 So, this afternoon we want to talk about Archives West Midlands, which is a new organisation which brings together archive services across the region. We had an well-established mode of working regionally which dated back to really the early 2000s where we had a regional archive forum. Before that, we had a regional archive council. Those of you who were were old enough to remember the resource and MLA, we were supported by those bodies. In 2009 we merged what was the regional archive forum with a more informal group that just supported the heads of archive services and after MLA was dissolved in 2012 we managed to carry on and we did maintain link with the museums and library sector. I think Yn ymgyrch, mae'n dweud y gweithio y rheiddiad ac yn gweithio gyda'r gweithio cyllid ac yn cyfrifio'r gweithio'r llyfr. Mae hyn yn gweithio'r traddwl gyda'r gweithio. Mae'n gweithio'r ffondiadau ymddangos ychydig yw'r sydd wedi gweithio'r sgwm ar gyfer ychydigau ar gyfer ychydigau. ond we decided that we really did need to develop our structures and how we worked together. We started talking with TNA in 2014 about a collaborative project for the West Midlands to explore ways of working together more strategically and addressing some of the challenges that we faced with reducing budgets. We were able to secure funding from the National Archives with the agreement that we would sort of match fund that. And we bought in external consultants to really get us to see where did we want to go and what was our future direction. We established a development board and we were lucky enough to get a senior officer to sponsor the project and that's Janine Cox who's the commissioner for culture and leisure within Staffordshire County Council. Her drive and experience were really crucial in helping us move things forward. She had just completed two years as president of the Society of Chief Librarians when she came on board. So her sort of drive and high profile was really important to us. We developed a project brief and following a tender process we appointed Tom Forrest and Kevin Bolton who I see is in the audience as consultants to help us. And we had a number of workshops which really brought everybody together to try and get us thinking about how did we want to work together. We created a prospectus which was a document demonstrating what we wanted to do and also with aims for the future. And we renamed ourselves as Archives West Midlands in 2016 and we had a formal launch in June of that year. The first sort of funded project that we've put together was called Strong Rooms. This was funded by the Arts Council and it was a really unique and exciting sort of fusion of archives and arts. We worked with a globally renowned street artist called Muhammad Ali and the project really, as it says there, aimed to get archives onto the streets and into people's lives in a new way. It mixed graffiti art and archives and really sort of challenged the perceptions of archives. The project altogether toured four locations, Rugby, Coventry, Dudley and Worcester. We had about 10,000 onsite visitors and over 900,000 who accessed the project online and there's still plenty of information on the website if you're interested in that. I think what it did show us as well was just the capacity that we needed to work together on projects. It did take a huge amount of work to put that whole project together. And because we were a constituted body but we didn't have a formal structure, one of our partners, Warwickshire County Council, they had to put in the funding bid. So that made us realise that we really needed to sort of change our constitution. So following on from that, we've actually become a charitable, incorporated organisation since July of last year. And as you can see our aims there are really to promote and encourage high standards across the archive profession. We've got particular areas that we want to look at, digital preservation, which we obviously heard a huge amount in the conference over the last few days. And Joe will talk more about that. And as I say, we really wanted to have this aspiration to develop support and fund regional projects. And that was part of the drive for us becoming a charitable organisation. Within the membership, we do have a subscription model, which is perhaps a little unusual within archives. So we do ask our full members to pay £500 a year. And we do ask that all those members are either an accredited archive service or a seeking accreditation. We've got a really good range of trustees. We've got 12 in total, as you can see there. And that includes Janine Cox, a number of heads of archive services. But we've also got representatives from business, academic and from archive consultants. When we did the slides, we had 15 full members, but we've actually had one more since then. So we've now got 16 full members within archives West Midlands. The vast majority of the local authority services within the West Midlands are members. And we're now moving to try and get more specialist repositories, universities and so on to join us. So I'll just hand over to Joanne now. So building on the success of the prospectus that we had, which was a brochure which we used to launch the organisation Archives West Midlands, we decided that we would have an annual review and that's a copy of the annual review. We have some still available at our table and it is available on the website. And the purpose of that was really to highlight our achievements to date and to use it as an advocacy tool. And we decided again to draw in on some Janine's experience from working as president of the Society of Chief Librarians. She was really keen that we got someone external to help us write that, someone who is an ex-journalist. So it is written in an accessible way. We provided the information and she turned it into something that's far more readable and interesting