January 5th is fast approaching and the whole team is busy preparing York Explore for opening. Right now a team of library and archive staff are hard at work stocking the shelves and preparing archive collections. Preparing the archives has been a process that Francesca, Georgie and I have been working on since August and … Continue reading The Community archive collections are coming!
Tag: Strongrooms
It’s time to Explore Your Archive!
This week the Explore Your Archive campaign is running across the UK and Ireland. This annual campaign was launched last year by The National Archives and the Archives and Records Association (UK and Ireland) to ‘raise awareness of archives, their value to society and the impact they have on individual lives.’ Its aim is to … Continue reading It’s time to Explore Your Archive!
Making a mark…
Welcome to my first and last blog post! This is a week of mixed feelings for me, because after five years leading the York Archives & Local History team (in the past few months jointly with Victoria Hoyle) I am now leaving to take up a new post as Project Curator at the London Transport … Continue reading Making a mark…
How to build a new archive, Part 1
Another new voice on the blog! I'm Victoria Hoyle, the City Archivist; or at least 40% of the City Archivist. I job-share the role with Richard Taylor, working on a Monday and Tuesday. The rest of the time I am studying for a PhD about archives and communities in York. (More on that another time!) My job … Continue reading How to build a new archive, Part 1
The storm before the calm
Is it really that long since my last post? Oh dear, time has flown. Since then I have unpacked, sorted, shelved and scanned the barcodes of over 850 boxes. I keep taking pictures to post on here, and then before I get the chance to put them online I unpack more boxes and so take … Continue reading The storm before the calm
Archives on shelf = peaceful. Archives in transit = hard work!
Let’s start with a sign of the times. Do you remember the York Press article about the project that was out in the Autumn? The top picture is that of me standing in the mezzanine, pondering, surrounded my massive plan chests and towering stacks of plans of bridges. Well it’s now completely empty! I … Continue reading Archives on shelf = peaceful. Archives in transit = hard work!
Taking control of the archive, box by box by box
Time has flown since my last blog post! I've now been to the local storage contractor I told you about, to see the space for the first time and see how much of the collection we can fit in, based on the measurements taken the week before. It was a really useful visit as it let us see all … Continue reading Taking control of the archive, box by box by box
Space, the final frontier…
Our move out of the art gallery is fast approaching. As the new strongroom at York Explore won’t be ready until next year, the records need to go into storage in the meantime. The bulk of the archive will be going away for a year to remote storage, but what about the civic archive that … Continue reading Space, the final frontier…
Strongrooms past and present
Hello and welcome to a slightly delayed post due to the Bank Holiday weekend. One of the fun parts of having a blog, is looking at the statistics to see where people are coming from to visit the site. So far I’ve had over 2000 hits from 21 countries on every continent apart from Antarctica which is pretty … Continue reading Strongrooms past and present
Clearing out the cobwebs and the clutter
We have three onsite strongrooms: creatively called strongrooms one, two, and three. These spaces are not perfect for keeping records (they have windows, and no environmental controls) but they are dry, have stable temperatures and can be accessed with a trolley. However, under strongroom three there is the basement... As I’ve mentioned before, the basement is below … Continue reading Clearing out the cobwebs and the clutter
Welcome to the blog of the Explore York Archives Service 