Staff at NRM’s Search Engine are working on cataloguing, fully digitising and researching the NRM’s Raisbeck Archive, and are looking for volunteers to help. Leonard Raisbeck was a lawyer, landowner and businessman and was a key figure in lobbying for the S&DR. His archive was unresearched and held in private hands until the NRM bought it in 2019 and contains correspondence, legal documents and family papers including documents from John Rennie and Edward Pease amongst other significant individuals.

This will be the first NRM archive to be fully digitised and we want it to be as accessible and well researched as possible. We are working to get the entire collection of over 250 items (of varying size, made up of thousands of pages) catalogued and digitised by March 2022, but there is still work to do. Our cataloguing will briefly summarise individual items but will not delve deep into the contents. For this we are looking for volunteers to help us transcribe selected documents and help us research aspects of the archive.

The volunteering would be remote, working off high-res scans and is likely to start after March 2022 when we have everything digitised, but could start earlier if people are keen to get going. Anyone who would like to volunteer would be inducted as an NRM/Locomotion volunteer and Alison Kay at the Search Engine can send additional information to anyone who would like it.
mailto:Alison.Kay@railwaymuseum.org.uk