Archives 2.0

October 31, 2008 / 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.

The Big Draw 2008: The Big Wheel

October 31, 2008 / Jane Stevenson

This October the Archives Hub took part in The Big Draw. Thank you for sending your drawings on the themes of Fairgrounds and Playgrounds or Cycling and Recycling.

Above: Research drawing of ferris wheel for the film Artificial Intelligence: AI, originally developed by Stanley Kubrick and realised by Steven Spielberg after Kubrick’s death in 1999. From the Stanley Kubrick Archive. Image provided by University of the Arts London with rights reserved by the Stanley Kubrick Estate and reproduced with their permission. Submitted by Karyn Stuckey, Archivist.

The Big Wheel: Fourth Spin

October 24, 2008 / Jane Stevenson

This October the Archives Hub is taking part in The Big Draw. We want you to make drawings on the themes of Fairgrounds and Playgrounds, or Cycling, or Recycling. Scan or photograph your drawing, and then email the digital version to us. We’ll post your pics here each Friday. And we’ll give an Archives Hub notepad and propelling pencil to everyone who sends us a drawing, and the first name out of the cycle helmet will receive colouring pens, a pencil case and a notepad – all made from recycled car tyres! If you send us your postal address, we won’t use it for anything else.

1. Windmill and bicycle
This is a detail of a calendar for 1950 from the Cyclists’ Touring Club archive. Photograph copyright © CTC, reproduced with kind permission, and courtesy of the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick. Submitted by Paddy: "I’ve recycled this from our feature about cycling and some other things."

Esther Rantzen eat your heart out

October 20, 2008 / Lisa

On 3rd October 2008, I attended the

The Big Wheel: Third Spin

October 17, 2008 / Jane Stevenson

This October the Archives Hub is taking part in The Big Draw. We want you to make drawings on the themes of Fairgrounds and Playgrounds, or Cycling, or Recycling. Scan or photograph your drawing, and then email the digital version to us. We’ll post your pics here each Friday. And we’ll give an Archives Hub notepad and propelling pencil to everyone who sends us a drawing, and the first name out of the cycle helmet will receive colouring pens, a pencil case and a notepad – all made from recycled car tyres! If you send us your postal address, we won’t use it for anything else.

1. An Oxford bicycle
Here’s a drawing of an Oxford bicycle. Submitted by Elizabeth Martin of Nuffield College Library.

The Big Wheel: Second Spin

October 10, 2008 / Jane Stevenson

This October the Archives Hub is taking part in The Big Draw. We want you to make drawings on the themes of Fairgrounds and Playgrounds, or Cycling, or Recycling. Scan or photograph your drawing, and then email the digital version to us. We’ll post your pics here each Friday. And we’ll give an Archives Hub notepad and propelling pencil to everyone who sends us a drawing, and the first name out of the cycle helmet will receive colouring pens, a pencil case and a notepad – all made from recycled car tyres! If you send us your postal address, we won’t use it for anything else.

1. Cyclist
This is a detail of a RoSPA leaflet from 1954. Photo courtesy the University of Liverpool Library, and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents. Copyright © RoSPA. Submitted by Paddy: "I’ve recycled this from the Collections of the Month about cycling."

2. Mr Pickwick
Label for the Pickwick fairground music LP ‘Radcliffe’s Steam Carnival on Tour’. Submitted by Paddy: "I found this in a charity shop years ago. The label includes a drawing of Mr Pickwick, so it still counts!"

The Big Wheel: First Spin

October 3, 2008 / Jane Stevenson

This October the Archives Hub is taking part in The Big Draw. We want you to make drawings on the themes of Fairgrounds or Playgrounds, or Cycling or Recycling. Scan or photograph your drawing, and then email the digital version to us. We’ll post your pics here each Friday. And we’ll give an Archives Hub notepad and propelling pencil to everyone who sends us a drawing, and the first name out of the cycle helmet will receive colouring pens, a pencil case and a notepad – all made from recycled car tyres! If you send us your postal address, we won’t use it for anything else.

1. Swing Ride Silhouette
Above: Drawing by Amanda Hill, formerly of the Archives Hub, and now relocated to Canada. This pic links to a larger version. Submitted by Amanda:"Mike says it looks like a pizza, but then he’s a complete philistine."

2. Recycle
Above: Quick drawing by Paddy of the Archives Hub. Submitted by Paddy: "I was going to try the Manchester Wheel but it looks a bit difficult… "

The Big Draw 2008: The Big Wheel

September 26, 2008 / Jane Stevenson

This October (2008) the Archives Hub is taking part in The Big Draw. We want you to make drawings on the themes of Fairgrounds and Playgrounds or Cycling and Recycling. Scan or photograph your drawing, and then email the digital version to us. We’ll post your pics here each Friday. And we’ll give an Archives Hub notepad and propelling pencil to everyone who sends us a drawing, and the first name out of the cycle helmet will receive colouring pens, a pencil case and a notepad – all made from recycled car tyres! If you send us your postal address, we won’t use it for anything else.

Above Concept drawing by Chris Baker for a submerged ferris wheel for the film Artificial Intelligence: AI, originally developed by Stanley Kubrick and realised by Steven Spielberg after Kubrick’s death in 1999. From the Stanley Kubrick Archive. Image provided by University of the Arts London with all rights reserved by the respective owners and reproduced with the permission of the Stanley Kubrick Estate. Submitted by Karyn Stuckey, Archivist.

