On November 20th, I had the privilege of participating in the Business Archives Council's (BAC) annual conference, which this year was titled No Archive is an Island. Connection and collaboration in business archives.
The conference took place at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in London and gathered about a hundred participants. The main theme of the conference, collaboration and networking, is a key issue for contemporary archival institutions. Archives and archival services today have a cross-border and interdisciplinary character that requires close contact between institutions. Through increased collaboration, we can realize the value of our collections for multiple audiences, solve common problems, and capture diverse voices.
The conference covered various strategies for networking and increased collaboration between archival institutions and universities. In four sessions, well-chosen speakers discussed the challenges posed by different collaboration models and shared their experiences, examples, and lessons around the theme.
In the first session, three projects were presented under the theme of collaboration and shared goals.
- Dr. Ella Parry-Davies from The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama talked about her oral source collection project from poor migrants in England who worked as cleaners or domestic servants.
- Archivist Sarah C. Jane, in turn, showed how an archive cataloging project contributed to creating a new relationship between two universities (University of Falmouth and University of Exeter’s Penryn Campus).
- The session concluded with Claire Tunstall from Unilever Archives & Records and Katherine Lynch from the local Port Sunlight Village Trust Management in Liverpool, where Unilever has its archives. They spoke about how they collaborate to tell the story of the place together.
The second session gathered three speakers:
- Christopher Cassells, Business Archives Surveying Officer for Scotland, spoke about his work to save records from Scottish companies that have gone bankrupt. The subject was very topical, as recently shown by the bankruptcy of the global travel company Thomas Cook & Co.
- The second speaker, Karyn Williamson from Standard Life Aberdeen – who also participated at ICA SBA 2017 in Stockholm – described how she, as an archivist at an investment company, successfully promoted collaboration on archive issues among different companies linked to Standard Life Aberdeen.
- Lastly came Lucy Davis, working at The National Archives (the English National Archives), who presented new initiatives to provide grants for the development of business archives, such as the Networks for Change program.
Personally, I liked the third session the most:
- It was opened by Mike Anson from Bank of England. The session was about collaboration between academia and archival institutions.
- Alix Green from University of Essex actively pursues this issue. Within the framework of the conference, she launched, together with Erin Lee (National Theatre) and Tamara Thornhill (Transport for London), a new guidance document to facilitate collaboration between academic researchers and archival institutions, Facilitating Academic-Archivist Collaborations in Business. It was authored with the help of several academics and business archivists experienced in these issues.
- The third speaker was geohistorian professor Alastair Owens from Queen Mary University of London, with experience of collaborative projects with archival institutions and currently an interesting research project on the British meat industry. (Our ongoing project Gendered Spaces has points of contact with his research area.)
The fourth session dealt with the challenges of making closed organizational records accessible resources for the public. Angela Sutton-Vane, from Open University, presented her work on older police records and a local archival institution's project to engage local migrants in the archive.
In short, a very interesting conference and a great opportunity to strengthen ties with other business archives beyond national borders.
