East Sussex Record Office Report of the County Archivist 2010-11
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Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................1 Public Services.............................................................................................3 Public Service statistics................................................................................4 Outreach and Learning.................................................................................5 Document Services ......................................................................................7 Work in Brighton and Hove ........................................................................20 Conservation ..............................................................................................25 Records Management ................................................................................27 Staff and Volunteers...................................................................................28 Friends of the East Sussex Record Office..................................................29 Appendix 1 – Record Office Staff, 2010/11 ................................................32 Appendix 2 – East Sussex Accessions ......................................................33 Appendix 3 – Brighton and Hove Accessions.............................................42 Introduction We began the year in a new department (Governance and Community Services) and a new place in the structure as part of Libraries and Culture. This has helped to strengthen still further our joint working with libraries. Work towards achieving our new partnership historical resource centre was both busy but ultimately rewarding. In April and May we carried out our pre- planning consultation, with displays in libraries across East Sussex and Brighton & Hove as well as at The Maltings and the University of Sussex library. We also had afternoon and evening drop-in consultation sessions at Lewes, Eastbourne and Brighton Jubilee libraries, where representatives of our partners and contractors were on hand to answer questions in person. The planning application, submitted in the autumn, was unanimously approved by Brighton & Hove City Council’s planning committee on 15 December. As was to be expected, there were a number of conditions attached to the approval, which we worked on to comply with throughout the rest of the year and beyond. We were kept busy finalising the details of the room layouts including the furniture and equipment, fixtures and fittings, ICT requirements and shelving for the Repository Block. We held a series of design workshops with our architect and partners to discuss and agree on all these elements; these meetings allowed the staff from all three partners to get to know each other better. We also had a trip to Clerkenwell to visit of furniture warehouses to get some idea of what is available for the moveable furniture. All this enabled Kier, our contractors, to finalise the requirements and cost plan and for us to Page 1 of 45 achieve a final commitment with our partners. As I write (in August 2011) the contractors have just begun on site and we expect the building to be completed in the spring of 2013. These are exciting times. We were pleased that this year we are once again a three-star service (out of a possible four) according to the National Archives Self-Assessment Process. We improved our overall score by 2.5% and made a massive improvement in our access and outreach score, increasing it by 13%. This means that we did go down elsewhere, mainly on the buildings side as during the year we had continuing problems with water getting into buildings and with mould growth. It’s always pleasing to see achievement recognised. Last year’s report recorded ESRO’s involvement in Living the Poor Life, a nationwide project co- ordinated by The National Archives (TNA) to catalogue and digitise the correspondence between officials in 21 local nineteenth century Poor Law Unions and the Poor Law Commissioners. East Sussex Record Office recruited, encouraged and supervised a group of volunteers to work on the letters from the Rye Poor Law Union. The project was recognised in the National Council on Archives Volunteer Awards, in which it was Highly Commended, at the award presentations at The House of Lords in July. We were also dubbed Take One Champion for the South East. The Take One project is described in more detail in the Outreach and Learning section, but we were particularly pleased with this moniker because the role of the Champion is to promote use of the project’s ethos to museums and libraries throughout the region, not just to archives. In these challenging financial times, we are also continuing to seek additional funding to support our activities. The majority of the work of the Outreach and Learning Officer is supported by grant funding; we continue to be grateful to grant-giving bodies, including our own Friends organisation, to ensure that we are able to purchase archives in order to keep them in the public domain; and we charge for the provision of external services, such as private conservation work, where appropriate. I must pay special tribute to Pam Combes, chairman of FESRO since 2004, who stepped down this year. Under her leadership the Friends have become a major player in the funding of purchases, as well as contributing to both the social and academic life of the office. During the summer the telephone system at The Maltings was transferred from BT to the county council-wide NGN (New Generation Network) system. Although it took a while to bed down, as we might have expected, our fears that we would need to change our contact telephone numbers were unfounded and we will be able to take those numbers easily to The Keep. At the Record Centre there was some uncertainty concerning the renewal of the records management contract with Brighton & Hove City Council (BHCC). The City Council was obliged to go out to tender and we decided not to bid since the contract was primarily for storage rather than the provision of a full records management service. As the end of the financial year approached work at the Record Centre concentrated on the disaggregation of the BHCC files, some 30,000 in all, and the staff involved must be congratulated for Page 2 of 45 achieving this major piece of work on time. The new financial year offers the opportunity to reconfigure the service in the absence of both the responsibility for the city’s semi-current records and the income we received for providing it, in order to ensure that its work, so essential to the County Council, continues to its usual high standard. Jane Bartlett was kept busy by requests under the Data Protection and Freedom of Information Acts. The number of requests received under both statutes in 2010/11 was 827, a 14% increase over the previous year (724). The service continued to host the East Sussex Museum Development Officer, who is paid for by the government’s Renaissance Funding. This post supports museums within the county, helping to identify additional financial support, but also benefits the Record Office by opening up new partnership and funding opportunities. The Record Office’s other activities and achievements, no less important than those already mentioned, are covered in the rest of this report. Public Services Searchroom attendance remained stable this year though document production figures increased yet again, confirming the impression that visitors are staying longer and looking at more material. Most visitors (56%) were tracing their family trees, although this was fewer than the previous year (61%). 31% were studying local and house history, 5% were educational users and 3% business users. The number of hours of paid research recovered somewhat from the dip last year and the number of copies sold remained buoyant, increasing by nearly 25% on the previous year. The number of postal and email enquiries was slightly down, but ranged as ever across a wide variety of subjects including, amongst many others, the formation of a loyalist society in Lewes in reaction to the Jacobinism of the French revolution; mayor of Lewes, Kenneth Charles Day, a founder member of VG stores; the descendants of the bell founder who made Big Ben and with a conspiracy-theorist’s link to Jack the Ripper; the life of William Broderick Thomas, designer of St Stephen’s Green, Dublin, one of the largest urban garden parks in the world; and the ever-popular subject of re-registering old tractors and motorcycles. We were also able to help a number of enquirers looking into their time in care in East Sussex and to help them fill gaps in their own personal histories. Our archive holdings and the information they contain were used in ways that reached a wider audience through publication and exhibition. Information on an Eastbourne practitioner of the Alexander Technique (HH 44/27) was used in a book on the subject, and photographs from a sale catalogue of 1929 of the Gothic Hall at Herstmonceux Castle were displayed in the foyer of the Queen’s Theatre by Cameron Mackintosh and Delmont Mackintosh Theatres Ltd. Page 3 of 45 We took part in the National Archives User Survey in February 2011. The results showed a continued high level of satisfaction with the quality of advice (84% good or very good) and helpfulness and friendliness of staff (87% good or very good) although they were several points down on the previous survey. 83% of respondents rated the overall service good or very good. Asked to state where improvements were most necessary,