The Amberley Society Archive is an extraordinary resource for anyone with an interest in Amberley’s past. But it has been difficult to access, and almost impossible to find anything except by chance.  We are now, at long last, a little bit further forward: a comprehensive catalogue tells us what’s in there, much material has been digitised, and online access is becoming available.   You can now look for, and find, information about people, about buildings, businesses, events, campaigns (a major Amberley activity), and much more.  And as anyone who has ever searched in archives will know, you may be researching one topic when, unexpectedly, you will come across material that is far more interesting and down the rabbit hole you go. Rabbit warren is a good term to use: you can never tell where your path will take you and what you will find. The archive contains not just written records but photographs, films, and audio records, including many recorded interviews.

 

This talk gave an idea of the breadth and depth of what we hold.  We explained the problems that we face, what we’ve been doing, and what we plan to do – our primary objective being to make the archive material easy to access, and as far as practicable, accessible online.  We also gave a sense of how one thing leading to another can make archive searching highly addictive.

 

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