In the old days (and still in some places where the resources are particularly fragile – or the archivist still enforces 20th century rules) you used to go into archives equipped with a pad, a pencil, and a mountain of boiled sweets… and spend the day scribbling until your wrist went dead, your eyes fell out, and your fingers fell off.

No more.

Most document collection now is done with a camera, which allows you to spend a lot less time in the archive, and a lot more time back home reading the material.

To make sure that you get the best possible photo of a document, you generally fit it to the camera screen shape – and since most photos that you take in an archive are of a single page, that means that most photos you come back with are on their side.

The first step is always to rotate them all so that you can read them. Which is easy if you are on your own, and you always hold the camera one way around.

Having returned from the archives with well over 700 photos of books, manuscripts, microfiche and other written material – I’m remembering how long it takes to rotate them all, and discovering that a shared camera means that I have to keep changing my rotation direction.

Almost done, then it’ll be time to folder them up and give them a structure.