Tag: archive

But, that’s not who we are?

I don’t think I’m sharing any huge secret when I say that archivists, and maybe by default archives, have a bit of an image problem outside of our sector. Since I joined the sector we have battled against the stereotypical cardigan wearing gatekeeper image of our profession with little success. But working within the sector, I know that archivists are a vibrant, passionate, friendly bunch of people who on the whole love the job that they do and want to help others explore the joys of archives. So where dos the disconnect come in? And what do we need to do to change it? That’s what I’m going to talk about in today’s blog.  

A closeup shot of a door with black and yellow stripes

The perception of archivists from outside the sector is something that’s always bothered me. When I decided to become an archivist, I was met with two main questions when I told people; one, ‘what’s that’? and two, ‘is that for people like us’? The latter was in reference to my working class background. I didn’t actually know what an archive was myself until much later in life and even when I found out, it did still seem like a sector that might be closed off to me. Perseverance paid off, but the fact that both these questions still plague the sector almost 20 years later is a problem. Worryingly, a problem that we don’t seem to be moving towards solving at any great pace.  

I think this may be something to do with a topic I mentioned in a previous blog. I think  perceptions of what an archivist is and isn’t are warped to the extent that people are so unsure of what we do and if it’s for them that they just don’t engage. The other side of the coin is that this is a truth universally acknowledged by archivists, but then also ignored. We don’t seem to care enough about this perception to do the work towards changing it. It is easier to continue to put pictures of our collections on social media and hope that the right person sees them and makes the leap to engage with the archive rather than putting our heads over the parapet and encouraging people to explore archives.  

This is not a blanket opinion of the sector. There are archives who post some content about the work they do, or fit information about archives into the latest Tik Tok trend, but I think sector wide input is needed for the perception to begin to change. And we also need to acknowledge that we want it to change. Explore Your Archive was designed as a mechanism to help the sector do this, but it has turned into a content sharing platform which floods the internet with images of archive content but does little to explain why people should engage with archives and what they can learn from them.  

As also mentioned in a previous blog, we need to acknowledge that the sector is changing and the work we do will be changing with it. Modern record collecting and community engagement is becoming the main focus of our role which is very different from the inward facing focus on catalogue creating and nothing else that archivists did when the profession established.  

So how do we fix it? I don’t really have an answer, but I do have some ideas. Using the tools we have already, and our skillset would be a great start. Using Explore Your Archive in a different way as a sector would help. It would provide a unified voice through which people literally all over the world could be encouraged to visit their archives and find things of interest. Open days are also a useful tool, as is engaging with local media and telling people about what we do and why rather than what we have. Increasing community engagement work will also increase our potential audience and may also increase our holdings as community groups realise what we can help with. To me, the benefits are many, but it would be remiss not to mention the main barriers to making this work. Archive budgets and resources are already stretched to their limits so an anonymous blog telling people to spend more money and time on yet another task is likely not overly welcome. Prioritisation of time and resource is always going to be a factor for our sector and I believe this is important enough to warrant prioritising and focus from the sector as a whole. Image is everything and we need to work on improving ours.  

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.