SRG session at Conference 2004

SRG session, Society of Archivists Conference 2004 – ‘The ethics of acquisition and disposal’

The Group’s session at Conference was held at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow. This year a new approach was taken of combining the special interest group sessions with the visits to repositories. This appeared to be well-received, and certainly for those attending the SRG session it afforded the opportunity for a most stimulating tour around the College building, which dates from the 19th century. In addition to the archives store and the library and reading room we saw furniture, paintings and an impressive (and alarming!) collection of historical medical instruments.

Ethics was a major theme of Conference this year, and so for the Group’s session we chose to look at ethical issues around collecting, with speakers from a wide range of backgrounds. Gina Lane, Director, Standards, Collections and Workforce Development at MLA, began with an overview of how acquisition and disposal impacted on the museums world. Gina pointed out that disposal tends to be regarded as unethical for museums, and that some of the national museums are statutorily required not to dispose of their holdings. However, arguments have been put forward that museums are holding too much, and the whole issue has been the subject of recent debate including the Museum Association’s wide-ranging ‘Collections for the Future’ consultation. For museums to become registered, they must meet minimum standards which encompass acquisition and disposal. In the case of acquisitions, this includes taking into account necessary limitations on collecting due to factors such as low staffing levels, as well as due diligence issues such as establishing rights to ownership and not acquiring items which have been illicitly traded. There are some basic principles regarding disposition, and some specific requirements, including that items should not be disposed of with the principal aim of generating funds. New UK-wide guidelines concerning illicit trade are in preparation and The National Archives has had input into these.

Janet Davies of the MLA/V&A Purchase Grant Fund looked at issues which arose out of the Fund’s experience in dealing with applications. The Purchase Grant Fund is a government-sponsored body which gives grants to archives, regional museums and specialist libraries in England and Wales to aid them in augmenting their collections through purchase. It considers carefully issues around governance, including storage conditions, public access and the viability of the institution which is applying. For archives, account is taken of whether the repository meets the HMC Standard for Record Repositories. It is expected that applicants have an acquisitions and disposal policy, which should set out the geographical and/or subject areas covered, and should address any areas where there might be potential clashes of interest between collecting institutions. Applicants also need to take account of due diligence issues, such as the vendor’s evidence of legal title. Janet stressed that museums, libraries and archives are viewed as long-term institutions and that public benefit need not necessarily be either direct or immediate for support to be deemed appropriate. The Fund had encountered particular ethical issues, for example in deciding whether to support a purchase of papers of an author who was still alive and wished to sell them with the condition that they could not be opened until after his death. Such issues require consideration on a case by case basis, but in general the Fund took the view that it was highly important that common procedures and standards were followed.

These talks covered a range of issues, and we then heard how they related to the work of two archivists. First, Sue Donnelly, Archivist of the London School of Economics, told us how the LSE’s archives and its collecting policies had developed over time, placing this within the context of the development of the School itself. The LSE Library was founded in 1896 and was always envisaged as a national resource, and one which should collect in the area of social and economic history. Acquisitions also tended to be made in line with the research interests of staff and in addition a significant quantity of material relating to women’s history was collected. However, for many years the LSE had no formal collecting policy or mechanisms, and this only began to change following the appointment of an archivist for the first time in 1975. There is now a formal collecting policy, available on the Archives’ section of the LSE’s website, which Sue believes is sufficiently flexible for them to acquire material which may not automatically appear to be relevant. Archives are actively collected, although only rarely purchased. Looking beyond the LSE, Sue also raised a number of wider issues for archives, including overlap between repositories which collect on the same subjects (which may not be a problem as no one institution can collect everything in any given subject area), the way in which some subject areas are not collected at all (because archives tend to be closely related to the establishment of which they are a part), problems with space and the possibility of de-accessioning and transfer as solutions to that, the costs associated with private deposits and the merits of pursuing endowments for them, and the problems ahead for archivists over the deposit of electronic archives.

The acquisition of a particular collection, the papers of the noted film director Lindsay Anderson, formed the subject of our last presentation, by Karl Magee, Archivist at the University of Stirling. Anderson, who was born in India of Scottish parents and saw himself as a Scot, died suddenly in 1994. His papers were held for a time at the British Council, and then the Scottish Screen Archive until 2001 when they were gifted to Stirling by Anderson’s executor. The collection includes personal and working papers, diaries, photographs and memorabilia, and Stirling was also gifted Anderson’s personal library. Pop devotees might also be interested to know that the collection includes Anderson’s own film version of an uncompleted and unreleased documentary about the visit of Wham! to China in 1985, where they were the first western pop group to play. The papers have been used by researchers for two books about Anderson, and his diaries have attracted particular interest, with a volume of edited extracts to be published November 2004. Karl hopes this book will help to stimulate interest in the collection at Stirling.

The talks were followed by a question and answer session prior to our tour of the College. SRG’s thanks go to all our speakers who provided different perspectives on a very wide-ranging topic to stimulating and thought-provoking effect, and to Carol Parry, Archivist of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, for kindly hosting us and providing us with tea and biscuits as well as the tour.

We have been able to make the Powerpoint presentations given by Gina and by Janet available online; for a copy of those given by Sue and by Karl please contact me directly at Robert.Baker@chelwest.nhs.uk

Rob Baker
SRG Training Officer

Copies of the presentations given at the SRG session  by Gina Lane and Janet Davies are available to download from this page.

Last modified 24/11/2004