Report from the chair (Nov 2023)
It has been a while since my last update on the archive but that is not to say that things haven’t been happening.
On the trustee front I am sorry to say that Angie Thompson has stepped down as a trustee. Angie was leading our marketing and the work on our website and social media as well as organising and delivering our Heritage Open Day events. On behalf of myself and the other trustees I would like to say a big Thank You to Angie for all the work she did for the archive. We are very fortunate that we have been able to replace Angie with someone who is a perfect fit for the role and I would like to welcome Katie Hilton as our new trustee taking over the role of marketing.
Katie is a designer specialising in creating engaging experiences for the museum and heritage sector and she holds an undergraduate degree in graphic design and is currently undertaking a postgraduate degree in heritage and interpretation. Throughout her career spanning over a decade, she has had the pleasure to develop her hobby of visiting museums into helping other visitors to access and enjoy heritage collections such as the Richard Roberts Archive.
As part of our links with Manchester Metropolitan University we posted on their RISE project board our project “Archives are not just for wrinklies” (a project aimed at how we can better engage with a younger demographic). We were glad to get a reply from Sukriti Mehta who came along and worked with us to create a report on how we can achieve our aims. Sukriti has not only written an excellent report on how we can reach out to a younger demographic but has also stayed on as a volunteer to work with our marketing team in delivering the report’s recommendations.
We have just completed this year’s participation in the Heritage Open Day scheme and were really pleased to welcome over thirty people to the archive. They were given a guided tour, plied with cake and coffee and had the opportunity to listen to Peter Moss’s talk on “Creativity in advertising design”.
For those of you who watch the website you will have noticed lots of changes over the last few months with Peter and Katie implementing improvements that show more of what the archive is about and what we have in the collection. This will be an ongoing activity so please keep popping back and look at the changes.
One of our constant challenges is finding new volunteers and I am hopeful that following the Heritage Open Day we may indeed have recruited a new person to the team. I am looking forward to welcoming them to the archive and opening the door to them onto our treasure trove of goodies.
Craig has been working hard on the archive building and we have now completed the addition of extra wood stores to complement the ones built a couple of years ago. This more than doubles our capacity for wood, allowing us to sell even more surplus and raise funds for the archive. Inside the building Craig has been putting up row after row of new bookcases and at the same time putting in extra beams to support the upstairs floor so that we can start using that space when downstairs is full.
On the collection front we are approaching 150,000 items in the main collection and 17,000 loose adverts sorted by company and product. It is always pleasing to have a success when asked to research the product files and the latest one that came in this week was for PYE the electronics company. We have four adverts on file for PYE which although not a great number did give pointers to the publications they came from and therefore potentially more to be found in the main collection.
A new area of the collection for us is the move to build up our beer mat and breweriana material. I have taken this on as a personal project and we already have an impressive collection of over 10,000 beer mats on file.
Our monthly open evenings continue to be a success with a good mix of people turning up. If you haven’t been before then come along and join us for coffee and cake, a perusal of the “finds” table and convivial conversation with others interested in this fabulous archive.
We are constantly trying to build bridges with other organisations and groups and this year Craig and I took part in a conference on the title of “The County Magazines”. It was an excellent event where we made good contacts across the academic world. Two outputs from the conference are that we have been asked to write a paper on the theme of advertising across the county magazines plus a specific article to celebrate the 90thyear anniversary of Cheshire Life magazine to be published in 2024.
In June we hosted the Stockport Library Heritage Team, giving them the grand tour of the archive. Although we were on their doorstep they only found out about us by chance through a mutual contact and were amazed at what we had achieved at the archive. A few weeks later the trustees from the archive had a reciprocal tour of Stockport Library with a fascinating behind-the-scenes tour.
I am now looking forward to working with the team to strengthen our links to other organisations and promote the archive to the rest of the world through the website and social media feeds.
Until next time, take care and keep safe
Richard Roberts
