The Haberdashers’ and The Saddlers’ Companies – Minute Books

The Worshipful Company of Haberdashers The Worshipful Company of Saddlers

A case study examining SDS City of London’s delivered solutions for scanning and digitising Minute Books for both The Haberdashers’ and The Saddlers’ companies. Court Minutes of the these Livery Companies were directly collected by SDS City of London staff from the Guildhall, Gresham Street (for historical volumes), and from the Livery Companies’ offices for more modern Minutes and Records.

The Worshipful Company of Saddlers had two collections of Minute books dating from 1892 to the current day to be scanned:

  • Company Minute Books
  • Warden’s Minute Books

It also has some historical volumes, which SDS City of London digitised:

  • Court Minute Book, 1605 to 1665
  • Audit Book, 1555 to 1882

Plus, some further precious volumes, which were also carefully scanned and digitised:

  • Record Book
  • Freedom Roll
  • Ordnances

The Worshipful Company of the Haberdashers have had its minutes digitised to the start of the 20th Century. There is a six year phased plan to go all the way back to 1652. Within the digital archive, there are currently more than 20,000 scanned and atomised pages.

SDS City of London are experts at handling such bound volumes for scanning, indexing (meta data) and producing the end-product (in this case, the resultant web site). As well as the normal user experience (no formal log in, with access straight to the archive), the web site developed also includes an admin area (with various defined roles and levels of access and operability) that enables online editing and approval-of-editing of meta tags such as the individual notes on the contents of the minutes.

Whilst digitising these volumes, SDS City of London has continued to carry out a procedure known as “non-destructive” scanning to protect the originals. This involves using specialist scanning techniques and devices to ensure the original material is unaltered (some services strip books of their bindings so pages can be processed). In over 20 years of operation, the SDS Group (of which SDS City of London is a part) has never damaged an original! Even when the pages are very tightly bound, SDS City of London made every attempt to capture all data, oftentimes by meticulous individual expert inspection.

Multi Page searchable PDF files were created from each Court Minute Book and provided to the client on DVDs. In additional to the disc-based copy, SDS City of London also provided a searchable web site, with the top level of indexing atomised down (enabling the user to order or search entries by Year, Court, Agenda, or to perform a free text search on the document body).

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