Letter with picture, March 6 – restricted research times at Huddersfield Library

Mar 6 2010 by Our Correspondent, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

A history of service

IT WAS interesting to read of the daily visits to Huddersfield Library by Peter Hurst to undertake his work on the Almondbury court rolls (History buff Peter’s Latin labour of love, March 3).

Peter will have been making use of the excellent service provided by the Kirklees office of the West Yorkshire Archive Service, which holds a vast range of original documents from centuries of local history.

Sadly this service is now being forced by budget and staffing cuts to reduce public access to its treasures. Opening hours have been reduced to three days a week and this has the effect that next week, for example, all available ‘slots’ for researchers are fully booked.

The service management argue that public opening is less important as more records are ‘digitised’ and placed on the web, but this extends to a tiny minority of documents and would certainly not have helped Peter Hurst’s work.

In any case, researchers making anything but elementary inquiries will always benefit from getting the ‘flavour’ of the originals, rather than images on a computer screen.

Anybody with an interest in researching the past may like toŠ contact the service management to encourage them to maintain or preferably enhance the present opening hours.

David Griffiths

Edgerton