Category Archives: Event

Preserved in Time: A Snapshot of Moss Side in the Archive of Daniel Meadows

Moss Side, Manchester, spring of 1972. On a sunny day, a group of children gather round an old barber’s shop, set into a row of single-storey Victorian buildings. They jostle for space as they peer at photographs on display in the window. The eldest among them holds up a toddler on their hip—perhaps a sibling, relation, or friend—to better see the photographs. To their left, outside the shop next door, stands a rack of second-hand clothes for sale. To the right is Jimmy Thomson’s Tattoo Parlour. Three teenage girls stand outside the tattoo shop, watching the flurry of activity. [1]

Moss Side covers just 1.84 square kilometres of Manchester, pushing up against Hulme to the north and Whalley Range to the south. [2]. In the 1950s, this neighbourhood became home to a small but growing Caribbean population, early arrivals of what is now known as the Windrush Generation. In the 1950s and 60s, many Caribbean people chose to move to Manchester where they knew others, family or friends, or if they had been stationed in nearby Lancashire during the war. Settling in and around Moss Side, a Caribbean community soon laid down roots in the neighbourhood. [3]. In the 1950s, Caribbean people made up the second-largest ethnic group in Manchester after white British people and by 1981 there were over 6,000 people from the Caribbean living in the city. These people came predominantly from Jamaica, but there were other from countries such as Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, and what was then known as the West Indies Associated States. [4].

Moss Side has long been stigmatised as an ‘inner-city problem area.’ [5]. In 1981, protests against racist and aggressive policing tactics in Moss Side turned into violent clashes lasting two nights, further consolidating the view of the neighbourhood as a site of violence and crime. This followed similar events in Brixton, Toxteth and Handsworth, caused by high unemployment, poor housing provision, a lack of investment, and racial tensions. [6]. However, photographs of Moss Side held in the Bodleian Libraries Special Collections show a very different story. Taken almost a decade before the disturbances of 1981, but twenty years after the first arrivals from the Caribbean, they are a window into the daily life of this deprived, but neighbourly area.

The shop described above, around which the children gathered to peek at photographs in the window, was the Free Photographic Shop, which had been set up by a photography student at Manchester Polytechnic called Daniel Meadows. Hailing from rural Gloucestershire, Meadows came to Manchester in 1970 and lived in Moss Side. In January 1972 he rented a barbershop at 79b Greame Street, converting it into a photographic studio in which local people could have their picture taken free of charge. Once developed, Meadows’ subjects received a copy of their photograph to keep. [7]. The studio was open for two months during which time Meadows photographed over 200 people, despite the shop being open only one day per week. [8].

The Free Photographic Shop at 79b Greame Street, MS. Meadows 46

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Notice to readers: Admissions office closure

Exclamation mark graphicDue to staff illness, the  Bodleian Library’s Admissions Office, based in the Weston Library, will remain closed today, 15 August, but will reopen from Wednesday 16 August (with a brief closure from 12:00-13:00 on Friday 18 August).

We offer sincere apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.

The resilience of digital heritage. A session in focus from the iPRES 2022 Conference

iPRES, the annual International Conference on Digital Preservation, took place in Glasgow 12th-16th September 2022, hosted by the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC). In this blog post, Alice Zamboni reports on some of the highlights of the conference, held in person after a two-year hiatus.

The title chosen for the 2022 iPRES Conference, “Let Digits Flourish. Data for all, for good, for ever” is also an exhortation that perfectly captures the ambitions of the Digital Preservation community and the spirit of its annual gathering at iPRES. Its rich conference programme combined traditional panels with lightning talks, workshops and interactive sessions. The subdivision of the programme into the five thematic strands of Resilience, Innovation, Environment, Exchange and Community was an effective way to foster interdisciplinary conversations among experts who are busy tackling similar issues from different angles and work towards the same goal of ensuring the preservation of digital heritage worldwide.

Thanks to the generous support of the DPC career development fund, I was lucky enough to be able to attend iPRES in person. As I am only a few months into my role as graduate trainee digital archivist at the Bodleian, this was my first professional conference. For me, attending iPRES was the perfect opportunity to get acquainted with current trends and developments in the field of digital preservation and learn more about the important work undertaken in Archives and Libraries across Europe and further afield.

Souvenirs from iPRES: a tote bag and a tartan scarf in the DPC colour scheme

One session that skilfully interwove many of the ideas running through the conference was held on Thursday 15th as part of the Resilience strand. The session brought together archivists, researchers and experts from various Industries, which allowed for a multifaceted exploration of the obstacles posed by the preservation of complex digital resources connected to academia and the art world. The session touched upon a number of issues, from the threat that obsolete software poses to Internet art, to the importance of digital preservation strategies for academic research projects with a digital output and the application of web archiving to academic referencing.

