I attended the ICA/SUV Conference in Dundee this week – that is, the International Council on Archives Section on University and Research Institution Archives. This is my first report of the event.

The conference began with an entertaining keynote by George McKenzie of the National Archives of Scotland, who opened by explaining, for the benefit of those from other countries, the rather unusual set up within the UK. We have a British Olympic team but if you went into a local pub in Dundee and asked how the British football team were doing you would not get a very good reception! So although we are all British, in many ways we have separate identities and histories. There are important legal and administrative differences between England and Scotland that impact on archives management. George talked about the National Register of Saisines, which is a Scottish property register, and how it has gone through six different formats, from handwritten to xerox and through to digital, whilst retaining the same content. The changes have all been in reaction to user demand, so the motivations for the move from handwritten to typescript were really the same as the move from Xerox to digital: it is always about satisfying user demand for access.

I found George’s description of the ScotlandsPeople service interesting, because as well as an online source the initiative has included the creation of a centre in Edinburgh, partly with a view to ‘genealogical tourism’. Studies show that 5% of visitors to Scotland are interested in family history, and they are often the visitors who stay longest and spend the most. This does seem to contrast with the approach in England, as the Family Records Centre in Islington, which is fairly central London, is closing down and operations are moving to The National Archives in Kew, which is a little way out of London (and on the infamous District Line!). A particular remark that drew my attention was his assertion that maybe it is no bad thing to compete with the private sector in the field of family history, as it means that the public sector has to be focussed and ensure that it delivers a good service that can compete effectively with others.

George’s talk ended with reference to the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320, which was a formal Declaration of Independence and is one of the most famous records in the National Archives. He also showed us an image of a most important document with the first known reference to the distilling of whisky!

Megan Sniffin-Marinoff of Harvard University also gave a keynote which looked at emerging trends within the higher education sector. Whilst acknowledging the great diversity of university archives and contexts across the globe, she did draw out some common themes that are likely to affect many of us. Amongst other things, she referred to life-long learning and the increase in students outside of the typical 18-21 year old range. She looked at some of the reasons for this change, such as the need for people to re-skill in a fast changing world and the increasing demands of employers. She also raised issues surrounding distance learning and new innovations in teaching and proposed that we might have to think differently about our outreach activities as a result of this changing student body.

There were a number of enlightening talks from archivists of different countries, and I thought the contrast between Latvia and Lebanon was particularly striking, because they are both very different from the typical UK experience. Gatis Karlsons explained to us that the University of Latvia has 28,000 students (the country has a population of 2 million). The way that the archives are managed is influenced by Soviet theories, because of the occupation of Latvia until the declaration of independence in 1991. One obvious difference to me (which caused some confusion until I realised) was that the term ‘archives’ is used to refer to records in their current, semi-current and non-current states. Whilst Gatis talked about the ‘archive’ where he works, the records for long-term preservation are in fact transferred to the state archives, so in UK terms his place of work would probably be seen more as a records centre and a place practising records management. There seemed to be a very integrated and rigorous approach to record keeping, with boards of experts to appraise the records, consisting of archivists, academics, legal and financial representatives. The archives have very few visitors, only about 10 per year, although the records are doubtless a rich source, so this does seem to be a shame. They therefore have no purpose-built search room.

Unfortunately Samar Mikati Kaissi from the American University of Beirut in Lebanon was not able to attend the conference and so Susanne Belovari from Tufts University in Boston gave her presentation. It was a sobering experience to hear about a situation where war has played such an all-pervasive part in the functioning of the archive. In fact, when Susanne originally asked Samar about the effects of war Samar said that they were not that significant, but as they talked what emerged was that the effects are ever-present and society has simply adjusted to them. The archive has managed to continue to function and is the only academic institution with a fully fledged archive programme and it has carried out some digitisation projects, but the numbers of researchers has been affected by the war and political upheavals (it is generally around 1,000 per year). Also, the war has affected staff morale and staff attendance, as people are often more preoccupied with the welfare of their families. There is some national archives legislation, which would not apply to the University as it is a private institution, but Samar said that no-one knows exactly what it is anyway! Rather ironically, the archive has no disaster preparedness plan, but when the archive was set up the decision was taken to put it in the basement because this offered t
he best protection from bombings. There are no archival suppliers in Lebanon so they are dependent on getting boxes, folders, etc, from outside. They also suffer from an intermittent electricity supply, which compounds the inadequate environmental situation.

Image from Flickr (Creative Commons licence)

I attended the Liverpool University Centre for Archive Studies (LUCAS) 60th anniversary event recently. There was one attendee from the first year of the course, in 1947, and she cut the anniversary cake with one of the recent graduates, which was a nice touch. The weekend was very successful, despite the fact that it rained almost constantly. One of the excursions was to see the Williamson Tunnels. These are the curious creation of an eccentric Victorian gentlelman, a labyrinth of tunnels and caverns constructed in the early 1800’s. Joseph Williamson, a rich merchant, seems to have decided to offer work to local unemployed men to build these tunnels from altruistic motives. But the real reason for building them is not clear, and there is no documentation to tell us.

