Bringing Order to the Chaos, and Nice Weather

'Chaos' is a large overstatement, but the archives definitely needed a great deal of organizing. I haven't had time to work there for a while, and there were still boxes of documents from several different collections that needed to be processed, some of which were donated 4 years ago and haven't been touched. It's become a priority to get that done soon, since we're almost done cleaning this year's archaeology finds and so the archives are soon going to be flooded with hundreds of artifacts to be catalogued!

On top of the desk in the above photo is the undealt-with segment of the Angela Minchin collection. Angela was instrumental in the fight to save the castle from developers 20 years ago, and when she died the castle archives received the copious amounts of letters, ads, newspaper articles, programs, etc that she had saved relating to the castle. Each item needs to be individually put in a plastic sheet protector and given an archive number (see below) then sorted into files within boxes.

An example of how each document is prepared for storage with sheet protector
and archive number labeled. These are the 38th and 39th documents in
File 2 of Box 21 of the Herstmonceux Castle Angela Minchin collection.
I didn't notice until I uploaded these photos that the top letter is addressed
to someone with 'Smyth' in their name :)

Dr. Scott's archive code is that anything on the floor needs to be dealt with, and anything on the shelves has been fully processed and documented. I finished processing the remains of 6 different document collections that had been lying on the floor, but what I couldn't do myself was the undealt-with archaeology: finds from multiple different digs around the estate stretching back ten years that are in various stages of being documented. Dr. Scott needs to deal with that, because a lot of it requires his memory to determine how things are labelled or what section of the archives they need to be stored in. The best I could do was to gather everything into one area of the archives for him to deal with later, although now it makes a much more daunting pile!

I also did various things to straighten up, like making the boxes fit on the shelves, scrubbing the chairs and moving them out of the way, and setting up a storage cabinet full of all the spare supplies floating around. 

This castle model is entirely made of fondant-covered fruitcake! Dr. Scott had given me permission to throw it away- it's several years old with broken pieces and crumbs, not something good to store in an archive- as long as I took photos of it first. I have no idea when or why it was made. 

Although I got all the documents sorted and numbered into the archive system, a description of each one still needs to be written into the archive notebooks. I was doing this earlier in the summer, but now I've run out of time; we decided that it was more important for me to organize all the documents into the system, since the job of writing out descriptions is easier for Scott's term-time student volunteers to pick up and drop.

On that note, an issue with the castle archives is the nature of how it's maintained. Dr. Scott runs it as a hobby, and it's too big of a job for someone who is also teaching and doing research! He recruits student volunteers, but with them changing so frequently, there hasn't been very much consistency in how things are catalogued. So, today I wrote out guidelines for artifact and document processing and artifact photography (see above), to try and ensure some consistency after I'm gone. Hopefully it works! :)

(Above) This is where I've spent 8 hours a day alone for the last two days. I know what I'm describing probably sounds pretty boring, but I really enjoy it. I feel like I've been given my own archive to play in and I love trying to help set it to rights!

It's also continued to be lovely outside, so here are a few recent shots of the South Downs as seen from Bader Hall: