Old Aberdeen House Decant: Project Complete!

We have now completed our move out of our Old Aberdeen House site, reopening our public search room at the Town House at the end of April 2025. It has been an incredibly busy couple of years for the service as we prepared for and completed this large scale collections' move. The project as a whole was successful - we achieved our goal of moving the collections and service out of Old Aberdeen House before the council's education team required the building for renovation. Our closure period, from June 2024 - May 2025 was in line with our predictions. As we have learned a lot from this project, we wanted to reflect on our processes and some of the things we would do differently, given our time again!

Successes

When discussing with the team, one of the biggest successes of our project was the improved communication between us all and the huge impact this has had on our working processes. Our Museum Assistant (now Collections and Archive Assistant) Lisette reflected:

I believe that one of the greatest outcomes from this move is how much we all came together and functioned as a team. I first started the project at the end of April 2024. At this stage, everyone was still concentrating on their own preparation tasks and maintaining the public service before its closure. Everyone just got on as individuals, completing their own activities for that day and working independently. As the move progressed, the team began to work together more cohesively. We generally started each day checking in on each other, sharing how we were feeling and discussing our energy levels and capacity on that day. We talked about our plans and priorities, how to share tasks more effectively and what other activities needed to be done if we required a break from our own tasks. Sharing our individual workloads, pressures and mental loads meant we could help each other better. We learned how to communicate openly and honestly with each other, without any pretences, and with regard to our own feelings and frustrations. Not all teams are like that and it was essential to a successful move and something that I am so glad we accomplished.

Staff members at Christmas 2024 meal out: L-R - Kimberley Newell (Archivist), Martin Hall (Archivist), Kimberley Smith (Senior Archivist), Freddie Cooper (Museum Assistant), Phil Astley (Archives Team Leader), Lisette Turner (Museum Assistant)

Senior Archivist Kimberley Smith agreed:

As the project progressed and our timescales and deadlines became more immediate, we really started working incredibly well together. We recognised and respected our individual capacities and our team capacity, and where each of our team member's skills and experience were strongest. We became better at articulating our own feelings and thoughts, so that we could move forward with the project in the best way possible. Getting to know your team members really well before and during a collections' move is invaluable - knowing when a team member is stressed, or that a colleague needs a group activity or focus as a pick me up, made everything so much easier for us.

Our Archivist Kimberley Newell reflected on our location control & box labelling processes as a huge success in our project:

One of the activities where we excelled was our location control - a vital part of the move! This involved an initial stocktake of our collections starting in November 2023, where all records and their locations in Old Aberdeen House were added to a move spreadsheet. We next labelled all our boxes and crates with a number - this was an easier way to keep track of the boxes moving than our catalogue references - and updated our move spreadsheet with these. 

Each box and crate number was recorded on an 'exit sheet' as they left the building. Each exit sheet had a date and store room title, so that we could see exactly when the box or crate had left the building and from what store it had been removed. Attention to detail was vital at this stage, especially as our box sequence ran to over 7000 numbers! We had to make sure the correct number was recorded on the exit sheet AND that it was in legible handwriting. We updated our move spreadsheet using the exit sheets.

The box numbers have allowed us to easily retrieve records from our offsite storage and the location control spreadsheet is in use at our Town House site as well.

Outreach

Although our normal outreach activities were suspended, we recognised that maintaining contact with our varied users through our social media channels would be important across the course of our move. Our Archivist Kim dedicated consistent time to this activity, ensuring that our Facebook, Instagram and Blog site were all updated regularly. We highlighted the array of activities that we completed to show the complexity of our project (and the reason for our closure!), and had some brilliant feedback and encouragement from our researchers!

We also created a display of the decant, which is now available to view when you visit us at our Town House site. 

Volunteer Coordination

As we have frequently articulated across our social media sites, our volunteers were pivotal to the success of our move. Up to 20 volunteers assisted during the project, completing appraisal and listing projects (so we weren't moving records we didn't need to retain), repackaging records and a massive amount of physical lifting. Our Senior Archivist Kim noted this as a big success of the project:

Our volunteer coordination could not have worked out better for our team. We did a huge recruitment of volunteers at the beginning of the project, when we had more time to induct new volunteers to the service and train them on specific projects. Introducing volunteers at the beginning embedded them into our team, which meant they were invested in their own projects as well as the overarching goal. As we came to the harder (more tedious) elements of the move, such as physically transferring the boxes, our volunteers were all comfortable in the team and excited to help!

Volunteers Alina and Olivia

We're so happy that many of the volunteers we recruited for the move have stayed on as volunteers afterwards as well!

Staff members Kim S, Phil, Martin, Kim N with volunteers Alina, Maryann and Andrew

Celebrating our Wins!

New & Old Staff members
Old Aberdeen House leaving party

Our team celebrated every win and every stage of the move - small or large, we either wrote about it or photographed it. Our processes and procedures were recorded at minute detail, but we would fully recommend also creating evidence, documentation and photo memories of other elements of the project as well - we've loved looking back over the diverse activities we've completed and all the small and big wins we've had! Our leaving party from Old Aberdeen House, where we invited previous staff members to celebrate as well, was a particular highlight of the project.

