Somerset Archives Closed Period
Archivist Graeme Edwards blogs about what happened at the Somerset Heritage Centre during the two week Closed Period of 2026.
Our annual Closed Period provides an opportunity to undertake larger projects that we would not have the time or space to tackle during our normal opening hours. All of the projects help improve the services we offer. As well as continuing to answer a range of enquiries, here’s a summary of some of the project work we have undertaken during this year’s Closed Period (19-30 January 2026).
Following a generous grant from Wessex Water, we have catalogued 48 boxes of archives relating to the water industry in Somerset. Wessex Water Authority was created by the Water Act, 1973 to manage water supply and sewage disposal, bringing together the resources and responsibilities of various regional water utilities. The collection contains plans of proposed water treatment facilities and reservoirs; maps of waterworks across Somerset; photographs of reservoirs, water supply sites, and Wessex Water staff and activities; along with publicity material, correspondence and reports. The collection also includes records inherited from Somerset Water Authority and West Somerset Water Board, and plans of water supply and proposed waterworks inherited from other regional waterworks, corporations and councils. During the Closed Period we have sorted, packaged and boxed the collection, and the catalogue is now available to search via our online catalogue.
Regular stock management is vital in keeping a library organised and accessible, so for the last two weeks our Local Studies Librarian Kate has been stock-checking the printed collections held in our strongrooms. Each book needs to be checked on the catalogue so that if anything has been missed, we can either find it or replace it, ensuring that when our visitors look something up on the catalogue, they aren’t sent on a wild goose chase! The Somerset Studies Library holds more than 25,000 books and periodicals, so even though more than 100 shelves of publications have been checked during the fortnight, the project will continue well into 2026.
Not every record created by an organisation is selected for permanent preservation amongst the Somerset Archives, otherwise we’d soon run out of space in our strongrooms! During the Closed Period we’ve appraised and catalogued 50 boxes of Somerset County Council planning contracts and plans (ref. C/PS). They relate to buildings run by the former Somerset County Council, including schools, fire stations, libraries and nursing homes. They also include correspondence and accounts regarding the building of County Hall, Taunton in the 1930s. The catalogue to these records can now be consulted online. We’ve also catalogued an additional 11 boxes of Wincanton Rural District Council planning applications (ref. D/R/winc/23) mainly dating back to the early 1960s. These have been added to the existing collection of planning records we hold for the rural district council.
In the first week of Closed Period two members of staff attended a careers event at The Castle School in Taunton, taking part in mock interviews with Year 10 students. The ‘candidates’ were a very impressive bunch! We have also been preparing for upcoming sessions and events, including the anniversaries of a number of Victorian ‘Board’ Schools, as well as Coffee Time Talks for Somerset Day and our ongoing project with Oaklands Community Primary School in Yeovil, researching animals for information boards in our searchroom. Keep an eye on our What’s On page for details of other talks and events we are holding this year.
On our final day of Closed Period we began preparations for a ‘Digital Detox’ and re-organisation of the networked team drive, which will hopefully make the drive easier to navigate, make finding important documents and images for marketing purposes easier, and save space by ensuring that any unnecessary files are deleted. This will help reduce the carbon footprint of our digital work. We began with some training on identifying which files are needed and which can be deleted, ways to be more economical with files, and making useful files in personal file spaces available in shared folders for team use. The next step will be for staff to ‘detox’ their own folders ahead of the wider reorganisation.
That’s not all we’ve been up to though, oh no!
- The strongrooms have been given a thorough clean.
- The Research and Copying Request Service has continued to work through a wide range of requests.
- We’ve catalogued a large transfer of marriage registers, deposited following changes to the Marriage Act in 2020.
It’s been a busy couple of weeks but order has now been restored to the searchroom and we’re ready to welcome our visitors back. Details of our opening times and booking system can be found here.