.

I am a member of the Cambridgeshire branch of the Miniature Armoured Fighting Vehicle Association MAFVA, and we hold our branch meetings inside the IWM Duxford site.

Jack Livesey who is a curator (I don't know his official title) there was at January the meeting.

I raised exactly this point with him. He of course is very familiar with the photo collection.

I asked if I could get a copy of the classification system. He said that the indexing has grown up over a long period of time, and is very complex. Most of the vehicle photos are just part of other collections and albums that the IWM has collected over time. They therefore appear in the index as photos from Colonel X, or the Kidbrooke Collection etc.

Friends in the MAFVA have been working together to catalogue collections like the British Pathe collection, others are working to collect all the tank names, and to link tank names to registration numbers and photos.

If you go to the MAFVA website you can see some of this work.

Jack Livesey is working on an excellent new book on tanks for publication shortly. He asked Paul Middleton and I to look through the proofs of the text to see if we could spot any obvious mistakes. His book has a very good set of photos, many of which are new to even hardened veteran obscure photo hunters like Paul and I.

It is obvious that he has shown us over the years that there is an absolutely huge number of really interesting photos in the IWM still hidden away.

We should support and encourage the IWM in their efforts to put these photos on line.

One way we could support this is in helping with captioning and commentary on the photos. Most photos have only the title put on them by Sergeant X in 1944 who took the pictures. He was not in a position to write down a very detailed caption, and it would never have entered his head that 50 years later people would be interested in the exact model of truck or tank that it portrayed.

Many of the IWM and other curatorial staff are no longer military in background, or even experts in their field. Many are just "curators" or experts in keeping collections.

When the current really great and throughly knowledgeable expert curators like David Fletcher and Jack Livesey retire it is very likely that they will be replaced by "professional curators". These new librarians will be chosen by the UK Civil Service from a pool of trained curators, who will barely know the difference between an APC and a tank, let alone be able to date the photo by using the model number to tell that it could not be before October 1943, and that the Divisional sign is the 81st West African Division.

This process is already happening in many libraries and museums like the IWM and even British Library.

They leave university qualified as "curators" but with no real interest or knowledge of the subject they look after.

Chance gets them their first position, which could be for paintings, cars, music, but just happens to be IWM photos.

Knowledgeable anoraks will be disqualified in future from applying because they are not university trained civil service curators.

We should see if there is not some way that we can repay these libraries for the thousands of hours of pleasure they are and have given us, by making these photos available, by helping them to provide commentaries or sub catalogue entries. With modern computer search engines, these sub catalogue entries would soon help future researchers find what they are looking for.

As many of us are aware from books like the excellent After the Battle series on the Arnhem and D Day campaigns, that it is becoming possible to reconstruct a lot of campaigns in incredible detail by cross referencing photographs from the many different archives around the world, and from private collections.

Many photos in the IWM and elsewhere are separated from others showing the events they were taken at. It should be possible for groups of enthusiasts like us to help link them back up, by providing commentaries on these photos to places like the IWM or Canadian and Australian US or German collections.

Sadly there is an awful lot of very sloppy and ill informed captioning in mass produced books at present. Somehow we have to try to find a way to provide a future clear way of protecting the core information in these collections. If we don't do this now, future generations will be getting an awful lot of very dodgy evidence from these books and films.

Regards

Nick Balmer