All Change: The University's records move house

The challenge…

The sheer scale of the material created by the University of Hull since 1927 is immense. Imagine moving house and having to take nearly 100 years worth of belongings with you. Now multiply this by numerous departments, faculties and professional services teams... that’s a lot of stuff!

As well as neatly boxed up material, we had accessions that hadn’t been re-packaged:

Records of the University's Anglican Chaplaincy stored in wine boxes

We had loose volumes that still needed bespoke boxes making for them:

Unboxed scrapbooks

And, we had outsized material that required us to resize the shelves to accommodate it in a new location:

Mixed sized material requiring shelf resizing before it could be rehomed

On top of all of this, we discovered that single collections were often split physically across multiple locations.

Basically, we had been putting things wherever there was space at the time it came to us. Although understandable, this was not an ideal situation to be in. Having things all over the place was going to make processing tasks such as re-boxing, weeding out duplicates, and box listing more complicated and time consuming. The logical step was to review the physical space, unite split collections, try to get everything into one area of the strong rooms, and generally create some kind of order from the chaos. 

Planning is key…

Remember our collections management spreadsheet? The work that went into this now started to pay off. We used the information we had collated to identify and locate split collections, work out how much space was needed for each collection to be relocated together, and make a list of everything that needed to be re-boxed. Next, we mapped this to the physical space we had to play with.

Getting moving…

And so, to the actual move. This was not a simple case of transferring boxes from one location to a lovely clear run of empty shelves – if only it was so easy! 

Our strongrooms are pretty full and so to move anything is a bit like a logic puzzle. A page of our working out might demonstrate the complexity of this task better than a description:

Location notes - a bit messy but we've shown our workings!

To get things into order we had to first move other things out, clear a run of shelf space, move the collections into place, and then move the boxes that had been clears to make this space elsewhere. In some cases, we had to pile whole collections on the floor until we could relocate them several steps of the move later.

Box move in progress - note the discarded cardigan, it was warm work!

This work was exhausting but worthwhile. Whilst lugging everything around, we discovered a number of duplicate record series, namely some bound volumes of minutes and student newspapers. These were taking up valuable space so we took the decision to weed them out, given that we already had complete sets in better condition. Yey! to a bit of space saving.

Duplicate records weeded out, along with folders and boxes for our repacking activities

We also took the opportunity to make some bespoke boxes for some of the outsized material we discovered. Chief amongst this stuff was a series of press cutting volumes. Boxing them up protected them and made them easier to handle, it also gave our wonderful City Archives colleague Pete and excuse to mess about with the box making machine in our conservation studio!

Pete making boxes for some volumes of press cuttings

Over the course of three weeks, we moved roughly 14 racks worth of boxes.

Example of one rack, we move 14 of these!

So, with everything intellectually and physically in place, we are now in a much better position to start on the cataloguing work. But first, a rest!

Claire Weatherall, Archivist (Hull University Archives)