To mix things up a bit I’m going to start a series of posts on actual individual records, that will pop up between my other topics. I could carefully select items that are particularly special, but as I have a crazy notion that ALL archives are interesting if you just look at them in the right way, I’m going to try an experiment.

I’m going to start at the first aisle in the strongroom and pick something randomly off the shelves, based on outside appearance alone. I’ll get it down, open it up and see what I can find. Next time, I’ll go to aisle two and so on. The aim is to go through the collection highlighting the massive diversity of material in the civic archive and what unique information you find when you get down to the nitty gritty.  Some of the records may have been listed before, others untouched for a decade. I’ll try and mix up the age and formats of documents so we get as much variety as possible.

This is a bit of a gamble, but I think it’s worth a go. If it fails miserably I can always stop and no harm done! It should help demonstrate why cataloguing this collection is worthwhile, and that the mundane has just as much to teach us as the sublime. First post will be up tomorrow, kicking things off with an early nineteenth-century committee volume…

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