Dorset Archives Trust will host their annual summer event at St Giles House on 12 July. Nicholas Ashley-Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, will share stories from his family archives and his project to save the house from disrepair. In recent years the 12th Earl of Shaftesbury has undertaken ambitious restoration work on his ancestral home and… Read more Dorset Archives Trust Summer Gala
At this time of year many of us are spending our free time in the garden. Our collections reveal a passion for gardening going back centuries. Changing fashions Plans for alterations to the grounds at Frampton House demonstrate the changing fashions in eighteenth century garden design (reference: D-SHE/22). In 1778 a survey of the grounds… Read more Archives A-Z: G is for gardens
Dorset History Centre recently celebrated achieving Accredited Archive Service status from The National Archives. Accreditation is the process by which the archive service is assessed across a wide range of indicators ranging from finance and governance to collections management and community and stakeholder engagement. Assessors from The National Archives also visited Dorset History Centre to… Read more Dorset History Centre celebrates accreditation
Our 8 miles of shelving includes a special room for audio-visual material – film, photographic and audio records. This room is slightly drier and cooler than the paper and parchment repositories. Physical items are stored in archival packaging and labelled with a reference number so we can find them again. The challenge is that the… Read more Archives A-Z: F is for film
Enjoy the countryside? Love history? Come and explore both as part of the Stepping into Nature project. We will be enjoying pictures, maps or recordings and learning something new about the natural world and local artists. In a small group we will work with speech, painting, writing, photography and crafts. The group is open to… Read more Inspired by Archives
April sees the 18th annual International Edible Book Festival (yes, it’s a real thing!). So, we’re sharing a few examples of insects that enjoy eating books and other materials found within an archive, such as paper, adhesives and leather. Please note that these pests were not found at Dorset History Centre! We have an extensive… Read more Archives A-Z: E is for edible archives
‘Digital’ is all around us, every day. Working in archives is no different. We are just as interested in your photographs, meeting minutes or maps in a digital format as we were in paper. If something has historical value and will be interesting to be people in 50 or 100 years then we want to… Read more Archives A-Z: D is for digital
Our Community Engagement Officer spent a lovely morning with the Swanage Probus Club in early March. Maria received a very warm welcome and was able to tell the members about our work collecting and preserving records and making them available to the public. There were also plenty of pointers on documents and collections that may help… Read more A visit to Swanage Probus Club
There are almost 320,000 records in our archive catalogue. This is the place where items in our collections are arranged and described so we can find what we’re looking for. If you have used archives before you will know that our catalogues aren’t arranged by place, subject or date. Instead, records are grouped according to… Read more Archives A-Z: C is for catalogues
It won’t surprise you that Dorset History Centre contains a LOT of boxes. Our environmentally controlled repositories have a capacity of around 49,000 archive boxes – not including oversize items. The boxes are made from materials that won’t have any negative effects on the unique items they contain. Collections arrive with us in various states… Read more Archive A-Z: B is for boxes
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