George Garrett Archive Project.

It’s been an important part of the project keeping the family involved and updated about the development of the archive and our activities. So on Saturday 8th March we held our third Garrett Family Update day at the fabulous Central Library. We were made up to see them again and spend the afternoon discussing the archive and our plans for the celebration events in May. We were particularly pleased that George’s two remaining sons, Derek and Roy, were able to join us.

Tony Wailey, in a Herculaneum effort, managed to condense our sixteen week course down to twenty minutes, in a superb presentation, ably assisted by his glamorous assistant (Me!) on the slide show. We wanted to make sure the family had a wider understanding of the context of George’s work, and they seemed suitably satisfied at the end of the discussion.

It was very generous of David Stoker, Service Manager for the Central Library & Archive, to give up his time on a Saturday to join us for the full session. David spoke with the family about the archive and how George’s artefacts would be treated and stored if they are stored at the Library.

David then took them on a tour of the archive rooms, demonstrating to them the up to date technology that exists there. This is an ongoing discussion and the family now have copies of the agreements to consider for the future.

We then discussed the celebration month and our proposals, and we were delighted the family granted WoW permission for us to republish copies of two of George’s writings in a small booklet myself and Tony have written as an introduction to his work and the archive. This will be published for the May celebration events. All done, we took some pics and headed off to Dr Duncan’s for some welcome lubrication.

The George Garrett Volunteer group met again on Monday to continue cataloguing the archive, and have now begun inputting all the information into templates. These will accompany the archive and provide a guide to the material available, as well as providing information for tagging the material on the website. The group worked like clockwork, and it’s always a surprise when 8pm comes round. Time flies when…

We’ll be continuing this work next Monday, and expect to have everything logged by that point, so we can move on to the other thousand and one things we are working on to prepare for May!

The George Garrett Archive project workshops are free and open to all. We meet every Monday, 6-8pm. For our next session on Monday 17th March, we will be meeting at LJMU’s Aldham Robarts Library, MaryLand Street. L1 9DE (off HopeStreet).