News

You might have missed Santes Dwynwen day, but it’s still not too late to express your love by sending a romantic card on Valentine's Day. Archives and Special Collections, Bangor University, have this example of a Valentine Card from the 19th century which can be found amongst the Wynn Hall Manuscripts. Paper Valentines became popular … Continue reading Good Wishes: Valentine’s Card, 1875

I am a masters student of Conservation Practice at Cardiff University, and over the last few months I have been volunteering at Glamorgan Archives, assisting with the conservation of the Plymouth Estate maps. These are a collection of maps and surveys from 1766 covering much of the historic county of Glamorgan. They provide an important … Continue reading Conserving the 18th Century Plymouth Estate Maps

Crucial transcripts of the witness testimonies from the Chartist Trials, which reported on the 1839 Newport Rising, the last large-scale armed protest in Great Britain, have been shared by Archives Wales as part of Explore Your Archive week (Saturday 20th – Sunday 28th November 2021) Held online at the People’s Collection Wales for anyone to … Continue reading Witness testimonies from the 1839 Newport Rising uncovered as part of Explore Your Archive week

A wealth of historic documents, each with unique stories from the past, are being shared ahead of Explore Your Archives Week (Saturday 20th – Sunday 28th November 2021).Items highlighted as part of the week include a 12-metre-long family tree from the 1500s claiming that a Welshman is descended from the Virgin Queen, Queen Elizabeth I; an … Continue reading From claims of Welsh descendants of Queen Elizabeth I, to evidence of an octopus in the Bristol Channel: hidden history uncovered for Explore Your Archive week

In Wales, we have been working for many years to break down barriers to digital preservation through working collaboratively to increase capacity and skills. The publication of the National Digital Preservation Policy and accompanying Technical Appendix, on Digital Preservation Day in 2017, aimed at ensuring digital resources of enduring value would be selected for preservation … Continue reading Saving the Bits in Wales

Archivists’ roles are wide-ranging and encompass skills and responsibilities such as the selection of archival materials to be retained, cataloguing and describing their contents, and determining arrangements for public access. Perhaps the foremost responsibility of the archivist, however, is to ensure that the records in their care are capable of being preserved securely and permanently. … Continue reading Covid-19 Archives Fund: Records at Risk Project

S4C has reached an agreement with the National Library of Wales to ensure that all the channel's programmes are protected and transferred to the National Library's care as part of the National Broadcast Archive for Wales. All S4C content, programmes and series which have been broadcast since the channel's launch in 1982 will be transferred … Continue reading S4C programmes to be protected at the National Library

Throughout June, Cambridgeshire Archives led a social media campaign; the 'Great Archives Bake Off', inviting us to try out recipes from archive collections. Archives services in Wales took part and here are a few of the recipes tried and tested. Amanda Sweet, Anglesey Archives: 'I have chosen a recipe from a note book belonging to … Continue reading On Your Marks, Get Set…BAKE!

The theme for this years’ International Archives Day is Empowering Archives. Sally McInnes, Chair of the ARCW Digital Preservation Group and Head of Unique Collections and Collections Care at the National Library of Wales, explains how services are supporting each other to advance the digital preservation agenda in Wales. The ability to remotely connect and network … Continue reading Teaming up to save the bits: digital sustainability in Wales

“This is a shilling, and here’s a threepenny bit and here’s…” Watching a very elderly woman patiently explaining the pre-decimal currency system of Britain to a genuinely interested and much younger woman was a delight. Even more so when one understood that the older lady had dementia, and the younger was one of a team … Continue reading The Brilliant Past –Dementia and Archives