Last week we ran another of our training workshops called “Caring for your Collection”. This workshop was attended by people from a number of mills, who were looking for advice and the chance to build their own links in the mill world and share ideas.
Our Archivist Nathanael Hodge started the day with a series of interactive presentations and Q&A sessions in the Founders’ Room, covering how to organise and catalogue material. His clip from the Lord of the Rings film showing Gandalf hunting for information in an archive – and how not to handle vulnerable images and documents – proved popular!
We then continued in the Library, where we laid out a display of archival packaging, environmental controls and examples of damaged images and documents. With help from trustee and retired miller Mildred Cookson, the participants explored the things they can do to help protect their own collections from damage.
Nathanael answered questions about safe storage of vulnerable images and documents as well as how to monitor their environment (above), while Mildred showed people examples of damaged items and the value of still keeping these where possible, drawing from her own experience as a collector (below).
The training continued with a session on digitisation and how we can help mills to make their own archives available to the public online through hosting on our AtoM cataloguing software. The day concluded with an introduction to an ongoing Heritage Lottery Funded project called Quern to Computer. In this last session, the project Learning & Engagement Manager, Claire Wooldridge, talked about the ways that mills can get involved in the £68,000 project and enrich their own visitor experience.
The participants left with a 55-page reference guide for their mill and free samples of archival packaging, not to mention a list of new contacts within the mill community, equipped to continue to share ideas between their different mills as well as within their own teams.
If you would like to find out more about our training workshops, please contact me at friends@millsarchive.org If a mill or organisation is a Heritage Partner or Corporate Friend, we offer free places on our workshops. To find out more about these supporter schemes and the range of benefits please click here or get in touch and I would be happy to answer any questions you might have.