About

cornishmemory.com was created by Azook Community Interest Company to help museums, heritage organisations and private collectors improve access to the film, audio and photographic heritage that they hold.

The idea came from Azook's 'Sense of Place' initiative which set out to create and share learning resources amongst schools in Cornwall. The Sense of Place project discovered a host of superb audio-visual material but sharing them with schools was impractical, many were in formats used in previous decades e.g. cine film, reel to reel audio tape and glass plates.

Azook's vision was to develop a web site enabling anyone to search, view and listen to archive content. With support from the Heritage Lottery Fund, through a project called 'Out of the Box', cornishmemory.com was born. Oral history recordings belonging to community groups became the very first collections to go on line.

Azook acquired a large range of legacy equipment, including VHS, U-matic and Hi8 decks, 8mm and 16mm cine film converters, reel to reel, cassette, and DAT decks, MiniDisc and more.

Combined with state-of-the-art technology, we're now able to convert a wide range of older formats into digital media.

News of the project is spreading, museums and private collectors are becoming aware of the online archive and choosing to share their collections with the public through cornishmemory.com. The Heritage Lottery Fund supported Re:collect, a project which enabled us to digitise these collections and put them online for everyone to enjoy.

This work would not be possible without the help of our amazing volunteers who digitise the material and research and write the information to go with each archive item. We are very lucky to work with socially minded collection contributors who are determined to share their archive collections with this and future generations. A word of thanks must also go to the teachers who are using cornishmemory.com to introduce schoolchildren to Cornish life and members of public, who give us much valued feedback on the contents of the archive, ensuring the accuracy of our information.

Our plan is to maintain and grow cornishmemory.com with a view to providing free public access to Cornish audio-visual archives in perpetuity. If you would like to help or support our work please contact us.

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Credits and Acknowledgements

cornishmemory.com uses Omeka, an open source collections display system built for heritage applications. It was installed, modified, configured and designed by Tom Goskar for Azook CIC.

Azook CIC is grateful to Interactive Mechanics, Philadelphia USA for additional code used in cornishmemory.com.