Archives Hub feature for April 2024 Work has begun on re-cataloguing the school and education records held by Carmarthenshire Archives.  The collection consists of the records of over 120 elementary schools, as well as school plans, photographs and minutes of various education authorities. Progress has been steady, and we aim to have the catalogues available on Archives Hub by the end of the year. The work on re-cataloguing the collections also ties in with the planned development of an archive service for schools and colleges in the Carmarthenshire area.  The new Curriculum for Wale ..read more

Archives Hub feature for March 2024 The Thackray Museum of Medicine houses an incredible collection of 50,000 objects and 25,000 books, journals and catalogues, and the collections focus on responses to people’s medical and healthcare needs – the innovation, enterprise, technology and collective effort to make us well. But it is also home to several gifted medical archives, over 200 of which have remained largely unexplored until now. Since November 2022, the Thackray Museum of Medicine has begun to catalogue its archive through appointing a qualified archivist for the first time, and with the ..read more

Archives Hub feature for February 2024 About Us Established on the official granting of a Royal Charter in 1969, The Open University turns 55 this year and remains a world leader in distance learning – it is the largest university in the UK by student number. The Open University Archive is housed within the Betty Boothroyd Library on the main university campus at Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, and operates to serve staff, students and external researchers alike. The Open University Charter, granted 1969. The collections of The Open University Archive largely delineate into three categories: • Tea ..read more

Archives Hub feature for January 2024 Thanks to the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Hallé Concerts Society have the opportunity to interrogate and share their archive collections in ways never before possible. One of those ways is through research and talks. With a generous audience of concert-goers, patrons, members and more, the appetite to learn more about the orchestra they love is ravenous. That got the project archivist, Heather Roberts, thinking. There are so many people who give to the Hallé and so much that the Hallé gives in return. What have been some of the most surprising phil ..read more

Archives Hub feature for October 2023 The Women’s Aid Federation of England Archive is housed in the University of Leeds Special Collections and is currently being arranged, catalogued and preserved as part of a Wellcome Trust funded project. This is an incredibly significant collection, documenting the charity’s approaches to tackling domestic abuse from its radical beginnings in the 1970s right through to modern day.   Our three-year project aims to increase public awareness of the work of Women’s Aid and to provide long-term preservation and access to this unique collection. The w ..read more

Archives Hub feature for August 2023 Introduction The summer months of June, July and August were prime flying season for Laker Airways – though significant discounts were offered to operators in the off-season, too. The man behind this pioneering budget airline was Sir Freddie Laker who recognised the inaccessibility of air travel for the general public, and identified a gap in the market dominated by British Airways and Pan Am. He subsequently founded Laker Airways and its multiple subsidiaries, which allowed tens of thousands of people to fly transatlantic for the very first time. His legac ..read more

Archives Hub feature for July 2023 Duden’s Lexicon adopts the classic British proclivity for the understatement in its definition of Vergangenheitsbewältigung: “public debate within a country on a problematic period of its recent history…”. The fact is, however, that the term is commonly understood to mean Germany’s coming to terms (or not) with the Holocaust both collectively and on an individual basis. There has been a proliferation of literature on the subject in the last couple of decades so much so that the Wiener Holocaust Library (WHL) has a whole section dedicated to it. Publications i ..read more

Archives Hub feature for May 2023 In 2020 the Cadbury Research Library was successful in our application for funding from the Wellcome Trust to catalogue the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and Youth Hostel Association (YHA) archive collections. We were awarded £235,791 for a two-year project called ‘Healthy Minds and Active Bodies: the promotion of health and wellbeing by UK youth movement’. Both archive collections provide a fantastic body of material regarding work with young people and their physical and mental health, from the development of gymnasiums and outdoor activities and ..read more

Archives Hub feature for May 2023 The beginnings of Archives of IT Archives of IT (AIT) began when entrepreneur Roger Graham saw the need to interview the founding generation of the IT Industry and save their stories for the future. Up to this point, heritage work was happening to save the history of computers, hardware and games but little was being done to preserve the social and oral history of the people behind the technology. Founder Roger Graham (copyright AIT). Archives of IT was registered as a Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO) in 2015, with the aims of educating the public on ..read more

Municipal Archive of Girona, Thursday, April 27, 2023 Yesterday I checked out some of the ‘Artificial Intelligence and Archives Seminar‘ hosted by the Municipal Archive of Girona “within the framework of the Faber-Llull Residency (Olot, Catalonia) and the project InterPARES Trust AI of the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada), and with the collaboration of the Society of Catalan Archivists“. There was some useful things discussed in this still quite new area of AI, so thought I’d share my notes. InterPARES Trust AI Project (https://interparestrustai.org ..read more