Cultural Heritage Sector

Out of the Archive 2003

The archives of the Imperial War Museum  (IWM) are well known to researchers. A visit there is probably a breath of fresh air to those now spending their days glued to a computer screen –leafing through old albums and handling beautifully crafted old prints brings back the detective element of picture research which was its defining pleasure for many years.

In year 2000, as picture libraries were just gearing up to the digital world, I was lucky enough to  spend two and a half weeks working in  the First World War archive at the IWM. My job was  to select images for the Heritage Institute Partnership (now Heritage Image Partnership, managed by Topham ) – a commercial project providing  a digital on-line portal for images from the rich collections of museums and galleries . Revenue from commercial sales is split between Heritage Images and heritage sector source archives.

As it happened, the IWM decided not to sign up, but it was a great idea, and seemed a good way to bring images from the cultural sector into a more public arena. I say public rather than just commercial, as it was clear to me in the course of researching a number of archives for HIP – The National Monuments Record, The British Library, The Guildhall Library and Art Gallery, The Science and Society Picture Library and others –  that there were treasures in those archives which should be better known and more accessible to the public.  The commercial imperative seemed a good way to galvanise the institutions – where the culture had been overwhelmingly one of conservation and curatorship -  into bringing the images into the light of day. Getting the images digitised and selected could be speeded up by sharing the cost with a commercial venture.

The National Monuments Record in London was another archive I visited in the course of this work. Previously I was unaware of the archive and was astonished to find that it is a public access resource, where anyone can go to order a print from the boxes lining the walls. In one box I  found an image of Caledonian market in Islington an old haunt of my father’s when he was a child and  the area – now rather bleak parkland surrounded by grey estates – was buzzing with the noise and activity of a huge flea market .

Selecting images from the IWM archive gave me an insight into another part of our collective past. As I leafed through the albums of prints  I was made aware of the layers of  experience in those photographs  - which were official records  of the war. A strong theme was the desire to create some kind of normality out of a situation of total and utter devastation. The image of a group of soldiers frying bacon on a heap of rubble against a backdrop of ruined buildings sticks in my mind. The cheery smiles of the men underline the bleakness of the reality which they were facing. Perhaps the overall impression was all the more intense because there was no intention to show the horrors of war in these official propaganda images.  But the real issue is making these vast resources accessible with the new digital tools we have available.

Museums are facing  pressures on all sides at the moment. They need to make collections more accessible to the public and at the same time to make money for a cash-strapped sector. The existence of NOF (New Opportunities Fund) funding for digitising cultural assets has spawned a number of ambitious projects within the museums which are now running alongside commercial ventures like HIP.

To follow up on progress at the IWM, I spoke to Jeremy Richards, the Photographic Unit Manager. He started in the year 2000 with  a completely analogue archive of 165,000 records . Faced with the question of how to take a well equipped and skilled workforce from one technology to another, he set in motion an extensive training programme, developed  workflow and standards for digitisation, and now has digitally skilled staff, 5000 plus scans and a core set of 400 digital  images available on-line.  He says it took quite a long time to get there, but the museum is now in a position to make a big funding bid to digitise a major part of the collection and to revamp the web site to make it more accessible to the user. Richards says of the process " The main difficulty for us has been that our project was carved out of our own time and resource. Really you need to ring-fence a project like this with designated staff and resource."

As staff  working in picture archives  are only too aware, the digitisation of the images is only a very small part of the project. Richards agrees, saying  "The conversion of images into data is only one third of the cost of bringing those images to the user."  He compares  the process with the first climb of Everest  where hundreds of people were needed in support of the two people who reached the summit. Similarly each image made accessible to users on the internet requires extensive work in the background by cataloguers, keyworders, digital imaging staff, web development teams and so on. This is the mountain the museums are facing at the moment, and is the reason why museums staff are packing out events like the EMII (European Museums ‘Information Institute conference in June ‘A Joint Solution to Managing Cultural Digital Assets’ and the Museums Association conference ‘Virtual Matters: Digitising the Museum.’

For those who have already benefited from NOF funding to digitise their collections, there is still a lot to do to bring the images to the people who need to see them. For many other museums the task begins much further back - with getting access to the works to be photographed, photographing the collection and cataloguing the data.  Indeed, it was clear during the time I spent working with HIP, that accessing the treasures buried deep in the archives is often a profoundly uneconomic activity.  As such it needs funding and the full participation of all the staff in the museum.

Lack of communication between museum departments has always been a limiting factor in the push to digitise, but thinking in this area has moved on considerably in the last few years. Linda Spurdle, Digitisation Project Leader at Tyne and Wear Museums and a  speaker at the MA conference, is in charge of a digitisation project involving 10,000 images from a number of collections. She says "It is important to have an Outer Web of support in place. You have to get curators and other staff members to buy into the project. It is good practice to listen to their commitments and needs when planning the project and make sure they are consulted on major issues, as their insights and advice are very helpful and it means they have a feeling of ‘ownership’ of the project."

Another area of concern is the cost of bringing the digitised images to market. The picture library world is well acquainted with this conundrum. Many new image portals have failed for lack of marketing investment and those that do well generally have the resources to dig in for a long hard climb. How can museums and galleries, whose resources are stretched between public access requirements and the need to make money, hope to compete in this competitive environment.? The answer may lie in commercial operations like HIP, which share the cost of bringing images to market. Or it may lie in the concept of ‘hub sites’  where like-minded picture libraries band together to create a mini-portal of their own. This idea is becoming popular amongst specialist commercial picture libraries and has been adopted by museums in Australia and Canada.
The Imperial War Museum hopes to have an non-line searchable collection on the web within a year. For smaller museums  the process will clearly take a lot longer.  Making a user-friendly web interface is a key undertaking, and in this respect the commercial and museum sectors have a lot to learn from each other.  Picture users need the same non-specialist search terms as the general public – what’s good for one group will be good for the other.  Compare this with the Everest climb. The first ascent was achieved by the joint talents of two very different men.  (c) Sarah Saunders, Electric Lane
Published in Montage 2003