Lascelles Slavery Archive website

Client: Borthwick Institute for Archives
Dates: December 2009 - March 2010

Overview
In December 2009, Heritage Technology was asked by the Borthwick Institute for Archives to help develop a website for a recent project on the documentary archives of the Lascelles family of Harewood House, Yorkshire - entitled Conserving and Making Available the Records of Slavery: Harewood House. The project was a joint venture between The Harewood House Trust, which owns the documents, and the Borthwick Institute for Archives at the University of York. The Heritage Lottery Fund generously provided grant funding.

The project included research and conservation work on the documents, which dated largely from the late 17th to early 19th centuries and included much information on the business dealings and properties of the Lascelles family's West Indian estates. The bicentenary of the abolition of slavery in 2007 made this work especially noteworthy, since many documents were related directly to the slaves who worked the plantations in question.

Requirements
The proposed website was to provide a searchable database to hold the roughly 500 documentary records contained within the archive. In addition, a number of records had associated transcripts and images that could provide useful examples of the subject matter and physical preservation of the documents.

Solution
The completed (MySQL/php driven) online database provides powerful functionality to the visitor, allowing searches by date, date range, keyword and category. The large size of the associated document images allowed the creation of a Zoomify-based facility, which enabled users to zoom in and pan around the documents.