FLINTSHIRE RECORD OFFICE ANNUAL REPORT 2010/11 Flintshire Record Office Annual Report 2010/1 FLINTSHIRE RECORD OFFICE ANNUAL REPORT 2010/1 Contents: List of staff p.2 Introduction p.3 User Statistics p.4 Outreach p.5 Conservation p.6 ICT p.7 Activities Behind the Scenes p.8 Staff Changes p.9 Staff Training p.9 Voluntary work p.10 External links p.10 Appendix A - list of accessions p.11 Appendix B - results of TNA self-assessment 2010 p.15 Front cover illustration: Mark Allen and Sarah Money repairing an enclosure map, working on the wall board in the conservation studio. Flintshire Record Office The Old Rectory Hawarden CH5 3NR Tel.: 01244 532364 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.flintshire.gov.uk/archives 1 Flintshire Record Office Annual Report 2010/1 Staff Principal Archivist: Claire Harrington Senior Archivist: Steve Davies Archivists: Angela Moore Liz Newman Archive Assistants: Sue Copp Steph Hines Karen McNiven Sue Millward James Wasiuk Conservator: Mark Allen Conservation Assistant: Sarah Money (from 5 July 2010) Admin Officer: Helen Waite Modern trainee: Leona Jones Staff and volunteers at Angela Moore’s retirement lunch 2 Flintshire Record Office Annual Report 2010/1 Introduction It’s been an eventful year at the Record Office. Along with many other parts of the Council, and local authorities all over the country, we have had to deal with a cut in our budget. It has been achieved by losing a vacant post and all other staff accepting a cut in hours and in pay. The result of this has been a reduction in opening hours but the service will continue in all areas with the high standards it has always had. This is the second change to our opening hours in the last year. It was in October 2010 that, following consultation of both users and non-users, we began a pilot period of opening on the second Saturday of each month. This is to run for one year, at which point it will be evaluated and a decision made whether to continue it. The latest national visitor survey was conducted in February and March 2011, too late for the results to be available here but very timely in that it will create a snapshot of usage and user opinion just before the budget cut took effect. As usual, we took part in the National Archives self-assessment process this year. The results can be seen in Appendix B. Most noticeable is our dramatic improvement in the “access” section, from 44.5% in 2008 to 65.5% this year. It is still our weak section but the gap has narrowed a lot. We are grateful to CyMAL for a variety of support through grant funding this year. The North-East Wales enclosure award project continued with digitisation undertaken by the National Library of Wales; a new conservation project was started, repairing three years’ worth of quarter-sessions rolls; a new computer with large screen and A3 scanner was purchased for our digitisation work. The on-line education project, which has been in the planning stage for some time, took a great leap forward in May with the arrival of Anna Logan from the University of Chester on a work-experience placement. She spent a month working on the early development of this resource, which has received a further boost from the partnership of the National Grid for Learning. We anticipate that it will be a valuable and inspiring resource for teachers both locally and further afield. Our newsletter, The Hourglass , is now in its fourth year and continues to be great organ of communication for us, both on paper and on-line. Lastly, but by no means least, we were very pleased to welcome Alun Ffred Jones, Welsh Assembly Minister for Heritage, for a brief visit in May. Claire Harrington 3 Flintshire Record Office Annual Report 2010/1 User Statistics Archive Service 2010/1 2009/10 2008/9 2007/8 2006/7 2005/6 Searchroom visits 2,584 2,890 2,906 2,650 2,630 2,461 Postal enquiries 166 199 212 223 250 295 Telephone and fax 501 573 779 614 583 602 enquiries E-mail enquiries 695 641 639 596 652 615 Documents 6,089 5,816 6,033 6,007 6,449 6,793 consulted Photocopies sold 5,510 4,460 6,139 7,643 6,684 6,492 Photographs sold 370 536 290 332 374 200 Origin of 2010/1 2009/10 2008/9 2007/8 2006/7 2005/6 searchers Flintshire 1,419 1,509 1,487 1,261 1,321 1,345 Rest of Wales 342 462 344 411 413 357 Rest of UK 767 843 1,052 948 854 699 Overseas 56 76 23 30 42 60 Classification of 2010/1 2009/10 2008/9 2007/8 2006/7 2005/6 searchers Education & 448 438 363 342 236 207 publication Genealogy 1,489 1,705 1,877 1,648 1,673 