Publicity is vital to ensure September’s North West Archive Festival is a success throughout the region – and beyond.

By highlighting Festival activity in the local, regional and specialist trade media, we can raise awareness of the importance of archives, dispel the negative stereotypes of archivists and encourage the use of record offices in the North West.

We need your help and enthusiasm to make the Festival a big success and maintain the momentum and excitement in the future.

Manchester-based public relations company Staniforth will be working with us throughout the Festival to maximise all media opportunities. The company recently worked with Cheshire and Chester Archives successfully launching the Access To Archives (A2A) project for the North West. The result was some great newspaper and radio coverage highlighting the fascinating contents of on-line catalogues and driving more than 210,000 visitors to the website in the first month alone.

A member of the Staniforth team will be contacting you shortly to help highlight in the media any activity you may have planned for September.

The company will:

To really interest the media in your area, the Staniforth team is looking to source interesting historical facts, stories and curiosities about each local North West region participating in the festival.

These fascinating facts, sourced from local archives, will be used to add vital colour and ‘human interest’ to Festival press releases, making them more appealing to the media in your area.

The more unusual, exciting, dramatic or quirky your local historical stories the better. For example:

Do you hold the details of an unusual committees or clubs that existed in the past?

Bolton’s civic leaders established the Committee for the Reclamation of Unfortunate Women was set up in 1867 to help the borough’s Victorian prostitutes escape a life of vice…

Chester’s rowers played a key role in helping Sir Stephen Redgrave achieve Olympic success…more than 100 years before he claimed his fifth gold medal in Sydney.

The city’s 165-year-old Royal Rowing Club was responsible for a new keel-less design of boat which revolutionised racing in 1855. The same design is the basis of the boats which Redgrave and his successors still use in regatta worldwide …

Do you hold fascinating letters involving a famous historical figure or local people with interesting backgrounds?

Molly Murphy, a Manchester nurse who helped lead the campaign for women’s votes, worked on the battlefront during the Spanish Civil War and was invited to meet Lenin in the Kremlin. She has her story detailed in papers at the Labour History Archives and Study Centre…

Newly-released documents have revealed the impact on Lancashire’s farmers of one of Britain’s most serious outbreaks of Foot and Mouth Disease in 1923.

The papers show the disruption caused by the epidemic – one of the two most severe instances of the livestock disease in Britain during the 20^th-century. Some of the files of the Longridge Show explain how an annual Christmas Stock Show was cancelled as the disease spread across northern England…

Examples such as these would be used as part of press release announcing planned festival events, or as interesting news stories in their own right. Please start thinking about your archive stories now

Staniforth will be in touch with you shortly, but you can also contact them at any time from now until the end of the Festival. The Staniforth team has volunteered to offer a ‘support hotline’ to all partners during the festival, which you can phone for advice, support, or to discuss the media potential of an event you are planning.

Please contact:

Archival Treasury

One of the aims of the North West Archives Festival is to promote the actual and potential roles of archives in the region. We want to promote both the cultural and evidential roles of archives and the Archival Treasury is your chance to dispel a few myths and celebrate your work.

As part of the North West Archives Festival 2003 we are running a competition to find up to 30 items within North West archive repositories which could be termed "treasures" of the region and which convey the wealth of information in the region’s archives. We are looking for archives, which have a cultural, historical, social, political, or

aesthetic significance to the history of your organisation, local people, the North West, UK or the world.

These treasures will form the basis of the regional promotional and publicity campaign and it is hoped the winning documents will be exhibited in participating offices for the public to view during the festival.

1 You can nominate a maximum of 3 items per organisation.

2 Closing date for nominations is 8th August 2003

3 Nominations can be made by repository staff or can be decided by the public, after initial nominations by staff. Public voting could be a useful means of promoting the holdings of an archive office and involving users in the Festival.

4 Entry forms must be completed for each item and digital copies of each item provided for publicity purposes. For sound/film a transcript should be supplied.

5 A committee will approve entry into the Archival Treasury and their decision is final.

Enquiries and nominations should be made to Janice Taylor, Archive Development Officer,NWMLAC, Griffin Lodge, Blackburn, BB2 2PN

or via email to janice.taylor@nwmlac.org.uk