Session 2 Collecting and Representing

Thursday 10 April 1.130-3.20

Dr Andrew Flinn
  • School of Library, Archive and Information Studies
  • University College London
Democratising the Archive. Representing diversity: an agenda for a 21st century profession

Drawing upon the speaker's experience with political and grass-roots organisations' archives, community histories and community archive initiatives, and membership of the Mayor of London's Heritage Diversity Task Force Archives Diversification Subcommittee this paper will explore the envisioning of the Archive (an archive 'without walls' or the national archival heritage) as the repository for the individual and collective memories of all of society, and the implications of such a vision for professional understandings and practice. The paper will argue that a democratised archival heritage will require both a re-examination and re-strengthening of the relationship with records management (record-keeping) as well as a simultaneous re-assertion of the distinctiveness of the archival mission and purpose, as something broader and more diverse, not necessarily bound by traditional practice or by narrow definitions of what constitutes a record.

In brief this paper will then outline what the imperative to democratise and diversify the archive might mean for the profession, including:

  • re-imagining of an archive to include a much more diverse range of tangible and perhaps intangible heritage;
  • asserting the centrality of appraisal, selection and collection and how these duties are accomplished, for the documentation of the whole of society;
  • opening up collections to greater user-generated description and other inputs;
  • exploring different models of mutually beneficial relationships with the creators and holders of archival material, including non or post-custodial ones;
  • mainstreaming diversity awareness, outreach, community interaction and interpretative activities as core parts of professional duties and education.

In conclusion, this paper will suggest that this radical re-formulating of the profession and its engagement with the project to democratise the archive presents serious challenges to professionals, educators and funding bodies, not least in terms of who will take responsibility and who will provide the resources for such an endeavour.

Andrew Flinn is the Programme Director and lecturer on the Archives and Records Management MA programme at UCL: SLAIS. He is also chair of the Forum for Archives and Records Management Education and Research (FARMER) and editor of the Journal of the Society of Archivists. He is the principal investigator on the AHRC funded 'Community archives and identities' project which over two years will examine community archive and heritage initiatives amongst Black and Minority Ethnic groups. Amongst other professional positions, Andrew was previously archivist of the Labour and Communist party archives held at the National Museum of Labour History in Manchester. As a social historian and archival educator, his research interests include documenting grassroots community organisation and activism, community and social memory, and the relationship between archives, heritage and identity. Recent publications include 'Community Histories, Community Archives: Some Opportunities and Challenges', Journal of the Society of Archivists 28(2) 2007 and (with Morgan & Cohen) Communists and British Society 1920-1991, London: 2007.


Sarah Jones
  • AHDS Performing Arts,
  • HATII, University of Glasgow
Redefining the performing arts archive

This paper investigates two concepts that have been the focus of research at AHDS

Performing Arts over the past year: representations of performance and the role of the archive. Notions of record and archive are critically investigated, raising questions about applying traditional archival definitions to the performing arts.

Performances are live events. For many the idea of recording them for posterity does not make sense as 'liveness' is an intrinsic part of their nature. The dynamics of the interaction and relationship between performer and audience in a specific time and place cannot be captured. It could be viewed that performance is defined by having the property of 'disappearance', so can representations be created that aren't simply unfaithful reproductions, static reflections devoid of atmosphere? Perhaps such 'records' are already created, though not in a form we may at first expect. Performing Arts researchers and practitioners recognise that a 'record' of performance remains as immaterial traces, forming memories and embodied knowledge that feed back into practice. Archive models run contrary to this perception of performance as process. By focusing on a single end product that can be captured, the transformative nature of performance is overlooked. Can the archive be redefined to accommodate intangible fragments and evolving forms of representation?

Performance researchers and practitioners are calling for such a redevelopment, dissatisfied with the traditional framework premised on fixity and notions of authenticity that reflect written documentary traditions. It is inappropriate for performance to be bound by the archive and presented as the single authoritative, authentic account. Each representation reproduces one aspect or logic of the reality of the performance event; the proliferation of discourses means that there can be no single reality. There can be no definitive interpretation of a performance as the signifiers are constantly evolving. In this context, authenticity is not absolute and fixity is a constraining rather than beneficial property. The paper responds with performance-specific concepts of record and archive. If records are to be authentic representations of performance they should arguably mirror its nature. Dynamic records that store and transform meaning simultaneously, maintaining the essence of the performance while adapting to the changing context, are proposed as solution. An open model of archives, encouraging multiple representations and allowing for creative reuse and reinterpretation to keep the spirit of the performance alive is envisaged as the future of the archive.

With a background in traditional archiving, Sarah Jones chose to continue her studies at the University of Glasgow, completing an MSc in Information Management and Preservation in 2006. She now manages performing arts collections for the Arts and Humanities Data Service and is responsible for liaising with depositors to ensure research outputs are preserved and made accessible in the future. Sarah is researching the challenges faced when representing performance and is specifically considering how archives can support performing arts communities to manage their heritage.


