It’s been an eventful year, with new collections and new people joining us at the Archive.
We’ve seen a swell in our material created by the acquisition of new archival items:
The Roy Gregory Collection
The David L Pearce Collection
The Muggeridge Collection
Roland W Smith and additional Ken Farries material
We also came to rescue of hundreds of issues of the Northwestern Miller, kindly donated by the Satake Centre for Grain Process Engineering.
The summer saw two successful garden parties, attended by some 150 people in total. The highlight included an Archimedean Screw model demonstration, demonstrated by our first Corporate Friend eWaterpower.
Along with the launch of the Corporate Friend scheme, 2014 has been a year of growth and collaboration, as seen by the development and popularity of the Heritage Partnership.
We also gained a second Archive Patron in addition to the SPAB Mills Section – Perendale Publishers Ltd – and their joint support has already helped us and will continue to do so in the future.
We received our first sponsored intern from Reading University – Sarra Sheikh – who did a great job of creating our first digitised press cuttings collection. You might have followed her story on this blog. The task of adding to the digitised press cuttings has now been taken over by our volunteers.
Our team has grown with new volunteers joining the ranks and an employed Administrator, who all had a say in developing our new logo.
We put Helen Major’s legacy to good use and along with improvements to our IT we created the Founders’ Room, an impressive meeting space.
We used the Founders’ Room to run our first training workshop for Heritage Partners called “Caring for your Collection”. Attended by people from 5 different mills, our workshop offered tips and ideas for how to care for a mill’s own collection of images and documents, and encouraged collaboration and sharing of ideas between these groups running mills.
We would like to take this opportunity to wish a Merry Christmas to all of our volunteers, Friends, donors, researchers, Heritage Partners, Corporate Friends and Archive Patrons and to thank you all for your support. We hope that you will share in our journey through 2015, when we will be launching our brand new website and catalogue!
