MESSAGE FROM OUR ARCHIVIST

Through-out the twentieth century Old Sedberghians have kindly donated their archive collections to the school. It has been a real privilege to be trusted with these collections.

Earlier this year Sedbergh School agreed that our archive storage agreement with Cumbria Archive Service will come to an end this summer. The service has been subject to local authority funding cuts and sadly have needed to change their policy about storing external collections. Sedbergh School will be losing storage for 120 boxes of archival material, this is around a sixth of our total collection storage.

Faced with the difficult decision of how to use archival resources to ensure that we are best preserving the records of the school for the future we have decided to offer some of the collections back to their owners as we no longer have the facilities to preserve and provide access to them. The donations effected are those that duplicate material held elsewhere in the archive or those that are largely non Sedbergh School material.

On 1st July I wrote to the donors or next of kin of those whose collections are affected by these changes. I would like to assure donors that if they have not received a letter then their collection will remain intact.

This decision was not taken lightly and we are sorry that we are no longer able to provide a long term home for everything offered in the past but hope that the OS community will understand why we are focussing our resources on ensuring that we preserve a core collection of historical material.

I would be very happy to discuss this move with anyone concerned,

Katy de la Rivière