Dorset History Centre (DHC) was constructed in 1991. Since then, it has provided an excellent, purpose-built home for the county’s archival and local studies resources – with records spanning well over 1000 years. The service manages a wealth of material in a wide variety of formats both physical and digital which provide evidence of our past as well as lessons from history for current and future generations.
After 31 years’ of occupancy, the repository areas of the building – the spaces in which we hold the collections in environmentally controlled conditions – are nearly full. With 55,000 boxes spaces, the archives need to be carefully managed, but there is still a lot of paper and parchment material that continues to be transferred for permanent preservation. Therefore, the service is developing a project which will form the basis of a future application to the National Heritage Lottery Fund. The project has three strands:
- The provision of 30 years’ of additional low-energy storage for physical archives
- Improved and re-purposed public spaces at DHC
- A large programme of public engagement – encouraging greater use of Dorset’s rich archival heritage
As a Dorchester-based county-wide service, we are conscious that we need to serve all Dorset’s communities and identifying digital solutions to assist with this whilst ensuring that physical access to records is maintained lies at the heart of the project.
In designing any project of this kind, it is really important that we consider the views of stakeholders, users and non-users of DHC. As a publicly funded service, we are very dependent on the support and feedback we receive from users and from a wide range of external partnerships. It is well known that project design is iterative, often changing and developing after feedback, comment and taking into account the views of people who use or may decide to use the service.
Therefore, we’d like to invite you to share your thoughts on DHC so that we can feed these views into our project planning and thereby develop proposals with the best, strongest outcomes for all. What do you like or like less about the service and what might we do differently? Information will be collected anonymously although there is an option to submit your details into a prize draw.
You can access the survey here. Please take part – your views really do count!
By way of an introduction to the project, we have created a short film narrated by a friend of the service Kate Adie. You can view it here.
Please note that this survey closes on Friday 9 December 2022.
Thank-you in advance for your time!