Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
What is an archive?
Dr Keith Rowntree reflects on the nature of archives, the archive and archiving at Leeds Beckett on the eve of Explore Your Archive week.
Space and Process
What is an archive? Is it a physical space where public or private records are stored? Is it the actual physical records - the material to be preserved? The answer lies in both.
The archives, in its plurality, is a term that may denote physical repositories; it hints at a space of innumerable records miraculously stored in their entirety. These archives of popular imagination contain an unlimited phalanx of documents charting the entire history of an institution, a city, or an estate, or so it is supposed. The archive, singular, can represent the processes performed to preserve collections. However, the terms are interchangeable, with no clear consensus on meaning.
For many, I suspect the archive as a construct conjures an image of a dusty, dimly lit, and little frequented corner of some grand building. Think Gandalf, searching in the archives of Gondor as depicted in Peter Jackson's film version of The Lord of the Rings. Or perhaps somewhere Indiana Jones might visit in his search for clues to the location of the Lost Ark. Of course, these are fictionalised spaces. But may still inform most people's concept of an archive.
The pragmatic reality for a space of preservation and the preservation of archive 'stuff' differs significantly from this popular vision. The archive space at Leeds Beckett is darkened, banishing the punishing UV light of the Sun. You have only to recall what happens to a newspaper left near a sunny window for a few days, becoming a brittle ghost of its former self. And what of the shelves of material preserved? Like all collections, they are fragmentary. Glimpses of the past suspended in the present, intrusions into our 'now' survivors from 'then', their survival grounded in luck, a chance incident or decision taken by others long gone. Even now, with an archive presence in place, that process of luck continues today and will continue tomorrow.
Past and Future
Dust is the enemy; it eats your collections; dust is never entirely banished; the paper you preserve is dust in potential. However, the archive at Leeds Beckett is generally dust-free, at least as best achievable in the 110-year-old James Graham Building. Carolyn Steedman's seminal book Dust explores the cultural phenomenon of dust and its constant nature.
Silverfish and other pests can nibble unnoticed at precious items in the cold and the damp. A balance is crafted with the tools of temperature and relative humidity in the archive space, pushing back the moment mould and insects find a comfortable niche to feast on your collections.
For now, at Leeds Beckett, the archiving process injects energy into our collections, cleaning dust, wrapping in acid-free materials, blocking UV light, cataloguing and a host of other small actions that arrest the entropy. It is a sobering thought that the second law of thermodynamics describes the relentless reduction of everything to chaos. We can all feel it in our bones!
So, what is an archive? It is a cry against the 'dying of the light'. Less dramatically, it is the application of perseveration techniques towards a dedicated space and its contents to allow the dissemination of knowledge about our shared past long enough to ensure a future.
