Quick update....

A quick progress update ahead of what's going to be a really busy week for the project.

The Powering the World exhibition has been signed off and the panels will be printed this week. It will be launched at Friday's workshop. It's hard to judge until I see them full size, but on paper they look great and I hope they promote the collections well. 

The pilot employability project has finished, with both students engaging with the business archives material and producing really interesting web-guides.  Both gave positive feedback on their experience, and particularly their change of opinion on business archives as 'dry' and 'daunting' to a source they would both happily use again. A full report to come in the next few weeks!

Finally, Friday is the day of the workshop �The Bottom Line:  The Value of Business Archives for Research� at Swansea University. The delegates will be made up of students, academics and heritage professionals. I'm really pleased to see that we have undergraduate and postgraduate students from a variety of disciplines, including Arts and Humanities, Business and Economics, Engineering and Bio-sciences. 

We have some excellent speakers on the day, showing the quality, and variety, of research that can come from business records.

�         Dr Quentin Outram, Senior Lecturer in Economics, Leeds University Business School: 

�A Real Victory: The First of its kind since 1926': Employer archives on the Emlyn Strike of 1934'

He is the co-author (with Roy Church) of Strikes and Solidarity: Coalfield Conflict in Britain 1889-1966 (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and �Class Warriors: The Coalowners� in Industrial Politics and the 1926 Lockout: The Struggle for Dignity (University of Wales Press, 2004) edited by John McIlroy, Alan Campbell and Keith Gildart. 

�         Dr Tehmina Goskar: Research officer on the ESRC-funded Global and Local Worlds of Welsh Copper Project (until Sep 2011)

�Putting Humpty together again: Reconstructing supply chain information from copper business archives'

See here for more information on this project which brought together academics, the heritage sector and local and global communities to tell the story of Welsh copper 

�         Richard Haines, PHD student at Swansea University:

�An Embarrassment of Riches: Approaches to the Quantitative Analysis of British Shipping� 

Received an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award to work in conjunction with Swansea University and the National Waterfront Museum. His research has examined Swansea�s shipowning community during the nineteenth century, focusing on issues such as investment in shipping, the crewing of vessels, and shipowners� role in the social and urban development of the town.

For more information, or to register, please see here