community – The Un-Accessioned Archivist

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.

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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.

Money, Money, Money – not always sunny in the archive sector

Archives have always been an underfunded sector, and I don’t see that changing any time soon. A lot of the time this is out of our control. The cost of living is ever increasing and budgets at almost all organisations are being squeezed ever tighter. In a world where everyone needs more money, archivists have to learn the skills of financial planning and making their budgets stretch as far as possible while also being ready to take full advantage of any small funding pots which may become available. This blog looks at some of the issues the sector has with funding and perhaps look at some possible solutions, if there are any.

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One of the main issues facing the sector is project funding. This is of particular concern in the world of digital preservation and digitisation. Project funding used to focus on short terms contracts to catalogue collections or carry out a specific promotional activity. Although not ideal, this type of project provides additional resource for a set piece of work that would not otherwise happen due to resource constraints. However, more recently, project funding has focused on digitisation as a means of preserving vulnerable collections and making them more accessible. This work is important, but it is not project work. Once the items are digitised, the digital copies need to be preserved. This is ongoing work. And the platform hosting the images online needs to be financed, maintained and kept in working order. This is also ongoing work. Viewing digitisation as a short term funded is problematic, particularly when that funding is given to community groups with limited resources in the first place.

Funding for short term archivist contracts can also be problematic if the organisation does not already have an archivist in place. Contracting someone to create an archive catalogue and make items available without resource available to continue the work after the contract has ended is problematic and puts records at risk. Short term contracts should always be a supplementary provision,

The recent relaunch of the Archives Revealed funding programme by the UK National Archives is a great boost to the UK archive sector. Real thought has been put into the types of grants available and what work will be funded. It is however interesting that those applying for consortium or cataloguing grants much spend 20% of their award on promotional activity, which can include digitisation, but no mention is made of a requirement to correctly preserve this content once the funding runs out. If a well-established National Archive hasn’t produced guidelines on this, then how can the smaller organisations be expected to forward plan to this extent?

The money writes with white chalk is on hand, draw concept.

It’s also interesting that one of the funding partners in the Archives Revealed Programme is the National Lottery Heritage Fund, who are on of the main contributors to the short-term funded projects across the archive sector. I think that funders do need to start taking responsibility for the projects they are funding and think more about the sustainability of them. Perhaps funding less projects but giving more money for longer term preservation should be a consideration. Ensuring that a project has resource to continue in some way when funding runs out should also be a consideration when awarding money to organisations.

But there is also an onus on the organisations and archivists themselves to ensure that any funding application is thought through to the very end and the sustainability of any projects is kept at the forefront when deciding what to apply for. Our main focus in this situation as in any other, is the collections in our care and there is no point having collections digitised if we can’t them preserve those copies. Resource is a great thing, but it needs to be invested in the right places.

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.

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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.

Making connections and finding communities – The right conversations

I don’t think that making connections is a contentious subject for a blog post, but I do think it’s a really important one. As I mentioned in previous posts, I believe that the role of the archivist is changing, and I think this involves a more focused approach to collecting. For some time now the sector has been talking about addressing gaps in collections, but how do we go about finding the communities that represent those gaps; and even more importantly, how do we have the right conversations that encourages collaboration with us in a way that is fair. That’s the subject of this blog post.

Although collecting has always been an important part of archive work, there hasn’t always been a targeted focus on what should be collected and what shouldn’t. Recent archive sector research has discussed the gaps in our collections and archives across the world are working to fill these and provide better representation to as many people and groups as possible. However, communities have also been doing this work, noticing the gaps in their own stories and working to fill them without institutional help. It could be argued that this is a factor in the increase in community archive work we have seen in the last few years.

There is an argument that if communities are doing this work themselves, why are archive organisations getting involved? Communities are best placed to tell their story and collect what they know to be the essential records for doing this and archives don’t need to be involved. For me, there is an element of truth to this. However, it is also true that community groups and archives are particularly under funded and under resourced and this for me is the main reason for the wider archive sector to get involved. Collaboration is always the key to success for me and I think we can do a lot more together than we can apart. However, the trust needs to be there and at the moment that is definitely not always the case.

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As previously mentioned, community archives are wary of engaging with institutions, seeing them as gatekeepers which will keep them from their own records and store them for years without doing any work to make them accessible. This is generally due to lack of fund on the part of the institution but this is largely irrelevant to the group who have worked so hard to pull a collection together and feel really passionate about it’s topic. Approaching community groups is also challenging because, just like archives, no two are the same. Some have a wealth of archive knowledge and training programmes to help spread this throughout their teams. Some are individuals with true passion for the items they collect but no real understanding of the good practice required to preserve them long term. This is a particular problem with digital records, where storage is regularly confused for preservation and access via a website is a common form of ‘preserving’ records.

So, what do we do? I would suggest we approach these groups ready to learn. Make it clear that we are interested in what they’ve been doing and are keen to help, but most importantly, help within their context. We are not the saviours of these collections as they have already been saved, but we can help with advice and guidance on what happens next. Offering collaboration over collections deposit for me is a good thing. If these collections can be preserved to the standards required for long term preservation within the community, then we should be facilitating that and helping to facilitate access and promotion rather than suggesting removal of the collection for cataloguing. Having a list of resources on hand will be a huge help in this work.

It’s also important to show actual interest in the communities we want to connect with. Go to their events, have conversations about things other than archives and forge a connection that’s about more than work. I think if we can do this, we are a good way down the path of collaboration. Working together, for me, is the key to all archive work, and this includes working with other archivists and record practitioners. There is a wealth of hugely successful projects and work in this area already and learning from those who have done or are already doing it will really help improve our own practice. Let’s work together and move the sector forward in a new way that benefits us all and makes more collections accessible in new ways. It all starts with a conversation…

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.

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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.