Archives The Journal of the British Records Association
Journal Data
| Type | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Publisher | British Records Association (GB) |
| ISSN | 0003-9535 / 2516-8975 |
| Scopus | 6000167588 |
| OpenAlex | S4210178661 |
| Website | https://api.elsevier.com/content/serial/title/issn/0003-9535 |
| Total publications | 64 |
| Coverage period | 1977 - 2025 |
| Country | GB |
| Language | EN |
| Indexing | Scopus indexed |
| Cited by | 3 |
| Impact factor | 0.022 |
| SJR | 0.101 (Q4) |
| CiteScore | 0.1 |
| h-index | 1 |
| Female authorship share | 66.7% |
This journal focuses on archival science, record-keeping, and British history. While history is a cognate field, its specific emphasis on the technical and administrative aspects of archives makes its intersection with social anthropology very loose. Anthropological content would be rare and incidental
History · Library and Information Sciences · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American Environmental and Regional History · Archaeological Research and Protection · Architecture, Modernity, and Design · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation · Cultural Insights and Digital Impacts · Digital and Traditional Archives Management · Diverse Scientific and Economic Studies
Apparitional Blackness
My PhD was a creative nonfiction called ‘Northamptonshire’s Caribbean: A Ghost Story, Post-1940’, based on oral interviews and limited use of archives. Outside of major UK cities, there are fewer Caribbean-centred structures: Northampton is not London or Liverpool, and so, I was largely dependent on the fragile memories of my elders. ‘Apparitional Blackness’ theorises a nowhereness stuck between the city-focused histories of Black Britain 1 and o…
‘The Monuments of the Dead Are Not Intended to Perpetuate the Memory of Crimes, but to Exhibit Patterns of Virtue’
The parish church of Ashbourne, Derbyshire, is famous chiefly for its medieval monuments to the Cockayne family and for Thomas Banks’s effigy of Penelope Boothby. It also boasts, however, a wall tablet by Sir Richard Westmacott commemorating George Errington Sr (d. 1769) and George Errington Jr (d. 1795), barristers of the Inns of Court, erected by the latter’s son, George Henry Errington. Both of the men commemorated left clear instructions requ…
Theatre Royal, Nottingham
Artists Lizzie Meakin, Amy Nicholson and Suzy Gunn from Handmade Theatre, along with students from Nottingham Trent University, transformed the space under the stairwell of the Theatre Royal Nottingham in November 2022 with a bespoke heritage timeline mural. The artists used the collections and included a wide range of materials from the theatre’s history in their final design. The space now reflects the variety of different performances that hav…
The Association of Performing Arts Collections
This article provides a brief introduction to the work of the Association of Performing Arts Collections (APAC), the membership organisation for professionals, specialists and other individuals working with or interested in performing arts heritage in the UK and Ireland
The Maurice Bond Lecture 2024 Placing Archives
This paper was delivered as the 2024 Maurice Bond Lecture. It explores the place of the Victoria County History in the landscape of English archives over the last 125 years. It examines the ways in which historians working for the project have helped establish and interact with the archives they use and the ways in which changing archival landscapes have influenced its work. The Victoria County History (strictly, the Victoria History of the Count…
Andrea Isobel Tanner (1956–2024)
The Pilgrim Trust and English Ecclesiastical Archives, 1930–C.1960
The records of the Pilgrim Trust, founded in 1930, are held at the London Archives. The trust’s activities have played a major role in the preservation of, and access to, English episcopal archives. This essay examines the crucial role of the Trust in the period immediately before and after the Second World War and its impact on the preservation of, and access to, English episcopal archives, and developments in the wider British archival world
Alexandra, Lady Wedgwood (1938–2025)
‘It Will Be a Publick Service That This Should Be Done’
The 1704 reform of the Tower Records Office was the apex of a series of reforms in record-keeping in the period from 1660 to 1707. This was expressed through a reassertion of physical controls on records, better intellectual control and finding aids to order collections, and a higher quality of professional control of the clerks that worked in the Records Office. These reforms reflected the intellectual and cultural importance of records in a Res…
‘She Hath Been Mother, Physician Aunt and All to Him’
This essay considers the wealth of research potential of the Loseley Archives, held at Surrey History Centre in Woking. The collection, which contains over 12,000 items, is an eclectic one, containing correspondence, family settlements and wills, documents pertaining to estate management, petitions, depositions, and more. Roughly half of the documents date from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and provide an insight into the lives and conc…
Creating Transformation
