Report from the chair (Feb 2024)
Dear all, welcome to our February newsletter. Word is certainly getting round about the archive and it is always a lovely surprise to be contacted out of the blue.
A recent email to the archive was from the Chairman of the Daimler and Lanchester Car Club who had heard of us through one of their club members. They are looking for somewhere to house their club archive and wondered if our archive could be a suitable repository. After some email correspondence the Chairman and another member of the club visited the archive and were given the “grand tour”. We plied them with coffee and biscuits in the reading room and had a very interesting discussion with them about their needs. They have now gone away to discuss ideas within their club but we are really hopeful that something good will come from the meeting.
Sukriti has now started her internship with us and is already working with the Marketing Team on ideas that she has. Watch this space, as they say.
You can never do too much promotion, and one of the excellent ways for us to promote the archive is through the Society of Automotive Historians in Britain (SAHB) (it helps that three of our trustees are members of this society). Peter Moss is webmaster for the SAHB and as such writes a weekly piece called SNAPSHOT. With his links to the archive Peter can often be seen trawling through our collection looking for ideas for his next snapshot feature and the archive always gets a credit when one of the images in the collection is used. I received a telephone call this morning from a member of the Talbot Car Club who had spotted SNAPSHOT 407 on the SAHB website and got in touch to find out more about the picture featured. It was easy enough to point him to Peter for this information.
Since the last newsletter we have received two wonderful donations from Manchester university libraries. The first was a run of about 3,000 copies of TIME magazine. The earliest copy was from 1936 and the run goes up to the 1990s. We are about a third of the way through cataloguing them. The second donation appears to be a run of the Observer magazine though how big we cannot tell as we have only had time to “peek” into a couple of boxes. Working at the archive really makes it feel like it’s Christmas every day.
On a more serious note, did you realise it costs us over £8,000 a year just to keep the doors to the archive open? We have been discussing at the trustee meetings how best to raise this money each year as we are almost entirely dependent on donations to cover these costs. One of our ideas was to have a donations page on our website where people can make either a one-off or ongoing donation to support our activities.
We have now tested the donations page and plan to launch it alongside this newsletter. Please feel free to donate generously on the link below and give feedback on how your experience went. We are always open to new ideas of how to raise money so please get in touch.
Take care and all the best
Richard Roberts and the team at the Richard Roberts Archive
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Collection Statistics
The Richard Roberts Archive collection statistics
Tuesday 8th February 2024
Collection database
Total items 155,809
- of which Magazines 131,913
Product folders
Total folders 141
- circa number of adverts 17,798
Breweriana
Total folders 285
Beermats 16,822
Transport photograph database
Total items 883
Volunteer hours
Total 69,833
- of which this month 462
