Category: Archives

Advocacy – For you and me

For me, being an archivist or a record keeper is a vocation more than a profession. However you stumble across the sector, you stay for a love of the collections, the people you work with and the stories you can tell. However, although we are really good at promoting the collections in our care, we are not so good at advocating for our collections, and for ourselves as archivists. Advocating for enough resources to properly collect our collections tends to come second to us trying to do everything. This blog looks at some ways we can make changes to the current status quo, both or ourselves and for the wider record keeping sector.

Business team putting together jigsaw puzzle isolated flat vector illustration. Cartoon partners working in connection. Teamwork, partnership and cooperation concept

The one thing that we as a sector need to get better at is advocating for ourselves and our collections. We know the importance of the records in our care, it’s why we do the job we do. But not everyone understands the importance of the work we do and the collections we preserve. And this means that the time required to complete the tasks involved in our role is also in most cases underestimated. Our diligence and desire to properly protect the records in our care and do a good job means that we take on far more work than is possible during our contracted hours and somehow complete what is asked of us, in many cases at great cost to our personal lives and in some cases, our mental health. But how do we stop this?

Stop doing it all

Some responses when I’ve brought this up in conversation include, ‘If I don’t do it who will? Or ‘It’s just a busy time just now, it will go back to normal soon’. Or ‘it’s in my job description so I need to do it’. It’s at this point we should remember that we all have someone above us. We are not the be all and end all at the organisations we work for and yes, we have a responsibility to the collections in our care, but we cannot preserve them to our own detriment. If work not getting done is what it takes for those above us to realise, they are under resourced, then so be it. Busy times never get easier, when you work over your capacity, that becomes the norm, you are setting your new expected work level and yes it might be in your job description, but it’s not in that description, or your contract that you need to work yourself into the ground to get everything on the list done. This is the beginning of advocating for yourself. I’m not suggesting that you stop working. I am saying that you work with your management to prioritise tasks, do what is possible within your contracted hours and enjoy your free time. Making it clear what work is required, and staying firm on what you as one person can and can’t do, helps highlight the labour involved in what we do and shows that the investment in additional resource is worthwhile.

Keep Speaking Up

Once you start on this journey, it will become easier to continue to keep advocating for yourself. The ripple effect this will have on the sector will hopefully be widespread. Having examples of similar organisations with good resource levels and work plans will give those struggling examples to point to. The effect of the ARA pay and salary guidelines has been huge since they were implemented. We can achieve more as a group than we can individually. Keep talking to each other and if something doesn’t feel or look right, speak up. Let’s help each other.

Donation Trauma – Is it a thing?

Without collecting and selection, the role of an archivist couldn’t exist. We are the modern-day hunter gatherers, seeking out historically valuable information and collecting it together in well organised groups for us to look after forever more. But how much thought do we really give to those handing their treasures over to us, and what impact does this transaction have on them? I think about this in more depth in this post.

Whether it’s creating a brand-new collection, or adding to an already established one, collecting is a core role of the archivist. Knowing where to look to find the records that tell the stories that need to be told is a skill built up over time. However, it’s a task that comes with many pitfalls and is problematic in a range of ways. How do we decide what is important? How do we know what story is the most important to tell? We know that we can’t collect everything, but although our role is to curate content, how do we know we’re saving the right things? Across the archive sector, what is kept depends largely on who is in charge of the collection and even though policies and processes are in place to help guide decisions, there is no real standardisation and opinions are what decide the value and therefore the fate of a record.

Sometimes this can lead to us being offered collections that don’t fit with our collecting policy, or would be better placed with another organisation, or even in some cases may not have the value that the potential donor thinks it does. We’re well versed in how to deal with this. Empathy and compassion are under valued skills of the archive profession in general. But do we apply this thought process to those we accept collections from? I’m not sure we always do.

A lot of our records come from community groups who have been building up collections as a labour of love for many years. Even some individuals have collected valuable records and have decided to donate them so ensure they survive long term. However, in our excitement to fill the gaps in our holdings, do we always acknowledge how difficult this decision could have been? Or the reasons it has been made? Having worked in the sector for so long, I’ve formed strong emotional attachments to the collections in my care, even when I wasn’t the collector, so having to give up the records which have played such an important roll in your life can, in some cases, be really difficult. To be handed paperwork that feels like signing your life away by an over excited archivist who keeps talking about the gaps that’s been filled or the importance of the collection will likely not make this easier.

