Working for a museum with a massive transport archive we haven't put anything online yet. That's because the archive itself isn't in a suitable state. Years of it being 'managed' by volunteers mean the curators don't know exactly what's in there. If you manually go through the room of filing cabinets you can (eventually) find what you hope you're looking for as there is no list containing everything. This also assumes that things have been filed how you would expect and not according to whatever quirks the original person who filed it was using as a filing system. We started scanning just the photos 5 years ago and we have a tiny percentage done (this is done with volunteer labour or if you get one out you scan it while you're there).
From the other side of the table it seems they have put something together to show they have an archive, probably with very little (for the massive job and IT costs) money but as an example to show they've started. Using the bookmarked link I found what I expected: images with details in the 'Themes' bit, and 'we have this but haven't uploaded an image yet' through the search box. All in all I think it's a good start for a resource with a massive amount of content (presumably) and little staff hours or cash to dedicate to it. It would be hoped that over the years that this is added to as time and resource permit. I haven't seen an archivist/curator job advertised in our trade press recently (and if £50,000 was the budget this would eat up most of that) so presume it's managed by someone who is either on their own or doing another job at the same time (I may be wrong).
Either way I think it's a good start and the general public don't always realise what taking on such a massive project entails, especially as they always expect you to be at the best of cataloguing and digitisation, when they never get to see the reality of behind the scenes.
Stephanie
ETA: Most archivists/curators are hired on the skills and experience rather than their knowledge of what's in the collection. I'd guess that the person responsible can safely look after thousands of photographs but doesn't necessarily know what they're looking at. Even many people on here have never done the whole canal system and so you rely on the previous caretaker to have known what they were doing (see above) and to have labelled correctly. While in this forum its not specialist knowledge, in the outside world it is and won't be something that will be required of the person doing the job as it would leave you with a very tiny pool of applicants (if any). As to comparing one image to modern photos, that's a massive job - finding out where that picture was taken, then finding a modern photo and comparing, when you have limited knowledge of your subject is a massive job and can't practically be done when you're working on thousands of images (let alone trying to do the day job at the same time). As said above we rely on those who know more to tell us when we've got it wrong, we need it verifying, which can take time if you don't know the industry (ie canals) and don't know who to talk to (I would guess most archivists would contact CRT in this instance which puts them at a disadvantage). Think of it like editing Wikipedia. Someone writes it, then someone reads and trusts it, then the next person objects and edits it. You don't know person 3's intentions or background so you always take Wikipedia entries with a grain of salt as there isn't 'official' verification. I'd like to think though that the archivist will react to your email - just forget that museums/archives run on 'museum time' (similar to canal time) so it might take longer than expected to deal with!
(Wow that's a long post!)