Looking after your archive

As mentioned earlier, Gloucestershire Archives held a ‘hands-on workshop’ here at the Heritage Hub as part of the Gloucester History Festival entitled ‘Looking after your archive’.On 4 September we ran a free drop-in event (10:00 til closing time at 16:30) on caring for an archive, with practical sessions working on the collection of historic sales particulars of Sandoe Luce Panes estate agents covering properties in South Gloucestershire (D4855).

Brief training sessions covered risks to collections, handling tips, archival quality materials, protective enclosures, removing surface dirt and identifying relevant information for a catalogue.  Visitors had the opportunity to clean, list, number and make up acid-free protective enclosures for the records.  

It was a very successful event with many people staying several hours and some all day! All in all around 100 documents were cleaned, listed and re-packaged.

Following on from this promising start we will be continuing the work on this collection as a volunteer project which several people who attended have already signed up for.

The archive proved to be extremely interesting with one attendee coming across a family property and another with a particular interest in the history of canals finding the particulars of a property that showed a flight of locks, one of which he knew to be a particularly significant deep lock. Apparently it didn’t actually work, so they had to build a flight of locks instead and no-one knows exactly where on the site the abandoned deep one is.

Ann Attwood ACR, Collections Care Development Officer