Current projects
Setting the Record Straight project
In April 2024, the we began a project to improve access to our collections, by enhancing catalogue discoverability and carrying out collections preservation activities.
The community and civic archives we hold on behalf of the City of York Council are one of the most important local authority archives outside London. Yet many of the records in our care remain invisible to York’s communities, and to our national and international researchers. Incomplete and fragmentary cataloguing in the past, records in need of preventative conservation, and a lack of online information is compromising the ability of our users to explore our collections and find the information they need.
This project addresses these issues through a comprehensive programme of works, which the archive team focus on for one week every month. This programme of works is ongoing, with over 10,000 catalogue entries reviewed in 2024-2025, and more than 29 cubic metres now clean and packaged so that they can be accessed by our researchers.
Digital Preservation
Alongside records on paper and parchment, Explore York Archives also holds records in various digital formats. Just as we preserve and provide access to our physical records, we also work to ensure that we look after our digital records.
We have a trusted digital repository system called Preservica, which we manage in partnership with the City of York Council. Preservica is the digital equivalent of an archive store and acts as a safe location to store digital records so that they aren’t lost or corrupted. It also updates a version of each digital record to a file format that will mean that the digital records continue to be accessible in the future.
We collect and hold several types of digital records:
- Born-digital records, such as Word documents, MP3 files and JPEGs, which were created and have continued to be stored on a computer or other electronic device.
- Records stored on analogue media carriers such as floppy disks and cassette tapes.
- Digitised surrogates of physical collections that have been copied into a digital format for conservation or access purposes.
A generous donation has allowed us to purchase an audio cassette player, USB interface and headphones. We are using this equipment to digitise oral history interviews created by the Poppleton History Society. Over the coming year we plan to digitise the interviews from the tapes, create catalogue records for the interviews, and make them available to researchers.