The first two presentations highlighted the value of web archiving as a way to ensure the preservation of online resources used in academic research. Sara Day Thomson and Anisa Hawes’s talk focused on the website created as part of the Carmichael Watson Research Project, based at the University of Edinburgh. The website hosts an important online database of primary written resources and artefacts relating to Gaelic culture. Following the end of the research project, the website was taken down owing to security issues caused by its infrastructure. Day Thomson and Hawes were involved in the complex task of archiving this very large online database using Webrecorder.

Without the web archivists’ intervention, the Carmichael Watson Project website would have simply vanished. The presentation made a case for the development of digital preservation strategies, which should be viewed as a priority by academic institutions whose research output includes important digital archives and databases. Equally, this case study sparks questions about whether web archiving is the sole and most viable solution for the preservation of digital archives and databases. Does the website – its structure and the way in which it displays the database – matter and is therefore worth preserving for its cultural and evidential value, or could the research output be separated from the website and preserved through other means?

Martin Klein’s (Los Alamos National Laboratory) paper on Reference Rot presented another issued posed by the ubiquity of the internet in academic writing and publishing. As the number of scholarly resources available solely in electronic formats grows, so too does the amount of bibliographic citations that include a URL. Yet these links are easily broken. Many of us will have experienced the disappointment of clicking on a hyperlink only to find that the resource is no longer available on that webpage. Fewer will know that this phenomenon has its own nickname: content drift, which exposes URLs to link rot. Luckily, Klein’s project has devised an automatized programme for the creation of what he described as ‘robustified links’. In this way, it is possible to create an archived version of a URL, along with a unique resource identifier that includes information about date and time of creation of this robust link.

Both presentations offered me a new perspective on the work that I do at the Bodleian, where I help manage the Bodleian Libraries Web Archive. I often wonder who the current users of our web archive may be and what value this collection of websites may acquire in decades from now. The two talks made me appreciate the growing recognition of web archiving as a form of preservation of digital heritage as well as the value that these archived resources have for different stakeholders.

The second half of the session turned from academia to the art world, with papers by Natasa Milic-Frayling (IntactDigital Ltd) and Dragan Espenschied (Rhizome). The two papers explored some of the challenges faced by the preservation of Internet art. Both talks were interesting for the historical perspective they offered on recent developments in the art world such as NFT artworks, which may eventually find their way in a contemporary artist’s archive. As Milic-Frayling pointed out, the internet opened up a world of possibilities for emerging artists in the 1990s. Thanks to the web, artists could reach new audiences online without the mediation of art galleries and exhibitions. Yet the dissemination of artworks in the online environment has exposed them to the insidious threat of software obsolescence.

Espenschied showed the valuable work that Rhizome’s platform ArtBase has done to counter this issue. Active since 1999, this archive of Internet art employs various pieces of software to handle obscure data formats used by artists in the 1990s and allows users to perform the artefact choosing from different options, such as browser emulation or a web archived version of the artwork.

Milic-Frayling talked about her recent collaboration with artist Michael Takeo Magruder. Some of his Internet art pieces were created using Flash and VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language), both of which are no longer supported by today’s browsers.  At first, it may be difficult to comprehend how a piece of software can negatively affect a work of art. Conservation issues affecting analogue archival material – from the threat of humidity and bookworms for a rare printed book to the excessive exposure to light for a delicate drawing – are tangible and visible. Yet software obsolescence should be taken just as seriously for the way in which it affects the born-digital counterparts to works on paper. In Magruder’s net art piece World[s], the combination of FLASH and VRML contributes to the creation of mesmerizingly intricate three-dimensional virtual shapes floating through a dark space. If the software is not correctly read, the integrity and quality of the artwork are endangered and potentially lost forever. Milic-Frayling worked to ensure the preservation of these net art pieces, guided in her approach by the artist’s requirements around access to and display of his artworks.

Together, the four talks contributed to show that born-digital resources are fragile and especially vulnerable to obsolescence. Yet the picture they painted was far from bleak. The speakers also made a case for the resilience of digital heritage, which owes much to the work that digital preservation specialists do to ensure that born-digital complex objects adapt to constant technological advancement and continue to be accessible to future generations.

Some useful links:

Digital Preservation Coalition – https://www.dpconline.org/

Webarchiving with Webrecorder – https://webrecorder.net/tools#archivewebpage

Robustifying Links Project – https://robustlinks.mementoweb.org/

ArtBase archive – https://artbase.rhizome.org/wiki/Main_Page

 

 

 

 

Windrush Day 2022

Wednesday 22 June 2022 is Windrush Day in the United Kingdom, celebrating the contributions of Afro-Caribbean migrants and their descendants to British culture, economy and society. The day is also a call to acknowledge and reflect on the hardships and sacrifice endured by the huge number of brave people who responded to the British call to colonies to migrate to Britain, assist in her recovery from World War Two and build a life here.

