Scope and sectors

As you will have probably already noticed, most collecting organisations exist in a sort of hierarchy from national to local. The national and state organisations in each sector tend to get together to develop policies, encourage collaboration and do other important things: there’s NSLA for libraries, CAARA for archives, and CAMD for museums.

At the local or community level there is huge diversity in the sorts of collections that are developed. They may be collections relating to specific institutions such as businesses, schools, or churches; or they may document the experience of particular localities, communities, or social and ethnic groups. The development of community museums, particularly since the 1970s, is explored in Let a thousand flowers bloom: museums in regional Australia

The Victorian Collections site separates the Victorian collecting sector into two categories – state collections and community collections. Many of these community collections – ‘metro-regional galleries, museums, historical societies, RSLs, sporting clubs, church, hospital and school archives, and more’ – are represented on the Victorian Collections site.

Browse through the organisations on Victorian Collections and have a look at the sorts of things they collect. Think about the sorts of subjects or interests they represent.

How can you find collections?

Unfortunately, once again, there’s no complete list of collecting organisations. Trove includes several hundred, but is nowhere near complete. Several directories have been created and then neglected. Here’s some places to look:

If you want to explore Trove’s collection of collections you can make use of the advanced search to filter results by organisation:

  • Go to Trove and click on the ‘Advanced Search’ link.
  • Scroll down to ‘Library’.
  • Where it says ‘Enter the name of a library or institution’ type in a name or type of organisation – try ‘Orbost’ and click on ‘Find locations’.
  • You’ll see a list of matching collections. Check ‘Orbost Historical Society Museum’ and click ‘Search’.
  • You’ll see all the items from the Orbost Historical Society Museum in Trove.

If you follow the instructions about you’ll notice that ‘(nuc:”VORH:M”)’ appears in the Trove search box. NUC stands for National Union Catalogue, and the code after ‘nuc:’ is a unique identifier for the Orbost Historical Society Museum. The NUC is also displayed in the list of the advanced search page and in the Australian Libraries Gateway. NUC codes are handy because you can use them to construct links to specific collections in Trove. For example, a link to the Orbost Historical Society collections on Trove is just: http://trove.nla.gov.au/result?q=(nuc:”VORH:M”). See Trove help for more examples.

Another way of exploring the collections in Trove is by using my experimental Trove Collection Profiler. Just select a collection to visualise and hit the ‘Display’ button. You can also filter individual collections by keyword.

Collection bingo

Your job – find an example of each of the collections on the bingo sheet. Try looking in Trove, Victorian Collections, the Australian Libraries Gateway, and the Queensland Museums and Galleries finder.

Collection bingo sheet

Portfolio alert Copy the collection bingo categories into your portfolio and add the names and urls of the examples you find.

What’s missing?

The broad-scale statistical picture gives us a sense of the size of the collecting sectors in Australia, and digging deep into Victorian collections gives a sense of the diversity of collecting activity. But what’s missing?

Have a look at How an archive of the Internet could change history and think about what’s not being collected and why?

The article challenges some our assumptions about the nature of collecting and collections. In particular, it makes us think about:

  • collections that seek to capture the voices and experiences of people that might not be preserved elsewhere
  • collections that are a response to particular events
  • collections that are digital and dispersed

Many of the collections on the Victorian Collections site would probably fall within the definition of ‘community archives’. Andrew Flinn has written widely on community archives, particularly in the UK, and I’d like you to read his chapter in The Future of Archives and Recordkeeping entitled ‘The impact of independent and community archives on professional archival thinking and practice’.

A community archive might not just be an archive – it may include objects, videos, or oral histories – but it collects, it has a particular purpose, and it is generally independent of existing organisations. It’s important to remember that collections are created in a variety of contexts, and for a variety of purposes.

Portfolio alert! Having read Flinn’s article, what do you think is the characteristic that most distinguishes a community archive from a national or state collecting institution? Write 200 words.

One example of a community archive that you may have come across in Victorian Collections is the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives. This was first established in the 1970s with the particular purpose to document the experience of the LGBT community.

Another example is the work of the Anangu people to develop Ara Irititja. The purpose of the collection is quite clear:

Missionaries, explorers and others recorded and photographed the lives of the people and took these records away. Ara Irititja makes it possible to bring the history back home where it belongs. To have Ara Irititja in our communities helps keep the past in the present and helps keep our culture strong. It is important to link future generations through Ara Irititja to generations past.

