Old Aberdeen House Decant Update: Moving On Up (to the Town House)

 

Museum Assistants Lisette and Freddie have been assisting us with the archives move project since April and August respectively. Here is their blog about what they’ve been doing in their time with us.

Lisette:

Planning and executing a major collections move is not something that often comes up in one's career, especially a career that is in its early stages of development. So when the opportunity arose to assist with such an undertaking at the Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire Archives, it became an exciting learning experience that I am sure will be invaluable and not easily forgotten.

Adding a reference number to a volume

A lot of the planning had already been done by the time we arrived through a massive stocktake, diligently done by the permanent archives team. This entailed listing everything that was in every store room and what needed to be done. From that list we got right to work relabelling collections, doing conditions assessments of the overall collections to ensure they would be suitable for transport, and repackaging what seemed like endless quantities of binders and boxes. Wrapping and protecting various materials including glass slides from World War II Red Cross hospitals, maps, oversized volumes and ledgers, carrying out content appraisals and listing centuries of Aberdeen School Board letters and thousands of architectural plans. These were all things that needed to be done prior to the physical move itself.

Repackaging School Board letters

Making a simple list of what has been done to move this collection from one location to the next does not do justice to the hard work put forth by this amazing team. For example: repackaging requires going into the storeroom with the appropriate gloves (and sometimes masks) needed to complete the job; making sure to collect the tools you may need to extricate the documents from a binder that has seen better days to protect the contents that lie within. After setting up your workspace, you then start the delicate task of taking apart a binder you have never seen before and removing the thin, sometimes tissue like paper, from posts that have somehow fused to the pages throughout its lifetime. Then, you carefully tie the bundle together with the equivalent to an archival cover page with a piece of cotton tape, place into an archival box, label said box and return it to its original location. Now, this may not seem like much but at the start of any given task, when you look at the 50+ (on a good day) binders that lay before you, it seems daunting until you complete that particular set and see just how satisfying it is to look back and know that you protected the collection for the foreseeable future. Rinse and repeat. You slowly start ticking off the parts of the collections you’ve completed until one day you walk into that same room, look at that same collection and realize that its ready for its next adventure to its new home. Anthropomorphising an archival collection is not something that I am in the general habit of doing, but when you spend the better part of a year engaging with such a vast body of the city’s and shire’s history you can’t help but feel like it is its own entity, to be respected and cared for as such.

Glass plate negatives before and after repackaging

This is just the tip of the moving iceberg and an example of what typical daily tasks could be.

Plans before and after repackaging

Freddie:

While the focus of the project was on moving existing collections, new records were still being added to the collection during our time helping the team. I have a strong interest in maritime history, so I was delighted when the opportunity came to list a box of materials from Rosehearty Harbour Board. This sleepy village once had a thriving fishing industry and so the board’s materials ranged from general receipts and accounts, and letters for and against planned extensions of the harbour over the course of about 50 years. Especially interesting were posters during the ‘herring boom’ years warning of new prohibitions against dumping materials and waste from fishing in line with the new public health acts. This had all arrived in original condition from Aberdeenshire Local Studies, roughly bundled with string (or even butchers' twine), and wrapped in brown paper. Sorting these involved condition checking, removing some of the many multiple copies of the posters and organising the letters, receipts, and accounts by date and type. This material now sits in modern archival boxes and bundles tied with cotton tape, improving access, and ensuring the records will last for longer in their new home.

Rosehearty Harbour materials in original condition 

Essential to the move was working out an easy system to move the now-repackaged items easily and effectively so they would end up in the right place at the other end. This was also needed to track what had already been moved so it could be accurately accounted for. Archival references can get complicated, and with several people moving at times hundreds of boxes a day each, it was crucial to find a way to avoid confusion with the slight differences between these reference numbers. It was decided that each box of materials would also be labelled with a simple four-digit number unique to the box to make the process of noting which box had been moved much easier. Preparing for this involved members of the team typing out nearly 10,000 of these labels to be printed and stuck on boxes and then began the laborious process of sticking them on while cross-referencing with the reference number. A particular highlight for me was completing one of the upstairs storerooms, AR13, with nearly 1,000 labels over a single afternoon. While this may sound repetitive and mundane, tasks like this are crucial to the success of the move.

Example of a bay before and after labelling, note the white sticker label on the bottom right corner of each square

    

We started moving records to the Town House in November. All of the hard work the team had done planning the move really started to pay off at this point. While moving days were very physically tiring, boxed items got to their new shelves with relative ease and there was a real sense of achievement from reorganising and sorting oversized items such as valuation rolls into place.

Placing the final Aberdeenshire valuation roll in its new position at the Town House on the last working day of 2024

Nearly all records due to go to the Town House have now been moved across and it’s beginning to feel like we will soon be in the final stages of the move at Old Aberdeen House. It has been an absolute privilege to support the archives service over the last 6 months and get an insight into archival work and what goes on behind the scenes with this incredible team.

Full van ready to move to the Town House