Introduction

A key part of any large cultural infrastructure project is creating a positive legacy for the place and its communities. In most situations collecting material of historic value is reactive and occurs after the event. With large cultural infrastructure projects, a proactive approach is imperative, as it is known beforehand that this story should be captured and preserved, so it can be subsequently re-told. If material is only gathered ten years after the project, only a fraction will have survived – meaning the story will be incomplete and harder to follow.

Engaging with colleagues from the bid/delivery and creative teams as early as possible will provide opportunities to create an archive that covers the planning, delivery, and legacy of the project. Demonstrating your awareness and expertise will, hopefully, highlight the contribution and difference that you can make.

Without direct intervention some material relating to the project would naturally feature amongst your collections over time. However, undertaking the work to actively collect the material will make the collection stronger and richer for all those who use it. It will also give you an opportunity to progress key areas of work for your archive service while increasing the service’s visibility.

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Working on a large cultural infrastructure project can have a significant impact on an archive service including supporting development in line with the Archive Service Accreditation standard. Aligning your activity with the large cultural infrastructure project to your service development needs as set out in the Archive Service Accreditation standard and guidance will allow conversations with senior decision-makers to be more strategic, especially in three key areas of work:

• The service’s collection development policy will reflect the desire to work closely with communities so the collections are more representative of the communities they serve. A large cultural infrastructure project offers the chance to build these relationships for everyone’s mutual benefit.
• Developing the skills and technical infrastructure to receive and preserve digital archives is essential for all archive services and will support the local authority’s statutory responsibilities relating to archives. A large cultural infrastructure project provides the impetus to make digital preservation business as usual.
• Creating the archive of the large cultural infrastructure project increases the profile of the service and serves to demonstrate its relevance to a wider range of audiences.

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There is no ‘template’ that determines what a large cultural infrastructure project archive should look like. Each iteration is shaped by the topography, the local history and its people, and the overall aims and activities of the project. In talking with colleagues who are less familiar with archives, it might be worth indicating an interest in a broad range of material.

Giving a set list of the specific types of documents you want to keep at the outset runs the risk that this will be taken literally and this could result in only these documents being kept at the expense of other highly relevant material. Creating a long list of material you would like to collect is important (see ‘key records to collect for the archive‘). However, in your conversations with colleagues, including the bid/delivery and creative teams, it might be worth talking about the archive has having three distinct components:

The business archive: how the project happened

This will comprise the records created by the central bid/delivery team. It will provide a record from the initial ideas all the way through the bid to the development and evolution of the programme and the wider infrastructure.

The creative archive: what the project looked like

This will comprise the records of the artistic programme delivered by a large number of creative partners. This will allow people to study the events but also to support a range of engagement activities work as part of the project’s legacy.

The participatory archive: what the project felt like

This will comprise information and context from a wide range of individuals and groups to capture the response to and consequence of being part of the project. It might include oral histories, filmed interviews, and creative responses.

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The business and creative archives will form the official record from a planning and delivery perspective. Capturing the broader, less well defined, participatory archive, is not straightforward. There will be a huge volume of content shared on social media channels with people sharing thoughts (e.g. via Twitter), pictures (e.g. via Instagram) and video (e.g. via YouTube). Trying to capture this content is not practical with huge logistical and copyright issues to consider.

The desire to capture the participatory archive should be used to secure an introduction to the monitoring and evaluation team. The team will be interviewing individuals throughout the programme, to capture qualitative and quantitative data. This research will include responses to specific events but also changes in awareness and attitudes to culture and heritage. The headline figures are widely publicised to celebrate the achievements and impact of the project – especially to funders. The raw data will be a valuable addition to the archive.

Other potential sources for the participatory voice might include:

• Encouraging individuals to complete a diary entry on specific dates, following the approach used by the Mass Observation Archive
• Writing skills activity undertaken by schools
• Local newspapers or local radio stations
• Interviews with members of the creative team about their experiences will capture a sense of what it was like to be in the middle of a large cultural infrastructure project – delivering one event while simultaneously working on several other projects.

There may also be evidence that captures differing views of the programme before it starts, and of changing perceptions once the programme starts.

Although evaluation and monitoring activity is an integral part of the programme the work is often led by an academic institution. Distinct negotiations may be necessary to secure this material including the appropriate permissions and consent. It might be that the resources will only be transferred to the archives once the initial research findings have been published. Ensuring you are aware of who is carrying out the monitoring and evaluation and cultivating a relationship with the individuals responsible as early as possible will be important.

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Born-digital archives such as Word documents, photographs from a digital camera, and emails, will form a large part of your large cultural infrastructure project archive. Ensuring a file can be accessed in twenty or fifty years’ time requires deliberate intervention – it is not simply a case of storing the file somewhere safe. You will need to have a plan for how your archive service will preserve and provide access to digital content; an issue that is likely to already be a key priority for your service.

The archive for a large cultural infrastructure project will consist of thousands of digital files (Hull secured 140,000 files for its City of Culture archive in 2017). These figures highlight the importance of the archive service having a system specifically designed to support the long-term preservation and access of digital content. It is sometimes important to make the distinction between born-digital and digitised content. The additional benefit of a digital preservation system to also provide access to the often large quantity of digitised content created or accumulated by the archive service over time will be useful.

