On the 15th February CAG were pleased to hear from Hannah Jones, Sector Development Manager East, Arts and Charities at The National Archives, with updates from The National Archives (TNA). There’s lots going on at TNA!
TNA are already working on a review of the accreditation scheme, developing the level 7 apprenticeships, archives benchmarking surveys, updates to digital preservation workflows and their funding programme. In the pipeline they have a refresh of TNA’s website planned, as well as dedicated carbon literacy education for the archive sector, new buildings guidance, spontaneous collecting guidance and job description guidance for employers and employees.
It was great to hear all about the work TNA are currently doing. If you have particular questions, Hannah is happy to be contacted directly and the slides from the presentation are available. Please email Lizzy (eae31) if you would like a copy.
A record number of CAG colleagues joined a Zoom presentation by Janice Tullock on 1st March to learn more about managing objects in archival collections. Janice is a qualified archivist and has been a freelance archive consultant since 2006 (see https://janicetullock.co.uk/ for full details of her work). The popularity of this session shows how many of us are dealing with issues such as conservation and cataloguing of objects, many of us without training in museum curation.
Janice’s talk was practical, thought-provoking and entertaining. She reminded us that it is our duty to meet all legal and ethical standards when dealing with objects in our care. We must also comply with all necessary legislation and regulations. She began by defining the term ‘mixed collection’ as primarily an archive, but including other heritage materials. She then led us through the legal context in which museums operate and the standards to which museum curators adhere. She took us through practical conservation issues such as considering materials (chemicals, human remains), the physical space required to house large objects and separate objects made from different substances (reminding us that measuring doors is important!) and packaging (making nests of tissue surrounding objects rather than wrapping) and placing photographs of objects outside boxes.
It was fascinating to learn the similarities and differences in managing accessions and cataloguing archives and objects in museum settings. The ‘object entry form’ is vital to the initial donation, and location management is key to tracking objects in storage, in display cases and on loan. Museum catalogue entries emphasise age, colour, weight, inscription content and handling requirements, following the Spectrum 5.1 UK collections management standard (https://collectionstrust.org.uk/spectrum/). The case study for ‘Unboxing the Boxer’ in the sporting archives of De Montfort University was particularly illuminating and showed how our archive management systems could be adapted to catalogue objects by creating separate fields or including Spectrum elements in existing fields (see https://library.dmu.ac.uk/specialcollections/unboxingtheboxer).
Understanding how museum curators approach objects helps archivists with appraisal and outreach. Museum curators may wish to preserve only one example of an object, not an entire collection. They may not need evidential value to accession an object; it may have emotive or cultural value. Museum curators are deeply sensitive to other communities which may hold claim over objects and deal with contested materials (examples were given of wild birds’ eggs and sacred archaeological finds). Curators may see display potential in objects which have meaning or stories associated with them (a wonderful example was an arran jumper given by a fan to the comedian Ken Dodd, and used in an exhibition to demonstrate the affection he inspired).
We are grateful to Janice for taking time to talk to CAG, and to Trinity College, Churchill Archives Centre and Cambridge University Library for sponsoring the event. For those of you too young to appreciate Janice’s reference to the Diddy Men in the context of her work on the Ken Dodd Archive, here’s an idea what you missed in your childhood.
On Tuesday 6th July we heard from a series of speakers about their lockdown projects.
Collecting Covid-19, Jacky Cox, Cambridge University Library
The University Library had been asked what they were doing to document the pandemic. There had been previous examples of the Library actively seeking materials to build up collections, e.g. with the EU Referendum Collections and it was decided something similar could be done to document the pandemic in Cambridge. The focus is on collecting the unofficial record of Collegiate Cambridge and the wider Cambridge community.
The collection is format agnostic and from the outset digital records have been collected, with paper records also to be collected once the Library fully re-opens again. The challenge with taking so much material digitally is to ensure that it remains accessible in the future. It is also essential that the terms of each donation are very clear. Support was received from the University’s Information Compliance Officer with this.
Material has been sent in via Google drive and Dropbox. The infrastructure for the project had to be built up from nothing whilst all members of were staff working from home. A workflow for rapid collecting was developed, which is hoped will be useful for future projects. So far around 40 donations of material have been received with all but 3 being digital.
