Setting sail

Anyone hoping to learn some of the secrets of the Aberdeen Harbour Board Archive may be slightly disappointed by this post. In typical archivist fashion, I have spent my first few weeks trying to get to grips with the collection by rooting through boxes, eating biscuits and suffering from the obligatory cold that you get when you move somewhere new.

I chose to move up to Aberdeen after only seeing the city once; most of this brief visit was spent running from Old Aberdeen to the Town House because I’d got the interview location wrong and hyperventilating on the beach front because I was planning to uproot my entire life once again. I had spent four years in Warwickshire with the British Motor Industry Heritage Trust as an Archive Trainee and then as an Archive Assistant – my first job out of University. As much as I’d enjoyed working there, it was time to move on and the Harbour Board project seemed a great way to do that.

Not only does the Harbour Board archive allow me to take on a project of my own, it allows me to work on a collection with such significance to the local community. This is one of the most rewarding things about working with publicly accessible business collections. The Harbour is something which affected the people of Aberdeen and beyond both negatively and positively. People will have fond memories of working on the ships and in the harbour whereas others will remember the heavy bombing of the area during the Second World War or the displacement of communities due to expansion. Either way, this project will make the entire collection more accessible to everyone and people will be able to view the records at their leisure.

Bond registers

What exactly is in the collection? At this stage I only have a vague idea. Before I started in the middle of December some work had been done on the collection. A list of the harbour block plans has been catalogued by the wonderful team of volunteers at the City and Shire Archives alongside Senior Archivist, Katy Kavanagh. This is a good chunk of work already done and something which I am extremely grateful! Similarly, the ledger collections of arrivals, departures, accounts, bonds and salmon sales had been roughly catalogued some time ago by the Scottish Record Office. These lists need to be checked against the physical records and adapted so that they can be transferred onto the official catalogue system. The rest of the material, mostly loaded into cardboard boxes, is still somewhat mysterious. A preliminary search showed that there were files concerning maintenance, staff, accounts, events and the Second World War amongst other things. When these boxes have been sorted through, I will have a much better idea of the detail of the records.

Contracts in original tin box

Now that I’m back from Christmas break, I’m excited to properly get started. This means getting the unsorted files out of the boxes and trying to make sure they’re in an order which is useful and fits with the rest of the collection. I’ll keep updating this blog with my progress and any particularly interesting documents I come across. Wish me luck!