As a major project to safeguard our most significant collection of film comes to a close, Digital Archivist Cassandra reflects on one of her favourite collections.
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I first encountered Windrose Rural Media Trust back in 2013 when I was invited to look at the extensive collection and assess whether we would preserve it at Dorset History Centre. Just over the Wiltshire border in Zeals I found Director, Trevor Bailey, in a converted farm building full of all sorts of media formats. I was fascinated to learn about how the charity had been collecting film of rural life in Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire since the 1980s. Also among the 700 tapes were video and audio recordings taken during the many community-based media projects undertaken by Windrose to capture changes and developments in community life. After watching some clips from a few films I was hooked!
Many of Windrose’s films are now available to view online via their website: my top 3 recommendations (and it was hard to choose just 3!) are:
1. Iwerne Minster in 1918 – a film recorded to boost morale in the last days of World War One by showing how the village was carrying on despite the conflict. It has everything from Maypole dancing and bee-keeping to butter-making and rams!
2. Will’s Surgery – a piece recorded for 1960s television documenting the communal cider making, and drinking, of Will and his friends. Presenter Clive Gunnell joins the locals for cider fueled stories and jolly singing. The Dorset accent is strong in this one!
3. Wimborne Market 1945 – colour scenes from a traditional livestock market overlaid with specially composed music and a poignant poem about the changes in society and the ongoing war.
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Trevor and colleagues at Windrose (previously Trilith) had worked hard to transfer their precious recordings from film to various video tape formats. One of the biggest risks to the survival of the collection was, and still is, format obsolescence. Kept in the right conditions, film and tape formats could last for decades. However, increasingly the equipment and expertise to play older and more obscure audio-visual formats is disappearing.
We were delighted to take in the Windrose collection for preservation in our environmentally controlled repositories. And, over the last 3 years, we have been supporting the National Heritage Lottery funded ‘A Century of Sights and Sounds’ project to, among other things, digitise large parts of the Windrose collection. The resulting digital files are being ingested (uploaded) to our digital preservation system, Preservica, with assistance from the Preservica team. Preservica securely stores multiple copies of files and constantly monitors them for corruption. It also offers the ability to migrate files to new formats to ensure future accessibility.
A large part of Windrose’s mission is to share their film collections and they have staged many performances and film shows over the years. Their online film festival runs from 24-30 June and features old favourites, such as Iwerne Minster in 1918, and recently digitised material. To find out more and watch the films visit: Dorset Online Archive Film Festival 2021. Get your popcorn ready!
We are working on ways to make more of this wonderful collection accessible and I look forward to working on future projects with Trevor and colleagues at Windrose Rural Media Trust.