I think than something we'd have done ourselves. It's been sent out to all our members, partners, current and potential funders and also potential members so we've sent it quite far and wide. And we're using it obviously to track membership and build and grow our organisation. And it's shared some key facts about our region so we pulled together some of the results across the region from the customer services questionnaire that we do each year. We've also built our website and social media. So I look after the social media accounts although I get help from other members and we've got Richard Lewis from Dudley Archives now looking after the website and we're sort of trying to grow that. We've got 520 followers on Twitter now and we are starting to see a sort of real growth in that area. We've also brought in someone called Catherine Seddon to help support the organisation so she is working for us on a freelance basis just again to help us run the organisation as we take it forward to the next stage. So our key priorities for this year really are to develop another regional project. Obviously we had great success with strong groups but what we really want to do is another project this time formally led by Archives West Midlands and will really promote our collections across the region. So we're looking at the moment of potentially a project around votes for women and possibly a partnership with the HEE sector partners potentially a small project to come through there. We're also going to continue promoting the Archives West Midlands and growing our membership so we're actively making approaches now on the back of our annual review writing to specific organisations. We've all collated details of who we'd like to extend membership to to again just grow and sustain the organisation. And we will be looking at developing a volunteer strategy across the region. It's something that we felt quite strongly about. We all use volunteers in our services and we want to look at ways that we can do that really well develop guidance and policies and perhaps bring volunteers together across the region. In addition all the priorities that we've got is to carry on promoting the importance of our collections regionally so advocating and we do that quite a lot through our social media so I always actively retweet particularly our members or any archive services in our region and I do try and focus it particularly on the West Midlands. We also support services as they work towards achieving accreditation and we've had more members achieve accreditation in the last year. I think we've got about seven that are now accredited out of our membership and three have been re-accredited so we make sure that we celebrate and support members. Also looking at supporting workforce development so we have a training session on social media. We're also looking at potentially one on the GDPR regulations and we're working together on digital preservation and digital preservation is sort of the really key area that we're focusing on at the moment because we recognise that it's a huge challenge for all of us and we kind of concluded that we can't do it on our own at all so we're wanting to really maximise the skills and expertise in the region. We've been fortunate again to get a grant from the National Archives so in 2016 we managed to achieve just under 1800 from TNA which was match funded by Worcestershire Archives and Archaeology Service and that was to conduct a survey across our members and what we wanted to establish was the readiness so we wanted to look at what current practices what existing policies and guidance did services have what were their skills, what were their knowledge gaps and what did members want, were they interested in working collaboratively were there any barriers that they might foresee in doing that within their organisation. The results that we've had from that survey which we did in the summit have shown that there is a real need for practical training and people really do want templates for policies and guidance and are looking for investment to increase capacity so we're all doing it on basically a zero budget and also trying to do it alone and people do want to work together to try and move that forward what we've been doing in the last couple of months is looking at testing some systems and seeing whether we can invest in a platform to provide a secure public access to digital archives so three services have tested Preservica in the region and more services are going to take part in that towards the end of the year what we're going to do then is share the results of that testing and have a meeting focused on digital preservation for our members early in 2018 and we're looking at potentially securing additional funding to move to the next stage we've got another service Warwickshire Archives who are looking at Archivematica and we're looking at them to sort of share their learning and their experience of using that system so we're not focusing on just one solution but what's becoming really, really clear Archive's West Midlands is offering us a model to share potentially the costs of digital preservation there are advantages of coming together in that the more members that would use a project the cheaper it gets in terms of being able to procure it but also a supportive community so we've been able to share our experiences of testing the project so we feel that collaboration is a really sustainable way forward for services and it's something that is working really well in the rest of West Midlands and is I think quite a success story for us so really just to finish off all I would say is just mention our annual review please do look at it it's got some interesting insights into what we've achieved in our first year it's also available on our website and please do follow us on Twitter because I really want to grow our presence and thank you