THE outcome of a £4.4million bid to improve archive storage space at the Dorset History Centre in Dorchester should be known within four weeks.

Senior archivist Sam Johnston has told Dorset and BCP councillors on the Joint Archive Board that £600,000 of the bid to the National Lottery Heritage Fund is for development work and £3.8million for the delivery of a new repository building, an extension to the existing centre off Bridport Road in Dorchester.

Records from both sides of the county are kept at the centre which is now running out of storage space.

Mr Johnston told the Board that if successful there would be a five-year delivery programme and if the response was negative the service would look at the feedback about its bid before deciding whether or not to try again.

He reported on other activities at the centre, including a new contract with Ancestry which would bring in additional income and would also see the online business digitise additional records at the Dorchester centre, working for 6-9 months, completing 2,000 records each day.

Other ongoing work at the centre was progressing well – with the William Barnes collection cataloguing due to be completed in July; the work being carried out by the same expert who had just completed a project on digitising eleven of Thomas Hardy's notebooks.

Mr Johnston said there had been renewed interest in the Sylvia Townsend Warner collection following the unveiling of a statue to her in Dorchester's South Street in December last year..

Sam Johnston

He said the centre and its partners were about to start a fundraising campaign to get £48,000 to catalogue that collection over the course of a year.

Much of the money is expected to come from a crowdfunding appeal with donations from trusts and foundations.

Other work included the Wessex Water archives and material from predecessor bodies amounting to several hundred boxes and over 1,000 maps, with work continuing on the records from Bournemouth's Jewish community and the records of the Poole Maritime Trust dating back 1838 which related to the work of the Harbour Commissioners, including details of shipping traffic in and out of the port.