South Brent Archive Create an Online Catalogue

A searchable, online Archive for South Brent and surrounding villages

We want to put South Brent Archive’s fabulous collections online - but expertly made, reliable and easy-to-use archive websites are costly.

An online community archive catalogue will make our collections accessible to:

• Housebound people

• People living elsewhere, including overseas

• Researchers needing to check documents at speed

• People who find it easier to view things on big screens

Our website will also host:

• News of our events

• Our blogs about local history

Hi, my name is Steph Bradley, and I’m the volunteer manager and treasurer of South Brent Storytellers and Archive. we’re a local not-for-profit community group, based at the Old School Community Centre in South Brent, archiving items of local history for local people and those doing research into our area, as well as for family history buffs.

Since we started in 2017 we have been gifted 30 local collections of images, documents, maps and other memorabilia.

COVID-19 taught us that having physical collections is not enough: some people are housebound, and others want to access our collections from halfway across the world (we have facebook members in New Zealand, for example). There are times when a researcher just wants to press a button at home and call up the missing information, and for some of our older followers, it might be much easier to look through our collections of old photos on a big screen at home.

So, we’re raising funds for a purpose-built Archive website - one that will allow people to browse all of our collections online. This will take months of work from us; every single catalogued item will need to be checked carefully for accuracy before we can hand the complete catalogue over to the dedicated Local History Website builder we have selected from amongst many to build our fit-for-purpose South Brent Archive Website.

This website will have a searchable online catalogue where anyone with an interest in our area will be able to find and examine images, documents, maps and other pertinent items to their particular search. Some of these will be downloadable at low resolution, whilst others will be available to download for a fee, depending on the copyright and ownership of each image (some of our large collection are digitised copies of originals, shared with permission).

As well as the searchable database, the website will feature news of all our local events and our regular blogs about local history. It will sit aside our extremely popular facebook group, and offer something precious to all our members, and future members. We believe this will be a valuable local resource for many years to come.

We have been fundraising for about a year now - donations and our very popular series of talks on local history have brought in £700 so far. We have been promised some local, parish-level funding if we can raise at least part of the total ourselves so every pound counts. Can you help us? Please note that no raffles, sweepstakes, giveaways, or promotions can be offered in exchange for any donations made to this GoFundMe.

Can you help us to get closer to our final target?