Earlier this week, as you may have read, the University of Melbourne announced it had acquired the archives of a former student, feminist scholar and writer Germaine Greer. The total cost of the archive including transport, cataloguing, indexing and digitisation is A$3 million, much of which will be raised by alumni donations.
Is this money well spent? As the university archivist, I’m inclined to say yes.
http://theconversation.com/why-germaine-greers-life-in-letters-is-one-for-the-archives-19625
Comments
Kim thanks for your comment and sorry for the delay in responding. I've been thinking about this a lot lately with respect to the research archive which, while it can and does support these functions, is fundamentally neither a compliance nor a community heritage organisation. There is probably another distinction to be drawn between resesarch archives and community archives (although obviously the categories and purposes overlap).
I don't think it matters whether archives are high profile or not but they do need to have stories of significance around them that connect to users. In many cases these stories might emerge through through the process of bringing out the archives into research and public knowledge, e.g. an iterative process. Successful projects seem to be based on finding the closest engaged stakeholders and working with them to broaden the network.
The peicemeal nature of the digitalisation of traditional archives tends towards single theme or case based (if cross collection) approaches to research and archives rather than whole collection and inter-collection appraoches, which is historically an important mental structure for archives. I try to hold both approaches in my head, but case based solutions may not suit whole collection problems or questions and vice versa.
Whatever the limitations of research and our approaches to collections, we all need to invest more in collaboration and to reconfigure collection management processes around discovery and access, while keeping in mind the need to scale and the long-term sustainability of the decisions we make.
The public service driver has been a great source of innovation in the government archives sector. What could motivate, focus, resource and join up the non-government archives sector, both beyond and with the government sector?
A practical question....is there a central / one-stop-shop where a potential researcher can find the location (and access conditions) of the archives of Australians who have contributed to the (Australian) Arts? I'm out of the loop in this area.
Hi Katrina,
Congratulations to you and Uni Melb for securing Greer's archive. I've read your blog post and am intrigued by your comment about the need for 'concerted effort' to translate paper records to computer readable form, especially in light of the closing session of the ASA conference - Brad Argent ...Ancenstry.com ...using archival material to support a business model....archivists not leveraging this very well. Fundamentally, I agree that unless 'stuff' is digitised, it will be underused (at best). My questions relate to the implications of this for archivists, especially those in non-government archives, where I believe digitisation (and access generally) are not given a high priority. Perhaps the collections in those non-government archives are not as high profile as Greer's? Does this matter? What partnerships do we need to establish, in the absence of a pool of alumni willing and able to fund activity beyond acquisition? Is there a need for a shift in priority for archivists further towards the 'making them accessible' end of our archival spectrum?
Of course its money well spent, her letters alone would be worth that amount - thank heavens its coming to Australia and not staying in the UK! Well done!