When is participatory cataloguing truly participatory?

By Debra Doggett, Senior Archivist at The Planned Environment Therapy Archives and Special Collections

At the Planned Environment Therapy Archives and Special Collections (PET Archives) we’ve had mixed experiences when it comes to participatory cataloguing, so we’re using this blog to explore some of the reasons for success and failure, and to examine the complexities of relationships between people, archives and place.

We currently work in a participatory way with several community groups. We should be clear that we have not yet accomplished a fully compliant catalogue with either group, so what we’re referring to here is participatory listing and appraisal rather than cataloguing as such.

Some of the communities we work with have very strong emotional ties to archival material. The archives mean something to them that goes beyond an historical narrative of an organisation or period in time; it’s a very personal part of their history. For example, some community members were taken into care as children and lived at a residential community for most of their childhood and now participate in the cataloguing of that community’s archive. Some members lived on a mental health hospital ward for three years and now participate in the cataloguing of that hospital’s archive. Some members worked alongside other members as their clinicians or support workers. These are understandably very emotive experiences which conjure up a variety of reactions from community groups who have strong attachments to the physical archive as a sense of place. These lived-experiences inform their work with the archives of these organisations, adding a rich layer of metadata, description and context.

What we’ve found is that the community members who tend to come to the archives have mostly had positive experiences of an organisation or place. We recognise that they are a self-selecting group who want to reconnect with something through archival work. By default, this sometimes leaves us with an idealised version of an organisation’s history because the people that had a negative experience often don’t want to engage with the archives. This puts community groups and the archives team in a difficult situation when the archives are telling a different story to what the community members believe or remember. Perhaps this is where the role of the archivist can be useful as somebody with greater distance from the subject?

The flip side is that it’s the attachment to positive memories that drives the community groups to keep returning, keep working with the archives, and keep in touch with each other. The friendships that are formed during the joint task of listing and reminiscing are far more important to the community groups than the archival work itself. We don’t kid ourselves at the archives, we know our place! And we work to support these relationships because it’s these friendships that help people when they encounter something in the archives which is emotionally challenging.

Community participation in archival processes brings a diversity to the work. It widens our lens to illuminate the human aspect of the collections, and the full breadth of human experience from all backgrounds. We value working with people, some of whom may have been marginalised by society in the past, because it brings a unique and important, often overlooked, perspective on social history and fills in some of the archival silences within our collections. They also bring indispensable expertise and knowledge. We always learn something from the community groups; they teach us how to support a range of people with different skillsets and they are unfailingly honest with us about our practice.  

That said, we sometimes find the participatory aspect frustrating as a team because it goes against our control freak archivist tendencies, and sometimes creates more work when we need to check descriptions. We have also found it interesting to work with a considerable generation gap between the archives team and the community groups, which can result in archaic, and what would now be considered offensive, language creeping into listings. We have also been cautioned by ICO for a minor data breach because of a lack of belief in GDPR and misunderstanding of social media by one of the community members. As a result we have implemented some new training procedures for volunteers.

Another aspect of participatory cataloguing/archiving which we’ve experienced is a reluctance to appraise items. Mostly because of the emotional attachment that community members assign to each item, we’ve ended up keeping some items against our professional judgement. We could view this as being truly participatory by respecting the judgement of people who lived and worked at an organisation and created and used the records/items when they were still in use. Surely they know better than us? But the end result is that we are preserving a collection that includes far more objects and ephemera than what we as archivists would consider items of archival evidentiary value. To illustrate the point, in some collections we have discovered elastic bands, hearing aids and urine bottles which have been preserved by previous archives teams because of a stakeholders’ connection to them.

Our experience of participatory cataloguing has left us with a conundrum of how do we empower the community groups that participate whilst also maintaining our professional boundaries as archivists? How do we appraise sufficiently when it’s experienced as taking something away and devaluing personal experience rather than simply part of the archival process? How do we capture descriptions that don’t just tell one side of the story when the experience of community members is valid and true to them? There’s no easy or complete answer to these questions and our practice is constantly evolving in response to these challenges.

So here at the PET Archives we continue to work collaboratively with and alongside community groups because we value the very real participation that people give to us. But we’re definitely still learning...