Palace Green Library and the Challenges of Archiving

A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to spend five days volunteering at Palace Green Library. The library is home to Durham University’s special collections, the University’s most important books, manuscripts, files and other miscellaneous artefacts. There are numerous different collections at the library referencing a wide range of different periods and people, as well as a number of different teams making use of the site, so it was a wonderfully diverse week. I was able to try out lots of roles and everyone at the library went out of their way to ensure I benefited from the experience. Today I want to write about a few of the key positions that I was involved with, and the skills and perspectives that I developed.

Many of the tasks that I was given used palaeography, a word I didn’t actually know beforehand. The idea of palaeography is to read documents by deciphering the author’s handwriting and abbreviations, an idea that applies to medieval manuscripts as equally as to more modern written pages. In my week at Palace Green, I learnt that when you’re reading a historical script, you can’t just read by recognising words as a whole. You need to understand the word letter by letter, slowly building up an idea of the words and their meanings in context of the document in front of you. The context was very important just as it is in archaeology; recognising patterns and phrases could open up the document’s meaning and function. The National Archive online tutorials (1) are really useful for practicing with real life examples and for picking up the essentials of medieval Latin, so I will be working on those in the future. With some determination and some more experience, I hope that palaeography becomes more accessible.

Another important part of my week at Palace Green was cataloguing. This work is carried out by the Special Collections team, who each have different collections and focuses that inform what kind of data they collect and store. For letters, this required the use of XMetaL software (2). I had never used this kind of program before, but its word processer style interface meant that I picked it up really quickly. For some of the correspondence, I transcribed the words directly; for others, I summarised the content. I also helped to catalogue a range of books bequeathed to the library by an individual, a range that was very eclectic and in two different languages. I was shown how to use the Millennium library system (3), which connects libraries across the globe, to find records for the books or to create a new record. We recorded different types of material for the different books. This included the obvious, like the publisher and author, but also clues about how the book was used over time. I particularly enjoyed writing down the text on the pastedowns, which told us so much about who had owned the book throughout its lifecycle.

Deciding the quantity, quality and nature of information to keep about which item seems to be at the heart of archiving. Predicting what data sets will be relevant in the future is the challenge of the profession, as current archiving priorities are informed by the current cultural and political climate. Reading about this after, I found a very interesting interview with Joanie Harmon, a professor of information studies at the University of California. In this, she writes that:

‘Legal and political systems and cultural practices are all influential in how and why records are created and preserved in different traditions, and archivists have traditionally been educated to work in their own national contexts or according to one specific worldview.’ (4)

A good example of this is the archives kept in colonial contexts. These collections were created and maintained by colonialists so were focused on their political rule, imposing their methods and priorities of archive management onto the original records. This could lead to bias in future research and underrepresents groups of indigenous people, limiting the power of their voice within their own past. This seems especially relevant to the library’s Sudan Archive. This collection was formed in 1957 after Sundanese independence (5). I think that this has been very well handled; the documents that are kept relate to the occupation of the Sudan by British forces but also to the country of Sudan afterwards, so that the archive forms a narrative following the country’s history beyond colonial influence. I have found these kinds of challenges very interesting to grapple with, and hope to learn more about this in the future.

In my week at Palace Green, I was also given a tour of the conservation facilities. I have experienced artefact cleaning before through volunteer work at an archaeological unit, but the detailed and careful work carried out by the conservation staff was new to me and absolutely incredible. I was shown documents and objects that had been cleaned through different techniques. Each kind of material requires a different set of skills, and different members of staff have distinct specialisations to ensure each artefact is treated to the best of their ability. Just like the archival staff, the conservation staff seemed to have their eyes firmly on the future. Intervention was minimal for each object because the current techniques are not seen as finite but are just stop gaps until better ways to preserve and maintain the fabric of the object are discovered. In this way, the profession needs to be open minded, resolving the conflicting priorities of the archive and the material, and finding a middle ground between making the artefact useful in the modern world and maintaining its integrity as a relic of the past. I wonder how these decisions are made on a day to day basis?

Finally, an overarching theme throughout my week was outreach: the involvement of the Palace Green Library with the wider community, whether children, academics, family historians or other interested citizens. Palace Green holds a number of different exhibitions throughout the year (6), which are designed and run by a special team of staff in collaboration with the collections and conservation staff groups. These are incredibly skilled productions that require an awareness of public interest as well as how best to protect the archive materials while they are on display; I was certainly surprised to find out just how much of the work of the conservation staff related to protecting documents in exhibition contexts. During my week at the library, the exhibition was titled ‘Somme 1916: From Durham to the Western Front’. I thought that this was a beautifully designed exhibition that made use of some really interesting original documents tied into multimedia presentations. It was also made especially poignant by the centenary of the battle as well as by the local focus of the exhibits. By the end of the week, experiencing the ‘behind the scenes’ life of Palace Green made me aware of just how much planning and organisation forms the backbone of exhibitions like Somme 1916. I would love to be involved in this kind of work in the future.

Beyond exhibitions, the library also works with children through its 4schools programme. I was able to experience a morning of activities with a local primary school, which included a tour of Durham Castle with the group dressed as princesses, princes and knights. It was lovely to see young people engaging with their history; they were encouraged to think about the functions of different rooms and the past occupants of the castle and many of them asked questions. This reminded me of an article I read in the Guardian written by Tim Taylor, an advanced skills teacher in Norwich, in which he argued for the importance of imagination and creativity when teaching young children about the past (7). I think that the children had an enjoyable morning and also that the enjoyment they felt helped them to understand the history around them. The 4schools staff were also very good at being flexible with the time given to them, and at ensuring the safety of the group no matter the situation. Their professionalism was inspiring.

In summary, my experiences at Palace Green were interesting and varied, and I think I really gained an understanding of how such a big organisation delegates the different tasks that it is required to accomplish. Archiving faces a lot of challenges. It constantly develops methods of conserving and cataloguing different materials to make them accessible to lots of different groups both now and in the future. I am very interested in how the profession deals with the demands of a digital future and how it develops in sharing knowledge with a global audience. In this way, I loved how forward-thinking the library is, and how open they are to exhibiting their documents and allowing academics and members of the public to access them. Everyone at the library was friendly and helpful, from the special collections team to the front of house staff, and I hope to work with them and with other archives in the future.

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