Worcestershire Record Office - Worcestershire County Council

Collection Management
Recent Additions
The year saw our team of volunteers engaged in a wide range of service developments and
outreach, providing the Record Office with 3,485 hours of dedicated support across seven
different projects including:
• The conversion of manual indexes to electronic format
• Oral history work
• Cataloguing
• The indexing of Wills and Quarter Sessions papers
All of these projects enhance the service for our users and Record Office staff are very
appreciative of the dedication shown by our volunteers and for the significant added value that
they bring about.
The public branches of the Record Office are moving to
the new Worcester Library and History Centre building at
the Butts in 2012; the ‘cutting of the sod’ ceremony on
Thursday 28th January officially marked the start of building
construction, bringing to positive conclusion many years of
discussion, debate and planning.
It was a very active year for accessions with scarcely a week going by without a new collection arriving.
224 separate deposits (812 linear feet) were added to the collections, ranging from single items to several
boxes of documents.
Routine, but important, deposits reflecting council business, parish councils, ecclesiastical parishes,
schools and hospitals were acquired throughout the year. However one of the collections, which might
have appeared to be a routine deposit of old deeds of a property in Corse Lawn, had an added interest
because it related to the house owned by Godfrey Bazeley, the creator of the radio serial ‘The Archers’
and where he wrote many of the episodes (BA14925)
Generous financial help from The Friends of Worcestershire Record Office enabled us to obtain two
interesting items. The first a late nineteenth-century printed table of Rules governing the Queen Elizabeth
Almshouses in the Tything, Worcester (BA14911). The second was a rare plan of part of the parish of
Dormston, purchased at auction, to which they contributed half the cost (BA15088). The plan is not dated
but the style of the handwriting and drawing, plus research undertaken on the families noted, place the
plan in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. This makes it one of the oldest plans in the Office’s
collections, with links to the Hanbury Hall estate. The other half of the cost was met by the Friends of the
National Libraries, to whom the office is also very grateful.
During the year Record Office staff started preparing in
earnest for this move through a programme of tasks that
are:
• Improving and widening public access to collections
• Increasing on-line access
• Developing the full range of skills that will be
essential for the effective delivery of an integrated
archive service in the new building.
Section from plan of Dormston (BA15088)
Cutting of the Sod Ceremony
Rules of Six Masters
Almshouses 1877 (BA14911)
5
6