The Risky in Pink video 1990






The last six weeks has seen an increase in the number of people putting their efforts into the website and the exhibition. Up until then Toby was mainly constructing it with John Ellingsworth, and this was the state of play then, at the beginning of October:

Glamorgan Archive material

Almost all of our paperwork has had duplicates removed, and has been sorted roughly into years and shows. We transferred the material into correct storage style for the Archive, and have done a list of contents of each of 16 boxes.

There is a lot more work to be done to them (labelling photos, etc), and we will still be drawing on them as a resource for the website, but if I had to hand them over today I might apologise that the work was not complete, but would not be embarrassed (they’ve seen worse).

Website

I have more or less finished feedback on the design of the website, (and quite a lot of content is already up) but now we have a real push to fill in all the details.

I am content that most of the Timeline is done (although new thoughts pop up occasionally).

I have made check-sheets of each of the Show pages, so I can monitor where we are up to with content loading.   I will type these up, so you can see the progress (and the glaring holes) in them.

The People pages have hardly begun (and that includes oral histories, biogs, photos).

The website obviously will not contain all the material we are handing to the archives, but we want it to be representative of what we have gathered.

Newspaper reviews

We sorted these into date order, and all were quickly photographed. The photos have been sorted and labelled in date order, so we could cherry-pick some good ones for the website.

For ideal presentation of these good ones, we would make PDF copies from the originals.

Photos

This is still an enormous task, and currently Matthew is the only person working systematically on it. Photos need to be selected, resized where necessary, and uploaded.

Programmes

For elegance, we have decided to put these on the website as PDFs. Quite a few are done, and someone like Esther could probably finish them in a session.

Posters

We have all the currently available posters in PDF format, and most are uploaded.

Scripts

We have turned all those we can find into PDFs and uploaded them.

Tour Dates

Most of these were compiled (some are missing) and just need uploading (again, maybe a day’s work for someone competent). I have started on this, for lack of a volunteer.

People

I have loaded 50 people on the website, but their content (photos, biogs and links to projects) need adding. This is potentially a huge project that needs someone drawing on our spreadsheet of cast members, and knowledge of the people. I have the next 50 in a list, ready to go.

Oral Histories

Just one aspect of the content for People. We have to deliver them to Cardiff Story Museum with all their data attached (for future researchers) but for the website we need to remove all that stuff at the beginning (…”it’s recording when the numbers, go round, OK we are in John Street, can you spell your name.” “T – i – m A-da-m”) and start with the first question. If the interviewer has used correct technique (getting the interviewed person to include the question) then we can start at the monologue.

This is a huge task, and we would be better off focusing on a general tidy up, rather than trying to get rid of the sound of a bus passing.

For any future summaries, we need to keep it simple, not write it all out, and just note mentions of any

• Show
• Person
• Date

as that is the way the website tags them. And then note any ‘funny’ anecdotes.

Music

As noted, we don’t have a lot of material available yet. Ideally we would have a sample track from each of the recent shows. If we do have whole albums we may have to decide exactly how to store them online (SoundCloud, etc) to be able to link to them. The website does not appear to have the capacity to store albums.

Exhibition

As far as I can tell, this is in hand, but I have not monitored it closely. Rather like the Oral Histories, I have assumed that we were proceeding quickly enough. I am in position to help provide material, and will certainly focus on it more, as we get closer to the time, but right now the website is consuming most of my time.