To mark Windrush Day, we thought we would have a look in our Archives and Modern Manuscripts to highlight some items related to the ship H.M.T. Empire Windrush, and the 70 year anniversary of 2018.

H.M.T. Empire Windrush

The first generation of settlers arrived in Tilbury Docks, 22 June 1948, aboard the Empire Windrush ship (previously called ‘Monte Rosa’, before the British renamed it). On this Caribbean journey the ship picked up passengers in Trinidad, Jamaica, Cuba, Mexico and Bermuda. Reports of numbers of arrivals on that first day vary between 500-1000 Caribbean men and women, but immigration from the colonies continued into the 1950s whereby the new British citizens who had travelled aboard H.M.T. Empire Windrush to their new home numbered tens of thousands. Many were servicemen or ex-servicemen.

In 2016 the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera  received the donation of the Sayers Collection of Ocean Liner Ephemera,  which holds some material relating to the ship’s other voyages.

After being claimed as a war prize by the British at the end of the Second World War in 1945, the H.M.T. Empire Windrush still operated as a troopship, at a hefty 14651 tons. Image credit: Sayers Collection of Ocean Liner Ephemera, WP37 Empire Windrush RP troopship

An order for a Divine Service given on board, 30 Oct 1949. Image Credit: Sayers Collection of Ocean Liner Ephemera, ZB19 Empire Windrush Divine Service

‘The Black House’, 1973-1976, photographic series by Colin Jones

Photojournalist Colin Jones, together with journalist Peter Gillman of the Sunday Times, created a photo-series focused on a community hostel run by Caribbean migrant Herman Edwards at 571 Holloway Road, London during the 1970s. The hostel was a refuge for young black British people who were victims of prejudice, unemployed and had problems with the law. The name of the series comes from the name given to the hostel by those who frequented the halfway house, officially named ‘Harambee [Swahili for ‘pulling together’]’, who knew it as ‘the Black House’. Jones and Gillman set about to create a photographic record of everyday life in the house. The story of the series of the British Caribbean adolescents is ‘one of the most profound portraits of Black urban life in Seventies Britain’.[1]

Two photographs from ‘The Black House’ series feature in the Hyman Collection of British Photographs, which was donated to the Bodleian in 2019. The photographs have been digitised and can be viewed on Digital.Bodleian here: MS. 16177/5/4 and MS. 16177/5/5 

 

Psalm for Windrush

Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, Mus. 2021 c. 1 (22)

The Bodleian holds a printed copy of the original 24 page music score for Psalm for Windrush: for the Brave and Ingenious, with words based on Psalm 84.  In 2018,  to mark the 70th anniversary of the arrival of migrants from the Caribbean aboard H.M.T Empire Windrush, Westminster Abbey held a service of thanksgiving and commemoration: ‘Spirit of Windrush: Contributions to Multicultural Britain’. This service also took place in the wake of the Windrush Scandal. The anthem of the service was Psalm for Windrush, written by British Jamaican composer and academic Shirley J. Thompson specifically for the commemoration of the Windrush Generation. Psalm for Windrush was performed for the first time at the Westminster service by sopranos Nadine Benjamin and Gweneth-Ann Rand, tenor Ronald Samm and Baritone Byron Jackson, accompanied by Peter Holder on the organ and directed by Thompson. This copy was printed in The Netherlands,  as part of the Deuss Music Vocal Series.

Many of the British Caribbean migrants settled in London. London local authorities (as well as those further afield) charities,  organisations and heritage institutions are holding arts events, hosting festivals, curating playlists and collating educational resources to engage with Windrush,  the Windrush generation and descendants, and their lived experiences.

References:

[1] ‘Remembering Colin Jones’ Landmark Photographic Series The Black House’ 4 Nov 2021 Elephant Art accessed via https://elephant.art/remembering-colin-jones-landmark-photographic-series-the-black-house-04112021/

The happiest day of your life (#ArchivesAreYou)

A bride in wedding dress and veil posing for the camera holding a corgi dog, c. 1960s

Bride + corgi, c. 1960s, ©Bodleian Libraries

Helen Muspratt (1907-2001) was a skilled experimental and documentary photographer of the 1930s who produced haunting photographs of pre-war Russia and Ukraine as well as the Welsh valleys in the depths of the Great Depression. For most of her life, however, she was a hardworking studio photographer. From her studio on Cornmarket Street in Oxford she staged lively portraits of everyone who crossed the threshold, from playful toddlers to students celebrating degree days. And she was also a skilled wedding photographer, a job which consumed many Saturdays. Our collection of her wedding photographs spans the 1940s to the 1970s and showcases ordinary people, usually unnamed, in a beautiful array of wedding fashions.

