Acquisitions and Cataloguing
The range of records deposited with the Joint Archive Service during the year 2010/2011 continued to reflect the many and varied aspects of life and work in the County and the City. We received 177 accessions, amounting to 6.71 cubic metres of records, a fairly average year.
Maintaining active contacts with owners of archive collections is very important to our acquisitions work. During the year a further 130 contacts were made either from or to people or organisations holding records but where, as yet, no records have been deposited. Taken together with the number of accessions received, this amounts to a total of 307 approaches or contacts for the year.
As part of the Archive Service’s contribution to the County Council’s Cultural Olympiad Programme, we carried out Year Two of our Olympic legacy project, the aim of which is to form a snapshot of sports provision and activity within the County and the City in the run up to the 2012 Olympics. The project consists of a survey of the records of sports’ associations and clubs, and an invitation to complete “A Brief History of Your Club”. In Year Two of the project, 53 survey and Club History forms were sent out to local sporting clubs and other organisations.
As a result of these contacts a number of clubs and individual sportsmen and women decided to deposit their records with the Archive Service. Notable amongst these were the Staffordshire Amateur Swimming Association, the Burton and District Football Association and Lichfield Bowling Club.
Among other accessions were:
Personal papers of the Bagnall family, particularly photograph albums and scrapbooks kept by Walter Bagnall, which complement the business collection reported on in last year’s annual report. (SRO)
Personal papers from the Bostock family, who owned another significant Stafford business, the Lotus shoe-making company. This collection relates mainly to Henry John Bostock, CBE, who was a distinguished townsperson in Stafford, holding civic offices. As well as personal papers and photograph albums, there are many business records including notes of Directors’ meetings, and notes of meetings of the Federation of British Industry, relating to discussions of national industrial matters during the Second World War. There are also diaries and letters home from his business trips abroad. (SRO)
Account book of the churchwardens of Harlaston, 1773-1850. This had been acquired by a book collector many years previously in New Zealand, and was kindly offered back to this county by the Dunedin Public Library that had been bequeathed his collection, involving a formal exportation process, and a “welcome back” event at the church was attended by the press. (SRO)
Significant additional deposits of Methodist records were made this year, consisting of records of seven separate Circuits and twenty-nine individual churches across North Staffordshire, from Biddulph to Tunstall and Leek to Cheadle. These are mainly late-nineteenth century to mid-twentieth century, but there are some from the early-mid nineteenth century, including minutes and some nice sets of Sunday School records. (SRO; SoTCA)
Trustees’ minute books for Newton’s Charity from 1803 to 1989. Newton’s College was set up in the Lichfield Cathedral Close in 1803 as an almshouse, originally for the widows and unmarried daughters of clergy, particularly those who had served the Cathedral directly. (LRO)
Lichfield Civic Society deposited further minutes, newsletters and surveys, together with a very useful photographic street survey of the centre of Lichfield from the late 1960s, potentially illustrating the changes in shop frontages in the last fifty years. (LRO)
Records of Westcliffe Hospital c 1953-1997 (SD1515). This hospital was the former workhouse for the Wolstanton and Burslem Poor Law Union built in 1894 as an addition to the existing workhouse. (SoTCA)
Our standard for receipting accessions
We aim to send out a receipt for any new accession received within 12 working days. This is how we did:
Staffordshire Record Office: 98% (96%)
Lichfield Record Office: 100% (100%)
Stoke on Trent City Archives: 98% (100%)
Work on back cataloguing, that is collections still remaining un-catalogued for more than 12 months after being received by the Archive Service, progressed well with a further 102 boxes of records from the backlog being catalogued. This equated in capacity to some 112 cubic feet of archives. 34% of new accessions were catalogued during the year. Overall a total of 9,308 new entries added to the catalogue database.
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