Ringing Forums

this discussion is about preserving information that's already in digital form, not digitising paper records, which would be a separate effor — John de Overa

What we are creating now is in digital form, but a lot of the recent (in historical teams) is on paper, and could end in a skip when the person who currently has them dies or downsizes. It took several years of chasing to get the records of one society recovered from the loft of a former secretary, and a lot of the CC Education Committee papers I archived were only on paper.

The new policy is to retain very litte, sadly — Alison Hodge

That policy is misguided imo and I have challenged it. If more do so then it can be changed.

so we need to change expectations before learners become infected with the traditional 'must be free' attitude.

strange that this topic should come up now:
1 I recently raised the question of archiving CC material that is of historical significance but likely to get lost. Currently the only formally retained documents are minutes and reports. They are certainly important but there can be a lot more of substance, as I discovered when I went through all the old Education Committee documents I had.
2 I was recently asked if all the discussion of NRT (Network for Ringing Training for those without long memories). The original Yahoogroups are long gone but it happened that (a) someone used to compile summaries of discussions (weeding out the noise and unscrambling crossed threads) and (b) I still had copies on my hard drive, do after some sorting and conversion I sent him a zip file.
Ideally there would be organisational mechanisms to ensure things are preserved that doesn't rely. On the right person happening to be in the right place at the right time.

What could ringing do with £1 million a year? — John de Overa

That depends on who you talk to. When The Ringing Foundation was set up to raise money and channel it into ringing a lot of ringers said 'it's not needed'.

I believe some were but I wasn't involved with any, they are just things I've read about or heard of over the decades.

quite a few people have run local education ringing courses over the years.

a DMO could offer such things, but I wonder whether their absence is that inhibiting? How many people organising peals, outings or whatever think about liability and insurance I wonder?

it can cause burnout but often results in the Wooler done, or the rate of doing it, being what people feel like doing rather than what needs doing.

I doubt there was a soft copy unless someone later scanned the original - theworldran on paper in those days. The easiest way is to get them from the RW DVD. Can't remember whether those years are online yet or whether you need the actual DVD.

articles by Steve Coleman called something like 'sifting through' or 'shuffling through' — John Harrison

It was 'rummaging through' and they ran through 1989 into early 1990.

John Harrison may know more of the history — Simon Linford

Yes, I was meaning to comment but waiting to check the facts to support what I remember. A working party was formed in 1990 to investigate: 'the possibility of a Ringing Centre as a way of lifting the Exercise off a plateau of ringing advancement'. That was just after we had declared the need for a 'decade of recruitment' to get from 40,000 to 50,000 ringers after the 1988 survey. The working party initially focused on a single National Ringing Centre, but concluded it would be better to promote a number of Centres throughout the country. See the report
Ringing centres were expected to be involved in both teaching and promotion, and the criteria for Council recognition included having a simulator and teaching room, being usable with minimal restriction, being open for use by anyone, and having a workable management structure.
Initially there were relatively few centres but many more were created after the Council negotiated a grant scheme funded by the Worshipful Company of Founders. Some met the original spirit of a ringing centre, and were proactive forces in their area, but some did little more than take the money, install the kit and call themselves a ringing centre.
The Ringing Centres Committee always had representative on the Education Committee since there were areas of sharedinterest. In 2007 Roger Booth and I negotiated terms to merge the two committes, which the Education Committee approved but the Ringing Centres Committee didn't, so it never happened.
Roger was on the Ringing Centres Committee for much of the time so could give better insights than I can.

afia the recent contract is for promotion, which will require some understanding of the status quo but well short of a definitive analysis.

Without having sight of the survey repor — Tristan Lockheart

The results were all published in the Ringing World in a series of about half a dozen articles by Steve Coleman called something like 'sifting through' or 'shuffling through', presumably because he kept going through the raw data to draw out different perspectives.

As there was no response to thus, do I assume that the answer is that there is no mechanism that would support an admin lifting an off topic part of a thread under a new, more appropriate, topic heading.

When I wrote the Shire book I obtained some statistics from various sources and said: "Around five thousand peals are rung each year of which about 15% are on handbells. Some ringers never ring a peal and many just ring a few for special occasions, but some ring them regularly. Each year about 3,000 ringers ring at least one peal. About a third ring only one but the leading peal ringer often rings over two hundred" and: "Quarter peals became popular in the twentieth century and are rung more often (around 13,000 per year) than peals, with well over a quarter of ringers taking part".
Those statistics are now out of date. Peals are down to ~4,500 and quarters up to ~18,000, but the proportion that ring a peal (in any one year) is similar to Peter's figure.

you could start by looking at the questions asked in previous surveys, notably the full 1988 survey and the more recent pilot survey run by the Ringing Trends Committee.

could we see more of a culture of investing money into the development of ringing? — Tristan Lockheart

That was the motivation behind The Ringing Foundation, modelled on comparable bodies in other activities. But the ringing community had an unexpected immune response to the idea, which generated a lot of opposition that undermined it and eventually killed it.

Is there an amount that's large enough? It's a labour of love, surely? — John de Overa

An interesting comment, worth unpacking. There are two ways to interpret 'labour of love': the standard ringing way = 'do everything for nothing' and a more nuanced way = 'requires a committment over and above the monetary payment'.
I think anyone appointed to such a key ringing post, whether paid or not, would be likely to have the latter by virtue of other necessary attributes. But the difference between a paid and non-paid appointment would be whether the person put in all the time the job needed to succeed or just the maximum that could be squeezed in around other other revenue earning activity.
But I wonder whether the President should be the first paid role? Some other organisations that are run by a mix of volunteers and paid staff retain volunteers as policy makers but relieve their load with paid staff to 'do the work' . The RW and ART obvious examples in ringing but there are organisations outside ringing that are more like the CC, for example Making Music (which formerly had the more descrpitive titile National Federation of Music Societies).
How much of the current President's work could have been delegated I don't know. Some I am sure couldn't but I'm equally sure that a lot could (for example a lot of the leg work behind the meeting in Nottingham).
But to have the debate about which roles to support or replace with paid effort we first ned two things.
1 - Those with influence in the ringing community must accept the principle that payment is possible.
2 - The Council finances need reforming in order to make it possible (on a sustained basis, not just by eating into reserves..

£10 doesn't sound like a day's wage today.
If it's any interest, in the early 60s where I rang we got 2/6 (before and after) and where I ring now we get £20 (after).