 

Conference Report: Archives and Records Association Annual Conference 2021

The Archives and Records Association (ARA) Annual Conference 2021 was held 1st–3rd September 2021. In this blog post, Rachael Marsay reports on some of the highlights of the conference, held entirely online this year for the first time.


Logo for the Archive and Records Association 2021 Virtual Conference

There were three themes to this year’s conference: sustainability, diversity, and advocacy. Though each day of the conference covered one theme, one of the stand-outs of the conference was just how interlinked all three strands were.

Day one’s keynote speaker was Jeff James, Chief Executive and Keeper at The National Archives. Jeff talked about environmental sustainability, as well as the sustainability of the record and of the archives sector. He mentioned how The National Archives at Kew are committed to lowering their carbon footprint, which has been reduced by 80% since 2009. This has been achieved by building on scientific research with regards to buildings, bringing both a financial and environmental benefit. He also spoke of records at risk, referring to the work of the Cultural Recovery Fund, the Covid-19 Archives Fund for records at risk and the Crisis Management Team alongside already established fund streams such as the Archives Revealed grant scheme. Digital records were flagged as records at risk and he stressed the need for the sector to work in partnership and collaboration, both together and with digital giants (such as Microsoft and Google) with regards to developing digital products. Sector skills include the need for records professionals to gain digital skills through schemes and strategies such as Plugged In Powered Up, the Novice to Know-How online training resource created by the Digital Preservation Coalition, the Digital Archives Learning Exchange, and the Bridging the Gap traineeship programme.

The fragility of born-digital records, identified as critically endangered by the Digital Preservation Coalition, was a common theme throughout the conference. Even the most modern of records are at risk (CD-Rs for example, have a lifespan of under 10 years). Particular digital records discussed related to oral history interviews, often seen as ‘history from below’, recording the lives of those with ‘hidden histories’ off mainstream records, such as women and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Challenges to preserve digital material include cost, knowledge, skills and training, technology, and resources, as well as issues surrounding ‘gatekeeping’ and access to material. Rachel MacGregor (Digital Preservation Officer at The Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick) emphasised the need to record, describe, and catalogue born digital collections well in order to ensure that that they can be utilised by researchers, and explored some of the standards and guidance currently available.

Day two’s keynote speaker was Arike Oke (Managing Director, Black Cultural Archives) who spoke about experiences with diversity, aptly described as the equitable and mindful bringing together of difference; diversity should not be seen as static, but as a perpetual movement, both including and evolving difference. In her talk, Arike raised the point of classifying and being classified, and several sessions across the three days referred to how language and terminology impacted the use of records or archives created by or for particular communities. The use of historic terminology can be a barrier to access, particularly when words hold negative connotations that can cause distress to users. This was explored in several sessions in relation to LGBTQ+ related records and archives (including those kept at the Parliamentary Archives of the UK Parliament), as well as colonial collections such as the Miscellaneous Reports Collection held by the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew. Thoughts on how to address the issues included guides or notes explaining the context and why such words were used, including modern terms or names in brackets, inviting feedback, and for events, giving participants time and space to process information.

The importance of being open to keeping more ephemeral material and objects (e.g. pin badges, leaflets and posters) was also highlighted, particularly in shedding light on lives not necessarily recorded in more traditional forms. Christopher Hilton of Britten Pears Arts gave an interesting presentation on the multitude of receipts kept by Benjamin Britten and his partner Peter Pears for tax purposes. The receipts were important in shedding light on their relationship by providing evidence that they maintained clearly separate financial lives, demonstrating how important it was for their professional lives at that period that their records could be used to demonstrate a ‘plausible deniability’ should their personal relationship be questioned. The receipts were also records of businesses in Aldeburgh which are now long gone, provoking memories for older residents and providing a tangible link between the archive and the town.

Day three’s keynote speaker was Deirdre McParland, Senior Archivist at the Electricity Supply Board (Ireland) whose inspirational talk focussed on the importance of advocacy and that ‘archives are for life, not just anniversaries’. Deirdre spoke of how archives should be pro-active and innovative when it comes to advocacy, and that projects should be strategically planned to include promotion as standard. Deirdre’s talk was followed by a talk by Jenny Moran and Robin Jenkins from the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland, and Richard Wiltshire of the Crisis Management Team. Jenny, Robin and Richard talked about saving the archive of the travel firm Thomas Cook after the company’s sudden collapse: an excellent example of how swift action, negotiation and successful advocacy led to the ensured survival of the archive. The conference was nicely brought to a close by a talk by Alan and Bethan Ward on their project Photographs from Another Place. Their talk, given from the perspective of the archive user, showed how a bit of archival research revealed the names and stories behind a group of forgotten and unlabelled glass plate negatives. It was, for me at least, a timely reminder of the enduring value of archives.


