Making History

What do archivists do?

Anna was in charge of the material we received from the Birmingham Hebrew Congregation which included the papers of Constance Davis. It was Anna's job to sort through the material and catalogue it. This allows us and users to search for items that might be of interest without having to rummage through each box. The catalogue contains a description and reference for each item.

Below is an image of Anna's notes that she made whilst sorting through the material for the first time. As you can see creating an archive involves a lot of sorting and many rearrangements.

The Office

This is the Connecting Histories, the table is always covered in material awaiting to be scanned, catalogued, conserved, boxed and researched for the website! You can see the mixture of sources and the various states they are in. In the bottom right we have a photo album from 1870. In the front are my notes for this webpage. You can see boxes, these contain photographs and newpaper cuttings. The CD player is being used to catalogue the Charles Parker Archive. As you can see archives are a juxtapostion not only of lots of different materials, but of different time periods and technologies.