PRESS RELEASE
Radley College, an independent boarding school for boys aged 13 to 18, continues its commitment to preserving and honouring its illustrious 176-year history and traditions with the launch of an updated PastView website.
Situated in 800 acres of breathtaking Oxfordshire countryside, the prestigious school offers a comprehensive education that prepares students for success in their academic and personal pursuits. By its very nature, the school boasts an impressive list of alumni such as England cricket captain Andrew Strauss, Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion, and British art historian Sandy Nairne.
With such a distinguished history comes a vast archive to study and preserve; one home to over 21,000 digitised items (including individual artefacts, audio files, and pages), over 8,000 people (of which 6,834 are former pupils), and multiple collections.
As one of PastView’s oldest clients, Radley College has enjoyed a range of features on its previous website. Users were able to browse an extensive collection of archive materials, including audio recordings, war memorials, music manuscripts, histories of Radley College, college registers, magazines, and photographs. The website allowed users to further narrow their search by applying filters such as name, record type, year of entry, position, and social/boarding house.
Spurred on, however, by the need to upgrade to align with changes on its main website and maintain consistent branding, Radley College recognised the value in moving to the upgraded version of PastView. This enhancement not only offers an improved user experience but ensures a seamless transition, all while preserving the school’s rich history and traditions.
The PastView upgrade included a thorough data cleanup to address formatting issues, a new advanced search and improved search ability for users, and a new controlled system that prevents images from being uploaded without adhering to the correct formatting, thus reducing the risk of data issues in the future.
However, as with all our projects, the upgrade represents much more than just a mere database of alumni and a repository for school magazines. The transformed PastView website will celebrate the remarkable history of Radley College and its students, and support the college's main website, archive blog and alumni relations while serving as a valuable teaching and research resource within the school and beyond. Whilst some design tweaks are still ongoing, you can explore the newly launched website today and dive deep into their remarkable history.
We have worked with TownsWeb for 10-12 years now. The PastView website gives us an invaluable home for our digital collections. It is our first port of call for enquiries with a superb database linking together our student registers and photograph albums of sports teams and more. And some astonishing stories emerged...
Clare Sargent
Radley College, Archivist
As Radley College continues to dedicate and extend excellence to every aspect of its operation, join us in congratulating them on their latest milestone with us here at TownsWeb Archiving. We can’t wait to see what incredible stories will emerge next.
