"For several years now, a small but consistent number of volunteers has been meeting at the Resource Centre to catalogue and reorganize the visual artefacts of the Newark & Sherwood District Museum Service. This has involved investigation and research to identify often puzzling items of heritage.
My task has been to look at the various photographic images of the township, dating back mainly across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but sometimes a lot further. The service owns quite a number of these, some of them carrying copyright, but also a number of transcriptions and reproductions from historic publications, brochures or magazines. Artists' drawings, often adding the confusion of artistic licence, have their place. Some images are obscured by age and inadvanced photography techniques of the time. Some have appeared delicate to the fingers, requiring much caution. Whilst there are those which have been carefully identified by handwritten dating, or approximate dating on the back, and have been labelled as belonging to specific events and/or sites, there are others that have occasioned much head-scratching owing to visual change over the years. I have been particularly grateful to two members of the group who have longer memories of Newark than I have, and have recognized places and people that I could not.
Each street or area of the town has been given an alphabetical place in the files, and comprises one or more packs of images. There is still plenty to do when opportunity allows us to return to it." - Roger, Resource Centre Volunteer