Gail Chester
  • Royal Holloway, University of London
When is an archive not an archive?: the experience of saving the feminist library

In 1975, in the heyday of the Women's Liberation Movement, I was a founder of the Women's Research and Resources Centre, in London. After a few years' involvement, I moved on, until, in Spring 2004, I heard that the Feminist Library (as it is now called) was under imminent threat of closure. Becoming involved again with the library, and our ongoing efforts to secure its future, has provided an excellent opportunity to reflect on why it matters that such collections should continue to have an autonomous existence, and some of the issues raised by its hybrid status.

There is considerable agreement that it is important for communities of interest, as well as those of geography and ethnicity, to record and preserve their history, yet the Feminist Library has encountered a number of obstacles, both political and practical, to retaining its integrity. Other repositories have been unwilling to take the collection in its entirety, or allow it to remain as a defined collection within the wider institution. It consists of books, pamphlets, periodicals, and ephemera, as well as the papers of individuals and organisations, thus, by the conventional definition, it is not a pure archive. As well as several thousand non-fiction books, it contains an almost equal quantity of fiction and poetry, which some institutions do not consider political.

Another issue of concern is what should become of its unique card catalogue, devised before the introduction of computer cataloguing, and therefore considered by many to be an obsolete artefact, whilst it is actually an important work of intellectual history.

My presentation will end by asking what the chances of survival are for minority archives and libraries such as the Feminist Library, founded with their own guiding philosophy, yet struggling to maintain their integrity in a period when the government's philosophy seems positively antagonistic to the preservation of almost any print culture at all.

Gail Chester worked for many years in publishing, and is now undertaking research into British publishers' readers, 1898-1960, at Royal Holloway, University of London, using the publishers' archives of Macmillan and Allen and Unwin. It was doing this work which alerted her to the significance of archives in general and the need to campaign for their survival. She is widely published on general and academic topics, mainly about publishing, feminism, and the history of both. Recently published articles have covered feminist anthologies and the Hawthornden Prize; she has contributed the entry on Publishers' Readers to the forthcoming Oxford Companion to the Book.


Sue Breakell
  • Head of Archives, Tate, London
Victoria Worsley
  • Archivist, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds
Context is half the work: activating the Artist Placement Group archive

This paper will consider the gaps or silences of the archive, and what is not captured or documented through the processes that create it. Using the particular example of the Artist Placement Group archive, it will also consider how these omissions can be supplemented through other sources, such as oral history recordings.

The Artist Placement Group (APG) has been described as 'one of the most radical social experiments of the 1960s'. Its aim was to increase engagement between art and society by placing artists directly within government, nationalised institutions and corporate businesses. The activities of the group's members through the 1960s and 1970s - including such artists as John Latham, Barbara Steveni, Ian Breakwell, and Stuart Brisley - were an important part of the history of conceptual art of this period.

The archive of APG, acquired by the Tate Archive in 2004, provides a rich range of documentation covering the management and administration of the group and the individual placements, which were at times revealing and charged encounters between different worlds. The nature of the archive itself is somewhere between the personal and the institutional and as such it offers rich territory for consideration of the nature and meaning of archives.

Despite the group's radical agenda, it was impossible for it to avoid using conventional institutional forms, such as accounting records, minutes of meetings, and constitutions, in order to be able to interact with official institutions. Yet this is only part of the story of the group and of the individuals who took part. The theoretical positions of individual artists were not unified, and their experiences within the placement institutions reflect tensions which the mediation of the Group at times struggled to bridge.

This paper will consider such ambiguities and tensions inherent in the APG archive, reflecting contemporary questions around politics, gender and society. It will also discuss a proposed project in which a contemporary artist will use both the APG archive and a consideration of archival practice to produce new work, thus activating the archive and regenerating the aims and objectives of the APG in a new context.

Sue Breakell is head of Tate Archive, which collects primary source material relating to British art and art in Britain since 1900. She started her career as a cataloguer in Tate Archive and subsequently worked at the Imperial War Museum, where she catalogued the War Artists Archive, as well as being the IWM's first Museum Archivist. She returned to Tate in her present role in 2004. She has a first degree in English Studies, and Master's degrees in both Archive Studies and the History of Art. As well as Tate Archive's collecting areas, Sue is particularly interested in the nature and meaning of archives and interdisciplinary approaches to the subject.

Victoria Worsley is Archivist at the Henry Moore Institute Archive, a specialist repository holding papers relating to British sculpture. She has a degree in the History of Art and a postgraduate Diploma in Archive Studies, and previously worked as a curator at Tate Archive. She has a particular interest in artist's books and concrete poetry, the display and exhibition of archives and meaning and memory in archives.