Update From The Archives
Having been here six months already, it is very satisfying to see that some of the main projects that I have started since joining the Foundation are beginning to come together. These will make the archives at the college easier to search and use for everyone.
One of the key areas that both myself and Nick Baker before me identified was the need to tackle the organisation of the photos relating to Princethorpe College. We have roughly 5,000 photos stored in our strongroom but the way that they were stored made it very difficult to know what we actually had. Many of them were stored in unlabelled envelopes in mixed boxes with no reference to what they were about. Looking for a specific photograph showing a member of staff or pupil was very much like searching for a needle in a haystack. With the help of a very dedicated sixth form student, Charlotte Ecclestone, we are now at a point where the photographs have been roughly sorted into archival boxes based on their subject. They will need another sort through to put them in to a rough date order and weed out any duplicates before they are catalogued and look more like the ‘after’ photo than the ‘before’ but it won’t be long before I am calling on Old Princethorpians to lend me their knowledge about people and events to catalogue the photos fully. What is funny is that because the same faces and names come up regularly in the photos, I have started to feel like I actually know some of the staff members that left long before I started here.
Talking about cataloguing leads nicely on to the second big project that is steaming ahead; the purchase of a new cataloguing system. Having looked at a number of different options, we are in the final stages of agreeing the purchase of one and the most exciting thing is that it will include a public searchable catalogue, replacing the PDF versions that are online currently, and we will be able to provide access to items within our collection that has been digitised, including old magazines so that you can take a trip down memory lane yourself. I look forward to being able to share the link to the website as soon as it is available.
Finally, all of the material donated by Crescent since it joined the Foundation in 2016 has been accessioned so we know exactly what we have. After a recent meeting with Joe Thackway, the headteacher at Crescent, I was delighted to be able to add their Admission Registers to the collection. The registers start in 1948, when the school admitted its first pupil, and carry on until 2017, when the decision was made to store the information in a purely digital format. Admission Registers are a fantastic source of information about past pupils, which are used regularly by both myself and the Development Office when we receive enquiries about pupils as they contain information such as dates of birth, as well as the dates an individual pupil joined and left the school.
We are always looking for new material to add to the archive, so if you come across any material from your days here at the college that you no longer want, please don’t hesitate to get in touch as we would be delighted to have it.
Janette Ratcliffe
Foundation Archivist