Project Update #1 30.JUNE.2015

HLF award news

Some of you may already have heard the news that the KYP project has been successful in being awarded the Heritage Lottery-funded application to deliver Know Your Place – West of England. This follows the successful stage 1 pilot project led by Project Officer Chris Webb in 2014. The 18-month stage 2 digital mapping project runs until December 2016 and will add detailed historic map layers to the existing Bristol-based Know Your Place map, expanding the website to cover the entire West of England region.

Introductions

I’m pleased to introduce myself and my colleague Anne Lovejoy (Cc’d), who have been appointed as the Project Officer and Assistant Project Officer to deliver this second stage of the KYP project. We’ll be picking up from where Chris Webb left off at completion of the pilot project, and taking over from colleague Paul Driscoll, who has been managing the project in the interim until now.

Visits

As part of our induction, Anne and I are visiting the archives at Gloucester, Chippenham, Taunton and Yate. We’d be pleased to meet other project partners in person too, so get in touch if you have any upcoming events with your networks or members which you would like us to attend.

Progress Reporting

I will send out a monthly email to all supporters and partners in similar format to this one, to keep everyone up to date on project progress and activities planned in future, so please let me know of anyone who should be added to this email update list.

We will also shortly be setting up a project blog and social media to provide regular news updates to followers. These should be ready next week and we’d be grateful for any help you can give in sharing these with your contacts, or suggestions of better ways to stay in touch.

Progress Meetings schedule

For project partners, I’m in the process of drawing up a schedule of progress meetings which will run every three months through the project, starting in September 2015.

Given partners’ other commitments and the size of the geographical area we cover, I’m assuming that it will be unrealistic to get everyone round the table for every meeting. So I’d like us to make it easier for everyone to attend some at least, by regularly rotating the meeting location through each of the partner counties. Notes will then be circulated to all partners afterwards.

I attach a draft schedule of meeting dates and would be grateful if partners could come back with suggested dates when they would be happy to host. Please complete and return this to me and I will confirm the final programme and first venue in September, as soon as I can.

Digitisation begins

ICAM Archive Systems Ltd have been awarded the contract to undertake the digital scanning of archive maps held at the county archives at Gloucester, Wiltshire and Somerset. They start setting up equipment at Wiltshire archives in Chippenham tomorrow, and scanning begins on Monday, before moving onto other archives later in the summer. Meanwhile the British Library will be working through digitisation of Historic OS Maps, which will provide the essential historic base against which the county maps will be georeferenced.

Finally…

Just a quick final note to say how much I am looking forward to working with you all on this project and meeting as many of you as possible soon. I will be back in touch again in the next week or so with further information about the project social media and to update on plans for the first progress meeting. In the meantime, drop me an email or phonecall if you have any queries or comments on any of the above.

With best wishes,

Felicia Davies

Project Officer

Know Your Place – West of England