The Collections Story
This is the story of our collections as told by the information we hold about them. This information is key to discovery and why our project has a dedicated Collections Information Improvement Project Officer who takes up the tale …
In October 2023 we celebrated the 75th anniversary of the appointment of Chester’s first archivist, Margaret Groombridge in 1948. A year later the Cheshire Record Office was founded when the first County Archivist Major Rowe took charge of one million county court documents held at The Castle and made his first entry into an Accessions Register … Accession number 1 ‘Miscellaneous documents found at the Record Office’.
Bright White, our interpretation consultants, had asked us how they could create an interactive display that could respond to people who want to get a sense of how the collection has been built over time and is still growing.
This is where that accessions documentation comes in, that captures the history of individual collections prior to and following deposit at the archive. Only it can offer this insight into the vastness of the Cheshire collection, in quantity, age and scope.
We took the opportunity to extract data from the handwritten registers, a set of updated typescript registers and the accessions files themselves - paper files opened for every accession from a new depositor, and reflect on 75 years of collecting.
As soon as we have structured data in a spreadsheet we have the means of analysing and visualising it - and something useful to hand over to the interpretation team to make it come to life.
We’re currently assigning accession numbers in the 9600s to new deposits, still averaging about 120 a year, but no longer into an accessions register that Miss Groombridge or Major Rowe would recognise. For the past 25 years or so we’ve been adding accessions information to a collections management database - a different way of gathering data is the next chapter.
