2019/20 Flintshire Record Office Annual Report Contents •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• Abbreviations p.3 List of staff p.4 Introduction p.5 User Statistics p.6 Outreach p.7 Conservation p.9 ICT p.10 Activities Behind the Scenes p.11 Staff Changes p.12 Staff Training p.12 Voluntary Work p.13 External Links p.13 Appendix A - Accessions p.14 Appendix B – Remote User Survey 2019 p.17 Appendix C – On-line Usage p.19 Front cover illustration: Image from Theatr Clwyd collection, production of “Barnaby and the Old Boys” in 1987, an image scanned by one of our volunteers (see p.13). Photo ref. CC/TC/2/15/14/4. FRO also holds a programme for this production, ref. CC/TC/1/396 Flintshire Record Offce The Old Rectory Hawarden CH5 3NR Tel.: 01244 532364 E-mail: archives@f intshire.gov.uk Website: www.f intshire.gov.uk/archives 2 Flintshire Record Offce Annual Report 2019/20 Abbreviations •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• ARA Archives & Records Association ARCW Archives & Records Council Wales DA Denbighshire Archives DCC Denbighshire County Council FCC Flintshire County Council FRO Flintshire Record Offce MALD Museums, Archives & Libraries Division, Welsh Government NEWA North East Wales Archives (merged Denbighshire Archives and Flintshire Record Offce from 1st April 2020) NLHF National Lottery Heritage Fund (previously the Heritage Lottery Fund) NLW National Library of Wales RCAHMW Royal Commission on the Ancient & Historic Monuments of Wales TNA The National Archives Visitors in period costume at the Talacre World War II weekend Flintshire Record Offce Annual Report 2019/20 3 Staff •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• Principal Archivist: Claire Harrington Senior Archivist: Steve Davies Archivists: Steph Hines Liz Newman Archive Assistants: Jen Armstrong (24 June – 28 Oct. 2019) Teresa Davies Sue Millward Bridget Thomas Conservator: Mark Allen ICT & Admin Assistant: Mandy Haslam Mark receiving his Distinguished Service Award from ARA President Dr Alex Buchanan 4 Flintshire Record Offce Annual Report 2019/20 Introduction •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• This year has proved to be the end of an era in two important ways. Firstly the County Archive Research Network (CARN) system of readers’ tickets has come to an end and been replaced by the Archives Card. CARN tickets have served their purpose well for many years but for the 21st century something a little more technologically advanced was required. It’s been a few years in the pipeline but we were able to start issuing Archives Cards on 3rd March. Archive users can now sign up for a card on-line from home and will need to visit an archive repository only to have their ID verifed and possibly their photograph taken. The system will automatically do user-statistics calculations for us, saving a lot of staff time. More fundamentally from our point of view, the year 2019/20 has been the last for the Flintshire Record Offce by that name. I’ve been reporting for the past couple of years our plans to merge with our neighbours, Denbighshire Archives. 31st March 2020 saw the end of the two separate services and the birth of the North East Wales Archives. This will be the last ever Flintshire Record Offce Annual Report! Hand-in-hand with the merging of the services go our exciting plans for a new, purpose-built archive centre on a site adjacent to Theatr Clwyd in Mold. It’s a big, ground-breaking project and we have been ambitious in going for a Heritage Horizon Award from the National Lottery. We are tremendously proud to have got through the initial two stages of an Expression of Interest and a presentation to the lottery panel. We now have to prepare a fully costed Stage One application but even to have got so far is a major achievement as from an initial 146 applications we are in the fnal 12. In connection with this project, in April we were delighted to welcome Jeff James, Chief Executive of TNA, and Malcolm Todd, Head of Policy. They visited both Flintshire and Denbighshire offces as well as seeing the site of our planned new building. We are very grateful for their continuing support as we proceed with our project. We are very proud of our Conservator, Mark Allen, who at the 2019 ARA conference was given a Distinguished Service Award for his work for the ARA Preservation & Conservation Group, his role as an instructor on the conservators’ training course and for many years of promoting archive conservation whenever possible. See photo p.4. As always we are very grateful to MALD, which has supported us in attending training and in employing external expertise to help us achieve our massive and exciting development project. As I write this all of