The New York Times article also talks about collecting contemporary political movements or events. Documenting Ferguson is a collection that was established in the wake of the shooting death of Michael Brown and the subsequent unrest – they’re inviting people to contribute their own images, videos and stories. The Documenting the Now project is developing new tools to allow easy archiving of social media around specific events to ensure they become part of the historical record. Another example of a collection created around a particular event is the CESIMIC digital archive documenting the Christchurch earthquakes of 2010 and 2011.

Or what about the Trump Protest Archive? It emerged from the protest rallies that followed Donald Trump’s inauguration earlier this year. It’s not just the fact that we can use digital tools to collect this sort of material that’s important, it’s the speed at which such collecting projects can now be established. (It’s also worth noting that both Documenting Ferguson and the Trump Protest Archive make use of Omeka, which we’ll be using for our project.)

The nature of what we think of as collections and the circumstances in which they’re created are themselves changing. Boundaries between journalism, archives and activism are becoming blurred. I Have a Name is a database of items retrieved from mass graves of people who dies while trying to cross the US/Mexico border. You can read and hear about it on NPR.

Portfolio alert! Use your googling powers to find an example of a collection (not in Victorian Collections!) that documents lives and experiences that might have otherwise been lost. If you’re having trouble you might look at some of the projects on this list. In your portfolio copy the url of the project and write a minimum of 100 words describing the collection and its significance.

The politics of collections

Howard Zinn was an American historian and activist who wrote a well-known history of the US from below. He was active in the civil rights movement and was sacked from one university for supporting a student protest.

In 1970 he gave a challenging speech to the American Society of Archivists in which he argued:

‘The archivist, even more than the historian and the political scientist, tends to be scrupulous about his neutrality, and to see his job as a technical job, free from the nasty world of political interest: a job of collecting, sorting, preserving, making available, the records of the society. But I will stick by what I have said about other scholars, and argue that the archivist, in subtle ways, tends to perpetuate the political and economic status quo simply by going about his ordinary business. His supposed neutrality is, in other words, a fake.’

He then made a series of points about what we collect and why, noting:

‘the collection of records, papers, and memoirs, as well as oral history, is biased towards the important and powerful people of the society, tending to ignore the impotent and obscure: we learn most about the rich, not the poor; the successful, not the failures; the old, not the young; the politically active, not the politically alienated; men, not women; white, not black; free people rather than prisoners; civilians rather than soldiers; officers rather than enlisted men.’

Zinn wanted archivists ‘to compile a whole new world of documentary material, about the lives, desires, needs, of ordinary people’. He was talking about archivists, but he might easily have said curators, or even librarians. His point was that our collections are not natural or inevitable, they have their own histories, their own assumptions and biases, their own politics.

Since Zinn’s time there have been many discussions of the idea of ‘neutrality’ or ‘objectivity’ in the cultural heritage professions, and the need to take deliberate action to ensure that a diversity of experiences is represented within our cultural heritage collections – to make sure that a wider range of voices is heard.

The National Trust in the UK is currently running a program of events, installations, and exhibitions that explore LGBTQ heritage:

Many of our places were home to, and shaped by, people who challenged conventional ideas of gender and sexuality. 50 years after the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality, we’re exploring our LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer) heritage with a programme called Prejudice and Pride.

The program aims to reveal the ‘hidden histories of love and relationships at our places’. For example here’s a short video that examines the life of Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer – the last Squire of Felbrigg.

But the Museums Association has noted, the program has also been the subject of some criticism from those who saw the National Trust as ‘a keeper of staid country houses and well-manicured lawns – an apolitical organisation whose job is to freeze in time a particular, rose-tinted view of English country life’. Some people still believe that we can keep politics out of cultural heritage collections.

Richard Sandell is a British museum academic who has been involved in the Prejudice and Pride program. He’s particularly interested in the roles museums can play in promoting social justice, and has researched the representation of disability in museum collections. One of his articles (co-authored with Delin, Dodd, and Gay) is ‘Beggars, freaks and heroes? Museum collections and the hidden history of disability’, published in the Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship.

Cassie Findlay is an Australian archivist. Last year she gave a keynote address at the Australian Society of Archivists annual conference on ‘Archival activism: collaboration and transformation’. You can a related article here, and view the video below.

Portfolio alert! Read (and watch) Zinn, Sandell, and Findlay and write a minimum of 200 words reflecting on the role of the cultural heritage professional in creating and interpreting collections. What are the responsibilities of archivists, curators, and librarians, and how do you think they are changing.