Saturday 3rd June at the Bar Convent

NB:// there is currently a planned rail strike this day, the event will continue despite this.

The Diocese of Salford was erected in September 1850 by Papal Bull – Universalis Ecclesiae, known as the Restoration of the Hierarchy. Thirteen new dioceses were created, and Nicholas Wiseman was elevated to the Cardinalate, as the first Archbishop of Westminster. William Turner was appointed as first Bishop of Salford in June 1851; the Church of St John the Evangelist, Salford was elevated to Cathedral status in June 1852; and the Diocesan Chapter erected the following month.

The project to research into the lives and ministries of the early clergy of the Diocese has been ongoing for many years and is now being bought to fruition in a projected two volume publication.

This, the first volume, tells the story of the clergy who were ordained for, or arrived to minister in, the Diocese from its formation in 1850 to the death of the third Bishop of Salford, John Bilsborrow in March 1903, while also including the details of those priests who were ordained prior to the Restoration of the Heirarchy in 1850, but who ministered in the Lancashire District, and before that the Northern District, at churches which would later become part of the Diocese of Salford.

Available to purchase at Amazon here

Northampton Diocese is looking for a Diocesan Information Manager, which includes caring for the diocesan archives.

Diocesan Information Manager

3 days per week,

The salary is £40-50k full time equivalent, depending upon experience.

Start date: May 2023

We are currently recruiting for an Information Manager to join our Diocese.

Full information for the position and an application form can be found by visiting  https://northamptondiocese.org/jobs/

All candidates should complete an application form and email it to hr.admin@northamptondiocese.org

The closing date for applications will be Friday 31^st March. Interviews dates to be confirmed.

A full job description can be found here

You’re invited to learn how easy it is to preserve and share your institution’s digital legacy.

As a religious institution, you are a steward of important materials that document the history of faith, music, local communities and events, genealogy and so much more. The digital age has made it possible to digitize and preserve these important materials to increase accessibility to new audiences and to ensure that these invaluable records are still available for religious historians and the community well into the future.

Creating a new digital collections program from scratch or reviving a dormant digital collections program requires the right technology. Tools should be simple and affordable, hosted in a secure environment, and flexible enough to grow as your program grows.

Participants will:

• Hear from a representative at Temple Rodef Shalom about how they are using Preservica Starter to connect with their community
• Learn how to easily create your first digital preservation collection with simple drag and drop
• Quickly upload metadata and digital files in bulk
• Request digital materials from the community
• Showcase your archive with your own public access portal
• Connect with learning resources and others using this technology on the Community Hub

Please join Preservica for a FREE training to learn how to use Preservica’s Starter platform to launch a digital collections program.

Wednesday, February 8, 2023
11:00AM-12:00PM ET
Register here

St Edmund’s 1906

St Edmund’s College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded as St Edmund’s House in 1896 as a lodging house for students, it became a graduate college in 1965, received its Royal Charter in 1998 and is the only Cambridge college with a Roman Catholic Chapel. The Von Hügel Institute, a research institute for critical Catholic enquiry, although separate, has strong links and is based on the same site.

St Edmund’s House was co-founded by Henry Fitzalan Howard, the 15th Duke of Norfolk and Baron Anatole von Hügel, an ethnographer and explorer who became the first Catholic to take a degree in Cambridge since 1688. Von Hugel was also instrumental in the revocation of the papal ban on Catholics attending Oxford and Cambridge. St Edmund’s College, Ware provided three of the first four students, all of whom were studying for the priesthood. Within a few years most of St Edmund’s House students had already been ordained to the priesthood before coming into residence as members of the University. They read a range of degrees to equip them for work in grammar schools and universities.

The decade of the 1960’s, especially during the Mastership of Canon Garrett Sweeney (1964-76), was a period of steady progress, and laid the foundation for the present College. The increased number of postgraduates in the University resulted in four graduate Colleges being established in 1965 (the other three were Darwin College, Wolfson College and Clare Hall). 1965 also saw the election of the first four Fellows and an increase in the number of lay people working at St Edmund’s.

The college gradually increased in student numbers throughout the 20th century and this is reflected in the plethora of new college buildings (many of which we hold plans, accounts and committee minutes for). There were less than 50 students in 1970 and this had more than doubled by 1990, doubling again to 200 in 2000, 400 in 2010 and over 450 by 2014. Although originally only postgraduates were admitted, this was extended to mature undergraduates in the later 20th century.

