Winsor & Newton Colourman's Manuscript Archive: Page-Image Database of Historic Recipes for Paint Making

Project start date: 2005-05

Project end date: 2008-04

The Winsor & Newton nineteenth century recipe archive consists of handwritten recipe books, bound records of processes and shopfloor accounts (time and pricing for manufacturing their products), as well as miscellaneous details of daily operations from the company's beginnings in the early 1830s through to the beginning of the twentieth century. The value of the Winsor & Newton recipe books is that they allow researchers to determine what materials were used to create a given pigment or colour; information that could be of great significance for interpreting analytical data from actual paintings in technical or authenticity studies and evaluations of deterioration. The creation of a database has allowed electronic searching and cross referencing of the material for the first time. Each of the nearly 17,000 pages has been photographed and the database compiled in considerable detail (by recipe titles, topics, materials, named individuals etc.). The database is linked electronically to each relevant page image. This approach combines flexibility and convenience in locating relevant material, together with the advantages of seeing the full manuscript text, along with notations such as corrections, insertions and diagrams, as well as erasures. Production of compressed JPEG files from uncompressed TIFF files for general dissemination. Generation of dynamic HTML pages from the MySQL data by means of PHP scripting. Generation of MySQL data from FileMaker via exporting and manual data manipulation