Author: Andrew Taylor

THE primary purpose of a Probus Club is to provide meetings and fellowship for retired PROfessional BUSiness men who value opportunities to meet with others of similar interest, and who enjoy listening to guest speakers on a wide variety of topical subjects.

Our Club, founded in 1981, now has around 100 members, and meets on the third Tuesday of every month at the East Grinstead Sports Club from 10am for coffee and a chat until 10.40am when routine Club business is conducted, followed by the guest speaker and questions.

At around 12pm we return to the bar for an optional drink and bar lunch.

We arrange walks with a pub lunch in the summer, and each year we have a number of organised outside events and short holidays at home and abroad at competitive cost, all of which are very popular with members, their wives, and families.

For more information telephone 01342 714172.

MID Sussex District Council is giving local families the chance to lose weight and feel great this summer by signing up for a free health and fitness course.

The Mid Sussex Wellbeing team and Freedom Leisure are offering free Family Weight Management courses to local families with a child who is above their ideal weight. Spaces are available now and with the summer holidays just around the corner this is the perfect time to sign up, get active, and make the most of the sunny weather.

The Family Weight Management course is an exciting and fun scheme where qualified instructors give local families expert one-to-one advice on healthy eating and taking new forms of exercise. The course, run over 10 sessions, is carefully tailored to the needs of the individual family and is scheduled at a time which suits them.

The free initiative is based on the principle that small changes in lifestyle can have a big impact on health. The basic goals of the course are to:

• support families who are looking to eat more healthily
• increase confidence
• increase fitness and activity levels
• support children and adults to achieve and maintain a healthy weight

“Modern families have so many demands on their time, it is no surprise that many find it difficult to squeeze in enough exercise or to find the space in their schedule to prepare healthy meals,” said Councillor Christopher Snowling, Cabinet Member for Leisure and Community. “It’s not easy, but sometimes a fresh pair of eyes, a creative way of looking at things and some expert knowledge can make a real difference and that’s why our Family Weight Management courses are so successful.

“Our trained fitness experts can offer advice on how to fit exercise around the busiest schedule and it doesn’t matter what your level of fitness, they are able to devise a specific exercise programme that is tailored just for you. I urge anybody who might be considering joining the scheme to do so because it has the potential to change lives, not just now but for years to come. Childhood is the perfect time to develop good habits because they are likely to stay with you into adulthood and make a real difference to your long term health in the future.”

Sessions are run from local leisure centres at the Triangle, Burgess Hill, Kings Centre, East Grinstead and the Dolphin, Haywards Heath. However, if a family cannot reach one of the three centres then sessions can be provided in any location that is considered safe and accessible by the instructor and the family.

Any parents who have concerns about their child’s weight and are interested in taking part in the Family Weight Management programme can contact the Mid Sussex Wellbeing team by calling 01444 477191 or emailing info@midsussexwellbeing.org.uk. Referrals with parental consent may also be made by GPs, Practice Nurses, School Nurses, Health Visitors and Parent Support Teams.

THE Town Museum in Cantelupe Road has scooped the Collections on a Budget Award given by the Collections Trust at its 2013 OpenCulture Conference.

East Grinstead’s application was called Digital Preservation Made Easy and featured the museum’s work in making all its images available for visitors to enjoy – see below for full details of the project and the work it entailed.

Congratulating the museum on its success, Council Leader Peter Wyan said it was a tribute to the work of the many volunteers who give generously of their time and their talents to preserve and retell the story of our town.

East Grinstead Museum competition entry – Digital Preservation Made Easy

THE project has been a huge challenge for a museum that only employees a part time collection officer and relies on volunteers to undertake all other roles.

This project, which started in 2007 and is still ongoing given the 16,000+ accessioned images the museum has, is not just about the fact we are scanning the images and adding the picture to our Modes catalogue, it is the innovative nature of how it is done.

With the entire image collection listed in a paper catalogue, searching for a photograph was a long task, even with a fairly comprehensive paper index. So the main challenge was to not only put the paper catalogue records onto Modes for Windows, but to find the corresponding image, scan it and then link it to the Modes record. For a small museum that is reliant on volunteers of different ages and IT abilities, making sure there were clear and simple procedures in place for documentation and cataloguing was essential, and with over 16,000 images, and only one computer licensed to use MfW, this was going to be a long task.

The Museum was able to recruit an IT professional as a volunteer. In order to make the whole process easier, he developed an in house cataloguing programme based on Modes records, which can be accessed by volunteers on any computer within the museum’s network. This means that multiple volunteers can transcribe hand written paper catalogue records onto a bespoke database from any museum computer. Our collections officer regularly runs a bespoke programme on the server to extract the most recent data stored. This programme converts new data held by the database to a (“TAG”) format which can be directly imported into Modes. As the data is exported, various data fields are converted by fixed rules, making the conversion process consistent.

As Modes records steadily increased, the task of matching and scanning the images to the records was the next challenge. Because the physical images were stored by categories (eg. transport, houses, people, etc), it wouldn’t be a simple case of going through the drawers of images and chronologically scanning the images – would a Modes record for that image even exist yet? There must be a more efficient way of managing this process.

The IT Manager created a very smart programme that, (whenever and whatever order the image had been scanned and providing it had been saved into the right folder), ‘read’ the file name of all the images in the ‘pictures’ folder and then ‘read’ the unique record numbers in the Modes export files. If the Accession number of an image matched the Accession number of a record, it would unite the two and automatically the image would appear in Modes.

