Accessibility and Archives: “So what kept them from producing the institution differently?”
In this post, Philip Milnes-Smith reflects on a couple of sessions at this year’s ARA Conference in Glasgow including Authentic Outreach and Authentic Voices sessions.
I have previously referenced the Government’s vision for the archive sector in England. While I clearly recognise that ARA has membership in other nations, with their own legislatures and developing sectoral visions, I don’t think the inclusion implications are limited to English practice. The 2021-25 Strategic plan of National Archives Ireland, for example, had pledged “We will create new and inclusive spaces, both physical and virtual where people can encounter and enjoy our work”, with the 2024 Director’s report noting “we are building a more inclusive, accessible and digitally-connected archival future.”
A recent Business Archives report from the Scottish Council on Archives, which was mentioned in the Authentic Voices session in Glasgow, for example, quotes both The Historic Environment Scotland Corporate Plan which “frames the organisation's purpose as using 'the past to make a better future,' wanting 'heritage to involve everyone so that we all benefit.'” and the NHLF Heritage 2033 strand which “aims to support 'greater inclusion, diversity, access and participation in heritage' and ensure 'everyone has opportunities to learn, develop new skills and explore heritage, regardless of background or personal circumstances.'” The SCA report concludes that “representation and inclusion matter”, with case study examples encouraging archives to seek out a wider and more representative diversity of voices on which future researchers will be able to draw. The Valentine Archive case study, for example, calls for actively addressing representation gaps: “When initial community responses don't reflect the full workforce, targeted outreach can ensure more complete stories are captured - particularly important for understanding gendered or other overlooked experiences.” Clearly that could include disabled people (as, for example, former employees of the businesses featured), although I didn’t find an explicit mention.
The other presentation in that session was about adding voices “through community engagement” in the form of a co-curated Persia Reimagined exhibition. This had not only diversified who was accessing the collection during the process but will diversify for future researchers and audiences both whose truth matters and what is discoverable. A comment that stood out for me, as also being relevant to disability, was that there was no single Persian perspective. Enacting ‘nothing about us without us’ is going to be more complex than adding one disabled voice to counterpoise the weight of the records creator perspective.
But I want to focus the rest of this blog on publications from the National Irish Visual Arts Library that were referenced in the Authentic Outreach session. The first, Archival Plurality, arose from a year-long project with “the objective of further facilitating access, inclusion and visibility of artists and designers from diverse ethnic, cultural and gender backgrounds and nationalities currently underrepresented in the collections”. An essay by teresa cisneros, sharing experience at Wellcome, reminds us that working with communities who have not worked with us before is not simply a matter of “well-intentioned, well-meaning, mostly university-educated good people” inviting them to contribute. What if the valid reasons why they “may not identify with the institution and the programme” include, for example, past experiences and perceptions of racism and ableism? In our processes and practices we need to make sure we do it in ways that don’t reinforce those perceptions.
That probably means staff need support “to think in more pluralistic and inclusive ways. After doing a listening tour of staff over several weeks, I realised employees lacked knowledge and experience in thinking beyond the way they had always done things. They needed to be challenged, I discovered, to think beyond what they had always centred: in this case ‘white non-disabled middle-class heterosexual narratives.’” Such change also requires senior leaders to recognise that there is an issue in how we have all been educated and trained, and to allocate resources that enable us to do the necessary work.
At Wellcome, another result was a co-produced “Principles for Working Together” policy agreement that recognised the reality that often “people do not know what they need”, meaning that it included example questions potential co-producers and co-curators might ask such as: “Will you pay for a translator to look over my contract?” or “I am a carer, could you provide a budget to support my being away from my caring duties?” There is a difference between saying you want to work with someone, and making it possible for them to do so.
Another NIVAL publication is a toolkit for artists’ archiving. This offers a reminder that hesitation to work with us may not just be about crossing our threshold for projects, but whether they want to be archived at all, let alone whether they wish to deposit with us: “The stories of artists who have been omitted or underrepresented in collected histories need to be amplified, but the choice to partake in self-documentation remains a personal one – with the option of not self-documenting as an equally valid choice.” Again, preconceptions about us could be important – have we shown ourselves to be interested in disability access, to surfacing the disability stories in our collections, or to be employing disabled archivists?
The question in the title comes from cisneros’ essay. It reminded me that in one of the keynotes at the ARA Conference, Elizabeth Shepherd implicitly raised the possibility that our handbooks, manuals and professional training might have been very different had they been the work of the pioneering women who invented the idea of Local Records Offices, rather than the necessarily ‘male’ keeper of the Public Record Office. How might our sector be different if disabled people had always been at the heart of what we do and how we were trained to do it?
Guest blogs are welcome. Please email diversityandinclusion@archives.org.uk. We would also like to hear from you if you have found one of the Allies’ blogs helpful to your work.