A selection of further reading recommendations made by speakers and participants:

 

#WeMissiPRES: A Bridge from 2019 to 2021

Every year, the international digital preservation community meets for the iPRES conference, an opportunity for practitioners to exchange knowledge and showcase the latest developments in the field. With the 2020 conference unable to take place due to the global pandemic, digital preservation professionals instead gathered online for #WeMissiPRES to ensure that the global community remained connected. Our graduate trainee digital archivist Simon Mackley attended the first day of the event; in this blog post he reflects on some of the highlights of the talks and what they tell us about the state of the field.

How do you keep the global digital preservation community connected when international conferences are not possible? This was the challenge faced by the organisers of #WeMissIPres, a three-day online event hosted by the Digital Preservation Coalition. Conceived as a festival of digital preservation, the aim was not to try and replicate the regular iPRES conference in an online format, but instead to serve as a bridge for the digital preservation community, connecting the efforts of 2019 with the plans for 2021.

As might be expected, the impact of the pandemic loomed large in many of the talks. Caylin Smith (Cambridge University Library) and Sara Day Thomson (University of Edinburgh) for instance gave a fascinating paper on the challenge of rapidly collecting institutional responses to coronavirus, focusing on the development of new workflows and streamlined processes. The difficulties of working from home, the requirements of remote access to resources, and the need to move training online likewise proved to be recurrent themes throughout the day. As someone whose own experience of digital preservation has been heavily shaped by the pandemic (I began my traineeship at the start of lockdown!) it was really useful to hear how colleagues in other institutions have risen to these challenges.

I was also struck by the different ways in which responses to the crisis have strengthened digital preservation efforts. Lynn Bruce and Eve Wright (National Records of Scotland) noted for instance that the experience of the pandemic has led to increased appreciation of the value of web-archiving from stakeholders, as the need to capture rapidly-changing content has become more apparent. Similarly, Natalie Harrower (Digital Repository of Ireland) made the excellent point that the crisis had not only highlighted the urgent need for the sharing of medical research data, but also the need to preserve it: Coronavirus data may one day prove essential to fighting a future pandemic, and so there is therefore a moral imperative for us to ensure that it is preserved.

As our keynote speaker Geert Lovink (Institute of Network Cultures) reminded us, the events of the past year have been momentous quite apart from the pandemic, with issues such as the distorting impacts of social media on society, the climate emergency, and global demands for racial justice all having risen to the forefront of society. It was great therefore to see the role of digital preservation in these challenges being addressed in many of the panel sessions. A personal highlight for me was the presentation by Daniel Steinmeier (KB National Library of the Netherlands) on diversity and digital preservation. Steinmeier stressed that in order for diversity efforts to be successful, institutions needed to commit to continuing programmes of inclusion rather than one-off actions, with the communities concerned actively included in the archiving process.

So what challenges can we expect from the year ahead? Perhaps more than ever, this year this has been a difficult question to answer. Nonetheless, a key theme that struck me from many of the discussions was that the growing challenge of archiving social media platforms was matched only by the increasing need to preserve the content hosted on them. As Zefi Kavvadia (International Institute of Social History) noted, many social media platforms actively resist archiving; even when preservation is possible, curators are faced with a dilemma between capturing user experiences and capturing platform data. Navigating this challenge will surely be a major priority for the profession going forward.

While perhaps no substitute for meeting in person, #WeMissiPRES nonetheless succeeded in bringing the international digital preservation community together in a shared celebration of the progress being made in the field, successfully bridging the gap between 2019 and 2021, and laying the foundations for next year’s conference.

 

#WeMissiPRES was held online from 22nd-24th September 2020. For more information, and for recordings of the talks and panel sessions, see the event page on the DPC website.

The Archives and Records of Humanitarian Organisations

On 20th November the Bodleian Libraries hosted a workshop on ‘The Archives and Records of Humanitarian Organisations: Challenges and Opportunities’. The event was attended by archivists, curators and academics working within the field of humanitarian archives and I was pleased to be invited along to learn more about their work and write a blogpost about some of my observations.

The first talk was given by Chrissie Webb, Project Archivist at the Bodleian Libraries, who discussed her work on the archive of the international charity, Oxfam. The archive was donated to the Bodleian in 2012 and constitutes an enormous collection of over 10,000 boxes of material. Chrissie explained that the archive mostly consists of written documents, but also contains objects and ephemera, audio recordings and digital materials. Cataloguing the archive took several years and was funded by a grant from the Wellcome Trust, as the materials are of great interest to those studying the history of health and public policy, humanitarianism and the voluntary sector. Chrissie touched on a number of issues in her talk, particularly highlighting the challenges of appraising and arranging a collection of such size in sufficient detail. As a trainee the principles of arrangement are still quite new to me, so the idea of working on a collection so big is extremely daunting! The work required robust workflows and proved useful as a case study for development of the Bodleian Libraries appraisal guidelines for future collections. Chrissie also highlighted that the Oxfam catalogue was published on a rolling basis to allow the Libraries to promote the collection and prevent an end-of-project information dump of epic proportions. If you’re curious to learn more, the Oxfam archive can be explored via Bodleian Archives & Manuscripts: https://archives.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

