Tag: heritage

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.

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.

Happy rich banker celebrating income growth. Broker enjoying success in stock market trading. Flat vector illustration for money, finance, millionaire concept

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.

Lets Get Digital – Or Should We?

Let’s get Digital! – Or should we?

Previous blogs talked about the ever-changing archive sector and no change has had a more dramatic impact than the development of technology and the establishment of digital archive work. Digital Preservation very quickly became another millstone around the neck of archivists along with the acquisition, appraisal, cataloguing, conservation, access, promotion, advocacy, research and any tasks as appropriate work we were already doing. But should this be the case? Has it got to the point that digital preservation (and maybe other aspects of digital work) has become so large that specific roles should be created to carry out this work? Should digital preservation be its own sector completely? That’s the topic of the musings in this blog.

The unofficial start of the digital preservation sector can be traced to a conference on metadata in 2000. Even then, the scale of the problem was well known. Digital records are created at a far faster pace than physical records due to ease of use. But as archivists, our role is to preserve, so we turned ourselves to the challenge, only to find preserving digital records was not the same as physical records and a far higher degree of technical knowledge was needed than was taught. The context in which digital preservation takes place was also far more complex than in the physical world and knowledge was required of anti-virus, cyber security, software systems, file formats and a raft of other topics before digital preservation could even be thought about.

It is definitely true that many archivists have risen to this challenge. Many have moved into digital archivist roles and completed the training to specialise in preserving digital records. However, many have struggled with turning their hand to the digital world. In particular those in lone archivist roles with responsibility for both physical and digital records have struggled as it’s physical impossible to do all the work involved in preserving an organisations entire record estate on your own, and that’s before you factor in the training element involved in keeping your skillset up to date.

It becomes clear that the roles are quite different in scope when comparing the competency frameworks of the sector organisations. The Digital Preservation Coalition created a fully comprehensive framework of digital preservation skills linked to role definitions which helps track skill building and career progression in the digital field. The Archive and Records Association have included digital preservation in their framework but it is as an add on optional skill that archivists can choose to ignore or develop as they see fit.

It is this problem that makes me think that the roles should be separated, and digital preservation should be given a place as its own sector with it’s own roles, pay scales and tasks. This is not to say that digital archivists shouldn’t exist, but in my mind their role should be far more defined than is currently the case. Taking the example of larger, well-funded organisations with good staff resource, many of them employ digital preservation specialists, as well as digital archivists. In some cases, software engineers are also employed as the technical requirements are far outside the scope of an archivist role. This makes the role of the archivist easier as they can focus on the preservation aspect of the role that they were hired to do with confidence that the technical side of the role is being covered by a specialist.

Preservation is complex no matter what the medium, and in the physical record world we have conservators who carry out the specialist technical work to ensure records are repaired as needed and conserved in order to last for generations. Why should this be any different in the digital world? Archivists have a strong specific skillset, which, although not complicated, took time and effort to build, and while continued professional development is important, it shouldn’t mean having to learn an entirely new role that we weren’t prepared for and didn’t really want to do in the first place. There is a huge market for digital preservation skills across the heritage sector, but do they need to come from archivists, who already do so much with their day?

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.