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What should we archive?

from Fiona Hoppe, Monday, August 03, 2009

The bust of Jessica Huntley at LMA

One of the themes from the last Exchange Programme workshop seemed to be the question of what should be archived. Richard Wiltshire, Senior Archivist – Business Archives at London Metropolitan Archives, emphasised the power of the archivist with his description of the role as “helping in deciding what the future knows about the past”.

The question circulated amongst the participants. Caroline Warhurst from London Transport Museum noted how the perception of what’s important changes over time, and the tensions between what different people feel is important. Richard agreed, commenting that it was difficult to know what to prioritise, though the City of London Corporation holds extensive business archives at Guildhall Library and LMA which means prioritising collections according to user needs, project funding and other considerations.

Archives reflect the dominant history

The LMA has a Chinese community who are interested in their history but no where is it shown in London. Richard said the archives reflect the history of an area and its people over time. He added in relation to collection building, that LMA relies on interested people who are contacted regarding potential deposits of archives in their care. Having an outward facing attitude reflected in LMA’s dedicated Interpretation section is important in helping reach out to diverse community groups.

Mae Keary observed how small businesses often just don’t think about archiving for the future, that their filing tends to be chaotic but that there’s a lot to be learnt from their histories. Mae noted how archives from these companies could shed light on how and why they failed or succeeded, or why the families involved split up, though these family histories are frequently and purposefully kept dark.

It was generally agreed that you have to have quite a high sense of self worth to want to record yourself.

The rise of the personal story

Looking back over time at history and the collection of archive material we have progressed from: Big History (i.e. institutions and elites) to Social History (e.g. Eric Hobsbawm on the history of protest movements) to Cultural History (i.e. narrative and story telling). And it was the importance of the personal story and the context that this gives to an archive which resonated throughout the afternoon. John Entwisle of Thompson Reuters remarked that without this story recorded how would future generations know or understand the significance of objects that had been preserved for them.

The prominence of narrative was vividly illustrated by Richard’s presentation on LMA and his experiences of working with LMA’s active depositors, Eric and Jessica Huntley. This couple have been prominent black political activists and founders of Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications Limited (publishers), who have played an active role in the African-Caribbean community during the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty first century. Richard stressed the importance of harvesting as much information from a depositor as possible to develop the framework of a collection through cataloguing and bring it to life through education and related outreach activities. Building relationships with depositors is an important part of this process and from the warm recollections of his meetings with Eric and Jessica this is surely what has been established.

Further information on this case study of a business collection held in local authority archive repository is available on the LMA pages of Managing Business Archives.

A dystopian future?

Another suggestion for the question of what should be archived was ’it’s the customer who decides’, this was further developed into ‘it’s whatever generates cash’. This last comment reverberated with the recent Innovation Fund workshop’s dystopian imaginings for what a future museum/archive would look like in the year 2025 – a museum shop.

To elaborate a little, this was one of four outcomes from a workshop held at the Whitechapel Gallery for the Innovation Fund Pilot, part of the MLA’s Knowledge Transfer Programme. At the workshop the eight museums and archives selected for the Pilot developed a timeline right in front of the Guernica tapestry. The timeline went back to 1950 and beyond, in fact right back to the seventeenth century, at least twice as far as we wanted the group to imagine a future museum/archive to be in 2025 to give the future organisation context. Participants were then split into four groups of mixed museums/archives and randomly dealt four drivers of change cards representing emerging or established changes in the areas of technology, energy/ecology, social and economic. Some drivers for change were more established than others, particularly those in the economic category.

Rays of hope

The future museums and archives envisaged by all four groups did look bleak by today’s standards, however there were a few rays of hope. For me, one of the more optimistic features from the group and cards I was working with was of the museum/archive building turning into a place for social gatherings, a place for community activity – primarily due to the cost of fuel. The consumers for our museum of 2025 made and deposited all the artefacts in the space using their own technologies. By way of explanation my group had drawn the following cards: ‘Rise of consumers as producers’ (technology), ‘Ageing population – but ageless’ (social), ‘Fuel poverty’ (Energy/ecology) and ‘Business-as-usual’ (economic).

Serendipitously, a few days after the Innovation Fund workshop, a Lancashire library was spotted hosting a music gig …