Monday 17 December 2012

Keeping vigilant

As with a lot of professions, accuracy is extremely important in the archives world.  However, as we are dealing with material produced by other people, we can not control their accuracy, or indeed correct any errors.  We can, however, draw attention to known errors through finding aids.

The Civil Defence cards have been a great example of this.  With the project, we have endeavoured to record the information as it appears on the card as there are cases of spelling where it is not clear what the correct form should take.  There are times when it is quite obvious that the original writer has entered the information as it sounds like it should be spelt. 

On occasion, this can have an amusing outcome such as the one I came across where the warden’s occupation struck me as perhaps not being correct.


I checked the address in the 1939 edition of the Kelly’s directory and found that the real purpose of the association was quite different.