Progress on the interactive timeline and national mills survey elements of our HLF funded ‘From Quern to Computer’ (Q2C) project continue apace. Read on for an update and to find out more about your chance to take part in our new campaign: the ‘Great British Mill Race’…
THE GREAT BRITISH MILL RACE: HOW YOU CAN HELP US DOCUMENT THE MILLS OF THE UK
We host a huge database of 10,000+ mills all over the UK. This includes all the mills in the UK that we know of, with each mill having an individual profile page. As you can imagine – keeping this information up to date, adding new mills and new images of mills is an enormous challenge!
This is where we need your help.
Members of the public will be encouraged to upload photographs and comments to a web form hosted on our website, relating to mills they have seen or visited all over the UK. This information will be used to update and improve our existing Mills Index of over 10,000 mills.
The survey – The Great British Mill Race – will be launched in May 2016, to coincide with the National Mills Weekend. The total duration of the survey will be May 2016 – Autumn 2017.
As of February 2016, we are finalising the IT requirements of the survey. Stay up to date with our latest progress on our blog: Mill Writing, on our Facebook page and twitter feed.
TIMELINE: THE STORY OF FLOUR MILLING FROM 6000BC TO THE PRESENT
What would you say are the key events and developments in our flour milling history? Let us know and you could see your suggestions included in our timeline.
As you may know one of the main strands of the Q2C project is working to create interactive digital timeline to tell the story of the history of flour milling. The purpose of Q2C overall is to tell the story of flour milling, from its ancient origins to the present day, up to and including the modern day roller flour milling industry.
We’re very fortunate to have two very knowledgeable and esteemed mills experts, Martin and Sue Watts, writing content to form the framework of the timeline. They’ve been set a hard task – condensing the entire history of flour milling into short, time based, ‘snapshots’ for me to post on the timeline – but they’re certainly rising to the challenge!
I’m spending time incorporating their content into the timeline and searching for images from our catalogue to go alongside their descriptions. I’ll be sure to share a few more examples from the timeline with you in the near future.
CATALOGUING FLOUR MILLING MATERIAL: MAKING ARCHIVAL RESOURCES AVAILABLE TO YOU
Running throughout the project (Summer 2015 – Spring 2018) is a large scale archive cataloguing and digitisation project, which aims to make thousands of records relating to the history of flour milling publically available via the online catalogue of the Mills Archive. The archive team have been working hard – so far they have made 3000 records available online (such as the one at the top of this blog post). .
We look forward to receiving your contributions to the Great British Mill Race when the survey launches in May 2016 – when you’ll be able to visit gbmillrace.org to take part.