Today is International Archives Day, with repositories around the world celebrating the archives profession by contributing to a special website a document from their collections that they feel ‘shows the locality served by [their] archive service’. The Bodleian Library’s contribution is Oxfam’s first minute book, a simple, now rather worn, school exercise book used to record the proceedings of the first meeting of the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief on 5 October 1942 and subsequent meetings up to November 1948.

The Oxford Committee, set up to lobby for the relief of suffering from starvation behind the Allied blockade in Greece and other occupied countries, is now internationally recognised and respected as Oxfam. Both rooted in Oxford, Oxfam and the Bodleian Library serve a global community.

See the International Archives Day website here:
http://www.internationalarchivesday.org/wordpress/?page_id=25

The Oxfam minute book is at: http://www.internationalarchivesday.org/wordpress/?portfolio=bodleian-library-department-of-special-collections