From Saturday 20th to Sunday 29th November 2021 we celebrated the national Explore Your Archive week. This is an annual week-long social media campaign led by the Archives and Records Association (ARA) that encourages archives to post each day with a different hashtag around a daily theme.

Explore Your Archive has been a successful tool for public and private organisations across the UK and Ireland to showcase the hidden gems stored in their collections and social media is at the heart of this. The benefit to a county record office taking part in a national campaign such as this is that it opens up the potential to reach a much bigger audience, including those who may be discovering archives for the very first time.

The Berkshire Record Office has three main social media channels: Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. These are all managed by a small team of staff who collaborate with the aim to create interesting or entertaining content for these platforms and to promote our services to an audience from all around the world.

Social media allows us to shine a light on the more unusual and intriguing records that visitors may not have seen before, as well as promote our more popular collections for further utilisation. We can also provide a glimpse of behind the scenes activity and some members of the team who contribute towards the running of the service.

On Wednesday 24th November 2021 the Explore Your Archive hashtag was #ArchiveShelfie which usually involves a selfie of an archive shelf. This time, we thought we would have a bit of fun by recreating the iconic Beauty and the Beast library scene in our strongroom - without swinging on the ladder, of course!

To our delight, it seems that the Twitter community enjoyed this light-hearted take on the hashtag, and we received the most ‘likes’ we have ever had on the platform (286 likes at time of posting). Some of our fellow archivists and librarians commented that, like ourselves, they loved this scene in the film as children which could be seen as an early sign of our interests in such professions.

Looking forward, we are considering how best to share more behind the scenes content with our followers to showcase our work beyond the searchroom. One of our goals for the near future is to develop our YouTube channel too so stay tuned for this coming soon.

If you'd like to follow us on social media, simply click on the links at the top of the BRO website as highlighted in the image below (PS they're also at the bottom of the web pages!).