I know I’ve been really quiet on the blog recently, but rest assured I have been working away behind the scenes. One of my big pieces of work at the end of last year was the creation of our 2016 Access Plan. The Access Plan will become an annual piece of work, letting you know what we are planning to do over the course of each calendar year. It includes details about our overall strategy, as well as information about partnership projects, funding bids and our cataloguing priorities. The plan will be published annually on our website (you can find the 2016 plan here), and we will update you quarterly on how things are progressing.

Which leads me on nicely to the fact that I’ve just published the first of our 2016 quarterly Access Plan updates (available on our website here). We’ve had a brilliant start to the year, with an increase in both the number of researchers we are hosting and the quantity of documents we are producing in the archives reading room. The plan contains details of a new partnership project we have formed with History and English students at York St John’s University, who have been helping us with some of our collections processing work. You can also find out more about our current projects – including some digitisation work and our Wellcome Trust bid – and some of the outreach events that we have hosted. I honestly can’t believe how much work we have achieved over the last three months. We really couldn’t have done this without the hard work and dedication of all the staff and volunteers at York Explore.

If you haven’t been into the Archives and Local History Service recently, then you won’t yet have had a chance to look at our new signage. We’ve improved our shelf signage, created some new banners for the stairwell and improved the appearance of the staff desk. We really hope you like the new look as much as we enjoyed creating it.

Next time you are in York Explore also keep an eye out for our new archives display case in the foyer. Over the coming months we will be creating a number of mini-exhibitions to coincide with local events and to promote the archive collections. Let us know if there is anything in particular you would like to see!

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