Digital Mycenae: The Aegean Bronze Age Rides in to the 21st Century, Rebecca Naylor, Faculty of Classics
The Greek city of Mycenae is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the Faculty of Classics holds an extensive archive collection of the British excavations that have taken place there. The collection was an excellent candidate to be digitised:
it is heavily used
surrogates would aid preservation
enhance access for existing audiences
introduce the collection to new audiences
enable the Cambridge and the British School in Athens collections to be reunited
enhance the centenary anniversary celebrations of Alan Wace’s 1920 excavation there.
The project began in 2018 with the support of the Cambridge University Library Digital Content Unit. The work to copy the material stopped in March 2020 but lockdown provided an opportunity to draft the webpages to show the newly digitised material and it was possible to launch the website during lockdown.
There are 6551 pages of field notebooks, 140 pages of site plans and section drawings, 236 drawings, 249 tomb photographs, 385 site photographs and 704 small finds photographs! The project also allows a new democratic evaluation of the archaeological evidence as all the material from the excavations is available, not just that which the dig director chose to include in their reports. The project has also garnered international press coverage, been shortlisted for an Apollo Digital Innovation of the Year Award and a virtual conference is due to be held in September this year!
The Great History Chase, Jayne Hoare, Cambridgeshire Archives
The Great History Chase is an HLF funded project which aims to enthuse primary school age children about local history. The project seeks to reach out to communities and help children learn about local history, archives and conservation and engage a broader audience for the Archive Service.
The project has worked with a number of local primary schools on topics as diverse as the history of the Fens and their drainage, World War II in Cambridgeshire and the history of local schools.
Jayne has visited a number of schools, taking copies of documents from the Archive with her. Children have been able to have a go at transcribing documents and see connections with their local area. The classes have, Covid restrictions permitting, been able to visit the Cambridgeshire Archives and see a range of original documents, as well as visiting the storage and conservation areas to get a real feel of how the Archive works.
It had originally been hoped that the children might then be able to visit local care homes to talk to residents about their experiences of the history of this area but this has not been possible so Jayne has created memory boxes to help stimulate conversations for care home residents.
Researching the Contents of an Archive Collection: Donald Wiseman, Alison Stacey, Tyndale House
Tyndale House holds the Archive of Professor Donald Wiseman, a biblical scholar, archaeologist and Assyriologist. His papers came to Tyndale House in c. 2010 thanks to his daughters. The collection documents all aspects of Wiseman’s life and Alison used lockdown to do further research into some of those people who feature in the Archive but are not especially well-known.
Fuʼād Safar, an Iraqi archaeologist, was one of the people Alison looked into. He was Director of Excavations at the Iraqi Directorate General of Antiquities. His name has various spellings, and even Wiseman was not consistent in how he spelled Safar’s name. Issues of spelling can make an archive collection problematic for users. Alison also looked at Theophilus Goldridge Pinches (1856-1934), an assistant and then curator at the British Museum as well as a lecturer in Assyriology at University College London and in the University of Liverpool.
Hannah gave us an update on some of the work TNA has been doing, principally their new guidance on managing mixed collections and the forthcoming GDPR Toolkit.
The Managing Mixed Collections Guidance provides detailed information on the management of Archives that contain non-archive heritage collections, those for example containing material more commonly found in a museum. Guidance is given on museum standards, such as SPECTRUM, ethical considerations and relevant legislation, before more detailed advice is provided on managing items such as weapons, costumes, sculpture and human remains. There are also case studies to provide real-world examples.
The Data Protection Toolkit for Archive Services will be launched later in July and will be freely available, though it will be necessary to register for a free account on the TNA website. It has been developed in consultation with Naomi Korn Associates and will provide an overview of GDPR legislation, decision-making steps when deciding whether to close items for data protection reasons, and templates to help document decisions. It has been approved by the Information Commissioner’s Office. A launch event is being held on the 20th July.
Elizabeth Ennion-Smith, Pembroke College, July 2021
Images: courtesy of Jayne Hoare, Cambridgeshire Archives
Cambridge Archivists Group 