Its a matter of research

/ Jane Stevenson

I’ve just been reading an article by Elizabeth Shepherd in the December 2008 ARC magazine, asking whether research matters within archives and records management. The ‘anti-intellectualism’ that Terry Cook refers to is something that I can recognise, not least because I was that way inclined as a younger archivist. I remember wanting the MA course to give me the practical skills necessary to become an archivist, and wanting to get on with the real hands-on stuff of collecting, appraising, cataloguing and preserving, once I started work. It seemed to me at the time that this was what was important – ‘its all very well theorising, but you need to get on and do it’ kind of attitude. It took me quite a few years to realise that this was a misplaced notion. It seems obvious to me now that you need to ask yourself ‘why’ you are doing something as a fundamental part of the process.

To take EAD as an example, when I talk to students about using EAD, I think that what is most important is to impress upon them why they might use it – why it is of benefit, and, indeed, what its shortcomings might be. The ‘why’ needs to come before the ‘how’. It is so important to have a firm understanding, which helps to facilitate the proper evaluation and application of a standard. The idea of just going ahead and doing something because its always been done, or because most people are doing it, just seems anathema to me now.

I absolutely agree with Elizabeth that we have to think in terms of working on the mindset of the archivist or records manager. This is something I’ve written about in a chapter for a recent book, What Are Archives? Cultural and Theoretical Perspectives: A Reader. In terms of issues like data structure, format, cataloguing, and dissemination, archivists and records managers need to understand the benefits and the wider implications of the various options available. It seems hardly worth saying that archivists should think about sustainability and think long-term (although clearly this is not always easy). We need to be open to the possibilities of new technologies and see them as exciting opportunities – which is not to say that we should adopt them simply because they are new and novel – but sticking with old methods and ways of thinking in a fast changing world may leave us disengaged, and separated from our stakeholders and users.

Whilst the Archives Hub has a very practical raison d’etre, we do also involve ourselves in research, and this is essential when you are looking to harness new technologies for the benefit of effective cross-searching and dissemination of information. Whilst we are, I am sure, as guilty as many people, of introducing the odd feature without proper critical thought about why, about the wider implications, about things like sustainability and future planning, we generally do endeavour to operate on a sound theoretical basis.

I think that it would be worth services, like the Archives Hub, thinking about working more closely with researchers on topics like the evaluation of online services, the changing patterns of user behaviour, the benefits of a National Archives Network, the use of EAD…there are many options, but all of them would be of benefit in helping us to gain a greater sense of WHY.

The Welsh in Patagonia

/ Jane Stevenson

Welsh settlers

This month we have our first bi-lingual pages, as look at the founding of a Welsh-speaking settlement in Argentina in the mid-19th century.

Elen Wyn Simpson, Assistant Archivist at Bangor University, has provided an introduction (in both Welsh and English) to the highlighted collections, and four striking photographs of the settlers. There are also links to related websites and some suggested reading.

Above: Building a road to the Andes, near ‘Afon y Mynach‘ in 1888. At the left, in a white coat, stands Llwyd ap Iwan, who was murdered in 1909, some say by Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid. Photo copyright © Bangor University.

Typewriters and Office Machines

/ Jane Stevenson

TypewriterFor our feature this December, we look at typewriters and their impact on office workers in collections at The Women’s Library and other collections around the UK.

Throughout the 20th century female typists were a key part of office life, resulting in an uneasy relationship between the workforce and the machine.

The Women’s Library have provided an introduction and some suggested reading, and there are links to related websites.

And the subject of a previous feature also gets a mention: Betty Boothroyd, Speaker of the House of Commons, 1992-2000, at one time worked as a secretary.

