Spirit of Revolt Progress Report.

Progress report for 2017.

We had the first meeting of 2018 on, Sunday 28th. January, and audited the past year’s activity by the Spirit of Revolt archive. We had a busy year as usual which brings the SoR Archive to 6 years old!

We are delighted to continue to work with the Archivist Paula Larkin as our sessional archivist. Paula links with Barbara, Senior Archivist.

  1. New Collections

Last year SoR catalogued another 6 Collections:

Les Forster Collection included material on Willie Nairn, a stone breaker and activist from the 1900’s.

Gilchrist Collection – which is an original copy of the Boston Herald with an in situ account of the Joe Hill execution.

Cooper Collection– new accruals including Glasgow Against Atos

Keenan Collection – extensive serials/magazine etc

Kelman Political Digital Collection which includes minutes and records of :

  • Self Determination and Power Event

  • Free University Network

  • Clydeside Action on Asbestos

  • Workers City

  • Glasgow 1990

  • Save Our Green

  • Elspeth King Defence Campaign

  • John Edward Hunter

  • Ravenscraig and Pat Finucane Centre

  • International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books, John La Rose Texts, George Padmore Institute and New Beacon Books Educational Trust

  • National People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement

  • Poll Tax

We have been in communication with the National Library of Scotland with regard to the Kelman Collection and they have viewed the Kelman scans . They praised the professionalism of the work and said that our work is ahead of their own on his papers, and hopefully it will meet up in the future creating links.

  1. SoR Fundraising Events

We hope to buy new Archive envelopes and other specialist materials in the coming months. We organised more events to boost the Hardware Fund which we consider were successful.

Our Raffle attracted so many generous donations we had to have 2 Hampers, 8 prizes and have some prizes for next year!.

We organised a very interesting Music and Performance night in the Old Hairdressers which we called – Revolt in Song. It was a sell-out crowd of over 200 people. The event was very entertaining and included insightful Poetry from Jim Ferguson and Rab Fullerton, Radical Folk song , multimedia performance music, and an open mike all coordinated by Brendan McLaughlin from the Old Scotia days and Workers City group.

We launched our first annual Calendar 2018 based upon images from our collections including Free School Movement, Banner Collections, International Womens Activists for March, and Photos from Demonstrations with quotations from early Anarchist publications. This is also Mail Order and is now sold out. We hope to follow this up in May with a new Annual May Day to April calendar.

Funding is an ongoing struggle, we organised a publicity drive on subscriptions doubling our monthly income from donations.

We applied for 3 more grant funds The Edge Fund, the Keunssberg Fund and the Weir Fund.

  1. Show and Tell

We were invited to participate in a Show and Tell event by Mitchell’s head of archives Dr O’Brien coinciding with ideas we were pursuing ourselves for a new outreach endeavour. Having sketched out the first 3 x 1 hour lunch time talks based on the Collections which we hoped would be monthly, we reduced this to 4 per year beginning with the Cooper Collection on Housing: The Natives are Revolting. We will also include our Pop Up Display and leaflets to encourage access to the Collections.

  1. Scanning Volunteers

We have 5 regular Scanning volunteers – Sarah, Jonathan M, Julia, Shirley and KM, we also have some occasional scanners, who fit in whenever they can. All the thousands of Scans are uploaded by John Couzin online, and the website is going from strength to strength. Though it varies considerably, it is around 30-80 clicks per day average. The past exhibitions of Radical Books and Rent Strikes draw a lot of interest. Genealogy searches create regular enquiries but the majority is from researchers all over the world seeking access to particular Serial Issues or other sources. On these occasions we scan that request, upload it and notify the enquirer. Several have visited Archives on the 5th Floor and Paula and John organises what they need.

We have 1 complete Collection ready for Storage.

  1. Website

Our Web Host crashed and has decided to close, this lost us some time online, we are back up and running. and we are migrating to a new server. This is being done by webdesigner Kevin. This crash created a loss of access to the website for a while but because our catalogue of scans is lodged with Archive.org they remained secure. Archive.org have 2 back-ups in 3 countries.

  1. Hardware

We have four computers for sacnners and we fixed the A3 Scanner and hope to get the printer working soon.

John Czn is following up on the problems in accessing the internet into the Springburn Room.

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