1,435 Local history 551 668 588 579 625 684 History of House 51 37 40 36 40 51 Official & legal 45 42 38 45 56 84 Visiting Japanese historians examining mining records Photo: Hideo Nakazawa 4 Flintshire Record Office Annual Report 2010/1 Outreach This year the Record Office has hosted a number of visits from groups, including local history groups from Bodfari and Flint Mountain, the staff of the Shropshire Archives and a group of Japanese historians with an interest in the history of coal mining in the area. The Record Office continues to provide small exhibitions for the foyer of County Hall and in May we hosted an exhibition illustrating the work of the Victorian Society. Also in May we were pleased to welcome Alun Ffred Jones, Welsh Assembly Minister for Heritage, to the Record Office. We were able to show him the new search-room and the conservation studio, where he saw our Assembly-funded conservation project in progress. We have also gone out to tell people about the Record Office. Staff once again manned a stall at the Llangollen Local History Fair and created a lot of interest. Claire Harrington gave talks about our work to groups at Buckley and Holywell Libraries, and a talk on “The Role of the Record Office in Local History” at Castell Alun School in Hope as part of the Flintshire Heritage series of lectures. Our conservator Mark Allen contributed to an event in Aberystwyth run by the Preservation Advisory Centre. At the beginning of 2011 we were approached by the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? magazine and an article about the ‘County of Flint War Memorial’, our card index of Flintshire men who fought in the First World War, appeared in the April edition (which actually comes out in March). It has resulted in a flurry of interest from all over the world in this wonderful and, we believe, unique index. Claire Harrington with the group from Flint Mountain 5 Flintshire Record Office Annual Report 2010/1 Conservation It has been an exceptionally busy year for the conservation studio. Work on the quarter-sessions project has been successfully completed with the aid of a CyMAL grant. The document rolls from three years, 1793-1795, were conserved by project assistant Sarah Money. This has involved cleaning, washing, de-acidification and repair with Japanese tissue. A new development has been the treating of writing in iron gall ink with a phytate solution to prevent further ink corrosion. This has resulted in many conservators from across the UK visiting the studio to see how the new treatment is accomplished. A short article was published in ARC magazine to explain the innovative gelatine repair technique. The individual sheets from the rolls have also been digitised to enable wider access in the future. Many of the Record Office’s volumes have been protected from light, dust and abrasion by the in-house construction of phase boxes with the help of a willing band of volunteers. This has been a new venture for the studio and has worked well for us whilst also providing an opportunity for people to experience the thrill of conservation work. Congratulations are due to our conservator, Mark Allen, who has qualified to teach parchment repair on the Archives & Records Association’s conservation course. His first student will arrive in June. A quarter sessions roll before … … and after conservation Conservation work 2010/1 2009/10 2008/9 2007/8 2006/7 2005/6 Exhibition items 66 40 49 0 0 46 Paper documents 1,024 68 139 351 1103 1056 Parchment 32 307 217 7 5 1 documents Maps & plans 109 58 103 134 260 24 Manilla & hard 35 20 28 16 48 22 cover bindings Folders, portfolios 205 53 118 102 207 46 & OS map guards Photographs 53 29 4 2 109 20 6 Flintshire Record Office Annual Report 2010/1 ICT With increasing demand for digital images and the wonderful work our volunteers are doing, pressure has been increasing on the equipment we use for digitisation. We are pleased to be able to report that this has been eased this year by the success of a CyMAL grant application for an additional PC and scanner. An exciting new project this year is a joint venture with the National Grid for Learning Wales to create an on-line educational resource for schools, using items from our collections to give teachers local examples of primary source material to illustrate themes in the History national curriculum. It involves a number of students on work placements as well as Record-Office staff researching and selecting suitable documents.