What were we doing for two weeks?

The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that Brent Museum and Archives was closed to inquiries and visitors for two weeks in September. We are sorry if this caused any inconvenience for anyone and hopefully this blog post will help to explain what we were up to.

Throughout the two weeks we strove to get parts of the archive and the local history collection in good order for our exciting move back to our new home, The Library at Willesden Green, which is  due to open next summer. One task was to assess the local history books we hold as reference material for researchers. We wanted to make sure we knew exactly what was going to go into our brand new search room. We needed to  select books that would be the more useful to people carrying out research into Brent’s past and we also wanted to check we had the most up to date copies of some books. The same process was applied to the red box files which many people who visited the old archive search room might be familiar with. These little treasure troves of information can be really useful to researchers but we wanted to make sure all of the information in the box files was relevant, not duplicated somewhere else and also that any delicate fragile material was removed and placed in the archive.

Our final (and biggest!) job was to check the location of each archive box and make sure material that had not been cataloged was described briefly and accurately on a database. By checking all of our 2,000 boxes during the two week closure we now have accurate location information which will help us find material more efficiently in the future for researchers.

One of the most exciting things about this task was the unknown archive gems we unearthed. Perhaps the highlight of the closed week was finding a collection of First World War letters from a father fighting far from home to his daughter. In the letters the father always refers to his daughter by her nick name of ‘Fluff’.

They are such wonderful letters to have discovered and Fluff and her father will feature in our new First World War exhibition Brent Remembers:Five Lives which opens at Brent Civic Centre on 29th October and closed in March 2015. So come along when the exhibition opens to discover more about Fluff and her family.

The Heritage team all feel the two weeks of closure was a big success and we will hopefully now be able to help archive users with their inquires more swiftly and easily.

 

http://www.brent.gov.uk/firstworldwar