To all & sundry Carolingians from Eowyn Eilonwy of Alewife Brook, your baronial historian.
Hi folks. I — and the barony — need your help: we need a new place to store the baronial archives.
For the past few years, they’ve lived in Margreta Gyllensteirna’s basement. However, she’s now moving away, so the archives have to move too.
The ideal place would be in my own house — but unfortunately, I do not have room for them. For a while they shared a commercial storage area with the baronial event equipment, but we stopped renting that space a couple of years ago, and when I asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer, I was assured that we (still) don’t have the financial ability to do that.
So I have to beg for someone else to house the archives, with these particulars:
The space they currently occupy is a ~ 6′ x 7′ footprint, x ~ 8′ high; there are 3 (collapsible) shelving units 6′ high, with stuff on the top shelves, along with some other odds & ends that don’t fit on the shelves. There are some other shelving pieces; I don’t recall whether these could only be used to make the current units higher, or if there are the right parts for a full new unit. Most of what we have is paper in boxes, but some definitely isn’t — like the actual pikestaff Old Marian was given back when she was EK Chronicler & made The Pikestaff a useful publication.
As time & our activities continue, we do keep accumulating more paper archives. Also, in connection with the EK 50th anniversary a couple years ago, I was offered various other artifacts, which I then had to decline due to lack of space to store them. I would be glad to accept those items if we had the space for them.
So what I’m looking for is either a very large closet, or a sizeable corner of a room:
- guaranteed dry (Margreta’s basement is unfinished but she lives at the top of a hill);
- secure not only from theft, but also from folks like too-inquisitive toddlers (see pikestaff, above);
- preferably with some extra space to expand into (see accumulating, above);
- and if possible, reasonably near me, so I might be encouraged to continue my project of cataloging what we have (I live in North Cambridge).
Margreta expects to leave sometime in May, so she’d appreciate if the archives could be evacuated before the end of April.
If you have space that fits, and are willing to let us use it, please let me know.
Eowyn
Carolingian Historian
<historian@carolingia.eastkingdom.org>
PS: It has already been suggested that I could digitize much or all of our paper records, and then we wouldn’t need to retain the originals. I have two responses: first, like many other SCA people, I like paper, so even if we did digitize all such records, I would be reluctant to dispose of most of them — and second, it wouldn’t make sense to dispose of -any- of them until I finish cataloging them, so that we would know what we had to begin with. Once we have a good handle on the catalog, I’ll be glad to look into digitizing.