Ensuring you have suitable resources, whether a digital preservation system, or tools that can be used modularly for different digital preservation tasks, will help to reassure future users about the authenticity of a digital object that is part of the large cultural infrastructure project archive.

Further Resources

• The National Archives’ Plugged In, Powered Up resources provide further information and help to build digital preservation capacity; they include the Novice to Know-How courses, case studies of services that have implemented digital preservation, and workflows for carrying out digital preservation.
• The NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation and the Digital Preservation Coalition’s Rapid Assessment Model (DPC-RAM) allow the service to undertake a self-assessment of its digital preservation capability.

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The archival material needs to be gathered and sorted before work can begin on making it accessible. There will be a need to carefully review the material, especially given the strong likelihood that access restrictions will need to be applied to some parts of the collection to comply with The General Data Protection Regulation.

There is an opportunity to involve members of the community including those who participated in the project in a volunteer capacity to support the work to sort the material. Engaging senior decision-makers about securing additional suitably qualified staff to support the archive service in this and other activities throughout the project will make a big difference. Be ready to explain the archive service’s current capacity and workload including collections management and providing public access, and the importance of this continuing throughout the course of the large cultural infrastructure project.

It will also be important to be prepared to explain to bid/delivery and creative teams the potential for using collections you already hold in the programming. This could be, for example, as a point of inspiration for creative partners or as the basis of a specific project or event. There should also be opportunities for advocacy throughout the programme to use social media to link events from the programme and the collections you already hold. Even simple messages along the lines of ‘…if you enjoyed x you might be interested to know that you can find out more about the place/person/event in the archives…’ will appeal to the curious.

There may not be an immediate demand for access to the large cultural infrastructure project collection. While the material is being sorted and catalogued, it will be important to share with colleagues the ways in which the archive might be used, including, for example:

• Cultural historians looking to compare and contrast the experiences of two large cultural infrastructure projects
• Local historians researching the history of the area
• Anybody curious to find out more about an event from the programme – how it happened and who was involved
• Artists, writers and other creatives who may wish to use the content as a point of inspiration for new work
• There should also be opportunities to use the archive to engage local schools or colleges, especially where students study creative practices.

There is no doubt that supporting a large cultural infrastructure project will increase the demands on your time, your collections knowledge and your archives expertise. There will, however, be many positive experiences and outcomes from this increase in workload with the service likely to have a much higher profile with both internal and external stakeholders.

Web presence

One aspect that is often overlooked is the project website which contains a wealth of information about the team and the programme. Most web content has a short life and there is a risk this will not remain accessible for long. Colleagues in the bid/delivery team are most likely to have set-up the website, so encourage them to register the site with the UK Web Archive or the Internet Archive. Doing this as close to the award being made as possible should mean the website will be captured before, during and after the programme.

Further resources

• See ‘Principles of access‘ for a discussion of practical issues relating to access.
• The National Archives’ Data Protection Toolkit helps archive services to comply with data protection legislation when providing access to collections.
• The National Archives’ Digital Engagement Toolkit helps archivists develop their use of collections to tell stories online and engage audiences.

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Discuss with the local museum service who has the space and capacity to collect artefacts relating to the large cultural infrastructure project. During Hull’s City of Culture year in 2017, the idea of collecting artefacts to support a future exhibition resonated deeply and the creative team and some volunteers helped to identify items. You may also like to explain to bid/delivery and creative teams that in a similar way, collecting the analogue and digital records will contribute to future exhibitions.

Leeds 2023 asked people to share an artwork in exchange for a ticket to the opening event ‘The Awakening‘. A selection of the submissions was then curated and displayed across the city, demonstrating how new content can be created and then re-used in a creative manner.

Further resources

See which artefacts were collected by Hull History Centre during Hull’s City of Culture year in 2017, with the hope of holding a retrospective exhibition in 2027.

The National Archives’ guidance on Managing mixed collections.

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Where the bid team is part of the local authority, the ‘business archive’ (see ‘What might the archive look like?’) should form part of the local authority archive. Local authorities are ‘required to make proper arrangements with respect to any documents that belong to or are in the custody of the council or any of their officers’ (Local Government Act 1972 s.224). This includes born-digital and digitised material.

If the delivery or creative team is a distinct entity, like a charitable trust, it is not obliged to deposit the records from the large cultural infrastructure project with the local authority archive service. If there is distinct trust responsible for delivering the large cultural infrastructure project it is highly likely that they may not have considered the possible value and benefits of archiving this work.

In this situation there may need to be some advocacy about why the local authority archive service is the natural home for the archive, even if the project has been delivered by a charitable trust. Placing the material with the local authority archive service ensures it will become part of the history of the locality, that the resources about the community remain accessible to the community for future access and re-use, and it is also the first place researchers will look for it.

Further resources

• The National Archives’ webpage on references to archives and records in the Local Government Acts.
• The London Archives Partnership brochure, Why Archives, Why Now? shows how archive services can align themselves with strategic priorities and also how they support good governance.
• The National Archives’ Management Framework for Retention and Transfer of Charity Records and Archives gives advice to charities on the retention and transfer of material worthy of permanent preservation, including records relating to the charity’s functioning and governance. This guidance may be especially useful where a charitable trust is set up and then expected to continue functioning beyond the delivery of the project to work on legacy projects and can help you to explain why continued transfers of the charity’s records to the local authority archive will be important.

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