Back in April I mentioned that we had very gently gone live with the
Database of 19th Century Photographers and Allied Trades in London 1841-1901 on the photoLondon website. It seems like a good time for an update for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, the site has proved to be quite a success, at least compared with our modest expectations. Actual visits and pageviews have only crept up gradually since the launch, albeit with a few great flurries of activity. We get around 3000 visits a month and people tend to look at 7 or 8 pages per visit. But user reaction has been growing inexorably, with more people contacting us through the website every week as they find their ancestors or seek the photographer of a photo they own. I think that Google is sending a lot more of our visits now, which means people with very specific interests and questions - which you should probably expect with a database of 10,000 people! Still I don’t think we were expecting quite so many inquiries, and it’s often hard to offer more than is already on the site. Tunjay, who is the administrator in our Later Department, does everything possible to give a helpful answer, but the fact is that we at the Museum of London aren’t the source of or experts about the data; that role belongs to David Webb, whose many years of research he generously contributed to the database.
The second reason for an update is that we were contacted while ago by the production team of a TV programme that’s due to air very shortly, and which just might feature the website, since it helped in researching the family history that the programme explores. I don’t know if it will actually be mentioned, but it would be nice validation of David Webb’s work if it was.
Both of these illustrate that family history and genealogy are a very important part of the reason that a site like this is interesting to a wide audience. Soon after the launch, as we started to get inquiries from family historians, I ventured onto their turf to ask in a couple of forums what we could do to make a site like this useful to them. The answer was basically “not a lot, it’s already what we need”; that’s gratifying, but I suspect there’s always more we could do. One thing might be to offer downloadable datasets; another (perhaps less for the benefit of genealogists) could be to integrate the biographies with related resources on photography, geography, social history, archive collections etc.
As well as inquries, there is another kind of contact we get through the site, where people write to add to or correct our information, and this is really exciting. Again, we pass the information on to David Webb for him to examine and process as he sees fit. So far, because of this roundabout flow of information, we have not re-integrated any information, but I would hope to do this in the future so if you have any amendments for us, please, please keep on sending them.
One final thing: I created a simple REST API for those geeks out there who want to play with the database. Sadly the quality of the address data isn’t that brilliant at present, which limits what we can do in terms of mashups until I get a chance to crunch it a bit, but if you want to play then please drop me a line and I’ll give you the keys.
So to wrap up, I would love to know your suggestions for how we might improve the site. Tell us things like
- what sort of information do you need that’s not obvious at present?
- would you like any tools to collect or download information?
- would it be useful to integrate a wiki with the site, so that each person can have a page that our site’s visitors can add to and edit?
Stick your ideas in the comments or drop us a line.
The 
We frequently receive enquiries about aspects of social history such as food and nutrition during wartime and the employment of women. We therefore decided to create pages for a range of