What We Do
The aim of the Guarding the Guards project is to preserve for history informational material about policing. We primarily collect police journals and magazines, as well as police guidebooks, directories and other paper materials. Our core focus is the history of modern policing in Ireland and the United Kingdom (UK). However, we also collect some content from other regions, especially English language materials.
How We Do It
We scan all the material we collect. The items are then securely stored. On this website we provide a catalogue of the content we hold including thumbnail images of covers (described for accessibility), structed data and keywords. Most of the material we hold is subject to copyright and thus we cannot publish it online in full. However, we do hold some material that we are able to share online fully.
Why We Do It
This project is an on-going work of passion for policing history. We believe preserving police history is important. We are especially keen to try to save copies of more fragile material like police magazines that we have found are frequently treated as disposable, and thus not as well preserved or catalogued in archives and libraries as other items like books.