At the recent Data Standards Group meeting of the Society of Archivists, Jon Newman from MLA London gave a talk on a current project that he is working on called Revisiting Archive Collections. This project involves recataloguing archives whilst, at the same time, increasing community awareness of and engagement with archives. The intended outcome is to add value, creating more relevant archive descriptions, whilst at the same time reaching new audiences and maybe getting archivists to think differently about approaches to cataloguing and about the audiences they are trying to reach.

Focus groups of diverse groups of people, generally unfamiliar with archives, were set up in three different London institutions. They were asked to look at and provide feedback on specially selected archives that were chosen because they might resonate with the groups, having relevance to their lives and experiences. For example, a Tanzanian women’s group was commenting on photographs and manuscripts relating to Tanzania and a group of cleaners and security staff, many of west African origin, were looking at Somalian and Nigerian material. The groups gave feedback through questionnaires, and the project is looking at adding this feedback to the archive descriptions in some way, either to the catalogue descriptions or to the index terms or as new associations or observations about the archive.

This approach does raise questions surrounding issues of reliability, authenticity, whether archivists should moderate or authenticate information provided by users, and intellectual property rights (the possibility of contributors claiming the ownership of their feedback). There are also questions about how exactly to integrate the information into the descriptions and finding aids.

The traditional view of archivists being the gatekeepers is to some extent challenged by this approach, but it surely can only be a good thing to recognise the value of expertise held within the community and work with the community to draw this out and use it to benefit others. It certainly does appear to have been very successful in providing new insights into archive materials from the perspectives of those who have a real and personal connection with the materials.

The sustainability of this type of project is uncertain. Jon Newman pointed out that the project depended on a well chosen selection of archives that were engaging and would resonate with the focus groups. It may not be practical from a funding and resource perspective to undertake this sort of project routinely, but there might be value in repositories carrying similar activities out intermittently, as this kind of approach helps to engage new audiences, provide new insights and furthermore it may change the approach that the archivist takes to thinking about, researching and cataloguing archives.

Image: Pics4Learning

An article in saturday’s Times (26/05/07) warns us about the Big Brother nature of Google:

http://tinyurl.com/ynuovl

David Rowan warns that Google holds a great deal of personal information about us, and yet this is only the beginning of its campaign to monitor our likes, dislikes and motivations. As soon as you sign up for any Google service, the data accumilation process begins. As Rowan suggested, I logged onto iGoogle (personalised Google web page) and looked at my web surfing history, which includes searches, sites and clicks. Curiously, top of the ‘movers’ which is described as ‘recent top queries related to your searches’ was ‘Crufts’. Seeing as my searches included conference venues, educational institutions and The National Archives, I found this a little surprising.

When Google started we all thought it was rather quirky and friendly and took us away from the global dominance attitude of Microsoft. Now it is becoming increasingly dominant in a way that may be rather more unhealthy. You may be happy for Google to build up a psychological profile of you, in order to make useful suggestions about what you might want to buy, to wear, to do, to think…Its not as if this approach isn’t something many of us take advantage of – I have bought items from Amazon following suggestions of ‘if you like that you might like this’. But it does seem to be important for us to be aware that this is happening and think about how confident we are that Google will guarantee to keep our information private.

It is also interesting to think about the nature of this personal data from the point of view of archiving. Google may be looking to ‘organise the world’s information’ rather than store it, but in the end it is still eagerly gathering personal information. How is this information held and what will happen to it in the future?

A new job opportunity has just been advertised on the University of Manchester’s website. This senior management role will have particular responsibility for the strategic management of the Copac and Archives Hub services. The closing date for applications is 5th June.

I was once told that written archives do not make good exhibition materials. My contention was that they did if they were displayed with care and due consideration for the audience and in conjunction with other more primarily visual materials. This was amply demonstrated to me by the exhibitions that I visited in Berlin last week. On a warm spring day I spent a few hours walking along the former line of the Berlin Wall and past fragments that remained standing in a peaceful and slightly unkempt cemetery, as well as a former watchtower standing incongruously amongst modern apartment buildings. I then arrived at the main Berlin Wall Memorial – a short length of the wall that has been maintained as a monument and, unlike most of the remaining fragments, is clean of all graffiti. Opposite the wall is the Information Centre. It is quite modest in size and has a simple layout, with one main exhibition area showing a small but effective display that mixes silent film footage (all the more effective for being silent), arresting and shocking photographs, audio reports and copies of archival material, including newspaper reports, personal testaments and postcards.

An even more memorable and haunting experience was Peter Eisenmann’s new Holocaust Memorial and the new information centre beneath. The memorial itself consists of 2,711 concrete blocks (‘stelae’) arranged in undulating rows with narrow gaps between them. The information centre is everything such a place should be. It has a sombre and quiet atmosphere and it tells the story of the Holocaust simply but very effectively. There are only a few rooms and they are themed, including one on families, one on individuals and one on locations. The first room consisted of illuminated areas on the floor that corresponded to the stelae above and displayed blown-up copies of archive materials, mainly personal letters, including one written in haste by a woman on a train who did not know its destination – it ended at a concentration camp. She flung the letter from the train and a local farmer found it and posted it on. The families room is deeply affecting, with the stories of 13 families brought to life through 13 panels showing photographs, archives, some film footage and short explanations of the plight of the families, with a record of those who died and those who survived. Much of the archive material comes from the families themselves and in fact one panel has very few photographs or documents, reflecting the reality that most families lost all of their personal possessions and for many people who perished in the concentration camps there may be no photographic or other personal evidence of their life before the War. The personal memorials room dedicated to individuals is a dark, empty space, illuminating one name on the wall at a time and telling a short history of that person, whether it be a 5 year old girl from Poland or a 75 year old man from Austria.

For me the Holocaust Memorial and information centre were very moving and affecting. A great deal of thought and care must have gone into the design of the centre, and the exhibits were obviously chosen very carefully so that the rooms were not overfull of masses of information but kept largely empty, with the archive materials used to great effect and speaking volumes about the past. My only reservation is that this is not a memorial for all who died in the genocide and that Berlin appears to be ending up with a number of victims’ memorials and a number of arguments over who should get what and where.

For me, Berlin is a city where archives really do play a central and very noticeable role in telling the story of a city and particularly of the dark and difficult events of Second World War.