‘Thunderer’

Curate your own

stuff – British archives

can’t cope

PATRICK MILES

Thinking of depositing your family papers in a public archive? Be prepared for nobody to answer your emails, promises to be broken, cataloguing never to happen, and to discover a few years later that your papers cannot be found.

Such has been my and my friends’ experience whilst working on the life of Edwardian polymath George Calderon, who was Britain’s first modern Russianist, introduced Chekhov’s plays to Britain, and was killed at Gallipoli.

Calderon’s annotated copy of a 1907 Russian book about Chekhov is of national importance, so I negotiated its transfer to Special Collections at a famous university library. When it got there, it was binned as ‘a duplicate’. A friend donated his grandfather’s Gallipoli photos to a military museum, where they disappeared without trace. The British Library acquired composer Martin Shaw’s archive, containing a sensational Calderon manuscript, but they never mentioned this acquisition on their website in the seven years they took to catalogue it.

Customer care at a famous London archive was surreal: when I arrived to read previously ordered Calderon letters, I was told by the curator that she knew nothing about them, the published description of them did not exist, and I should go home!

Our archives are failing us and we are always told the reason is underfunding. I don’t think so. From my point of view, an archivist’s mission is to collect, conserve, catalogue, and communicate. Accountants and PR consultants, however, have persuaded our archivists that they must ‘sell’ their institutions through the media, conferences, and endless exhibitions. Although this raises archives’ public profile and may be rewarded with more funding, it is not strictly speaking productive because archive tourists don’t work in archives, only researchers do. Judging by the amount of self-publicity that archives now generate, I doubt whether their employees spend half their time on what matters most to researchers: curating the collections and facilitating access through prompt cataloguing.

But perhaps you want to sell the papers you have inherited? Even if you succeed in your attempts to communicate with an archival manager, these salaried process-driven folk believe you shouldn’t be ‘making money’ out of family papers. It is your duty to donate them. In any case, our archival institutions always have ‘no money’. This is because they are addicted to celebrity (£1.1m for Harold Pinter’s papers, £32,000 for Wendy Cope’s emails). They need to buck this trend and free up money for less pretentious purchases. What is the point, in the digital age, of spending all your funds on a 68-page manuscript of Jane Austen’s?

Fortunately, there are ways of avoiding tangling with Britain’s hopeless archives. First, you could become a ‘citizen archivist’ and curate your papers on your own website. Second, you could sell them to one of the impressively managed American institutions, whose motto tends to be: ‘More Product, Less Process’.

Patrick Miles is a freelance writer and the author of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius (Sam&Sam, 2018).

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’  Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.