How to preserve your family or community archive: the Collection Care Covid-19 lockdown blogs. Blog CC #18

 

• Do you have a personal, organisational, local or subject related archive?
• Have you been following our training blogs?

 Since April 2020, we’ve posted over 20 blogs to help you care for, manage and develop your collection. We hope you’ve found them helpful.  Here’s a quick re-cap of what we’ve covered:

 

Topic	Blog number	Date posted
Introduction & overview	CC#1	9 April 2020
Writing a mission statement	CC#2	14 April 2020
Protective enclosures: introduction	CC#3	21 April 2020
10 agents of deterioration	CC#4	23 April 2020
Protective enclosures & suppliers	CC#5	30 April 2020
Action checklist & how to prioritise	CC#6	12 May 2020
Funding options	CC#7	19 May 2020
Protective enclosures: which & how to choose	CC#8	26 May 2020
Protective enclosures: case studies	CC#9	2 June 2020
Caring for large & “outsize” items	CC#10	9 June 2020
Caring for books	CC#11	18 June 2020
Managing the environment	CC#12	1 December 2020
Emergency planning	CC#13	3 December 2020
Safe handling & use	CC#14	17 December 2020
Working with a conservator	CC#15	22 December 2020
Preparing for digitisation	CC#16	24 December 2020
Storage and security	CC#17	29 December 2020
Dissociation (loss of context & meaning)	CM#1	5 May 2020
Taking in new material (“accessioning”)	CM#2	4 June 2020
Copyright legislation	CM#3	14 July 2020
Data protection legislation	CM#4	3 September 2020
Cataloguing your collection	CM#5	12 November 2020
Preserving digital records	DP#1	18 August 2020
Oral history interviews	OH#1	16 June 2020

So what next?

Although this series of blogs is at an end, we will develop the content into an online resource and a downloadable booklet. 

We plan to set up a Gloucestershire forum network for people within the county who are looking after archive collections.  This could encourage the exchange of information and ideas and provide mutual support.  If you’d like to be part of this group or have suggestions about how it could best be done, please let us know.

We also want to bring our community archive “trainees” together from time to time, whether virtually, or-looking ahead- in person, to celebrate achievement and share progress.  This would include anyone who’s attended our training sessions in person, or who has found our online support, such as these blogs, useful. Watch out for more on this on our website, the Heritage Hub newsletter, and social media.

 Finally, we’d like to encourage you to continue your archiving journey with us by: 

• Joining our Heritage Hub community: sign up for our newsletter and follow us on social media.
• Providing feedback on our blogs; flagging up areas where you need more help and new topics which you’d like us to cover. The more feedback we get, the better and more relevant we can make our support.
• Looking out for new on-line, or even on-site, Heritage Hub training and support. We’ll advertise new opportunities via our newsletter, website and social media.
• Sharing what you’ve been doing with your collection by writing something for our blog or the Heritage Hub newsletter or our blog. It doesn’t have to be long or wordy – a picture can speak a thousand words!

You can contact us by emailing archives@gloucestershire.gov.uk

 

This concludes the series of Heritage Hub core training blogs developed by professional staff at Gloucestershire Archives

 Funded by HLF through the FTR Project. For further information see https://www.gloucestershire.gov.uk/archives/for-the-record/