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Posts tagged 'Archives'

21
Tue May
2013
2

Sweet, sweet music

Posted by Emma Jay in Behind the scenes

I’m in Gateshead and I can hear music. No, I haven’t gone doolally, though you might well wonder. The second work placement I’ve chosen to do for the Clore leadership programme is at Sage Gateshead (which was previously known as ‘The Sage Gateshead’, but is currently undergoing a brand refresh).

All kinds of music are happening here: classical, jazz, folk, rock, world, big band, soul and blues, to name a few. A highlight for me was Fiddlers Two By Two, one of the concerts in the recent Fiddles on Fire festival. A brilliant and spontaneous medley of music led by Kathryn Tickell, it featured surprising combinations of artists from different countries and traditions.

Sage Gateshead by Mark Savage

Sage Gateshead © Mark Savage

The best workplace perk I’ve ever come across is the ability to pop into the public viewing gallery in Hall One (the bigger of the two concert halls) and listen to rehearsals. And it’s been a delight to catch Northern Sinfonia as often as I have, whether in rehearsal or in performance.

It seems apt that I’m at a musical venue, because in many ways the Clore programme is about listening. I’ve had the privilege of sitting in on a huge variety of meetings and conversations, both here and on my previous placement at Battersea Arts Centre, and that has given me a sense of what the two organisations are doing, and how and why they are doing it.

I’m learning about things I knew little or nothing about before, from artistic programming to ticket sales, and from London’s fringe theatre scene to the cultural infrastructure of the north east of England. In both places I’ve encountered the excitement and the risks of putting on a live show – something I’ve not been exposed to at all in my job at The National Archives, of course.

Listening plays a large part in a course I’m taking (along with several other Clore fellows) called Relational Dynamics. The course covers elements of leadership and personal awareness, but is mainly focused on coaching, and provides the opportunity of gaining a coaching accreditation. The concept of ‘active listening’ is key to the coaching experience: it’s a way of enabling the coachee (horrible word!) to explore his or her thoughts, articulate positive goals and make decisions.

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24
Wed Apr
2013

Collaborative Doctoral Partnerships

Posted by Victoria Lain in Records and research

Research at The National Archives is going from strength to strength! We have more good news to report as The Thames Consortium, comprised of The National Maritime Museum, The National Portrait Gallery and The National Archives has been awarded six Collaborative Doctoral Partnerships (CDPs) per year for the next three years to support doctoral students.

Page of the order book of the Sequestration Committee

Page of the order book of the Sequestration Committee includes an entry relating to the case of Lady Mary Bankes, who was attempting to secure the return of family estates on behalf of her children while at the same time attempting to defend Corfe Castle from falling into the hands of Parliament (SP 20/1, vol 3, 22 September 1645)

The CDP studentships are distributed by the Arts and Humanities Research Council to sustain and promote high-quality research and skills in the sector. Maintaining the skills base in the arts and humanities is vital, and The National Archives will now be able to extend more opportunities for interdisciplinary research, knowledge exchange and training. We are really pleased to be involved and are thrilled that students will have access to a museum, an art gallery and an archive through which to explore their themes.

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17
Wed Apr
2013

Imaginings from the image library

Posted by Marion Downie (admin) in Behind the scenes

Looking for a picture of Santa in a kayak or cats taking part in a wheelbarrow race? Well, you may be surprised to learn you have come to the right place. If you have more serious pursuits, you can also get your hands on manuscripts such as a copy of the earliest printed document, pages from the Magna Carta or 18th century plans for parliament.

Cats by artist Louis Wain

Cats by artist Louis Wain, 1904 (catalogue reference: COPY 1/221 (204))

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8
Mon Apr
2013
12

Censuses compared

Posted by Audrey Collins in Records and research

1940 Census indexingJust over a year ago the 1940 census of the United States was released, causing much excitement and activity in the genealogical community there. Unlike recent census releases in the UK, it did not arrive fully indexed, but as soon as the census images were made public a massive crowd-sourcing project got underway to create name indexes. This is no mean feat since that census contains over 132 million names. The project was jointly undertaken by FamilySearch and by two commercial companies, findmypast.com and Archives.com with batches being allocated to volunteer transcribers and moderators using FamilySearch indexing software. The enthusiasm of the volunteers exceeded expectations, and the whole project was completed ahead of schedule within a few months. Quite independently of this, two other companies, Ancestry.com and MyHeritage.com, also compiled their own indexes.

I indexed a few batches myself, because I thought it was a worthwhile project, but also because I have an interest in American records. My own ancestry is all Scottish and Irish so far, but learning about American records is useful to me because I keep finding distant relatives whose families migrated there in the 19th and 20th centuries, and I have an American daughter-in-law. It’s also relevant to the day job, since many Americans have British or Irish roots, and when I am answering their research enquiries on British records it helps to know a little about the kind of records they are used to.

Nationwide or federal censuses have been taken in the USA every ten years since 1790. In Great Britain there has been a census every ten years since 1801, with the exception of 1941, and in Ireland every ten years from 1821 to 1911. There was no Irish census in 1921 because of the Troubles, but a census was taken in 1926 in both the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. There is a lot more US census to look at, and not just because it is a much bigger country. There are lists of names all the way back to 1790, albeit names of heads of households only before 1850, while in Great Britain no name lists at all were collected centrally until 1841 (although some lists from 1801 to 1831 do survive in local archives). But there is also a great deal of extra census material in the USA, including state censuses, often taken half-way between the federal censuses. There are also ‘Non-population’ returns for some years, recording details about agriculture and manufacturing.

