The Royal Marines Museum has been awarded £50,000 by the Heritage Lottery Fund to transform its archive and the way it can be used. The new archive system will allow visitors easy access to the Museum’s extensive archive and transform the ability for people to research their Royal Marine ancestors.
The money will be used to pay for a brand new archive storage system enabling the Museum’s extensive archives to be stored in a much more effective way. Some of the items include a huge archive of Landing Craft plans numbering over 4,000 items alone.
The scheme will also pay for new computers and specialist software to enable people to find items in the archive, or information contained within it, much more quickly. The project will also use volunteers in cataloguing and conserving items in the collection.
The 2011 special exhibition ‘Terms of Service’ will also use aspects of the archive to illustrate unusual aspects of serving in the Royal Marines over the years. The exhibition will introduce people to the archive and ways in which they can use archive material, both at the Museum and elsewhere. A linked programme with schools is also planned.
Ian Maine, Royal Marines Museum Curator explains ‘This award will really transform the way people can use our important archive here, enabling them to find out more for themselves’.
It is anticipated that work on the scheme will be fully complete by next April.
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