Illustration: Untitled [typewriter covered with beads], 2003, by Brigitte Williams, University for the Creative Arts at Farnham. Photo courtesy of VADS

Thoughts on context and bias

/ Jane Stevenson

The importance of context is always emphasised when thinking about how to present archives to researchers. At a recent seminar series I attended in the beautiful town of Lewes, East Sussex (pictured), Mike Savage of the University of Manchester talked about a well-known social survey by Elizabeth Bott, carried out in the 1950s, where 32 couples were interviewed about their relationships. Much of the contextual material was left out of the resultant book, so it was effectively stripped away from the findings. But closer analysis of the survey shows that the selection of the couples themselves was significant – the notes (unpublished) reveal why people volunteered for the study. There was quite a long process of application and most people who ended up taking part had interest in the research as a social activity. This is an important piece of the whole picture and would have had an effect on the findings. The research process itself is an important part of the whole picture.

Social scientists need to find methods to extract key findings from diverse archive sources, often covering long periods. Mike referred to the need to avoid the ‘juicy quotes syndrome’ and talked in detail about sampling methods, all of which have their pros and cons. He referred, for example, to ‘trend analysis’, which strips out the contextual detail (e.g. economic indicators, studies of changing attitudes). Processes and methods get forgotten about.

Archived qualitative data does not allow this abstraction from context and hence cannot deploy representative or aggregate findings. In this sense, qualitative data may have something to teach the social scientist in terms of the importance of context.

Archivists need to think carefully about the whole picture: what they are presenting to users and what they are leaving out. The whole question of subjectivity is a complex one. The social scientist must build the biases of inquiry into their analysis of qualitative data, and this distinguishes it from quantitative data. There is a need to develop clear analytical strategies to allow rigorous yet partial examination of such data – it is important not to give a false sense of the completeness of the data.

At the seminar, there was a great deal of discussion about methodology, the bias of the archive and the life of the archive itself. A particularly interesting talk from Carolyn Hamilton of the University of Cape Town referred to ways of using archival sources to study pre-colonial South Africa. The colonial archive is itself an expression of the power and dominance of the ruling elite – so what can it meaningfully say about the indigenous population? It is profoundly contaminated as evidence, and yet by the very act of proclaiming their dominance, the rulers shed light on those they claim the right to rule. In fact, the colonial archive brims with material germane to the pre-colonial past, but it is important to think about how to approach it and analyse it. Historians tend to study the archive ‘against the grain’ in order to mine it against its basic bias.

A similar situation of bias, although in a very different context, occurs with a community ‘archive’ website such as MyBrightonAndHove: www.mybrightonandhove.org.uk. Jack Latimer of QueenSpark Books talked about how this Website has become a very successful community website where people post images, stories and comments about their local community and history. It is very active, with around 1,300 visits per day and around 10-20 comments put up per day. But of course, this is also a skewed history – maybe a history that is born out of nostalgia, and obviously a self-selecting group of people.

John Hay, of the University of Wolverhampton, gave us a very engaging presentation about archives relating to deaf people and deaf culture. One thing that struck me was his wish to have an archive that represents the achievements of deaf people within society – here we come to another sort of bias. This does, of course, sound like a very worthwhile idea, especially, as John explained, when you consider how the deaf have been treated in the past, pretty much as second class citizens and victims of an affliction. But it does raise the question of whether an archive should have a goal of celebration or creating a certain image. Should it actually seek to gather any and all materials and artefacts that reflect the history of deaf people in the UK? Or is it perfectly valid to want to create something that is intended to be positive and affirming?

Archives may be a result of discourses and may in turn mould discourses, which in turn may give shape to practices that shape the archive. This, as Ann Cvetkovich of the University of Texas postulated, could be thought of as the public life of archive. If we accept that the archive has public life, then maybe it requires methodologically its own biography. The Archive acquires a provenance, is a part of the history of institution housing it. The Archive itself could be seen as a biographical subject.


On Holiday in the Archives

/ Jane Stevenson

Pierrot troupe, 'Shorefield Gardens Westcliff 1916'
Liverpool University Centre for Archive Studies (LUCAS) organised an event on Saturday, with Sefton MBC, at Southport Arts Centre. This was an afternoon of talks and films about what archives can show us about holidays and seaside resorts.

