News from the Archives
We want your memories. We’ve had some submissions to our lockdown archive but would love more, be it a diary, written account, recording, photo or however you want to record these exceptional times.
Click here for more details about how to submit your memories
The collections team are taking the opportunity of lockdown (again!) to do strong-room based work. We are stock-checking boxes and locations and also moving frequently used records from far flung strong-rooms in Moons into the three new strong-rooms which are much nearer the research room.
We’ve been able to recruit two graduate trainee archivists: Malcolm Cohn, who started with us in September, and Laura Cassidy who started early December. It’s not the easiest time to start a new job but we hope the experience they gain with us will help them pursue their chosen career in the archive sector. We are also hosting a "Bridging the Digital Gap” trainee for 15 months, and have recruited Natasha Young to this role. This post is funded by the National Archives and is an initiative to diversity the workforce in various ways.
We’ve accepted a quote from Greenfields to create our wildlife pond. Greenfields did the hoggin path and volunteer shelter so we know it will be done to a high standard. The work will happen in Spring 2021.
The procurement exercise to replace CALM, our specialist software, was completed in December and the contract was awarded to Metadatis Ltd who will supply our new archive management system. We’re excited about this as we hope the new system will have a more intuitive public “interface” for the online catalogue.
We’ve made a start at putting our training for community archives online, via the “How to preserve your family archive- the COVID-19 lockdown blogs”, a series which we’ve been posting since April. These will then be used to create content for a web -based resource and also a downloadable booklet. If anyone has any feedback on the blogs, please do get in touch via archives@gloucestershire.gov.uk. Your comments are invaluable.
See a summary of all the blogs here.
Our learning & outreach team have been planning some work with The Shire (city centre project for care-leavers) and mental health nurses at the University of Gloucestershire, and have created some new online resources for schools.
The “Never Better” project, based on mental health records in our collections, was shortlisted for a national award from CHWA (Culture, Health & Wellbeing Alliance), a nationwide charity promoting arts and culture in relation to positive health and wellbeing. Well done to Plymouth Music Zone who were the eventual winners.
Looking ahead, we are drawing up a comprehensive 3 year programme of events and activities. As part of this, we’d like to work in partnership to deliver monthly talks - probably virtual for the next few months - on themed topics. Please contact kate.maisey@gloucestershire.gov.uk if you, or your local history group, would be interested in discussing this further.
Read more about the themes here.
As ever, please watch our website for up to date information.
Kate Maisey, January 2021