Lessons learned!

It is inevitable that within any project there will be activities and processes that could have been smoother. We hope that reflecting on these areas of our project will give other repositories some tips in the future!

Recognise Project Management:

Project management of our collections' move required our Senior Archivist (maternity cover) Kim Smith to learn many new skills in a short period of time. Kim was in this post from July 2024 and was very mindful that there would be some bumps in the road due to her inexperience in this particular role. Recognising this and incorporating some training into the programme of activities at the earlier stages may have aided the transition from Archivist - Senior Archivist - Project Management - a steep learning curve!

Priority Levels

Our team had many discussions about where records should be moved to - our other Town House site (limited space) or offsite storage. We based our decisions on several factors, such as the 'value' of the record (both financial and historical), as well as predicted level of use. We wanted our most regularly used records to be moved to the Town House for easier access. However, we should have developed our process for ensuring this happened more before we implemented it - more meetings to confirm / embed our decisions with clearer lists as an output! The final decisions were made in a bit of a rush, which meant they were not as consistent as we'd have liked. We decided that visually tagging the records for removal to the Town House would be easier than using the digital spreadsheet. The tagging system needed a bit more thought as some of the 'tags' fell off, which meant boxes were removed to offsite storage by mistake and had to be recalled at a later date.

School Log Books transferred from OAH to TH

Unpacking at the Town House

Our Archivist Kimberley Newell thought about our processes for unpacking at the Town House:

As moving records to offsite storage had been a huge part of the process, there wasn't as much time for discussing the transfer of records between our own sites, from Old Aberdeen to the Town House. This element of the move was double the work of moving records offsite, as we had to both load and unload our van. We should have allocated more time to loading the van, creating a better order of boxes in the van, so that unloading the boxes at the other end was more methodical. Although we had a rough overview of where each series or category of record was going in the new storeroom, we should have been more precise. This would have saved time and energy. In one case, we unloaded some huge valuation rolls onto the allocated shelves, but not in the right order. This meant we then had to take all the volumes back off the shelves so that we could rearrange them appropriately. In hindsight, we should have unloaded them elsewhere, so they were sorted onto the shelves once and with less handling and lifting! 

Communication - daily briefings and across teams -

We had regular briefings and meetings as we progressed through the stages of our move. We also had a work schedule, accessible to all members of staff. The daily briefings probably had the most impact, even if it was just 5 minutes at the start of the day, and we wish we had scheduled these in more consistently over the course of the project. This would have benefited our workflows and ensured clear and concise direction for each staff member's tasks on any given day.

Our Museum Assistant Lisette noted that sometimes, although our own priorities were clear, these were not (and could not be) the priorities for other teams in the council or our external stakeholders:

One thing that I would say that we could have done differently, having seen some frustration across our team, was to factor in a more realistic timeframe for updates and decisions that were beyond our control, or more consistent and honest communication with other teams as to their capacity for delivering any tasks. Additionally, other teams sometimes became weary of the move schedule and our requests - this meant there were hold ups where they took more than a week or two to complete.

We should have been more realistic on certain timescales or our work with other teams and companies, or perhaps been bolder or clearer about the urgency or priority of each specific task.

A long awaited delivery of crates

To Conclude - 

To end this post our Archivist Martin and Archives Team Leader Phil commented on the positive outcomes of our move:

Martin, Archivist - The Voltron Effect

One of the greatest benefits of the process of moving two sites together into one location has been the way in which our team has adapted to working in the same place. It’s not something that’s going to be tremendously obvious to people outside of the service, but the simple measure of being able to talk to another member of staff about a question and get a second perspective on possible answers is worth more than gold. In coming together at a single site after the service’s working lifetime being spent split between Town House and Old Aberdeen, we are able to collaborate very effectively, and the service is truly stronger than the sum of its parts.

Archives Staff Members L-R - Martin, Lisette, Kim S, Kim N in the Town House Charter Room

Phil, Archives Team Leader:

When we closed to the public at the start of June 2024 I think all the staff, not least myself, were quite awed by the scale of the task that lay ahead of us. Shutting the doors seemed so contrary to one of our core functions, namely providing access to the amazing collections in our care. We had already done a considerable amount of preparation in the months leading up to the closure, but when we said "goodbye" to the last researcher at Old Aberdeen House, the reality of the impending move really hit home. It is to the immense credit of the staff and volunteers that the following nine months went as smoothly as they did: packing volumes, shifting boxes, moving shelving and furniture are not the most glamorous jobs known to mankind, but the whole team approached the task with genuine positivity and good humour. Now that we have reopened to the public at the Town House, it is great to have all the staff under the one roof and possible to reflect on what a brilliantly cohesive team managed to achieve over the past year and how that experience now stands us in such good stead for the challenges ahead.