The second talk was about the Save the Children Fund archive and was given by Matthew Goodwin, Project Archivist at the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham. The Save the Children Fund archive shares some immediate similarities with the Oxfam archive: it was acquired by the University of Birmingham at around the same time (2011) and is being catalogued thanks to a grant from the Wellcome Trust. The archive covers the activities of the charity in the 20th and early 21st Century and while it is smaller than the Oxfam archive, it still spans over 2000 boxes of material. Matthew noted some interesting trends that he came across in the archive, such as the charity’s move away from campaign material that included intense images of child poverty and towards more positive images that highlighted the charity’s life-saving work. This is a trend that is noticeable across the sector, as many humanitarian organisations have chosen to pivot their publicity materials in this way in recent years.

A particularly interesting discussion evolved around the challenges presented by archives that contain graphic or distressing material and how this effects the archivists cataloguing the collections and the readers who access them. Several attendees noted that their work with collections from humanitarian and aid organisations had presented this issue. Possible solutions discussed included inserting warning notices inside boxes containing especially graphic material to warn users in advance of their contents and seating those using these materials in separate parts of the reading room to prevent other readers from accidentally viewing them. The archival community has shown an increased awareness of these challenges in recent years and in 2017 the Archives and Records Association (ARA) released guidance for professionals working with potentially disturbing materials. Their documents explore the current research around ‘vicarious’ or secondary trauma and compassion fatigue, as well as offering practical techniques for staff and detailing how to access support. Their guidance can be found here: https://www.archives.org.uk/what-we-do/emotional-support-guides.html

Regrettably I wasn’t able to attend the afternoon workshop sessions which discussed the Red Cross Archive and Museum and how the collections of humanitarian organisations factor into the work of NGOs. Hopefully as my traineeship develops I will get a chance to revisit these collections and learn more!

Archives Unleashed – Vancouver Datathon

On the 1st-2nd of November 2018 I was lucky enough to attend the  Archives Unleashed Datathon Vancouver co-hosted by the Archives Unleashed Team and Simon Fraser University Library along with KEY (SFU Big Data Initiative). I was very thankful and appreciative of the generous travel grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that made this possible.

The SFU campus at the Habour Centre was an amazing venue for the Datathon and it was nice to be able to take in some views of the surrounding mountains.

About the Archives Unleashed Project

The Archives Unleashed Project is a three year project with a focus on making historical internet content easily accessible to scholars and researchers whose interests lay in exploring and researching both the recent past and contemporary history.

After a series of datathons held at a number of International institutions such as the British Library, University of Toronto, Library of Congress and the Internet Archive, the Archives Unleashed Team identified some key areas of development that would enable and help to deliver their aim of making petabytes of valuable web content accessible.

Key Areas of Development
  • Better analytics tools
  • Community infrastructure
  • Accessible web archival interfaces

By engaging and building a community, alongside developing web archive search and data analysis tools the project is successfully enabling a wide range of people including scholars, programmers, archivists and librarians to “access, share and investigate recent history since the early days of the World Wide Web.”

The project has a three-pronged approach
  1. Build a software toolkit (Archives Unleashed Toolkit)
  2. Deploy the toolkit in a cloud-based environment (Archives Unleashed Cloud)
  3. Build a cohesive user community that is sustainable and inclusive by bringing together the project team members with archivists, librarians and researchers (Datathons)
Archives Unleashed Toolkit

The Archives Unleashed Toolkit (AUT) is an open-source platform for analysing web archives with Apache Spark. I was really impressed by AUT due to its scalability, relative ease of use and the huge amount of analytical options it provides. It can work on a laptop (Mac OS, Linux or Windows), a powerful cluster or on a single-node server and if you wanted to, you could even use a Raspberry Pi to run AUT. The Toolkit allows for a number of search functions across the entirety of a web archive collection. You can filter collections by domain, URL pattern, date, languages and more. Create lists of URLs to return the top ten in a collection. Extract plain text files from HTML files in the ARC or WARC file and clean the data by removing ‘boilerplate’ content such as advertisements. Its also possible to use the Stanford Named Entity Recognizer (NER) to extract names of entities, locations, organisations and persons. I’m looking forward to seeing the possibilities of how this functionality is adapted to localised instances and controlled vocabularies – would it be possible to run a similar programme for automated tagging of web archive collections in the future? Maybe ingest a collection into ATK , run a NER and automatically tag up the data providing richer metadata for web archives and subsequent research.