A ‘Check Modes Update’ report can be run at any point which reports how many Modes records there are, how many images have been scanned in total, and how many ‘matches’ of linked records to images exist, the aim being 16,000 Modes records, 16,000 images and 16,000 matches.

Because of the efficiency of the system, it means anyone can come in at any point and just pick up where the previous person left off. The scanning and cataloguing of paper records is now a simple task because there aren’t any confusing technical procedures involved. All volunteers can contribute to the task using multiple scanners and cameras, and at any computer in the museum (and in some cases, volunteers could even access the network from home and carry on inputting catalogue records at their leisure).

Impact of the project

The impacts of this ongoing project have been multiple. The volunteers can all be involved and, because of the regular back-up system set up on the network, can all visibly see the completed records within the hour. This gives a huge sense of satisfaction and shows the volunteers that their time and work is tremendously valued.

It has also enabled improved search functions for staff, volunteers and visitors alike. As well as importing items into MfW, bespoke programmes are also used to convert data exported “from” MfW for display by the web server to any PC at the museum including the PC available in the Research Room in the Museum for everyone to use. This means that anyone can do a quick keyword search at any time and be confident that they are searching the most up to date digitised data.

This also really helps museum staff and volunteers answer the various and multiple enquiries that the museum receives about ‘whether we have a photo of…?’ The museum provides high resolution copies of images to visitors and commercial organisations and with so many images available we are able to quickly and efficiently respond to image requests, as well as being a useful source of income.

Another impact of the project is the fact that, with such high resolution copies of the images in the system that are accessible to all, we very rarely have to physically riffle through drawers and boxes. This cuts down on handling and will improve the long term preservation of the collection.

Relevance to the criteria and category

The Collections Practice Award: This award celebrates projects which demonstrate the application of innovative practice to improve the sustainability and use of collections in arts and cultural organisations.

Budget of the project

Modes for Windows £800
A4 scanner £250
A3 scanner £900
Printer £500

Purchase of the above items was funded by grants.

Next steps for the project outcome

There is still so much we don’t know about our collection and would love to build on some Revisiting Collections work we carried out in 2011. We have recently begun this through our 6 The in-house keyword search function is also a useful tool to have when volunteers are researching for exhibitions, articles and other information as it means they don’t have to use Modes. Facebook page where we encourage our users to add their own comments and knowledge to the images that we post.

We are also investigating setting up our own HistoryPin Channel to create a series of ‘Then and Now’ collections available to for the public to view and comment on. The potential to move forward and use the images and information in innovative and creative ways is very exciting and a challenge we look forward to embracing.

WITH just two weekends to win it, the East Grinstead in Bloom Committee has appealed to the town’s gardeners to do their bit for the annual South and South East in Bloom competition which will be judged on 17 July.

So remember – it’s all hands on deck and failure is not an option!

CHILDREN’S author Geraldine Durrant, who handles the Town Council’s PR, will be putting on her Pirate hat for a reading at the West Street library at 11am on 13 July.

Her third book, Pirate Gran and the Monsters, is one of the stories which has been chosen to feature in this year’s UK-wide Summer Reading Scheme which encourages children to keep up their reading during the long school holiday.

Using the umbrella title Creepy House, this summer’s stories have all been chosen for being a bit scary – but not so frightening they can’t be read before bedtime, laughed Geraldine.

“One than a million children take part in the reading scheme each year, so I am delighted to be part of it. Encouraging children to enjoy books is one of the most important things parents can do, and I am looking forward to meeting some of East Grinstead’s little readers at the library’s launch event.”

Pirate Gran and the Monsters is also being adapted for the stage, with the first two books in the Pirate Gran series, as part of an Arts Council project which will tour the UK next year.

“Scamp Theatre specialise in adapting children’s literature for the stage, so I am thrilled they have chosen Pirate Gran for their next production,” said Geraldine, whose next book, Two Bad Grans, will be published in September.

TONY Neale has been appointed as the new Head of Finance at East Court.

Tony, who replaces Barry Male, is a Fellow with CIMA (Chartered Institute of Management Accountants) and has previously worked in Finance and HR around the world.

Having recently completed a contract with Caversham SA in Geneva, he is available to start working on a handover period immediately.

THE Parish HallsTrust has exchanged contracts for the sale of the Parish Halls to Whitehall Homes LLP.

Whitehall Homes are looking to submit plans for a small residential development of six town houses on the site.

The plans are due to be submitted to the District Council within the next 3 months and overall completion of sale is dependent on the permission being approved.

The Trust (of which East Grinstead Town Council is the trustee) decided to sell the Halls after declining use due to competition, and escalating repair and refurbishment costs.   The Trustees will be able to see the plans prior to them being submitted for permission to build.

Chairman of the Charities Committee Nick Hodges said: ”It has been a long road to get to this point,  and we hope that the planning application will go smoothly to allow the money to be put to good use.  We are pleased with the concept of Whitehall Homes’ plan for town houses which will complement the streetscape and very much look forward to seeing the detail of the plans”

A spokesman for Whitehall homes LLP said: “Although we are sad to see the end of a once-thriving public amenity, we look forward to redeveloping this property into an attractive residential property which will prove an aesthetic and noteworthy improvement to the area.”