This Saturday (28/01/12) the National Library will hold it’s first open day of 2012. During this marathon of a day there will a number of events, some highlights include films in the Drwm theatre with ‘Pictwrs y Plant’ (children’s films) in the morning, and in the afternoon a showing of a film of Aberystwyth in the 1920’s. There will be a selection of entertaing talks with Professor April McHahon the Vice-chancellor of Aberystwyth University, a talk by Will Troughton about Aberystwyth Photographers and a special talk by the newsreader Huw Edwards about his new series ‘The Story of Wales’.

There will also be an introduction to of one of the Screen and Sound Archives most interesting sound collection, the Ceredigion Library Oral History Collection (‘Casgliad Llyfrgell Ceredigion’). A vast collection of oral history of the Ceredigion area. On show will be extracts from Mr Tom MacDonald talking about the history of Capel Bangor, the history of Penuwch by Mr Dafydd Edwardes, Evan Jones will be talking about his memories of Llanfarian, an interesting incite to the old Aberystwyth harbour with Captain William Ellis, Captain Jack Williams and Mr Howell Ellis. Mrs Katie Morris will be remembering her career as a teacher and Mrs Lewis, Aberaeron will be talking about Cribyn before and during the First World War.

The door’s will be open and everyone is welcome, so come along!

Last week Anwen Jones (our Access Officer) and I attended seminar at the National Museum in Cardiff which focused on the Welsh Baccalaureate and how archives, museums and libraries can support its teaching in schools by providing relevant resources and experiences for the pupils who are engaged with it. By now most secondary schools in Wales offer the ‘Welsh BAC’, as it’s referred to – currently for the upper years only, but soon it will also be introduced for the 14+ age group. Pupils can choose from a wide range of ‘strands’ to study, alongside their A Level courses – from hair and beauty to systems of government worldwide! The points that they earn for completing the various sections (through classwork, community involvement, individual research etc), count towards the necessary points for access to higher education.

We enjoyed several entertaining and unexpected presentations by organisations such as Big Pit, the Centre for Alternative Technology, and the National Library itself courtesy of Owen Llywelyn, the Library’s Senior Education Officer – and began to gather ideas about which films from the Archive might be of interest to schools in terms of supporting their ‘BAC’ sessions. The most surprising presentation was the demo by the Centre for Alternative Technology of their use of a clothes line and pegs to explain the amazing, cross-continental journey of the ‘Kinder Egg’ from start to its end in the hands of eager children! It will be hard act to follow that with film – but we’ll do our best…

We’ve recently been working on a project to digitise film clips of Lloyd George.

He made his name at the turn of the twentieth century, becoming Prime Minister in 1916, and was the first British statesman to be captured at length on the fledgling new medium of  film. We have some wonderful footage depicting his life, both documentary and family films,  and of course the amazing ‘lost’  biopic of 1918.

For the moment we’ve just put them up on our website so that everyone can see them but plans are in development to use them more creatively in future…

Check them out, and if  you only see one film, the one to go for is Lloyd George visiting Hitler at his holiday home in 1936.