Nick's blog

Recently, we have had a young volunteer called Kimberley working with us from Downs Park Community Special School in Brighton & Hove. The daughter of a regular volunteer, Kimberley has assisted us with various tasks and been very helpful indeed. Set out below is an entry written by Kimberley for our blog, explaining some of the things she learnt about silhouettes during the week she spent with us.

Beginning to see content appearing on the staging server now, it is not yet beautifully styled but it's live on the system, what a treat. They tell me that some of the material will be on the public site soon. hang on . . .

Today we handed all the biog content to the developers, it will now be several weeks while they work their magic but then we will all see the result of our last 11 months work become available in the public domain. Go on developers, weave your magic . . .

We are now very close to having completed all the biog work that we have set ourselves. In the next few weeks we will be able to hand the material to our development team and they can start configuring the content for our system. It will be thrilling to see the material sitting live on the main server, albeit, I'm sure, we will be making the odd correction to data for months to come, there's so much of it!

Lots of visitors to this year's Brighton Festival exhibition at the Town House and therefore lots of people being introduced to the Profiles project. We are getting really good attendance and excellent interest levels for our silhouette initiative. Hopefully, lots of this May's visitors will return in August.

A health problem resolved! It's finally been determined that my mother's heart is in need of mechanical assistance. After an interminable time suffering with black outs, etc., she is to get a pace maker. It will be a fine day when, recovered from the operation, she can enjoy a walk across the Common once again with her dog. It helps the concentration too, to know that she is being offered a solution to an ongoing problem. Silhouettes, you will soon have my undivided attention once again.

We are staging a silhouette machine workshop for volunteers today. If you want to be involved but have not yet put your name down, please do so ASAP :-) Nick.

The costume collector Marion May has confirmed the availability of period dresses to support our silhouette exhibition. We are really excited to be able to stage an event that juxtaposes the two types of collection and hope that it will generate real cross-over interest in the respective specialist groups. Our silhouette exhibition will run 01 August to 14 September 2014. Look back to this website as of July for exhibition details.

I'm speaking about Profiles at the 'Friends of East Sussex Record Office' (FESRO) AGM tonight. Not at my sparkling best today, with my father's death having occured this morning, but keen to share the project tonight. Look forward to seeing you later.

My father's health is now causing grave concern and it's difficult for me to dedicate sufficient time to the Profiles project right now. I've been relying very heavily on our wonderful volunteers to hold things together over the last few weeks and I'm grateful to them all for their input and for their personal messages of support. To our Town House team: Thanks to you all, your help is very much appreciated. Nick.