Report from the chair (Jan 2024)

Dear all, Happy New Year for 2024 and best wishes to you for a prosperous year. It may be bitterly cold outside but it is wonderfully warm here in the reading room at the archive as I put this missive together.

Fortunately the weather does not prevent us getting on with the day-to-day activities of running the archive and we are still actively processing items into the collection, acquiring and building more shelving and putting in the extra floor supports to allow us to use the upstairs space more effectively.

I hope you all enjoyed our Christmas advent calendar – the first year we have done one. I am already collecting Christmas advertising in preparation for the 2024 offering.

Our marketing team is busy putting ideas into action to enable us to promote the archive actively throughout the year and we are looking forward to using the Austin Seven Ruby at motoring events to promote the archive as well as taking part in the Heritage Open Day scheme again this year which will be taking place in September.

 I am pleased to say that Sukriti Mehta, the student at Manchester Metropolitan University who ran our project “archives are not just for wrinklies” is now joining us at the archive to do a one-year internship as part of her master’s degree. We are all excited at the prospect of this and Sukriti will be working closely with our marketing team to deliver a number of projects aiming to work towards the archive’s five-year plan.

Richard Roberts

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Collection Statistics

The Richard Roberts Archive collection statistics
Tuesday 9th January 2024

Collection database                          

TOTAL items                                           154,309
Of which Magazines                           130,496
Product file database
TOTAL items (scanned and DB)     15,092
Of which physical copies                    8,444  

Product folders

Companies, people and authors A4   132
- circa number of adverts                        17,461
Companies, people and authors A3   1                                 
Companies, people and authors A2+ 0                                 
Artists and engravers                           5                                 

Drinking glasses                                              1                                 

Breweriana   folders                         262     
- Beermats                                                   14,825

Transport photograph database

TOTAL items                                                   883   

Volunteer hours

TOTAL                                                 69,371