Explore Your Archive week: Working from Home

2020 has been a very strange year for everyone and the Archives are no exception. The archives team have been working from home (the theme for today in the Explore Your Archive week) since the first lockdown in the middle of March, and although we have been keeping very busy it has been very strange having so little hands on time with our wonderful collections.  

Our Senior Archivist's new office space

Here is a flavour of what we’ve been up to this year in our new home offices:  

• Our Archives Revealed/Aberdeen Harbour Board funded cataloguer Mollie Horne has been overseeing an online transcription project, as well as adding thousands of descriptions for the Aberdeen Harbour Board collection to the catalogue. Read her blog for more information or check out her YouTube video on the project on the Aberdeen Art Gallery Museum's channel. 
• During the early stages of the pandemic some staff members were redeployed to help other areas of the Council which offered us an insight into different areas of the Council's services. 
• Recording YouTube videos to remotely introduce our service and some of the records we hold: the full playlist is available on the Aberdeen Archives Gallery & Museum's YouTube channel. If you have any suggestions for extra guides please let us know via archives@aberdeencity.gov.uk. 
• We have all completed the Digital Preservation Coalition’s Novice to Know How training: this has prepared us for dealing with born digital records produced by the Councils, as well as digital images of our paper-based collections. 
• Working on our application for the UK National Archives' Accreditation programme.
• Chipping away at our cataloguing backlog using paper and Word lists: this is often challenging when we can’t access the records themselves, so there’s going to be a long list of checking to do when we’re back on site! So far this year we've added almost 4000 entries to the catalogue and edited many more. 
• Adding indexes and guides to our website. These include a: new list of business collections; indexes to the Aberdeen Propinquity Books and Enactment Books; and indexes to the first Banff Poor Relief Minute Book.
• Welcoming our new Archivist, Kim Smith, to the team. Kim moved from London and began work on the first day of lockdown! An odd start to a new role!  
• Adding pieces to our blogs - if you haven't already done so, check out our Criminal Portraits blog - sharing collection information on Facebook and Twitter, and launching a new Instagram account at the end of this week. 
• Collecting and accessioning records from offices around Aberdeenshire as well as digital copies of meeting papers. 
• Attending many Zoom and Teams meetings and working out the new etiquette for digital meeting  (as well as a few interuptions from pets!)
• Thinking about how we can ensure a record of this period is preserved in our collections, which has involved launching our Covid Diaries project and identifying records from both Councils that will provide evidence of how the pandemic affected life in the North East, and how the region reacted to the challenges 2020 has brought. 

Keep an eye on Aberdeen Archives Galleries and Museums social media accounts (Facebook , Twitter and Instagram) for our Explore Your Archive takeover this week!