Archives Unleashed Cloud

The Archives Unleashed Cloud (AUK) is a GUI based front end for working with AUT, it essentially provides an accessible interface for generating research derivatives from Web archive files (WARCS). With a few clicks users can ingest and sync Archive-it collections, analyse the collections, create network graphs and visualise connections and nodes. It is currently free to use and runs on AUK central servers.

My experience at the Vancouver Datathon

The datathons bring together a small group of 15-20 people of varied professional backgrounds and experience to work and experiment with the Archives Unleashed Toolkit and the Archives Unleashed Cloud. I really like that the team have chosen to minimise the numbers that attend because it created a close knit working group that was full of collaboration, knowledge and idea exchange. It was a relaxed, fun and friendly environment to work in.

Day One

After a quick coffee and light breakfast, the Datathon opened with introductory talks from project team members Ian Milligan (Principal Investigator), Nick Ruest (Co-Principal Investigator) and Samantha Fritz (Project Manager), relating to the project – its goals and outcomes, the toolkit, available datasets and event logistics.

Another quick coffee break and it was back to work – participants were asked to think about the datasets that interested them, techniques they might want to use and questions or themes they would like to explore and write these on sticky notes.

Once placed on the white board, teams naturally formed around datasets, themes and questions. The team I was in consisted of  Kathleen Reed and Ben O’Brien  and formed around a common interest in exploring the First Nations and Indigenous communities dataset.

Virtual Machines were kindly provided by Compute Canada and available for use throughout the Datathon to run AUT, datasets were preloaded onto these VMs and a number of derivative files had already been created. We spent some time brainstorming, sharing ideas and exploring datasets using a number of different tools. The day finished with some informative lightning talks about the work participants had been doing with web archives at their home institutions.

Day Two

On day two we continued to explore datasets by using the full text derivatives and running some NER and performing key word searches using the command line tool Grep. We also analysed the text using sentiment analysis with the Natural Language Toolkit. To help visualise the data, we took the new text files produced from the key word searches and uploaded them into Voyant tools. This helped by visualising links between words, creating a list of top terms and provides quantitative data such as how many times each word appears. It was here we found that the word ‘letter’ appeared quite frequently and we finalised the dataset we would be using – University of British Columbia – bc-hydro-site-c.

We hunted down the site and found it contained a number of letters from people about the BC Hydro Dam Project. The problem was that the letters were in a table and when extracted the data was not clean enough. Ben O’Brien came up with a clever extraction solution utilising the raw HTML files and some script magic. The data was then prepped for geocoding by Kathleen Reed to show the geographical spread of the letter writers, hot-spots and timeline, a useful way of looking at the issue from the perspective of engagement and the community.

Map of letter writers.

Time Lapse of locations of letter writers. 

At the end of day 2 each team had a chance to present their project to the other teams. You can view the presentation (Exploring Letters of protest for the BC Hydro Dam Site C) we prepared here, as well as the other team projects.

Why Web Archives Matter

How we preserve, collect, share and exchange cultural information has changed dramatically. The act of remembering at National Institutes and Libraries has altered greatly in terms of scope, speed and scale due to the web. The way in which we provide access to, use and engage with archival material has been disrupted. All current and future historians who want to study the periods after the 1990s will have to use web archives as a resource. Currently issues around accessibility and usability have lagged behind and many students and historians are not ready. Projects like Archives Unleashed will help to furnish and equip researchers, historians, students and the community with the necessary tools to combat these problems. I look forward to seeing the next steps the project takes.

Archives Unleashed are currently accepted submissions for the next Datathon in March 2019, I highly recommend it.

Attending the ARA Annual Conference 2018

ARA Annual Conference 2018, Grand Central Hotel, Glasgow

ARA Annual Conference 2018, Grand Central Hotel, Glasgow

Having been awarded the Diversity Bursary for BME individuals, sponsored by Kevin J Bolton Ltd., I was able to attend the ARA Annual Conference 2018 held in Glasgow in August.

Capitalising on the host city’s existing ubiquitous branding of People Make Glasgow,  the Conference Committee set People Make Records as this year’s conference theme. This was then divided into three individual themes, one for each day of the conference:

  • People in Records
  • People Using Records
  • People Looking After Records

Examined through the lens of the above themes over the course of three days,  this year’s conference addressed three keys areas within the sector: representation, diversity and engagement.

Following an introduction from Kevin Bolton (@kevjbolton), the conference kicked off with Professor Gus John (@Gus_John) delivering the opening keynote address, entitled “Choices of the Living and the Dead”. With People Make Records the theme for the day, Professor John gave a powerful talk discussing how people are impacting the records and recordkeeping of African (and other) diaspora in the UK, enabling the airbrushing of the history of oppressed communities. Professor John noted yes people make records, but we also determine what to record, and what to do with it once it has been recorded.

