British Records Association

Category: News

  • Archives of crisis and conspiracy: the digital future

    This webinar is one of a series of six organised by the British Records Association’s Archives Advocacy Group which will be held during 2021 and 2022.  The aim of the series is to raise and debate questions surrounding the criticality and value of archives and records as information and evidence. questions such as:

    • What does the record – be it in hard copy paper format, digital or other media – mean to us?
    • Why should we be concerned about its survival?
    • How can the authenticity and significance of records be assessed?
    • How can perceived barriers to the access and use of records be broken down?

    Speakers Valérie Schafer from the University of Luxembourg, Friedel Geeraert Belgian Royal Library and Kees Teszelszky National Library of the Netherlands will consider how memory institutions and other organisations conduct rapid response archiving to capture the digital records of crisis. This includes how they decide what to include and exclude, and how and when those born-digital archives should be made available to researchers and the wider public. It will also consider how huge digital archives, which may contain multiple forms of misinformation, can be effectively described and contextualised when close reading and cataloguing are not possible.

    The webinar will take place on , 6:00PM – 7:30PM via Zoom. A link will be emailed to you once you have booked a ticket.

    The webinar series is in partnership with the Institute of Historic Research (IHR) Tickets are booked on the IHR website.

    A captioned recording of this webinar can now be viewed online. Past webinars in this series can be viewed on the IHR’s YouTube channel.

     

     

  • Maurice Bond Lecture tickets now available

    Maurice Bond Lecture tickets now available

    “Living through a pandemic has forced historians to look anew at previous crises and to interrogate archives with different assumptions. It also makes us think about what material we should be generating for future historians.”

    Martin Daunton, Emeritus Professor of Economic History at the University of Cambridge and Visiting Professor at Gresham College will consider the topic of Covid and the Historian in the British Record Association’s 2021 Maurice Bond Lecture.

    We will also take the opportunity to present the 2021 Janette Harley Prize to Dr Amy Erickson for her work “City Women in the 18th Century”.

    Click this link to book tickets on Eventbrite.

    Wed, 23 February 2022

    18:00 – 20:00 GMT

    Access is available from 5.30pm. Please go to the West Wing entrance to Guildhall, on the corner of Aldermanbury and Gresham Street by St Lawrence Jewry church. Bags will have to pass through security scanners.

    Image detail from Esther Sleepe’s trade card © Trustees of the British Museum.

  • Records at Risk Fund Launched

    The BRA has worked in partnership with The National Archives (TNA) and the Archives and Records Association to launch the Records at Risk Fund, a new collaborative pilot fund to support urgent interventions to save physical and digital records facing immediate peril across the UK.

    The fund has been created in response to the increased risk of vulnerable collections being lost or dispersed in the wake of the pandemic. In 2020, TNA awarded grants from the government’s ‘COVID-19 Archives Fund’ and this new partnership programme builds on that experience. The Records at Risk Fund will continue to focus on records unprotected by legislation, such as the archives of businesses, charities and individuals, and will help organisations that do not have the resources to respond to collections at immediate risk for any reason.

    Limited funding is available but applicants will be able to apply for funds of up to £5000, which will help cover the costs of a range of urgent activities needed to transfer vulnerable material to safe custody. These activities could include transporting and temporarily storing the records, purchasing conservation and packaging materials, or emergency conservation work such as decontamination. Successful applicants could also use their grants to carry out an on site appraisal of the records at risk or to gain expertise from a freelance consultant.

    Find out more on TNA’s Records at Risk Fund webpages.