Large group of people different silhouette crowded together in heart shape isolated on white background. Vector illustration

Trauma has become an important word across the sector in recent years, particularly in reference to trauma informed practice and the emotional trauma that archivists can go through dealing with records with difficult subject matter. This in an important part of the work we do and needs to be explored more to ensure we feel able to do our jobs every day. But we do also need to be mindful of the impact we can have on others and be prepared to act with compassion when needed. Even if inside, we are doing cartwheels about the amazing stuff being donated. Allowing free access to donated collections can also help ease this transition. Donators should be welcomed to work on the collections they have contributed, or just be able to look at them whenever opening hours facilitate this. No one will know more than them about their collections and cultivating these relationships can only bring us benefits.

I think the previous blogs about working with community archives inform this post as well. Communication skills have never been more important in our role, and we should always take a minute to think about the task we are doing and how it may affect the people we are working with. This can only ever be a good thing.   

Archives, Archivists, and Storytelling

From a personal perspective, this blog is quite a difficult one to write. Before I begin, I don’t think this is a black and white issue, but it’s been something that’s been percolating in my mind for a long time, so I thought it appropriate to bring it up here.

One of the key components of archives is their role in storytelling. Some of the best stories in the world are held in archives and with the digital technology sphere growing and expanding what feels like daily, there is a wealth of ways these stories can now be expressed, interpreted and told.

And when I qualified it was one of the aspects of the job that I was most looking forward to doing. I liked the idea of being able to research a collection I had just catalogued for the nuggets of interesting information I could share with the world. Every archive course across the UK includes an element of outreach and advocacy and the Explore Your Archive Campaign encourages us to tell the stories in our collections and show the world our treasures through the medium of storytelling. However, in the last 5 to 10 years, this has become problematic for me for several reasons.

Firstly, in every institution I’ve worked in, promotion of the collections has taken priority over the actual work I was hired to do – namely catalogue a collection and make it accessible. In project cataloguing roles I’ve been told to include less description or only catalogue to series level to ensure that time remains at the end of the project for promotion, whether that be online or via exhibitions. It never made sense to me how I could promote a collection well when I wasn’t entirely sure what was in it; and my title was project cataloguing archivist in some cases – Surely, I was hired to catalogue. The sector seems to me to have forgotten that the best way to promote a collection is a well laid out detailed catalogue that users can access, understand and interpret according to their research needs. In my mind what we should actually be promoting is the archive itself, the work being done and why it’s so important. We should be a gateway for discovery, not gate keeping what we think the most important and interesting parts of our collections are.

Secondly, the world has changed so much since I qualified that it’s changed the role (and in some ways perceptions) of the archive and the archivist too. The focus used to be on the collections held that were hundreds of years old, preserving them and telling the stories contained within them. I think this is still a core part of the job, but it’s been joined by a sharper focus on modern collecting. Having learnt from the gaps that exist in these older collections, archivists are now focused on making sure we collect a full representation of the world around us and that no voice is forgotten or left behind. This is a huge step forward and should continue as there is still improvement to be made in this area. However, in many cases, we still cling onto the notion that we are the best people to tell the stories held in modern collections and I believe we need to analyse this feeling. With modern collecting, many of the record subjects are still alive, and although our collecting will ensure they have a voice in the future – they still have their own voice now. With community archives, whole communities still exist which lived the truth described in the records we hold, and no one is more qualified to tell that story then them.

Perhaps with these collections, our role should be to facilitate storytelling, to make the collections easily searchable and accessible so the people who can see themselves within it are encouraged to use it and tell their story. Yes, exhibitions around collections from hundreds of years ago still have a place but are there scholars of the period who could interpret the records in a new way, or someone with ancestors from that period that has a particular link they could share. Oral histories can be collected and added to the collection to enrich it and create a range of perspectives for those who look at the collection many years from now. Surely that is the role of the archivist? To leave the most accessible, representative collections that we can for the future? Our advocacy work should focus on this and why the work we do is so important.

This is where the true value of the Explore Your Archive Campaign comes in. We shouldn’t be telling people what we think they should be interested in, or promoting the records that are our favourite from the collections. We should be saying this is what we do and this is why it matters and without it you wouldn’t have records like these. But there is no point in pointing out records which are only accessible via online exhibition because the catalogue was badly completed.

So for me, I’ve hung up my storytelling coat. I want to focus on making collections available for others to tell their own story. I was to help give a voice to those who may feel they’ve been forgotten and the last thing I want to do is gatekeep that experience. In the future, if where I’m working has no collections backlog (does anyone have this? Will we ever have this?) then research would be a nice to do job. But until then, advocacy and storytelling will remain separate. It’s not that I won’t promote what the archive I work in has, but it will be through a lense of archivist and not storyteller – because I’m an archivist and that’s what I am and I’m still very proud to be one.

