Fit for purpose, then?

Some of my friends feel that I suffer from Low Frustration Tolerance (‘Foot Stuck on Indignation Pedal’, one calls it). They may be right, but I think Karl Popper would agree with me that you can’t improve the design of boats without rocking them. In the case of British archives, I think my range of experience qualifies me to do that.

I first researched in an archive when I was fourteen (at Sandwich Guildhall, I think), and as I said at the beginning of this series of posts, I had intensive dealings of all kinds with thirty-seven British archives in the course of researching my biography of George Calderon. Moreover, between 1970 and 1981 I worked in Russian state archives from Taganrog to St Petersburg and I have experience of archives in France, Germany and Sweden, so that gives me a wider sense of procedures and standards.

The Chekhov Library in Taganrog, designed by Fedor Shekhtel’, 1911 (Wikipedia, Public Domain)

I am inclined to perform a complete SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis on British archives as I have recently experienced them, but must resist the temptation: it should be done by the best management consultants in the business. It is overdue. Vital for such an appraisal would be for it not only to include end users’ experience but to be preponderantly based on that. It would be useless just to observe what archivists do, or take their word for it. It needs a real understanding of what archives exist for, rather than appreciating their potential as entertainment. Archives exist for people who want to research the past. This kind of user is their raison d’être, so such users’ experience should be sampled in depth and listened to above all.

If asked whether British archives are fit for purpose, I would be bound to say as a user (which includes as a donor/vendor) that many of them are only fifty per cent fit. That positive fifty per cent would almost certainly cover the institution’s person-to-person relations with users, namely fetching materials for them, serving them in a relaxed, courteous and friendly manner, advising them, making suggestions to them, helping them exploit resources to the full. Customer care in many European archives is famously surly. Somehow or other, the staff in even very large British archives, e.g. the Bodleian or the Imperial War Museum, achieve consistently radiant service.

I often have the impression, however, that the reason our archives are so strong in this area is that archivists enjoy it far more than the solitary labour of cataloguing and curating. Several have said to me things like: ‘You can’t imagine how boring it is when I’m working for weeks backstage on my own, and what a relief it is to talk to people and get involved in their projects.’ Well, I do acknowledge the dangers to archivists’ mental health of a life of cataloguing, conservation and filing. Getting a healthy and fulfilling balance between the spadework, customer relations and organising exhibitions, for example, should be a top priority of their line managers.

These are the areas in which British archives are not fit for purpose in my experience as set out in the previous four posts:

• Safekeeping and retaining items
• Communicating the fact of new accessions
• Cataloguing accessions in real time
• Line management
• Evaluating materials to acquire
• Managing approaches from donors or vendors
• Managing funds for acquisitions

My personal proposed solutions to these dire problems are embedded in or may be inferred from my previous three posts. On the Popper principle, they are only as good as the results obtained from testing them.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, there seems to be a correlation between bigness and failure in British archives. In my experience, small or medium-sized ones are the most efficient. They are leaner and fitter. When you work there, you feel an atmosphere of unofficious professionalism combined with vibrant purposefulness. Their staff are on top of their cataloguing and curation. They make ‘their’ collections work for you. For me such institutions would include Leeds Russian Archive, the Liddell Hart Military Archives at King’s College London, the Women’s Library Archive at LSE, the Theatre Museum Collections at the V&A, or Torquay Library. Oxbridge college archives are in a class of their own. They are relatively small, benefit from centuries of continuity, and are run by highly qualified archivists with an intense personal interest in the college.

Whereas…after my tortured dealings with the British Library and Cambridge University Library in the matter of the Calderon Papers, I honestly cannot bring myself to set foot in them again. (Fortunately, I am not planning to write any more biographies.)

The next post, on 3 August, will be a cracker by our stalwart contributor John Pym; a highly original and beautifully imaged guest post that brings together three very different persons and their life stories, whilst the spirits of George and Kittie hover over them all. Not to be missed!

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.