Museum and art gallery gets grant to put archives online

The Ropewalk Museum – based in a building which for centuries provided work making ropes for generations of local families – has been awarded the funding by the Heritage Lottery Fund for all of its collection to be documented, catalogued and published online.

Ropewalk managing director Liz Bennet said: “At the moment we lack the necessary facilities to allow visitors or researches access our archives which we hope to expand and at the same time raise our profile even further since the Museum received Accreditation Status from the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council.

“It was while we were applying for accreditation that we reviewed our collections and archives and decided that if possible the way forward would be to appoint, if funding was available, a project officer on a fixed-term contract to enable far greater access to our collections.

“Thanks to the HLF this is now possible and we will be dedicating an area of The Ropewalk as a research area as well cataloguing the collection and then facilitating the use of the archives and collection through a publicly-accessible website.”

The Ropewalk – which dates from 1767 – is the only publically accessible historic building in the town which documents the industrial heritage of Barton-upon-Humber.