What is a 'Collections Week'?

Bath Record Office collects and cares for historic records relating to Bath, and makes them available to all who want to use them.  We always put our users – both current and potential - at the centre of our service.  For this reason, although we are a very small office with limited resources, we try to keep search room opening hours as long as possible.

 

However, to provide access for all users now and in the future, we need to do more than just keep the search room open: we need to ensure that the records we hold are properly packaged and stored, we need to appraise and record fully all new records that come in to us, we need to catalogue many of the records that we already hold – at present only about a quarter of our holdings are fully catalogued – and make these catalogues available online.  Doing this work properly will open up the records for users today, and ensure their permanent preservation for the users of the future.

 

We are fortunate in having a group of very conscientious and able volunteers, who make a valuable contribution to the work of the Record Office.  These volunteers can help us to carry out some of the work which needs doing.  However, to make best use of volunteer input, we need to organise and manage projects effectively, and we need to be able to devote time to doing this.

 

To carry out this essential work, we decided in January 2011 to close the Record Office for the third full week of every month for a trial period of six months. This proved to be a success - we have carried out significant cataloguing and other work, reported in our news section - and we decided to continue with 'collections weeks'.

 

We realise that this will cause inconvenience to many of our users, for which we apologise.  However it will result in greatly improved access to many of our collections.

 

Every three months, we will report on what we have achieved in our ‘collection weeks’.  Look out for our updates!