National Sporting Heritage Day was on September 30 and in combination with this I continued at a webinar Sporty heritage About identifying and supporting collections in danger.
So, which collections are at risk? Almost everything in some form, from individuals and local club level to competitions and province, to national and even international level, whether it is stored digitally in original hard copy or information.
In our sport there have been some catastrophic losses, with perhaps the most famous being when the Etta offices received two direct hits during the first Blitz in the Second World War and everything was destroyed, all records, correspondence, furniture, etc.
The history of about 15 years of activity for table tennis, the carefully prepared address list of players and ticket buyers all went, all manuals and countless records needed for such a large organization were under a huge stack of rubble.
When the then assistant secretary, Marjorie Carrington, saw it, she sat down and cried and never really forgave Mr Hitler! The work began to build the collection.
There have been other cases of loss, information about computers that crashed and are not backup, with the loss of hundreds of photos and other documentation. There is also loss due to physical damage – fungus, water, fire, etc. – or by theft, malignant destruction or neglect.
Often if someone who has kept records, the house is moved, a cleaning up is performed and valuable material is thrown away, and in the same way when someone dies or just loses interest. The list is almost endless.
With digitally retained records there are also problems to ensure that material is not lost. Change websites, change servers and information is not necessarily transferred to the new website or server. Digitized material is spread to the ether.
With the loss of printed material, such as programs or magazines, it is more difficult and often more time-consuming to find information by searching for many website articles instead of having everything in one place. With the decline of the local press, that source of information is also lost.
If you add to this, there is some institutional memory that can be endangered collections. A change in staff, whether it is staff, board and committee members or volunteers, results in the loss of personal knowledge. Changes can mean that collections are not known about and their value cannot be appreciated.
If this all sounds doom and gloom, what can be done?
The first step is to identify what you have and, more importantly, to identify what is missing. Know who has what and where and who has legal property. Manage your archives positively, have a plan and take on follow -up planning. Make as many people as possible who are aware of your heritage, create an inventory, have a ‘transcribathon’ or ‘scanathon’ to digitize material.
Let people who do donations know that their material is appreciated and appreciated and where possible are displayed, creating oral histories, sharing what you have, making new people aware of your heritage, have saved your heritage as an agenda item during your next committee meeting and/or contacting former members to see what they have. Make sure the storage is suitable and safe.
As with most things in life, there are probably costs, whether it is storage in the cloud or in a storage facility or buying an external hard drive. Perhaps the most important costs of all is the time of people.
It may seem like a huge task, but it is important to remember, even if you can only do a small part to help your heritage leave everything you do in a better condition than when you started.
What has Table Tennis England done to retain their heritage? Several projects have been carried out or have been underway and much of it can be found in the ‘Visit the document archiveSection on the website.
Oral histories are also recorded, records made, videos transferred to digital format, a Flickr -page for many of our artifacts And a number of other work areas.
If you want to discuss something in this article or help you maintain the English tennis heritage of the table, please contact me.
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