Accessions accessions accessions!
If you only have a passing knowledge of what we do at the archives, let me explain it a bit. I’m a trainee archivist, so I’m well placed to break it down as not too long ago, this was all completely new to me too.
Organisations and individuals can deposit records with us for safekeeping, and when this first arrives it is ‘accessioned’. This isn’t the same as cataloguing. Accessioning is like an acknowledgement that we have something, and it’s given a running number. Cataloguing puts the items in a specific collection, breaks it down into sections and gives us more details. Often this is done at the same time as accessioning, but large collections will sometimes be earmarked for a later project.
So it shouldn’t take too long to accession something, right? Well, that question is like ‘how long is a piece of string?’ Sometimes it’s one piece of paper, sometimes it’s 20 boxes. This is why we try to stagger it and have no more than one per day to give the collections management team time to get through it.
At the end of last year we had a challenge on our hands, because of a combination of staff working from home/isolating/a sudden influx of deposits after lockdown. The decision was made to not take any more accessions until 2022. Slowly but surely, we managed to start crossing off accessions one by one.
As a trainee this was both overwhelming and a wonderful opportunity. I love to-do lists but this was something else! You just had to get stuck in. Accessioning itself doesn’t take too long, it’s a bit like writing out a receipt. It’s a very important stage, as it’s when we can collect as many details as we can about a collection, and what copyright or access restrictions might be in place. We look through the material to decide if we want it all, as sometimes people give us things we might already have. We also need to make sure the depositor details are correct. Even if we don’t move onto cataloguing (which we try to anyway) it’s useful to think about where it might go, as we can divide up and package the collection in the simplest way possible. You just need to keep asking the question: ‘How is someone going to be able to find this again?’
Most of the material I’ve accessioned and catalogued in that time have been marriage registers. On 4 May 2021 the law was changed so that future marriage registers become digitally made, and hard copies were closed and handed into registry offices. Many copies of these came to us, and I’ve personally accessioned 52 of these. It sounds like a lot but 52 of the same type of document becomes a very repetitive process, and I managed to speed things up to spending 20 minutes per register!
Other times something completely random ends up on my desk. One in particular I enjoyed was D15821, which was sent to us by Buckingham Palace! This was the papers of Helmut Gieselmann, a prisoner of war in Britain during the second world war, with a letter asking for his release to return to work in Cheltenham. The papers were sent by his son who wanted them to be in a British collection to illustrate British-German relations.
In January 2022 we came back with a hugely reduced list so were able to start taking in new accessions again. Bring on the exciting finds of 2022!
Laura Cassidy, Trainee Archivist at Gloucestershire Archives