Collections Development Week 2025

Posted on 10 February 2025

Last week, we closed the Borthwick Institute to researchers so we could undertake our annual Collections Development Week.

Collections Development Week 2025 Highlights

Our annual Collections Development Week closure allows staff to concentrate on strategic cataloguing to increase access to our collections, as well as other important tasks. We are pleased to say we had a hugely successful week. Overall, we've added 687 new entries to Borthcat, and prepared hundreds more.

Highlights include:

Catalogued eight sets of parish accessions, an addition to the Student Life Collection and plans for the first 174 surviving projects for Ferrey and Mennim archive.
Descriptions and catalogues at the collection level for the Tony Southall Archive, South African Student Unions and Publications, Books of the York Particular Meeting, and the Cape Town Disturbances collection.
Created a collection-level description for the Sir Andrew Derbyshire archive and retro-converted the box list. This will be added to Borthcat in the coming weeks.
Collections level description and box list for MD/266 - Militärgeographische Angaben über England (Military Geographic Information about England, prepared by German Army General Staff, Department of War Maps and Surveying), prepared in 1940-42 to inform Operation Sealion and any subsequent occupation of Britain.
Sorted out nearly 600 new additions to the AAGB archive in an Excel spreadsheet and placed them physically into the correct series for integration into the existing collection. These will be added to Borthcat in the coming weeks.
50 accessions were moved to a new consolidated accessions area, and location markers were updated. New accessions for the York Racecourse Archive and the Goon Show Preservation Society Archive were also processed.
Hoovered our foam book rests and washed our snake weights, and the covers for our Norfolk book sofas.
Created specialist mounts and packaging for a temporary exhibition of archives for the Post-offer Visit Days, and staff attended the visit day on 8th February.
Added six new collections to Discover, including early 20th-century images of Israel and Palestine from the Society of the Sacred Mission archive and Raymond Burton Playbills.
Our our Art Curator Helena spent a lot of time moving artwork and installing a new exhibition last week. She also started looking at our ceramic collections in preparation for a possible new exhibition.

A massive thanks goes to everyone in the team who made this happen!