Another National Award for RSHG!
At the Annual Conference of the Community Archives and Heritage Group (CAHG) on July 15 Ryde Social Heritage Group received the award for Best Website.
CAHG is a special interest group of the Archives and Records Association of UK and Ireland and aims to support and promote community archives, bring together bodies and organisations concerned with community archives and provide a forum for the regular exchange of views and information.
I travelled to London with Arthur and Jill Williams to attend the conference at UCL and receive the award on behalf of the group.
The judges said “RSHG is a previous award winning group voted Most Inspirational in 2012 however we felt that once again they stood out amongst the entries. We like this group because it is evolving to meet their community with a varied programme, reacting and interacting with their local community, recording information, serving educational needs, has an amazing imagination and demonstrates sustainability. This is a mature, extremely comprehensive website. It has a fresh feel and is kept updated. It ticks all the qualifying boxes.”
We were delighted and surprised when we were told we would receive our second national award for the work of the group at this year’s conference. We feel that our website is one of the most important aspects of our work and are pleased that the judges, all professional archivists, recognise its worth.
The conference is a great place for networking and for picking up inspiration and ideas.
Janette Gregson
Chairman
21 July 2015
Created with flickr slideshow.
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When the RSHG was first set up in 2002 we aimed to assist people with their family history research, if they have ancestors from Ryde, by putting online transcriptions from the readable memorials in Ryde Cemetery. We invest a lot of time on the website making sure it is kept up to date with current technology and with news, events and information. We try to keep it looking fresh and current so there should always be something new for people to see when they visit the site.
At the award ceremony in London I gave a short presentation about the website and explained the various transformations it has been through since we first started to put information online. Initially we learnt how to write code and built our own website in 2004. We soon realised that in order to store the information from all the memorials we needed a more robust website and employed a professional web designer to help us. In March 2006 the new website was launched and since then it has been upgraded and improved twice and in the very near future it will be completely upgraded yet again. When we first launched our website in 2004 it had records for 300 individuals from Ryde. Our current website has records for more than 15,000 individuals. Soon after we started to record the inscriptions from the memorials we realised that the information allowed us to find out a wealth of information about the people and development of the town. Our research team visit the local Records Office every week and search through the archives. |
| Over the past 13 years we have built up a huge archive of information about Ryde and its people. Much of this information is available on the website and our research folders are available for visitors to browse at the Heritage and Learning Centre in Ryde Cemetery.
At the CAHG conference in London the keynote speaker was Professor Michael Wood and there were also presentations on 6 other projects which had used archives in different ways to tell stories and there were presentations from the other award winners: Khizra Foundation Every day Muslim, voted Winners Best New Group http://www.everydaymuslim.org/ Newlyn Archive, Inspiration category winners Milford Street Bridge, Innovation category winners and over all winners of Community Archive and Heritage Group of the year. |
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