The Marketors are a Modern Livery Company – and yet we recognise that even with our short “history” it is inevitable that one day no-one involved in the early days of our Company will still be alive. We also found that some of our Past Masters hold some unique documents and memorabilia that our own Clerk (and her predecessors) do not have – documents that are extremely important to record our history for future Members.
The Marketors also had many boxes of historical data stored securely underground. We recognised the vulnerability of single copy paper storage to fire, flood and vermin. Most importantly none of this valuable information could be easily researched.
We therefore embarked on a comprehensive project to digitise every document relevant to our past – and at the same time put all this valuable information into a database accessible via the web. Naturally we had to take into account the confidentiality of certain types of document and incorporate appropriate safeguards (there are different levels of access permission depending on the sensitivity of each item of information).
The Marketors could never have achieved this without a dedicated team together with a highly professional external organisation (SDS Heritage - www.sds-group.co.uk/heritage) to plan the entire project, scan everything and create the database in such a way that subsequent searching for information is quick, easy and secure.
We have been asked by other Livery Companies to share our experience and in particular to allow them to see what we have developed for them. The result is this cut down version of the Marketors website which contains a small part of our database and provides some of the look and feel that our Members and others will experience when our full History Project goes live.
SDS has created this website and we recommend that any organisation considering a similar digitisation project talks to SDS as their professionalism has greatly impressed us.
For further information contact the Marketors at: clerk@marketors.org