Hello, my name is Guy Boocock and I have been a work experience volunteer here at MAT since November 2010.
As you may have read in Mill Writing or in Mill Memories, I and colleague Liz Bartram were lucky enough to win a place on the 2012 Vodafone Foundation – World of Difference UK programme – a second year running for me and a 5th win in 3 years for the Archive.
For the past 3 and a half months I have been working fastidiously, preserving and cataloguing Niall’s valuable collection. I can now officially announce that the cataloguing part of my Vodafone programme at The Mills Archive has recently been completed. 650 items, which include many photographs and research documents relating to papers that Niall Roberts had published in various mill society journals. Topics include mills and milling technology in world regions including the Caribbean, East and South-East Asia, South Africa, Ireland and France. The material will soon be available to the public to come and view, by appointment. This is only half of the Niall Roberts Collection and the rest of his research, photographs and 7 boxes of slides have yet to be done – these weren’t included in my project remit. The final four days I have left on the project will be spent developing webpages on the different aspects of the collection, and these webpages will go on to be used as templates for present and future collections.
A full list of papers by Niall Roberts will be published soon. We have many of the journals and newsletters in which the papers were published available here in the Mills Archive Library.
You can read about my progress over the past months on my Vodafone blog.
