Royal Air Force Museum (RAFM)

Took a visit to DORIS today and was rather shocked to find car parking charges at £2.50 for three hours or £3.50 for six hours.

The second shock of the day, was that the old aperture card reader and printer has been replaced with a brand new scanner / computer and ink jet printer. For those of you who were familar with the old machine you may find the new one a little more difficult to use at first (you have to set up contrast and neg / poss first before you scan) but once you get the hang of it - its fine). The advantage is that its possible to only print a small area at high magnification as this was not possible with the old machine.

I cant help thinking though, that the whole process take about three times as long to the old method. Furthermore, the system is begging for the entire collection to be scanned and saved to disk, thus doing away with the scanner.

What are the aperture cards and what do they hold on them? I think you mentioned them before but I seem to have the memory of a thing that has a very short memory.

They are 35mm neg or pos images of airfield site plans mounted into aperture cards which are then magnified and printed at A3 or A2.

Just gone to check on the stuff I recieved yesterday. No Hendon, even in the address! Just a thought, is that area actually called Hendon or is it Colindale? Might explain the address bit.

The best thing is the continuing use of old counties. Many place in SE London still use Kent in the address when that ceased long ago. Middlesex is another one. All these predate the 1974 changes.