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1
Fri Mar
2013
2

‘Cardinals by candlelight’: British diplomats and the Vatican

Posted by Tommy Norton in Records and research

I imagine the past couple of weeks have been pretty busy for the British Embassy to the Holy See, but they probably have nothing on 1978, otherwise known as the Year of Three Popes.

Pope Benedict XVI’s recent decision to step down as leader of the Roman Catholic Church – the first pope to abdicate in almost six centuries – opens the way for the unusual situation of two popes living in the Vatican at the same time.

In 1978, in the space of three tumultuous months between August and October, the Roman Catholic Church had no less than three different leaders: Pope Paul VI, Pope John Paul I and Pope John Paul II. I’ve been looking back through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) files from the period to see how British officials at the legation (as it was then) in Rome dealt with the fast-changing situation.

Poland's Cardinal Wojtyla became the third pope of 1978. (catalogue ref: FCO 33/3787)

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28
Thu Feb
2013
1

Writer of the month: Mali’s monuments

Posted by Gus Casely-Hayford in Records and research

Over the last year I have watched helplessly as dozens of Mali’s most ancient monuments have been damaged or destroyed as Ansar Dine supporting militia have pushed further and further south from their strongholds on the edge of the Sahara Desert. So it was with more than a little relief that I watched the recent liberation of Timbuktu by French and West African forces. But that relief turned quickly to shock as news reports showed the liberating forces uncovering what appeared to be the deliberate destruction of some of the irreplaceable archives ancient and libraries of Timbuktu.

Gus Casely-Hayford

Gus Casely-Hayford

As I watched the news reports, I was taken back to my last visit to the great city…

The alleyway had been worn into a series of deep smooth sculpted ruts making it almost impossible to negotiate for the uninitiated without absolute concentration.

It is only in recent years that I have come to realise what has driven me to spend significant chunks of my adult life travelling, searching out archives and libraries across Africa, hunting down local historians and visiting small and remote museums. Whether I have been engaged in concrete research or not, I have always sought out manuscripts whether held in state archives or small family collections.

Over decades I have fed my fetish in the basements of multi-national corporations, in the stores of village churches and mosques, at battlefields, in goldmines and in the backrooms of small corner shops. And I have learned that history is important in Africa for all the reasons one might imagine – but perhaps more than anywhere else I have travelled, I have become aware of the past forming a vivid and palpable presence in people’s lives.

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14
Mon Jan
2013
2

What was really going on: the hidden secrets of the UK Government Web Archive

Posted by Linda Stewart in Technology and innovation

New Year Openings at The National Archives are a time for looking back at the world of 30 years ago, marvelling at how much has changed, or, as a recent blog post on Renewing the Values of Society demonstrated, how much has stayed the same.

What government was doing about the web in 1982 hasn’t received the publicity of the Falklands files. Mainly because, you might think, in 1982 the World Wide Web was little more than a gleam in the eye of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, called ENQUIRE. But while war was raging in the Falklands, a group of civil servants from the government’s Central Computing and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) were trying to second guess the future (BN 120/8 and BN 120/9).

Pre-web, there was plenty of computing going on in government departments; most of it hidden away on the one large machine each department had, with a scattering of terminals that connected staff in distant offices to the machine. The CCTA were trying to establish how much need, if any, there would be to transfer data from one government department’s machine to another. Another 1982 anniversary was the official adoption of the TCP/IP protocol, building block of the internet, by the US Department of Defense. In 1982, data was being exchanged across the world, but the internet was still very much part of its US Cold War communications origins. In the UK civil servants were speaking not of nets, let alone internets, but packet switching. The climate for building networks was not very encouraging. There was a waiting list for new telephone lines – which it was hoped the privatisation of British Telecom would address – meanwhile the first Data Protection Act (1984) was stirring in Parliament;  there was an awareness of the public’s reluctance to have their personal information shared across departments by these worrying computers that sent you gas bills for £1,000,000,000.99p.  And cost was a major factor: to save  taxpayers money data from local benefits offices was sent  by the cheaper overnight tariff to the DHSS central computer in Newcastle.

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12
Mon Nov
2012
2

In autumn, the cycle begins again…

Posted by Melinda Haunton in Behind the scenes, Managing information
Image of the life cycle of a frog, from spawn to adult

All the best things go in cycles - thanks to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History for the inspirational diagram

One of my very first posts on this blog was about our annual survey of collecting, known as ‘accessions to repositories’. It’s a crucial way we keep in touch with hundreds of archive services across the UK, finding out what they are collecting and how the archival map is evolving. Archive services’ collections grow constantly: they add items to document more recent history, and also when new collections become available, whether because new relationships have been built, or because of a major event, as when a company has closed or an owner has died and the records need a safe new home.

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8
Thu Nov
2012
1

The conservation of MH 47: Preparing military tribunal records for digitisation

Posted by Tessa Thomas in Behind the scenes, Records and research

The conservation of MH 47 in preparation for digitisation has been an intriguing and engaging experience due to the nature of the content and variety of paper-based materials within this group of records. The records are primary sources regarding conscientious objectors and appeals of exemption for the First World War.

Repairing a MH 47 record

While the majority of the records are standard forms of the Middlesex Appeal Tribunal, the group also includes minute volumes and hand written letters and photographs submitted by applicants as evidence of their claim. Thanks to the exceptional efforts of volunteers, the forms and letters pertaining to the appeal of each individual applicant have been sorted and placed in separate folders; this enables greater ease of handling, increased efficiency in completing conservation treatments and appropriate housing for long-term storage after digitisation.

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