The Doncaster Archives were established in 1973, with an aim to collect, catalogue and preserve documents relating to the history of the Doncaster Metropolitan District.
During 2021 and following the opening of the state-of-the-art Danum Gallery, Library and Museum, the decision was made to relocate the Archive Storage to the Museums’s old site on Chequer Road.
The archival collections feature historical documents dating as far back as the 1100s, books, photographs, newspapers, maps, census information, and many more resources. These resources and collections shed light on centuries of local history and cover topics including business, law, healthcare, education and politics.
The site has been transformed over several years into a state of the art collections storage and research facility.
With a vast and ever increasing catalogue of items, the facilities teams were looking to expand their archive storage to both maximise capacity and reduce any reliance on external storage facilities.
These archive storage areas needed to be secure and environmentally controlled to ensure their valuable, and often delicate documents were protected from damage and further deterioration.
To achieve this, the archives team searched for businesses with the requisite archive storage experience.
Doncaster chose Rackline over the competition based on our personal approach, wide variety of systems and extensive knowledge of similar installations.
Rackline’s team visited the archives, with both a technical and product expert to examine the space and provide solutions based on their budget and inventory. After this the team begin the process of drafting layouts, plans and solution configurations to meet their needs.
Rackline provided a number of options, and took the time to re-visit and explain how these would work with their inventory and space. We provided plans based on their original layout ideas together with ones based on our experience, these won out by providing both greater capacity and accessibility.
The final design chosen by the Doncaster archives is a configuration based on Rackline’s time tested Speedrax, a high capacity, cost effective shelving system.
Post installation by the dedicated fitting team, the Doncaster Archives now boasts a massively increased capacity. This removes their reliance on external storage and gives them extensive capacity for their existing archive items, and well into the future. Items can be stored safely, in conditions that reduce the factors that can potentially cause deterioration.
The chosen Speedrax shelving solution is both flexible and easily reconfigurable. Find out more here.
If you are building an archive, or you are looking at way to reconfigure or increase archive storage capacity then see our solutions for Archives here. Alternatively get in touch. We can analyse your space, and support you in maximising its capabilities.