The College achieved the status of an Approved Foundation on 8 March 1975. The old Association was dissolved on 30 June 1984 and replaced by a new governing body of Fellows and St Edmund’s became a fully autonomous and self-regulating society. It attained full collegiate status in 1996, exactly 100 years after its foundation. All of these changes were well documented, and the records are in the archive.

The college archive has been in its current room since 2006. Underneath the library, it has a separate strong room and office, although efficient records management means that the office is slowly becoming a second strong room! Like many Cambridge archives, there has been a Fellow in overall charge of the archives since at least 1994. In the early 2000’s, the Archivist Dr Philip Gardener employed a professional consultant archivist (Joan Bullock-Anderson) and adopted the title Fellow Archivist in 2007.

The archive has had a professionally qualified archivist since 2012, originally for only half day a week, but latterly for one day a week. The post now includes both archives and records management, as a Records Management Schedule was created in 2018. This has had a massive impact on accrual rates, and also raised the profile of the archive hugely within college; most enquiries are now internal. It also means that we have very recent records which are a bit of a challenge to catalogue!

As you would expect, the archive stores, preserves, and provides access to the records that document the history of the College. It includes records from the first 13 Masters of the college, taking us up to 2014. The Archive also contains minutes of the governing bodies, records of clubs and societies, College publications, photographs, and some personal papers. There are also plans and minutes from the numerous building projects, records from May Balls and the Norfolk Feast, the college’s pre-eminent social event, which is still held annually. Some records acquired from external sources predate the date of the foundation of St Edmund’s, although the majority of the collection is from the 20th century.

In common with other college archives in Cambridge, there are relatively few papers of prominent fellows, many of which are kept in the main University Library. The majority of the collection has been catalogued and is on the Cambridge University Archives Search at https://archivesearch.lib.cam.ac.uk/

As the archivist is only one day a week, it can take a little while for us to answer enquiries, and our search-room capabilities are limited. We do, however, offer an excellent remote service (with no research charges) and would be delighted to show any archivists or interested parties around if you are ever in Cambridge. Our email address is archives@st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk

Genny Silvanus, Cover Archivist.

To book, please follow the link here

By Stephanie Nield​ – Archivist

The Leonard Cheshire Archive Centre in Netherseal, South Derbyshire collects, cares for and shares the history of disability charity Leonard Cheshire and its founder, Group Captain Lord Leonard Cheshire VC OM.

Whilst the charity is non-denominational, its founder and his wife and fellow charity worker Lady Sue Ryder CMG OBE were well known Roman Catholics in their lifetime, and the archive contains much evidence of their faith.

In 2019, we were awarded grants by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Foyle Foundation to save our historic sound collection, which was at grave risk due to technical and physical obsolescence. This project, called ‘Resonate’ saw 256 reel to reel and cassette tapes digitised and then transcribed by a team of digital volunteers. As well as this vital conservation and access work, we produced a podcast and a series of blogs, and made some sound recordings available on our website.

The digitisation was done by an external company, Sirensound who we selected after a tender process. Once this was complete, we did a lot of work to improve the accessibility of the digitised sound files for disabled people. This started with transcription – a transcript is available for each recording and podcast. It also affected the way we chose to present the information online. For the digitised sound tapes, each tape is presented on our website as a fully captioned film, hosted on YouTube, so that people with sensory disabilities can access the recordings. The films were created for us by the company Nutmeg, again selected through a tendering process. For the podcast, we hosted the podcast in the Anchor app, which distributes the podcast to other apps such as iTunes and Spotify and provided a YouTube version as a fully captioned film too. We plan to continue this podcast now the project has ended.

Because of our location in South Derbyshire, and the limits on the size of our premises, the volunteering part of this project was always going to be ‘virtual’. However, our call for volunteers coincided with the first pandemic lockdown, so we were quite overwhelmed with expressions of interest. This soon settled down, and we had 27 volunteers, who contributed over 1,177 hours to the project.

There are a selection of the digitised sound tapes now available online. They include interviews with Group Captain Cheshire and Lady Ryder, and soundtracks of films on both of their charity work by Ryder-Cheshire films. Also included are oral history interviews with past members of staff, volunteers and residents as well as a selection of Group Captain Cheshire’s sermons. They can be viewed online, along with the accompanying blogs and podcast episodes at https://rewind.leonardcheshire.org/?type=tag&s=resonate.