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Posts tagged 'archives sector'

Fri May

2013

Corporate memory – a national treasure

Posted by Melinda Haunton in Behind the scenes, Records and research

Did you know that The National Archives has a Business Archives Advice Manager? Alex Ritchie is the man in question, and I thought today’s blog should introduce you to some elements of his work. It’s all part of a national strategy for business archives, in which The National Archives is a partner.

Image of the corporate archive searchroom at Roche

The home of the archives at F Hoffmann-La Roche

What’s so special about business archives?

The written heritage of Britain is not only in public hands, and represents more than individuals, families and organisations. Any commercial entity, from massive international corporations to small family businesses and sole traders, needs to maintain records to succeed. They keep accounts, staff records and production records. Designs, publicity, staff records and product images are also kept. Their value can be anything from heritage branding to patent information crucial to company income or Victorian engineering diagrams for structures still in active use today. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that many businesses retain an archive and that they are among the richest collections for historical research.

Mon Apr

2013

Happy centenary to you!

Posted by Melinda Haunton in Behind the scenes

It’s a pleasure today to wish a happy centenary to Bedfordshire and Luton Archives and Records Service which – as Bedfordshire Record Office – was the first ever county record office to be founded in Britain, in 1913. As any archive student knows, this foundation was the start of a network of county-based archive services which came to form the backbone of local archive provision in the UK.

…Except any archive student also knows, it’s a bit more complicated than that!

RAIL 1031/10: Bradshaw's 1839 railway map of the UK. Like the railways, a local archives network stetches across the country

By 1913, there were already many local institutions deeply involved in preserving local records. Some were within local authorities themselves – the clerks of the peace and those who cared for city and borough muniments. Local public libraries collected important historical documents. And in some areas, antiquarian, archaeological and records societies were providing a third sector solution, collecting and preserving their local history through voluntary effort. ¹ The solution that Bedfordshire adopted, of a county records committee which evolved into a record office run by the County Council, was by no means the only solution. (Hertfordshire actually got there first with the records committee model, though they don’t claim to have had the same unbroken institutional history.)

Notes:

1. This is a very brief summary of the analysis made by Elizabeth Shepherd in her Archives and Archivists in 20^th Century England (Ashgate: 2009), pp 95-102. ^

Tue Apr

2013

Trainee Tuesday: Goodbye from the Opening up Archives trainees

Posted by Kate Sutton in Behind the scenes, Records and research

Over the last year the other Opening Up Archives trainees and I have blogged on everything from Richard III and ice cream to medieval archives and LGBT history month. We’ve created a Polish Community Project, apps, trained archivists on the digital preservation process, and one of us even ventured outside to an archaeology dig. As our traineeships are coming to an end we’ve picked some highlights and interesting archives for one last blog post.

Julie Thomson – Leicester and Rutland Archives

Women’s Legion, Land Army, and factory and munitions workers

It’s been a busy, slightly wacky, but overall rewarding year of digital preservation training! The best part is that I was able to throw myself into the day-to-day functioning of my host Record Office in a really hands-on way, and at the end of it all feel like I’d made a significant contribution to preserving its holdings. I also hope my work (both digitising large numbers of items and helping to create an accessible, commercially viable online image library) will ultimately generate some real revenue for the Record Office, as well as promoting local heritage to a global audience. I’ve genuinely enjoyed learning about my colleague Kasia McCabe’s Polish Community Project too. Archives are definitely looking like a viable career path, especially with regard to digital technology.

Personal favourite archive item? That is a tough one. We’ve had Richard III material, Isaac Newton’s property rolls, and a lot of interesting medieval documents. But the photography collections are especially rich, and dealt with exciting material from throughout the 20th century. One of my most abiding interests is the role of women on the home front during the First and Second World Wars. I’ve cheated and made a collage because there are too many good ones!

