The Resource Centre is open Monday-Friday 10am - 4pm at our headquarters in Dulverton. You're welcome to call in, browse our reference library and use the work room. To access material in the archive, please contact the archivist on exmoorsocietyarchivist@gmail.com or phone us on 01398 323335.
It is essential to make an appointment to access archive material as the Resource Centre is run by volunteers. We need a minimum of 5 working days notice in order to provide cover and gather the material you require.
The archive catalogue is now almost complete. It is a hierarchical catalogue consisting of four levels. The top level consists of series such as the papers generated by the Exmoor Society in its daily business (prefix ES). The next level down is subseries, for example papers relating to the Society's publication the Exmoor Review (prefix ES/Rev). Underneath this are folders, for example ES/Rev/001 consists of papers relating to the Review published in 1967. Finally, many folders are then catalogued to item level, so ES/Rev/001/001 is a letter from Gladys Bawden to the Exmoor Society.
You can find material either by browsing the catalogue or by searching. The search is Google-powered. Enter a keyword in the search box at the top right of the screen. We have endeavoured to keep spellings as consistent as possible, but you may want to search on, for example, Lanacre as well as Landacre. The search facility includes the whole site so you may find it brings up pages from elsewhere, for example the walks programme.
To browse, click on the headings in the catalogue. There is also a menu on the right-hand side headed "Browse the archive". You can work up or down the various levels. For example you could browse through the Reports series (prefix REP) or look through reports published by the Exmoor National Park Authority (REP/ENP). These are further subdivided into folders so you can browse through their reports on landscape (REP/ENP/009).
Note, this is the catalogue only. Although some material is digitised, it is not available online. We can scan on request and provide electronic copies of many of the documents. There is a charge for this.