A group of us archivists were taken round by one of the Friends of the Tunnels. He talked about the bricks used for the tunnels and we suggested that the source of the bricks could be traced – being archivists we were inevitably thinking about possible sources to help put together the history of the tunnels. However, I got the feeling that our guide preferred the sense of mystery to remain, and didn’t really want to know about documentary sources!

You can find out more at http://www.williamsontunnels.com/

We also enjoyed a fascinating talk by Professor John Belchem on the history of Liverpool. He has recently edited a book, Liverpool 800: Culture, Character and History, which charts the history of the city from 1207. One of the points he made that struck me was how Liverpool had built its reputation as a city of commerce and tended to look out to the sea, the source of wealth and status, rather than looking inward to England, which has in some ways been responsible for the sense that Liverpool is rather isolated. When the fortunes of the city started changing for the worse, there was a reluctance within Liverpool to label it as an industrial city, because it still saw itself as a city of commerce and empire, and this meant that when the government was giving out aid to struggling industrial centres, Liverpool was largely by-passed.

As well as excursions and talks, we also took advantage of a table tennis room (croquet was out unfortunately). Margaret Procter, LUCAS Course Director, and I, were the table tennis champions, hence the rather odd picture of us with some garishly coloured ping pong balls!

I have just read an entry on the e-Foundation blog referring to Jakob Nielsen’s alertbox entry ‘Write Articles, Not Blog Postings’ where he relates an incident where he advised a ‘world leader in his field’ to invest time in writing articles rather than starting a blog, which Nielsen seems to define (erroneously I would say) as posting numerous short comments on blogosphere discussions. It may be true that blog entries do not always represent highly detailed, top quality, innovative thinking, but I think that many blogs are well worth reading and perform a useful function. As Andy Powell says on the e-Foundation blog, Nielsen does seem to be assuming that a blog entry is always superficial and derivative.

It is true that we started the Archives Hub blog without any real in-depth analysis of the cost and benefits of doing so, and that we weren’t thinking of posting ground-breaking content, but maybe the material point is that we started it with the notion that we could just try it out and see how it goes. I suppose this is one of the underlying drivers of Web 2.0, and we felt that at the very least it would be useful to post news, with hopefully some ideas and comments that would be useful to archivists and others working in similar areas. Whilst the pressure to blog can sometimes be kind of intimidating, there is no doubt that a blog entry is often forthcoming where an article for a peer reviewed journal would never materialise. I am sure that we are not alone in this situation. Apart from the fact that we are not strictly research staff, and could not find the time to write in-depth articles of this nature, we also want to be immediate and current and we see great advantages in the immediacy of a blog.

Nielsen says that weblogs are useful for business projects and for sites that sell cheap products. Well, I beg to differ. Whilst many blogs are not terribly useful for my work, I have feeds for a few dozen that I think are well worth casting my eye over. I can just read the posts that seem most relevant and interesting to me. I am generally more likely to do this than to search out articles in academic journals.

P.S. I should say that I have generally found Nielsen’s alertbox to be useful and worthwhile. I well remember his top 10 mistakes in Web design providing invaluable advice, back in the days when I had little idea about usability and accessibility.

The recent Research Portals for Arts and Humanities (RePAH) study found that

I’ve just been reading Taking Part: The National Survey of Culture, Leisure and Sport Annual Report 2005-2006. Well, i’ve been reading the conclusions and then reading the archive bits, as its rather long and i’m less interested in those taking part in active sport and gambling.

Anyway, it seems that ‘6 percent of all adults attended an archive at least once during the past twelve months.’ That’s about 2.4 million, which is a respectable number. Almost all of these had engaged in other cultural or sporting activities. With my Archives Hub bias I am immediately struck by the fact that this survey is about physical visits to archives and so misses out on satisfied users who have got the information that they needed from online resources.

I was a little surprised that the majority had visited (I can’t use the word ‘attended’ – it doesn’t sound right) just once or twice (80%). I would have thought a larger proportion would have visited several times in a year. I was pleased to see that though attendance by ethnicity showed that adults from white ethnic backgrounds had higher rates of attendance, there were still significant proportions from other ethnic groups visiting archives. The figures for attendance by qualification showed the majority of visitors had A-levels or above and the age range was pretty much as expected.

We are of course always keen to attract more people to use archives, but not so encouraging was the fact that the largest majority who had not visited one said they had ‘no need to go’. I think there will always be a significant proportion who are not, at least on the surface, interested in documented history, but having said that, through exhibitions and interactive events we might persuade some of these people that archives can be relevant to them, even if they are not interested in sitting in a reading room. There were 14% who said that visiting an archive had not occurred to them, so this is a potential group to tap into.

From the point of view of the Hub, the 14% who felt that they might visit an archive if there was better information on how to find material are a significant group, as our mission is really to enable users to find archive materials more easily. The survey collected data from 28,000 people, so 14% is pretty significant. However, we can’t do much about the 30% who would visit if they had more free time!