Today I attended a presentation by several leading officers of the Smarden Local History Society to members of the Council of Kent Archaeological Society about records and record keeping within history societies and museums. As the presenters highlighted, there are considerable bodies of material at many local history organisations in Kent, much of which has probably not been catalogued and is often kept in less than ideal conditions. Such local collections can be seen as highly vulnerable, and in some ways this is doubly worrying if few or no one actually knows in detail what is held. Nor are such problems confined to history societies because some local museums are equally vulnerable. Moreover, with Kent County Council’s recent announcement of the formation of a trust to manage libraries, archives and registration in the county outside Medway, the future of local history collections in libraries would similarly appear to be uncertain. This is all against a backdrop of staff reductions across libraries and archives as a consequence of the government’s squeeze on local government, and, as I said several weeks ago, the county has some wonderful documentary and other collections that are of national and international importance. To a large extent there has always been a partnership between professionals and volunteers as guardians of these resources, but this balance would appear to be in danger in that as the numbers of qualified professionals decline, the role of trained amateurs will need to grow to meet this skills and manpower shortfall.

The Hythe skulls

One way to try to overcome some of these problems and likely difficulties in the future would be to try to digitise as much of this material as local history societies, museums and other organisations wish to, thereby providing a record for their members and others. At the moment such good quality facilities in an archive context are not widely available. However the purpose of this blog is not to describe Smarden’s proposal but to highlight what I, as a practising historian, see as a very worrying scenario if such ideas are not taken up. Now I know there are various digitisation projects underway in some places across the county, but it would seem that another thing that is needed, if at all possible, is an up-to-date register of such projects and preferably a degree of standardisation with regard to cataloguing and data management so that organisations can talk and continue to talk to each other. Whether in some ways umbrella organisations like the Kent History Federation or Kent Archaeological Society can take a growing lead in this might seem a sensible way forward. As many of you probably know KAS has an amazing website packed full of research material, and thus may be best placed to take a lead here. Furthermore, the institutions in the county that (hopefully) might also wish to be involved in some form or other are the universities, not least because in many ways they have resources that other organisations can only dream of. So these are just some musings in response to events this morning.

To finish, I thought I would just mention what is coming up in relation to the Centre here next week because, in addition to the Magna Carta, King John and Kent conference at Christ Church next Saturday, there will be the start of the exhibition at The Beaney and other celebrations surrounding Canterbury’s Magna Carta. And it is perhaps worth mentioning that Faversham, too, is celebrating its own later copy of the reissued Magna Carta. As well as the exhibition there, the weekly lecturers will include Professor Louise Wilkinson and Richard Eales, both experts in the field and they are similarly among the speakers in Canterbury next Saturday.