How to preserve your family or community archive: the Covid-19 lockdown blogs. Blog DP #1

• Are all your treasured family photos digital?
• Does your community archive include CDs and scans?

Digital documents can be easily shared and copied, and take up no physical space.  But the very characteristics which make them so convenient also present us with risks and challenges.  There is no single, magic bullet solution which can protect your digital material or ensure it will last for decades.  But the good news is that there some simple, low tech, no/low cost steps you can take to manage and minimise the risks.

How to preserve your family or community archive: the Collection Care Covid-19 lockdown blogs. Blog CC #1

• Time on your hands during the lockdown?
• Want to make sure you preserve your precious family memories?
• Want to preserve your community story?
• Do you have a personal, organisational, local or subject related collection or archive?

It could be a small or large collection of letters, photographs, documents, computer (digital) files or other records that have meaning for you. Maybe you have been keeping them safe so that they can be shared and passed on to future generations. Your treasured documents provide a visceral link from the past to the future. They carry a thread of emotional connection down the generations and across the wider community. They can show who we are and how we live, relate, work and play.

Gloucestershire wins lottery support to preserve ongoing history

I am delighted to announce some good news – we have been successful in our ‘For the Record’ bid and have received initial support from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF).

The project will improve the way the documented heritage of Gloucestershire and South Gloucestershire is gathered, kept and shared.

Development funding of £123,300 has been awarded to help Gloucestershire Archives progress our plans to apply for the full grant next year.

Records aren’t always made of vinyl

The title of this post may seem obvious to anyone with a long-standing interest in archives, history or heritage, but not everyone comes from this kind of background. If you’d asked me, two years ago, to describe a record I would probably have imagined my parents’ 33rpm albums or the few Top-40 singles I bought just before cassette tapes became widely available. If I thought about it really seriously I might have muttered something about hospital notes.

But what has this got to do with Gloucestershire Archives? Well, two things really.