How To Provide A Display

The 'displays' section was first suggested by George Russell in a piece in Newsletter 318 (Jul/Aug 2009, p23), entitled Exhibits Should Be For Everyone. It stemmed from the very reasonable observations that (a) many members do not get to see displays and exhibits of great interest, because they are unable to attend the meeting or exhibition where they are shown, and (b) that scanned images of such exhibits made available to members via the website would be a very helpful alternative.

Naturally, we would like to have a wide selection of interesting things to look at, and further displays are actively solicited. So if you have a suitable display in mind, how should you go about getting it on the site? Well, I'm glad you asked that. The basic answer is 'provide the webmaster with a set of scanned pages', but the answers to some questions you might have are given in more detail below.

Which subjects are suitable?

Anything to do with GB philately that will be of interest to GBPS members, especially if it's something not commonly seen. That doesn't mean it must be stuffed with rarities, merely that it's not a straight SG Part 1 presentation. Unusual topics are good, so in general are specialised studies (shade studies are an exception, I'm afraid -- variation among scanners and screens makes the necessary precise colour accuracy virtually impossible). Basically, if it would make a good display at a meeting, it'll fit right in.

What are the minimum and maximum number of pages?

There are no particular limits on these, although I'd suggest one frame (16 sheets) as a useful minimum. (But if you have 'only' 8 sheets of something extremely rare, I don't suppose anyone's going to object.) As for the maximum, two to five frames would be typical, but really it depends on the display -- in principle there's no reason why we couldn't put up a few hundred pages of a genuinely comprehensive and helpful look at a popular or difficult subject. It's the sort of thing that can be worked out once the details are known.

Does the number of pages have to be a multiple of 16?

No; the 16-sheet 'frames' are merely a presentation convenience, since competition entries and displays tend to be arranged that way anyway. But if you had (say) 43 sheets of some interesting topic, they'd be displayed as two frames of 16 and one of 11 with blank 'pages' at the end.

What happens if I have pages of a non-standard size?

Not a problem, as long as they're all a multiple of some base size. So if you have sheets that are double width, say, that's fine -- see my own 1971 Postal Strike display for an example (all right, I chose that one as a test because it had a lot of such sheets, although it did do well as a social philately entry). But you can also have double height sheets, for example, or in principle even sheets that take up a frame by themselves. (How you would go about scanning such a sheet in the first place is left as an exercise for the reader.)

We can also cope with wide sheets -- e.g. the style some exhibitors prefer, or need, which uses sheets that are a third wider than usual (giving a frame of four rows of three). See this revenue stamps display for an example.

Who can see the displays?

At present, the intro pages are viewable by anyone to act as a 'taster', but the actual exhibit pages themselves can only be viewed by GBPS members who are logged in (if you don't have an account set up, you'll need your membership number to do so -- it's on the address label of the envelope the Newsletter and GBJ arrive in, or if not please inquire). The intro pages can be blocked on request too, and you can be anonymous or use a pseudonym if you wish.

How many displays can the site handle?

A lot, subject only to the usual disk space and bandwidth concerns -- at present we have plenty of spare capacity in both, so we could have dozens of displays in this section before we needed to become concerned.

OK, I'm up for this. What do I need to provide?

Excellent! Ideally I'd like the following; only the first of these is absolutely essential, but the other two are really useful and strongly encouraged. (The reduced sized images and the HTML for the pages themselves are generated by a Perl script that I run -- so systematic naming etc is a big help here, as it means I don't have to do much work to get the files into a form that it can use.)

(a) A set of scans of the pages in question, done at a reasonably high resolution -- 300dpi is the recommended choice (any less and the reduced size images look poor, any larger and the file sizes become huge) -- and with the files named in page order: 1.jpg, 2.jpg, 3.jpg, ... 47.jpg ... etc. If a sheet spans multiple positions, name it with all of them separated with dashes -- e.g. if you have one megasheet occupying the four positions in the bottom right corner of the first frame, the scanned page would be called 11-12-15-16.jpg. You needn't supply the page-sized images and the thumbnails, they'll be automatically produced.

(b) A short introduction to the display which explains what it's about and what it contains, the sort of thing you might put on a title page (you can have it on the title page as well if you want). Without that, the intro page will just instruct the viewer to see the first sheet. Any reasonably standard format is OK for this -- Word doc, plain text file, HTML, etc.

(c) A list of headings for each page, of the form '14. The Changes of January 1878' or whatever. These are used in the frame pages to give an idea of what each frame contains. Absent these headings, the titles will simply be given as (e.g.) 'Sheet 14' -- accurate but uninformative! Again, any normal format will be fine.

How do I get the files to you?

You could either save them to a CD or DVD or USB stick and post it to me, or place them on some website that I can download them from (e.g. Photobucket, Dropbox, or box.net). Unless the display is quite small, emailing them to me probably won't work, unfortunately, as it's likely to hit mailbox size limits. Ask if you're unsure.

So there you have it. I rather like this idea myself, since I'm sure all of us have seen displays that we'd like to be able to refer to repeatedly, rather than simply see once and scramble to make notes on. But it all depends on you, the GBPS membership -- so if you can help, please contact the with the details!