Tag: archives
Sophy Rickett’s missing women
At the centre of ‘The curious moaning of Kenfig Burrows’, Sophy Rickett’s collection of photographs in the Glynn Vivian Art Galley, is Cupid, a seventeenth century oil painting from the Gallery’s foundation collection. It’s safe to say that this work hasn’t been seen by the public for many decades. It’s attributed to an obscure Italian […]
In search of 100 objects
September 2018 has turned out to be a month of personal endings. Three weeks ago, after five and a half years of sporadic legwork, we finished the last mile of the Wales Coast Path. This week saw the publication of two books I’ve been working on for what seems almost as long, Wales in 100 […]
Celebrating our research collections
The text of a talk given in Taliesin, Swansea University on 11 December 2017 to mark the 80th birthday of the 1937 Library. The talk was supported by Swansea University, the Learned Society of Wales and the Royal Institution of South Wales. Diolch yn fawr am y gwahoddiad i siarad – y tro cyntaf imi […]
Archives, libraries and the Heritage Lottery Fund
As government funding for memory institutions has declined – catastrophically in the case of regular capital finance for buildings, ICT infrastructure and collections purchase – the importance of the Lottery, and especially the Heritage Lottery Fund, as a funding source to those bodies has risen. What is the relationship between the HLF and those memory […]
UNESCO Memory of the World: what is its value?
Statutory protection for historic documentary collections in the UK is weak, with the exception of some highly specific categories of archives under the Public Record Acts. Similarly, non-statutory schemes that aim to identify such collections and grant institutional approval to them are rare, in comparison with programmes by national or international bodies to protect by […]