What an Archive is – and what it isn’t

Following on from my what is an archivist blog, I thought it might be useful to think about what an archive is, and also what it isn’t. Traditionally, archives have been intrinsically linked with tangibility and historical importance, but some events I have attended recently have discussed the archive in a wider context and played with the definition in a way which not only confused, but also irritated me. So, I decided to attempt to unpack these feelings a bit more and see if I’m justified in feeling this way or if I need to open up my own definitions.

For me, the traditional meaning of archives is (was?) twofold. One, the building or repository where the physical or digital collections are stored and can be retrieved for access. I haven’t seen this side of the definition changed or challenged (always happy to be corrected), and two, the actual items that are being collected, preserved and retrieved for access from this building or repository. For me, the two are forever linked and cannot be separated and this is what keeps order in my archive world. I don’t attribute any physical descriptions or formats to these items as collections can contain anything, (just see the twitter post about locks of hair and other such interesting items for confirmation), but I do believe that for something to be an archive it needs to be collected in some way and the main reason for this is that I believe a central component of archives is  for them to be accessed. If you can’t create access to it in some way, I really strongly believe that it’s not an archive and stretching the term only adds confusion to an already confused sector that struggles to define itself at the best of times. I also think by its nature, an archive needs to be unchanging and will therefore have some evidentiary value, even just to confirm that something existed, or something was said. If we don’t have this stability and trust, we don’t have archives.

However, recent discussions I’ve heard, taken part in or read, state that the purpose of an archive is to replicate a memory or an experience and for this reason, ANYTHING can be an archive. Arguments that the body (or certain parts of it, like the brain, or sexual organs) are an archive due to the experiences they have and the memories they create. Individuals’ homes are archives, for the same reason and recently on the listserv, the term ‘artchive’ was used to refer to works of art as archives. At a talk I attended a few months ago, an activist turned archivist made the claim that anything that can create a memory can be an archive.  This need to turn everything around us into an archive baffles me. Archivists have accepted that we cannot collect everything and to try would be a huge waste of time and resource. This is why appraisal exists – it is absolute necessity and statements like the above only serve to make our role more complex than it already is.

There is a huge amount of discourse and research around the idea of archives and memory and I’m not going to discuss any of that here or I’d be writing a book. But I will say that I think the notion that archives are there to replicate or create past events that archive users did not attend is fundamentally wrong. Archives can be used in a range of ways to encourage memories from people who were there or provide a small glimpse into what the past may have been like for those accessing the archive in some cases hundred of years later, but the idea that we should be aiming to recreate these experiences make very little sense to me. I want to use archives to learn about the past and see why things happened or why people involved felt the way we did. I want to know what other people experienced and why it’s different to what I experience now. This is why an archive needs to be something that can be collected. A person (or part of them) cannot be an archive because they cannot be collected, preserved and accessed in perpetuity by anyone who wants to – and neither should they be. The importance of archives in storytelling, accessing small parts of the past and learning from those who have gone before is what makes archives so unique. We don’t need to keep adding to the term to make it count- it’s already one of the most important terms there is and our role is to highlight that by continuing to collect, preserve and facilitate access.

I did a lot of soul searching for this blog as I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t just stuck in the past and determined not to learn and grow in this area. I also tried to compare it to other sectors and what would happen if this logic were to be applied there. The best I could come up with is a lawyer presenting evidence to a court. Evidence needs to be concrete to support the case being made. In fact, in many cases archives are used for this exact purpose because they are unchanging and held in such a way that they can’t be altered. Using the above logic, a defendant could claim that their body is evidence as they were there and experienced the situation. It wouldn’t be accepted because there is no evidence of the fact that body was there. The body, to me, cannot be an archive for similar reasons.

Team discussing bookkeeping report, working late at night at bureaucracy record in storage room. Diverse depository workers analyzing administrative documents, discovering accountancy files

I don’t think it is the job of the archive to create memories around the content they hold and facilitate. Yes, memories can be made about interactions with records and experiences can be had in an archive when using the material, but that for me is where the facilitation start sand ends. I tried to open my mind for this blog and think theoretically but for this particular question, I found it really unhelpful and confusing, and my conclusion is I’m going to stick my previous definitions – if only so the sector that I love still continues to make sense to me.

I would be keen to hear from anyone who thinks the opposite as me. Either on here via the comments, or on social media via #UnAccessioned .