This article is based on a presentation given at the British Records Association 2024 joint conference with the Association of Performing Arts Collections (APAC), the membership organisation for professionals, specialists and other individuals working with or interested in performing arts heritage in the UK and Ireland. It summarises the work undertaken by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) to co-curate new collection-based displays with communi…
Caring for Parliament’s Archive Collections
This essay describes developments that took place within the Collections Care team at the Parliamentary Archives in recent years, as well as the wide range of materials that make up the collection. This period was driven by the evolution of conservation methodologies, the adoption of cutting-edge technology, and a renewed commitment to sustainability and ethical preservation
The Last Word
To close this series of essays, Annie Pinder offers a personal view of the activities of the office and the people who have worked there as she looks back over the several decades she has worked in the Parliamentary Archives
The History of the Parliamentary Archives, Part 2
Following the fire of 1834, which destroyed the medieval Houses of Parliament, architect Charles Barry built the Palace of Westminster we see today. This included the tower which became known as the Victoria Tower, the largest and most splendid part of the new palace. Positioned exactly opposite the Jewel Tower, the previous home of the House of Lords archives, Barry created one of the very earliest purpose-built record repositories in the UK – c…
The History of the Parliamentary Archives, Part 3
After the Second World War Parliament’s archives finally received dedicated professional management, with the establishment of the House of Lords Record Office (HLRO) led by a clerk of the records. This paper describes the history of the archives from 1946 to 1999 in detail, including the short-lived clerkship of Francis Needham, the long reign of Maurice Bond, and Bond’s successors Harry Cobb and David Johnson. It highlights some significant ind…
Preserving Parliament’s Digital Landscape
After beginning to identify the need to acquire, preserve, and provide access to digital archival records in late 2006, parliament has established and operated a mature and sophisticated digital preservation service which encompasses born-digital and digitised records, and the parliamentary web archive. In doing so, the Parliamentary Archives had to make the business case for a significant institutional investment, procure systems and build organ…
Futureproofing the Parliamentary Archives
The Victoria Tower was built in 1860 by Sir Charles Barry to house the historic records of the houses of parliament. Located at the south-west end of the Palace of Westminster and standing slightly taller than the Elizabeth Tower, more commonly known as ‘Big Ben’, the Victoria Tower has served its purpose as a records repository ever since, but has, over time, posed considerable issues and risks for the long-term storage and care of parliamentary…
The History of the Parliamentary Archives, Part 1
The archives collections held at Westminster date back more than 500 years. The House of Lords kept its most important records for centuries in the Jewel Tower, a stone tower on the parliamentary estate previously used by the royal family to store precious goods. As well as a storage space, it was a place for members, clerks and the wider public to consult the archives. The House of Commons, in contrast, kept its records in the roof space above S…
The Challenge of Public Engagement With Parliament
Until the late 1990s outreach at the Parliamentary Archives (or the House of Lords Record Office, as it was then known) was based around publications, talks, a permanent display of records in the Palace of Westminster and occasional exhibition and display projects. The last volume of the calendar of House of Lords manuscripts, begun by the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts in 1869, had been published in 1977. Following a review in 1999 D…
Podcasting the Archive
The purpose of the empirical work discussed in this paper was to explore the theme of audience engagement with digitised archive data in different formats. A comparison is drawn between experiences of interacting with an archive presented as a narrative non-fiction audio performance and the same core material displayed as online text and images. The findings derive from an analysis of data collected in interviews with participants familiar with b…
How Rich Was Gibbon
From 1766 to his death, Edward Gibbon (1737–94) banked with Goslings of Fleet Street. Goslings merged with Barclays in 1896, and their customer ledgers are preserved among the Barclays Group Archives. Bank accounts provide exceptionally reliable historical evidence, but are rarely self-explanatory. The ledgers themselves usually record no more than a date, a name and a sum. Yet with careful analysis, and in conjunction with documents surviving fr…
The Fairfax Archives
This paper is an attempt to bring up to date the research first published here in 1973 (Archives, xi (50), Autumn 1973, pp. 76–85). Since then there have been further discoveries, and dispersals have continued through the book and manuscript trade. Although tracking the fate of material of this kind through the salerooms and elsewhere has been rendered more difficult in recent years by the general tightening of data security, it is still possible…
