The Submarine Collection Preserved and Catalogued for the Foreseeable Future.
Many will be aware that the move of all the artefacts (SM bits, models, papers, books and photographs) from the Torbay building at the Submarine Museum to Storehouse 12 in the Dockyard was completed earlier this year. Storehouse 12 a hugely impressive conversion of an old dockyard store house into a dedicated NMRN repository for artefacts from across their estate and in particular for the Submarine Museum and Royal Marines Museum collections, and it even includes a large cold room to kill any nasty bugs in, or on, all items before entering storage.
More impressive is the substantial amount of work undertaken so far by the Collections Team to uprate, clean and catalogue the data on many thousands of the records. Public access to the online Collections (www.nmrn.org.uk/collections) went live recently on the new NMRN website and there is a specific Royal Navy Submarine Collection Portal. The task is of course ongoing and the NMRN has also invested in a powerful content management system to manage over a million photographs and film to import these assets into the online Collections system.
All in all this is a most successful NMRN initiative giving positive support to submarine heritage particularly in a period of significant financial constraint.
3 comments on “The Submarine Collection Preserved and Catalogued for the Foreseeable Future.”
I followed the link to the collections page and for a personal visit it appears you can only visit for a few hours on a Friday and they close for lunch!Asking for a digital copy of a document is going to cost a researcher £200 fora ten page document. This all seems to be very unhelpful and costly for a private researcher
From the Vice Chairman of the Friends’ committee.
Thanks for this comment and your interest in what’s happening in the Submarine Archive. This will be discussed at our next meeting in February. To be fair to the NMRN, we believe that the new facility will be a vast improvement over the system and the storage in use before the move to Storehouse 12. I saw the reserve submarine collection both before and during the move, and to say that “the rot had set in” is something of an understatement! The care of the Reserve Collection is now much more assured.
There are certainly aspects of what is proposed that would bear scrutiny, comment and – hopefully – some amendment. However, I can understand the NMRN’s wish to seek some return on their investment in terms of both cash and archivist resources, the latter being required for some time (months?) yet. I understand there have also been problems with staffing and availability, which may also go on for some time yet.
To cut a long response short, we are at the beginning of a new era which we hope will be evolutionary and the Friends intend to put the case for a system of access that is both fair and flexible.
Thank you for your reply Jock. I think that the access and charges of our archives should mirror that of the Templer Study Centre of the National Army Museum ,details of which can be found here-https://www.nam.ac.uk/collections/templer-study-centre