Noting the ignorance surrounding racial prejudice and violence, citing the Notting Hill race riots, the Windrush generation,  and Stephen Lawrence as examples, Professor John illustrated how the commemoration of historical events is selective: while in 2018 the 50th anniversary of the Race Relations Act received much attention, in comparison the 500th anniversary of the start of the Transatlantic Slave Trade was largely ignored, by the sector and the media alike.  This culture of oppression, and omission, he said, is leading to ignorance amongst young people about major defining events, contributing to a removal of context to historically oppressed groups.

In response to questions from the audience, Professor John noted that one of the problems facing the sector is the failure to interrogate the ‘business as usual’ climate, and that it may be ‘too difficult to consider what an alternative route might be’. Professor John challenged us to question the status quo: ‘Why is my curriculum white? Why isn’t my lecturer black? What does “de-colonising” the curriculum mean? This is what we must ask ourselves’.

Following Professor John’s keynote and his ultimate call to action, there was a palpable atmosphere of engagement amongst the delegates, with myself and those around me eager to spend the next three days learning from the experiences of others, listening to new perspectives and extracting guidance on the actions we may take to develop and improve our sector, in terms of representation, diversity and engagement.

Various issues relating to these areas were threaded throughout many of the presentations, and as a person of colour at the start of my career in this sector, and recipient of the Diversity Bursary, I was excited to hear more about the challenges facing marginalised communities in archives and records, including some I could relate to on a personal and professional level, and, hopefully, also take away some proposed solutions and recommendations.

I attended an excellent talk by Adele Patrick (@AdelePAtrickGWL),  of Glasgow Women’s Library, who discussed the place for feminism within the archive, noting GWL’s history in resistance, and insistence on a plural representation, when women’s work, past and present, is eclipsed. Dr Alan Butler (@AButlerArchive), Coordinator at Plymouth LGBT Community Archive, discussed his experiences of trying to create a sense of community within a group that is inherently quite nebulous.  Nevertheless, Butler illustrated the importance of capturing LGBTQIA+ history, as people today are increasingly removed from the struggles that previous generations have had to overcome, echoing a similar point Professor Gus John made earlier.

A presentation which particularly resonated with me came from Kirsty Fife (@DIYarchivist) and Hannah Henthorn (@hanarchovist), on the issue of diversity in the workforce. Fife and Henthorn presented the findings from their research, including their survey of experiences of marginalisation in the UK archive sector, highlighting the structural barriers to diversifying the archive sector workforce. Fife and Henthorn identified several key themes which are experienced  by marginalised communities in the sector, including: the feeling of isolation and otherness in both workplace and universities; difficulties in gaining qualifications, perhaps due to ill health/disability/financial barriers/other commitments; feeling unsafe and under confident in professional spaces and a frustration at the lack of diversity in leadership roles.

As a Graduate Trainee Digital Archivist, I couldn’t abandon my own focus on digital preservation and digital archiving, and as such attended various digital-related talks, including “Machines make records: the future of archival processing” by Jenny Bunn (@JnyBn1), discussing the impact of taking a computational approach to archival processing, “Using digital preservation and access to build a sustainable future for your archive” led by Ann Keen of Preservica, with presentations given by various Preservica users, as well as a mini-workshop led by Sarah Higgins and William Kilbride, on ethics in digital preservation, asking us to consider if we need our own code of conduct in digital preservation, and what this could look like.

Image of William Kilbride and Sarah Higgins running their workshop "Encoding ethics: professional practice digital preservation", ARA Annual Conference 2018, Glasgow

William Kilbride and Sarah Higgins running their workshop “Encoding ethics: professional practice digital preservation”, ARA Annual Conference 2018, Glasgow

I have only been able to touch on a very small amount of what I heard and learnt at the many and varied talks, presentations and workshops at the ARA conference,  however,  one thing I took away from the conference was the realisation that archivists and recordkeepers have the power to challenge structural inequalities, and must act now, in order to become truly inclusive. As Michelle Caswell (@professorcaz), 2nd keynote speaker said, we must act with sensitivity, acknowledge our privileges and, above all empower not marginalise. This conference felt like a call to action to the archive and recordkeeping community, in order to include the ‘hard to reach’ communities, or alternatively as Adele Patrick noted, the ‘easy to ignore’. As William Kilbride (@William Kilbride) said, this is an exciting time to be in archives.

I want to thank Kevin Bolton for sponsoring the Diversity Bursary, which enabled me to attend an enriching, engaging and informative event, which otherwise would have been inaccessible for me.

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Because every day is a school day, as homework for us all, I made a note of some of the recommendations made by speakers throughout the conference, compiled into this very brief list which I thought I would share:

Reading list