Tue Apr

2013

Trainee Tuesday: the best of Borthwick

Posted by Amy Coaker in Behind the scenes, Records and research

Original artwork for a poster advertising Rowntree’s Fruit Gums (1954)

2013 is an important year for my host organisation, the Borthwick Institute for Archives, based at the University of York. The year simultaneously marks both the 50th anniversary of the University’s establishment, and the 60th anniversary of the Borthwick’s foundation. The latter became a part of the former in 1963, on occasion of the university’s opening.

Formed in 1953 as a repository and public research centre for the vast ecclesiastical archive of the Archdiocese of York, the Borthwick has since acquired material of increasingly broad and diverse origins. No longer renowned solely for its extensive church records, dating as far back as the 13th century, the Borthwick now boasts holdings that range from the archive of internationally acclaimed playwright Alan Ayckbourn, to those of the famous confectionery firms, Rowntree’s and Terry’s. Other highlights include the secret war diaries of E. F. L. Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax, who served as Foreign Secretary and British Ambassador to the United States during World War II, and the archive of The Retreat, a Quaker-founded hospital for the mentally ill, established in 1796, which pioneered humane, progressive therapies at a time when most other asylums were treating their patients as little more than animals.

Telegram from Noël Coward to Alan Ayckbourn

Telegram from famed playwright Noël Coward to Alan Ayckbourn on the premiere of his play, Relatively Speaking (1967)

Tue Mar

2013

Trainee Tuesday: Outside the Archive

Posted by Emily Rumble in Behind the scenes

Over the months I have thoroughly enjoyed reading my fellow-trainees’ accounts of some of the projects they have undertaken this past year. It goes to show what fascinating stories we can find in our archives. However, in this entry I’m going to break the mould a bit…

Like the other trainees, I have spent a lot of time in the archives exploring topics such as Alan Turing for LGBT History Month, the origins of local place names, and food in Surrey (mock turtle soup, anyone?). But that is only one part of my traineeship at Surrey Heritage.

Based at Surrey History Centre, Surrey Heritage makes up the County Council’s heritage based departments, including the archives, archaeology, learning in heritage, and museums. This means that the traineeship here incorporates not only working in the archive, but some of the other teams as well. I don’t have enough time to describe all the projects I have been involved in during my traineeship, but have decided to pick out a few to describe some of the work I have undertaken outside the archive.

Tue Mar

2013

Trainee Tuesday: Richard III… from the horse’s mouth

Posted by Julie Thomson in Behind the scenes, Records and research

I am very privileged to be blogging to you today from a place to which I affectionately refer as ‘ground zero’. I mean, of course, the city of Leicester, much famed in recent weeks for a certain Yorkist monarch unearthed below the tarmac and asphalt of the county seat. Just 700mm below the aforesaid asphalt, mind you. This precarious state of affairs was compounded by the presence of 19th-century building foundations, drains and outhouses criss-crossing the ancient footprint of the 13th-century Franciscan friary in which he was laid to rest. Any one of these building projects could have easily swept away any evidence of Old Dick, and were indeed responsible for the unfortunate demise of his feet.

This fortuitous preservation, combined with the skill and luck that allowed University of Leicester archaeologists to pinpoint the grave’s location after opening only three trial trenches, is miraculous indeed. I am pleased and humbled to be placed in Leicester for my Opening Up Archives traineeship in this most landmark of years. All images in this article were personally digitised and it’s been wonderful to help preserve and promote such important source material.

But what exactly does the ‘Richard III Discovery Story’ have to do with archives, you may ask? In many ways, everything – because of course, our county Record Office holds the majority of desk-based data, in conjunction with the local Historic Environment Record office, which was used by resident archaeologists to surmise the circumstances of Richard’s burial.