There were four films from the North West Film Archive, made by railway companies to encourage visitors to travel to northern resorts, and films showing local people made by cinema owners to encourage visitors to their cinemas.

Then Dr Chris Lewis of Victoria County History told us about his investigation into the names of private houses in the seaside town of Goring in West Sussex – an ingenious way to shine light on social history.

Allan Brodie of English Heritage showed us some of the evidence he had uncovered that Liverpool (rather than Margate) can make a claim to be the first seaside resort, in the early 18th century.

Professor John Walton of Leeds Metropolitan University described some of the lateral thiking and detective work required to track down sparse or scattered records of resort life in Britain (and Spain) in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Documented history concerned with these aspects of ordinary lives tends to be thin on the ground, as the whole subject was generally seen as ‘trivial’. But there’s so much more to history than the ‘great and the good’. These archivists and historians were at the seaside, but they were working on illuminating our history…

Above: Photo from the collection Papers relating to English concert parties and pierrot shows, held at the University of Exeter. Image courtesy of University of Exeter Library (Special Collections).

Use of archives by social scientists

/ Jane Stevenson

I have just attended two seminars as part of a project on Archiving and Reusing Qualitative Data: Theory, Methods and Ethics Across Disciplines. They provided a great deal of food for thought, as seminars like this so often do. These seminars were particularly valuable because they drew together academics, particularly social scientists and archivists. Many of the participants were oral historians, and the challenges of oral history ran through many of the talks.

When archivists think about archival theory and description, they are generally thinking about archives as materials ‘created by an individual or organisation in the course of their life or work and considered worthy of permanent preservation’ (my quotes, to indicate that this is a classic definition of archives). But if we think about archives as any records considered worthy of preservation and with value for future researchers, then we can expand the definition to include records that social scientists refer to as archives. For them, archives are often data sets, created by researchers in the course of their research and then, possibly, reused.

Social scientists do not necessarily think in terms of business records or personal letters, or archives as a reflection of personal or organisational activity. They think in terms of longitudinal studies and oral histories; quantitative and qualitative data. These are archives that generally are created for the purposes of research, and so the perspective is rather different to those created in the course of individual or organisational activity. We have the UK Data Archive which has ‘the largest collection of digital data in the social sciences and humanities in the UK’, and this houses the History Data Service which ‘promotes the use of digital resources, which result from or support historical research, learning and teaching’, but I don’t think that there is a general sense amongst archivists that these are part of the archive community, in the sense that trainee archivists don’t really think about working for a data archive, and arhcival theory doesn’t appear to really encompass this type of archive. Certainly social scientists clearly see archives as both data archives (data sets) and traditional archives (archives as reflections of past activity), and the fact that the two were not explicitly distinguished during the seminars was striking in itself.

It may be that data archives require different ways of thinking to ‘historical archives’, in terms of how they are organised and managed, but now that archives are increasingly digital, and as all archives are a valuable source for research, surely there is sense in the two communities moving closer together?

What Are Archives? (Or, Shameless Plug for Archives Hub Authors)

/ Joy Palmer

(And as I am not one of the authors in question, I can do the shameless plugging:)

I’m proud to announce that two of our colleagues here at the Hub, Jane Stevenson and Paddy Collis, have been included in this important anthology of essays What Are Archives? Cultural and Theoretical Perspectives: A Reader. The collection has been edited by Louise Craven of The National Archives (UK) and brings together a range of voices around this complex question. Underpinning the question, ‘What Are Archives?’ is a fundamental change in perspective where new answers to that question are beginning to emerge, as Craven notes. We are now, she says, beginning to adopt a wider perspective, “looking at archives from the outside, rather than from the inside” (Preface).