the above changes have been affected by the world-wide Covid-19 virus outbreak. We started issuing Archives Cards just a couple of weeks before closing our doors to visitors. We’d hoped to have all our regular users signed up to the new card by now and more or less phased out the old CARN tickets altogether. The merging of the two services still took place on 1st April but without the fanfare we’d hoped. The process of applying for funding for our new building will certainly be put back, we don’t know yet for how long. I can assure everyone, though, that staff are continuing to preserve the archive material in our care and that it will be available for consultation again as soon as the present national emergency is over. In the meantime we are doing all we can to provide a service remotely, online, through social media and corresponding by post and e-mail. Claire Harrington Flintshire Record Offce Annual Report 2019/20 5 User Statistics •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• Archive Service 2019/20 2018/9 2017/8 2016/7 2015/6 2014/5 Searchroom visits 1,346 1,855 1,475 1,761 2,000 2,005 Postal enquiries 16 27 23 31 47 81 Telephone enquiries 276 337 286 326 421 361 E-mail/online enquiries 619 617 506 522 536 608 Documents consulted 3,811 4,000 4,707 4,423 4,849 5,991 Photocopies/printouts sold 2,726 963 2,458 2,273 3,454 3,263 Photographs sold 180 598 184 334 313 371 Photo permits issued 96 111 107 133 130 188 Research service orders; 19 18 37 30 30 32 1-to-1 sessions Origin of searchers 2019/20 2018/9 2017/8 2016/7 2015/6 2014/5 Flintshire 923 1,364 1,037 1,188 1,409 1,306 Rest of Wales 204 232 179 250 277 286 Rest of UK 191 240 258 287 289 358 Overseas 28 19 21 36 25 55 Classifi cation of searchers 2019/20 2018/9 2017/8 2016/7 2015/6 2014/5 Education & publication 291 595 182 313 591 439 Genealogy 534 529 625 766 626 607 Local history 368 500 512 555 626 809 History of house 81 95 57 45 62 69 Offcial & legal 72 136 78 82 95 81 The old CARN ticket and the new Archives Card 6 Flintshire Record Offce Annual Report 2019/20 Outreach •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• Open Doors After making Open Doors 2018 a major event we decided to go for something lower-key this year, reverting to the idea of opening up areas not usually open to the public. On Saturday 21st September we ran three behind-the-scenes tours covering the strong-rooms and the conservation studio. They were free but had to be booked in advance and, following excellent coverage in the press, we had all three tours booked up in record time and had to run two more during the following week to accommodate at least some of those we couldn’t ft in on the day. See p.21. Explore Your Archive This year we joined in with the national Explore Your Archive campaign on Facebook by selecting items from our collections and highlighting them using the daily hashtags. There were nine hashtags covering the extended week (over two weekends) and we received over 12,500 views of just the # items. It began with #SweetArchives on Saturday 23rd November, going through Hairy, Friendly, Surprising, Action, ArchivesAtSea, Mysterious, ArchiveVoices, ending with #WildArchives on Sunday 1st December. We tried to be imaginative with our interpretation of the hashtags, which were set nationally. This included a “hairy” hemp fbre used in repairing an account book, our conservator playing the saxophone and a botanical painting of a wild saxifrage (see image p.10). Educational visits We’ve had some interesting school visits this year. Ten girls from Holywell High School came to research the role of women in the Queensferry Munitions Factory during the First World War; St John the Baptist VA Primary School, Penymynydd, came to look at the history of their school and village; and Hawarden Village School made several visits to explore Victorian Christmas and, along with excursions into the churchyard next door, looked at some of the Victorian graves and their occupants. Holywell High School Claire answered a remote enquiry from some pupils at Ysgol pupils visiting FRO Esgob Morgan in St Asaph about the bishop who gave his name to their school and was delighted to be invited to an event where they displayed the results of their research. They’d worked hard and creatively and found out a lot. We were also pleased to welcome a group of volunteers from Mold’s Bailey Hill project for an exploratory visit prior to some individual research. Denbigh & Flint Show We and Denbighshire Archives took the opportunity the Denbigh & Flint Show offered to present ourselves as a future joint service and to put our plans for a new archive centre to the people of both counties, many of whom were not already users of our service.