This includes historical documents written post-Bosworth, in which various people have described, recorded, and theorised about the King’s death and final resting place, as in this example below by William Burton in The Description of Leicestershire, 1622:

Extract from William Burton's The Description of Leicestershire, 1622 (reference P 9/2)

Wed Mar

2013

Discovering discovery across the archives sector

Posted by Melinda Haunton in Behind the scenes

Three speakers on a platform, with a crowd watching them

The packed Forum programme included plenary panel discussions

The National Archives was pleased to host the third annual Archives Discovery Forum on 7 March. The Forum brings together information and archives professionals from across the UK to talk about how to open up access to collections and information about collections. You can see the full programme on the UK Archives Discovery Network (UKAD) website. The Forum is a key part of the work of the UKAD network, to get people together and discussing progress in this area. That can be about major changes to standards affecting the sector internationally or about improving awareness of individual archives’ collections, and anything in between. We know not everyone in the sector is progressing at the same rate, but so long as everyone is going in the same direction, towards ever-broadening access, there is value in sharing our progress.

Tue Mar

2013

Trainee Tuesday: When archivists and technology collide!

Posted by Naomi Lewis in Managing information, Technology and innovation

In the past few months, I have been spreading awareness of digital preservation via a workshop and the notion that digital material, like a word document or excel spreadsheet, is also an archive via displays to the general public.

However, focus has been shifted to the archivists themselves as they are the individuals that will be looking after the digital archives now and in the future.

In the last few years, digital preservation has become a core part of the qualification required to become an archivist, but archivists who have been qualified for longer may not be as aware of the issues surrounding digital preservation or be comfortable with the terminology used when discussing the subject unless they have actively decided to complete a Continuing Professional Development (CPD) module or taken part in training provided by The National Archives, the Archives and Records Association (ARA) or professional bodies.

Tue Mar

2013

Trainee Tuesday: Brave New Worlds

Posted by Chris Day in Behind the scenes, Records and research

LGBT History and Education at London Metropolitan Archives

This year’s LGBT History Month has been a special one for us at London Metropolitan Archives, marking the 10th year of our London Gay History Project, which culminated in our 10th LGBT History, Archives and Culture Conference, Brave New World? (already mentioned on The National Archives’ blog).

LMA’s London Gay History Project doesn’t just end with our conferences however. 2013 will see the launch of our LGBT History Education workshops, which allow young people to use documents from the LMA’s collections to explore themes in LGBT history.

With all of this in mind, I thought this blog would be a great opportunity to highlight and celebrate some of the LMA’s LGBT history sources…

Account of the trial for sodomy of Captain Edward Rigby (LMA reference MJ/SP/1698/12/024)

As has been discussed on this blog before, one of the largest difficulties in researching LGBT history is that before the mid-20th century, the stories of people’s lives are often next to invisible, hidden away in the records of official bodies, using archaic language and usually lacking in detail. This makes researching LGBT history in archives quite a challenge (which is why The National Archives’ Discovery tags are such a good idea!), but I’ve been lucky enough at LMA to have most of the hard graft done already by our community archivist.

One of our most interesting early modern documents is the account of the trial for sodomy of Captain Edward Rigby, which took place in 1698 (LMA reference: MJ/SP/1698/12/024). It tells a fascinating story and paints an unusually vivid picture of homosexual life in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, further context for which I am indebted to historian Rictor Norton.

Mon Mar

2013

You can take the girl out of the archives …

Posted by Emma Jay in Behind the scenes

My fellowship on the Clore leadership programme has entered a new phase. I’m taking six months out of my job at The National Archives to focus fully on the fellowship – I’ll not be back until the end of July.

There won’t be any time to twiddle my thumbs. I’ll be doing two work placements in different organisations, going on various training courses, researching and writing a paper on an aspect of leadership, attending a two-week residential course with the other Clore fellows (the sequel to our first Bore Place experience), and much else besides.

I’m immensely lucky to be able to make the most of the fellowship by spending time away from work. Not all the fellows are doing the same. Yet whereas the six-month hiatus felt like a long time when I thought about it in advance, it now seems to be speeding by at an alarming rate.

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