Jane Stevenson’s contribution, ‘The Online Archivist: A Positive Approach to the Digital Information Age,’ is an excellent overview of the practical issues that emerge in the realm of ‘online archives.’ She considers the evolving skillsets needed by information professionals in general and archivists in particular, especially around emerging technologies. “We need to know how to share and exchange data, how to structure finding aids to enable sophisticated searching, what the advantages and disadvantages are of using controlled vocabularies…”(90). Above all, she says, “If the archive profession does not address this need to change and adapt to meet the needs of the new information society, we run the risk of being sidelined in this most crucial area of work”(105).

Paddy (Gerard) Collis’s essay, ‘Permitted Use and Users: The Fallout Shelter’s Sealed Environment’ takes an altogether more exploratory and philosophical approach to the central question of the collection. Through a series of meditations on the ‘archives’ such as the caves at Lascaux, nuclear waste repositories, and avant-garde art exhibits, Paddy asks us to question our perhaps restricted notion of ‘the archive,’ and significantly the polarising concept of the ‘casual’ visitor versus the ‘serious’ researcher.

Well done to both Paddy and Jane for these valuable contributions. We’re very lucky to have you sitting in desks across from us!

Tom Eckersley

/ Jane Stevenson

Postcards: Chaplin, Groucho, Keaton, Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Garbo, Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd
This month we celebrate the work of Tom Eckersley (1914-1995), one of the foremost graphic designers of the twentieth century working in Britain.

With an introduction by Karyn Stuckey, Archivist at University of the Arts London, and illustrated with 14 designs and drawings from their Tom Eckersley collection, including poster designs for Guinness, the World Wildlife Fund, and RoSPA.

There are also links to selected websites and a some suggested reading.

Above: Image provided by University of the Arts London with all rights reserved by the owners: the Tom Eckersley Estate and London College of Communication. Image of poster taken by Graham Goldwater. With rights reserved by University of the Arts London, contact: archive-enquiries@arts.ac.uk, 02075 149 335.

Archives 2.0

/ Jane Stevenson

I’ve just been reading the excellent entry (with many interesting comments) on the ArchivesNext blog on the subject of ‘Archives 2.0’. I agree with Kate’s position, that ‘Archives 2.0’ should be about our mindset – the principles of participation, openness, experimenting with new technologies, collaboration and exploration. Whilst we can argue over various tools that may or may not be ‘Web 2.0’ and how we might or might not integrate these into our work patterns, surely taking a more open and participatory approach should be something we can all agree on?

At the Archives Hub our raison d’etre is dissemination – we want to improve access to archives through providing an effective cross-searching service. I see ‘Archives 2.0’ as very much in line with what we are doing – implementing standards, looking at interoperability and taking a collaborative approach. As a community, we are entirely at liberty to shape ‘Archives 2.0’ ourselves, to make it something relevant to us – the label is, after all, just a label until it has an agreed meaning behind it. It should not be seen as something forced upon us, but as something that we create and progress for our own benefit and the benefit of our users.

I’ve kept an eye open for good examples of more interactive and participatory websites relating to archives, but they seem to be a bit thin on the ground in the UK. I think that the archives community might be a bit behind the Library community in this respect, although maybe that is hardly surprising given the resources that most of us are working with and the fact that many archivists are lone practitioners. It’s not easy to embrace new technologies and new ways of working when you’re struggling to accomplish the basic tasks – acquisition, cataloguing (backlogs!), preservation, etc.

I think that some of the work that we at the Hub are doing with The Women’s Library (Genesis portal) and AIM25 in terms of interoperability and data sharing is very much ‘Archives 2.0’ but the benefits of this won’t be obvious to the outside world because its not about whizzy new user interfaces, but about sharing descriptions, rather than asking archivists to create several descriptions for different services. So this brings benefits of efficiency and more content and reduces problems of version control. We’ll post more about this work as we progress it!

I think that if we can work together as a community, then the benefits of a more open and collaborative approach can be widely shared. Certainly at the Hub we are keen to share our experience and any expertise that we might have for the benefit of the wider community, and we are also keen to find out about any other projects that we might learn from – no point in trying to work out everything for yourself if you can benefit from the experience of others.