LGBT Archive:Press Release December 2015
5 December 2015
The LGBT History Project, set up to create a Wikipedia-style resource for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender life in the UK, is being relaunched today, on the occasion of the London Metropolitan Archives’ 13th annual LGBT Conference, “Speak Up! Speak Out!”, as the UK LGBT Archive – http://www.lgbtarchive.uk.
Since its launch in June 2011, the Project has grown to include over 3,600 articles, which have been viewed over five million times. The Project is a Key Partner of LGBT History Month UK, and the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) has voted to work for its long term survival and enhancement.
The new name emphasises the purpose of the site, to be a virtual time capsule of information about LGBT people, places, organisation and events. A key aim is to document the sources of all information, and in the case of facts obtained from external web pages to ensure that these too are archived, for the benefit of future historians and researchers.
Jonathan Harbourne, founder of the Project, said:
- “I created this site when I realised how little today’s younger LGBT people knew about the struggle that won us our equalities and our freedoms, and I’m delighted to see the success that it has achieved since then. We’re about to upgrade both the hardware and software that it runs on, so that it can cope with future demands.”
The historian Jeff Evans, representing Schools Out/ LGBT History Month, said:
- “The remarkable work of the LGBT Archive, in collecting and preserving the evidence of past events and attitudes, is both urgent and necessary: in the absence of such a body of material it’s all too easy for those with a political agenda to invent their own distorted version of the past. The work of the LGBT Archive increases the chance of future generations obtaining a more robust and inclusive reading of this remarkable aspect of British history.”
Ross Burgess, one of the Project’s volunteer editors, said:
- “We’ve been working with LGBT History Month since the early days of the project, and we’ve recently added a new Timeline on the 2016 History Month theme of Religion Belief and Philosophy.”
- For the new Timeline, see www.lgbtarchive.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Timeline_of_UK_LGBT_Religion,_Belief_and_Philosophy.
- For the CHE Conference motion, see http://www.c-h-e.org.uk/motions2015.shtml.
- For LGBT History Month, see http://lgbthistorymonth.org.uk/.
- For the London Metropolitan Archives LGBT Conferences, see http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-to-do/london-metropolitan-archives/learning/Pages/lgbt.aspx.
ENDS
