Accessibility and Archives: “no trace of our past, no bridge to our future”
Accessibility and Archives: “no trace of our past, no bridge to our future” [i]
In this, the second of two personal blogs, Philip Milnes-Smithreflects on how disability might fare under the Collections Management and Development tools of Reviewing Significance. This blog has not been intended as a takedown of one specific framework, but rather to prompt thinking about what rational processes might still be limiting the admission of certain demographics into our collections, securing “no trace of our past” leaving “no bridge to our future”.
At the risk of alienating my audience, I want to acknowledge that it is more hypothetical than other blogs in the series (with the reader invited to imagine, suppose and speculate). However, it draws directly on my own experience consulting on a disability history project.
A Provenance / acquisition
Suppose an organisation closes down a side-project for disabled people, with no intention of reopening it, the administrators may not feel that it was ever sufficiently core to their purpose to maintain the records for future use. Should the decision have been deferred, a later records manager – even if they lacked a prejudice against disabled people – may not recognise the importance of what they discover in a previously overlooked filing cabinet, once it has passed statutory retention periods. If they were to look more closely, records of individuals may be deemed too sensitive (in terms of personal data) to be retained, meaning that any records that do get passed on for archiving purposes may be merely business records of income and expenditure, that record the institution but not the disabled beneficiaries.
Supposing there are photographs, the chances are slim that there would be clear identifications of the intellectual property rights, subject consent, captions and labels, dates, and so on. In addition, the disability of the individuals might be readable only from the context. Indeed, as most disabilities are non-visible, might the subjects even be recognisable as disabled people.
Supposing an interested third party from outside the recordkeeping profession retrieves them from the bin or skip to support, for example, writing a history of the parent institution, they have become a collector, but were perhaps never the legitimate owner, and not the creator. That the materials survive at all could be down to their intervention, but should they later seek to return them, having shuffled them away from an original order, and mixing up originals with their own scans and enlargements, any re-accession cannot be built from a straightforward chain of ownership.
B Rarity / Uniqueness
Given the under-representation of disabled people in our collections, this category ought to be in our favour. But some of the more specific prompt questions might well get different answers depending on the appraiser and their level of awareness of disability, disability records and disability history (e.g. “is it the only/the best/a good example of its type accessible in a public collection? Or is it the only (or one of the best) examples of its type accessible in a UK or worldwide context?). Such questions also depend on the discoverability of disability in other collections, which may be only minimally described.
Suppose the surviving built environment is accessible architecture from a quarter of a century before the first UK manual on the subject. How relevant is the uniqueness of the buildings to the significance of any archive? What amount of due diligence would an appraiser need to undertake to know this, if it is not spelled out in the surviving archive materials?
C Sensory / Visual quality / Emotional impact
This is always a tricky area for archives to score in when so much of what we hold is text on sheets of paper – however interesting or important the contents, they tend not to be that visually engaging or, indeed, to have a multisensory impact.
Suppose there are photographs, but these are a mixture of snapshots and more curated and composed publicity or journalistic shots, and they are in black and white, not in glorious technicolour. Is an aesthetic visual quality really what counts here?
If we consider the language used, the emotional reaction in the present may not be a positive one, particularly for disabled people. Brilmyer’s essay, for example, notes: “I think how words such as ‘‘insane,’’ ‘‘dangerous,’’ and ‘‘dirty’’ have been used against my disabled community, implying that we are lesser than others and how those words, for me, draw in all of those who participated in and were (and still are) affected by the creation of such archival records that were established around ableist, racist, and classist ideals” (and see also this).
D Condition / Completeness
When disability is not valued, records may have been stored in suboptimal conditions. If non-specialists find mouldy records, for example, their inclination is to throw out (not treat). That single decision could mean most of what once existed no longer does. The upshot could be that there are questions we can no longer answer and perspectives we can no longer directly recover. But does it also mean any remainder is not worth retaining?
But how complete were the records in the first place? – the records required to administer the institution give one perspective, but what did the users think and feel? Does anyone notice this absence when considering completeness?
E Historical / Cultural Meaning
Whilst the disabled community is one to which many of us will belong in our lifetimes, disability history has been more usually imagined as niche than everyone’s history. That means it is less likely that enquiries would be coming to the archive, or that the records before appraisal have been used for academic/cultural research. But disabled people also have diverse needs and experiences. If, for example, the focus in the records is physical disability, is that too specific to be pertinent to the history of those with sensory or intellectual impairments, for example.
Supposing there is a chaotic room of dumped records. A survey could show them to have research potential, but for as long as there is no resource to do some initial arrangement, the archive may reasonably decide that they can’t ingest them, even if the accrual illuminates the “organisation’s history, site, building or locality”. Such records may remain at risk.
F Exploitability
For a twentieth century organisation, there might need to be short-term access limits to protect confidentiality, that might limit suitability for developing community programming with local disability groups. If this is not a demographic already being reached, how much of a priority would it seem to be, anyway?
For as long as disability history is seen as niche and even off-putting, how exploitable is it for marketing and product development? Might a disability archive “power the creative industries, inspiring books, plays, films, adverts, music, art and design” in a world that centres non-disability? Even if it had potential for creative exploitation by disabled artists, but would they get commissioned by funders?
What questions might we need to ask instead, if we are to secure different outcomes?
[i]https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/archives-sector/our-archives-sector-role/the-governments-vision-for-archives-in-england/turning-vision-into-action/
Thumbnail image Photo by Tom Butler on Unsplash