In the Court of Arches
The physical condition, size and complexity of the records of the Court of Arches has long posed difficulties for researchers wishing to exploit this rich resource. The task has now been made much easier by a long-term programme of conservation alongside an ongoing cataloguing project which is making detailed descriptions available for the first time. This case study uses the records of the court to provide a vivid account of the life of the Rest…
Duncan Chalmers Ma Frhists (1940–2023)
Charles Kerr, 2nd Baron Teviot (1934–2023)
Customs Records as a Source for Historical Research
Fifteenth- And Sixteenth-Century Wills as Historical Sources
Two Oxford Archives in the Early Seventeenth Century
The Records of the Court of First Fruits and Tenths
The Late Medieval Commonplace Book
William Bolts
Destroying Records, Keeping Records
Dis Membering or Re Membering the ‘Zimbabwe Archive’
The Historical Manuscripts Commission at 150
The 150th anniversary of the Historical Manuscripts Commission invites the opportunity for reflection on how the commission characterises and influences the development of the archives profession. This article considers archival practice as linked to the mood and character of a nation, in this case Britain. It uses the historiography of post-war identity building to begin to investigate and critique the British archives sector, and asks questions…
Felicity Strong (1935–2019)
Obituary
The Civic Importance of Archives
The article is based on a short talk given at the parliamentary reception to celebrate 150 years of the Historical Manuscripts Commission in 2019. It draws on some work I did when I was at the British Library and subsequently at Yale University, some of it presented to a conference of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), whose section on rare books and archives I chaired for a few years
The Historical Manuscripts Commission
The creation of the Royal Historical Manuscripts Commission formed part of a wider movement of institutional renewal and reform in mid-Victorian Britain, including growing professionalisation of both public administration and the academic study of history, particularly from the 1850s. Two features of the commission’s work continued to influence its development and The National Archives’ engagement with the archives sector today: first, the need t…
Facts Are Sacred
The Historical Manuscripts Commission
This is an edited and elaborated version of the address given by Jeff James as historical manuscripts commissioner to the symposium held on 14 October 2019 to mark the 150th anniversary of the creation of the Historical Manuscripts Commission in 1869. He reviews The National Archives’ current activities and priorities as a contemporary expression of the objectives of the HMC royal warrant and concludes that the Historical Manuscripts Commission s…
Securing the British Records Association’s Legacy
Notes and Documents
Obituary
History Concealed, History Withheld
Tenants’ Copies of Court Rolls in England and Wales Before 1400
While much has been written about the early development of copyhold, and the presumed origins in the fourteenth century of the practice of making copies of court roll entries for tenants, original copies have not been systematically sought or investigated. This article uses research in 38 repositories to analyse 176 copies of seigneurial court rolls, of which full transcripts are published online elsewhere. It indicates their diverse physical and…
The Enclosure of St Mary’s, Nottingham
An account taken from the extensive minutes, 24 big books remaining of the original 32, of Nottingham’s enclosure. Of the day-to-day work of the three commissioners dealing with the maps, the land sales to provide the money for the work, the current use of the land, burgess parts, tithes, claims, objections, roads, sewers, recreation grounds, the final allotments, with their work occasionally praised but more often tetchily criticised by the coun…
A New Set of First World War Diaries for the Mesopotamia Campaign, February 1916 to June 1917
Two diaries written by a Territorial Force officer serving in Mesopotamia from 1916 to 1917 have been recently discovered. They contain valuable insight into the difficulties and dangers of life on campaign, an account of the action of As Sahilan (11 September 1916), and what appears to be a unique description of the escort of an Ottoman princeling to a prisoner-of-war camp. These diaries help shed light on a theatre of the First World War that i…
Sonia Anderson (1944–2020)
Debating Politics During Confinement
While hundreds of Provisional Irish republicans were imprisoned in Portlaoise Prison during the Northern Ireland conflict, their part in the conflict remains largely neglected by researchers. During an attempt to politicise these Provisional IRA prisoners, a cumann (local branch) was formed at a meeting of republicans in Portlaoise in January 1979. In the summer of 1986, four miontuairiscí (minute books) of this cumann were removed from the priso…
Michael Stanley Moss (1947–2021)