Inside the Archive #36: From Manchester to The Hague

In early July, a group of archive staff travelled to Manchester to attend the Future of Museums: Collection Management event, organised by Museums Association.

Collection management is a complex, collaborative endeavour that involves many different roles at the BFI National Archive. So, we sent representatives from Special Collections, Collections Data and Systems, Collections Access, and Collection Development teams to learn what the museum sector sees on the horizon.

The event included speakers and attendees from collecting institutions of different scales and UK locations, from National Museums Northern Ireland to the Museum of Transology (a community-led collection originating in Brighton). Speakers shared recent projects and research such as the Science Museum Group’s 300,000 item collection move, and Birmingham Museum’s crowd-sourced provenance records transcription activities. Others spoke to upcoming challenges and opportunities for collection management: the ethics of AI tools, using collection management data to advocate for resources, and collaboration and skill-sharing between organisations.

A few highlights from BFI attendees were:

• Looking at the potential for AI tools to unlock access to collections and the discussions around the ethics of this. Organisations currently working on AI assisted projects include The National Museum of the Royal Navy and The Living Museum. This is a fascinating area for collections management, and it was interesting to hear the views from other parts of the sector. — Jo Molyneux (Archive Access Researcher)
• Reflecting on the trusted role of museums and how our collections data can be used to enhance public trust in different areas; thinking about how we talk about the risk of doing a project or long-term piece of work vs the risk of not doing something. Both particularly pertinent to working on our collections management systems where change can be time consuming but the risk of not updating our systems is significant. — Louise McAward-White (Collections Data Manager)
• Listening to Birmingham Museum discuss their on-site volunteering audit activities. Their main focus is outreach, editing sessions dependent on whether participants volunteer due to the activity or those who want to volunteer to develop training and experience. Also, understanding accessibility considerations with some volunteers working on a paper checklist, others updating the database and some taking photographs to make it an inclusive space. — Kay Eldridge (Assistant Curator, Special Collections)

The event was hosted at Manchester’s Science and Industry Museum. We took advantage of the lunch break to have a nosy: most notable was a live demonstration of cotton factory machinery and a model of a computer made in Manchester in 1948! Very cool, though not quite up to handling the BFI National Archive’s collection data…

- Caitlin Lynch, Curatorial Archivist

This year’s Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) ‘Members Forum and Networking Event – Europe’ (formerly known as the DPC Unconference) was hosted by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) of the Netherlands at their location in Den Haag.

I should start by saying that the event was held under Chatham House rules. For those not familiar with what that means, it’s essentially an agreement that participants of an event are free to share information gained at the event but may not reveal who said what or participated. This allows all participants to share openly and without worry of causing problems for themselves or their organisations.

Whilst I will need to be a little vague with some details, I can tell you a little about the venue. We were in KB’s “Club Erasmus”, a newly renovated space at the library for meetings and events. Given that we were in a library, it makes sense that the room was “Well Red”, although I’m not sure that was what they were going for… Participants were also given a tour of the library, including the reading rooms and some of its storerooms, which house many millions of books, both from the Netherlands and further afield.

During the event, various interesting topics came up — both “old” and new — including environmental sustainability, cybersecurity, storage and user expectations of archives and libraries. Several organisations have been looking at how to reduce their carbon footprint by using more offline storage, a solution which can also reduce overall storage costs.

One session that stood out for me was around low-tech solutions to high-tech problems. Some of the solutions discussed included printing to pdf, as pdf is a stable and well-understood format. PDF also works for a variety of formats, such as word-processing, spreadsheets, websites and so on, although it was noted that it can limit reusability. The conversation then went onto printing stuff out (1990’s style!), as well as the benefits of other analogue formats, including film negatives. I don’t think anyone there was advocating for a full return to analogue methods of information creation and storage, but I think it does highlight that sometimes a low-tech solution can be a viable option, even if it seems a little dated!

I’m also pleased to report that many of the participants (mainly from the UK) were familiar with the Our Screen Heritage project (which is supported by the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding). One had even attended the launch event in Bristol! Whilst discussing the location of the launch, we reflected on the UK-wide nature of OSH, and I was able to talk a little about the project and the script to screen strand.

Overall, the forum was a relaxed event that facilitated an open debate about the trials and tribulations of digital preservation. It was great to have a platform to discuss the work currently being done in this field by the BFI National Archive and to hear lessons learnt by other organisations.

- Tom Wilson, Digital Preservation Archivist

The Inside the Archive blog is supported by the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.