Following our chairman, David Livermore’s, initiative for HAT to take a more proactive approach to fulfilling its mission of making Hampshire archives more accessible to the public, HAT commissioned a survey to establish the extent and nature of groups and organization’s archives and their needs. This encompassed the extent and nature of their archives, the degree to which they were a) catalogued, b) digitised and c) their accessibility to the public.
In all cases we attempted to identify how they were managing now. Since the interim report published in August the extensive research exercise has enabled us to add a further 55 groups in addition to the 200 organisations in Hampshire which were likely to have archives which would be of help to researchers.
The groups surveyed ranged from those interested in the Basingstoke canal through to the extensive archives of Winchester College, Newsquest or the Museum of the Royal Navy. As HAT already had extensive contacts with, and knowledge of, the Hampshire record offices, these were excluded from the survey. The survey received an additional 26 sets of responses to the over 44 received by August 2024 bringing the percentage response to over 30%.
As part of the survey visits were made to Newsquest (Weymouth), visits was made to Winchester College, Newsquest at Weymouth, the Army Flying Museum, Middle Wallop, the Royal Logistics Museum, Winchester and Farnborough Air Sciences Trust (FAST)