History and memory

September 16, 2008 / Jane Stevenson

“History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.” (Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces)

When I attended a workshop on the Ontology of the Archive back in March 2008, Louise Craven from The National Archives talked about archives referenced in literature in a very engaging and thought-provoking way. It made me more aware of how archives are evident in many novels in one way or another. Fugitive Pieces (a truly great and inspiring book) is not particularly about archives but it resonates because it is about memory and history and understanding, and about the spaces, the emptiness, about what is missing…but then the absence is just as important as the presence in so many things, and not least in shaping and interpreting history. Archivists know this better than most, as they can be responsible for choosing what stays and what goes as far as documentary evidence is concerned, and they are responsible for deciding how to describe what exists, which has so much impact upon whether and how things are accessed and used, and arguably on how things are actually interpreted.

In some ways, archives represent history rather than memory because they are not consciously created to be research material – at least not in the sense that they may become historical evidence years into the future. When the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944) wrote over 2,000 letters to his wife, particularly whilst he was in India designing New Delhi, he did not think about the letters being read nearly one hundred years hence, and used by social and architectural historians (at least we assume he did not). So, do letters such as these give us a piece of history? Do they represent the history rather than the memory? I have generally been inclined to think that archives are a means to access history in a direct way, as much as that is possible at all – they bring history closer because they are not an interpretation or an intellectualising of past events, but the stuff of past events. Having said that, reading a novel such as Fugitive Pieces, the past is brought to life and is given soul and emotion so effectively, and maybe that is really the life blood of history. In many ways its central theme is the holocaust, but rather than describing events, it just barely touches upon them. Yet the poignancy of the writing builds up emotions and empathy that seem to bring history to life far more palpably than facts could ever do.

Documents may not be emotional in themselves, but they can convey a great deal of emotion. Love letters may be obviously moving, and there may be expectation of the emotion that we should feel when reading them, but the simplest of texts – maybe a list of household goods or a hastily scribbled note, can also convey a great deal of feeling, especially if we know something of the context. This partly explains the continual importance that archivists place on provenance and the integrity of the whole archive. If we want to try to understand the feelings of past events, then it may be that the more context we have the better. But ironically by having so much context, the reality of a place in time will always elude us in the end; a broader perspective can draw us away from understanding the experience that the creator of the material might have felt.

When I worked as an archivist in a repository, I didn’t really muse on these things; now that I am surrounded by descriptions of archives without having to concern myself with the actual physical materials, it seems to encourage the occasional philosophical outburst. I think it has something to do with the fact that the descriptions are removed from the physical things and so I spend quite a bit of time thinking about them in abstract…or something along those lines.

Beyond Brochures — A Few Thoughts about Marketing

September 12, 2008 / Joy Palmer

The Archives Hub is headed for a bit of a makeover this autumn, and lately my head has been spinning with buzzwords like ‘brand identity,’ ‘brand values, “strategic marketing” and ”USPs,” (Unique Selling Points — for those who don’t know…I didn’t). For someone like me who’s been in the HE sector for many a year, these terms lift me out of my comfort zone — from academia, where we like to be low-key about these matters (or at least act that way) to the business world, where we suddenly asked to think about our users and stakeholders as ‘customers.’

On the other hand, the process is an exciting one, and I am learning to rethink my view of ‘Marketing’ as something much more than advertising and spin. An excellent book I can recommend to anyone in our sector who is undertaking marketing or promotional activities is Developing Strategic Marketing Plans That Really Work: A Toolkit for Public Libraries by Terry Kendrick. (Incidentally, I learned from Kendrick that Marketing and Promotions are certainly not the same thing — more on that below). Obviously, we’re not a public library, but Kendrick’s points are very applicable to those who are running library or archival services that are funded by public money. Significant amounts of this money are devoted to services like ours, and maximising value from this expenditure requires that we communicate effectively with our users. We need to demonstrate value to “meet, and hopefully exceed, government standards and performance targets” (2).

Kendrick points out that marketing as a concept is often misunderstood — it is not synonymous with advertising and promotions, which is just one facet of marketing. Instead,

“Marketing is a dialogue over time. In other words, it is a two-way process which is not simply the sending out of messages from the library to users or non-users. In our everyday lives all of us are bombarded with advertising messages and slogans, many of which completely wash over us… For libraries this suggests that the most effective marketing is based upon an ongoing conversation with users and non-users and not simply upon slogan-based marketing campaigns.”

This approach to marketing appeals because this is something that many of us in this profession strive for — understanding and responding to user’s needs. I realise that a great deal of the planning and engagement we undertake at the Hub could fall under the umbrella of ‘marketing activity.’ This doesn’t mean that all we are is ‘marketers,’ but it does highlight that user-engagement is central to what we do, and that engagement comes in many forms (whether via a usability test or the Hub’s interface, or a meeting with our colleagues at The National Archives and other archival networks to discuss where we are headed as a collective). What we need to be clearer about is our mission, our values, and where we want to be headed.

Thankfully, our central mission is coming into sharper focus, and this autumn, in addition to a surface makeover, we’re looking forward to creating a marketing strategy that achieves a more effective dialogue with our users.