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The 578 Squadron Archive folders consist of 23 volumes; folders of material collected by Des & Dinky Hollis over a period of twenty years.
Des Hollis is the son of Padre Hollis the RAF Burn Station Chaplain. As a child Des lived on the base amongst the Squadron members. He and his wife Dinky collected stories, photographs, and visited families and the graves of the fallen to collect together the volumes of archive material that we now have.
Each volume contains loose leaf material in A4 format bound to black card. Each volume is bound in a red cover embossed with the Squadron Crest.
During the 1990's it became clear that with diminishing numbers of veterans the material needed to be looked after and they were transfered to the safe keeping of the Yorkshire air museum archives. They are held there together with other Squadron and association memorabilia and can be viewed by prior appointment.
During the early 2000's concern was raised about what would happen to the material if something were to happen to the original volumes and it was decided to digitise all 23 volumes for future safeguarding.
The digitisation process was undertaken at the Bothwick institiute for Archives at York University.
High resolution images of each page have been taken to preserve the material. (Also photographs of the reverse of some the images have been taken as some have writing from their origianal owners). This process means that should the unthinkable happen then volumes can be recreated.
The file sizes for the images run into many Gb of data and this does present a problem for making the volumes available for public reading. (Far, far too large to add to the web in their present form).
The files were therefore compressed, reducing the file sizes and to some extent reducing the resolution but still leaving them readable on screen. The individual pages were then collated back into volumes to make online books of each volume to be read from the web site.
Should you require to see the high resolution originals then these can be viewed at the Yorkshire Air museum's archive section by prior appointment only. I can recommend a trip to the museum. Not least for the fact that it houses the only complete reconstrution of a Halifax BIII bomber in the UK. It is a very evocative sight.
(578 Squadron veterans visit their Halifax in 2013)
It should be noted that all the information collected in these archives are the intellectual property of the 578 Squadron Burn association and cannot be reproduced for commercial purposes without the permission of the Squadron Association.
Do you have any photographs or memorabilia that you would be willing to let us have to complete our archives? For example crew photographs are still turning up. We have a dearth of ground crew images. (You will note that additional crew photographs can be found in volumes 22 & 23). We would love to expand the archive and we would appreciate your assistance.
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