Welcome to the very first post of the York: A City Making History blog! I’m Justine, the project archivist and over the next 15 or so months I will use this space to share my journey cataloguing the 800+ years worth of records that make up the York civic archive.

York: A City Making History is a National Cataloguing Grants Scheme-funded project to improve access to a locally, nationally and internationally significant but underused collection of original archive material by creating the first digital hierarchical catalogue to cover the whole collection.

Building upon previous work, but adding a fresh perspective and an up-to-date approach, the project aims to open up difficult-to-use sections of records that are a hidden resource on the history of the people of York.

For more information on the project, the rich and diverse archive collection and the blog itself, you can explore my static pages by clicking the links above the banner. I have also included an introduction to “More Product Less Process” or MPLP, the methodology that this project has been inspired by.

I will be posting on this blog at least weekly in order to share my progress – achievements and frustrations alike – and provide a window on the often opaque world of the cataloguing archivist. You can subscribe by RSS and interact by commenting on this blog, the York Libraries and Archives facebook page or twitter feed, or by using the hashtag #cityarchive in your own tweets.

Thank-you for joining me on this journey, and seeing where it will take us over the next year and more.

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