Meeting the challenges

Timescales and capacity are challenges faced by every team involved with a large cultural infrastructure project. Some projects may have shorter lead-in times than others, and your archive service may comprise a team of staff, or just you.

Supporting the project will represent a significant body of work for the archive service, which will include some or all of the following activities:

• Collections research and potential supply of information and images, including copyright clearance.
• Supporting artistic and creative teams and members of the community looking to draw inspiration from the archives.
• Undertaking research, putting-on displays and exhibitions and other events as part of the archives outreach programme.
• Supporting specific events which have a strong heritage element.
• Advocating for the need for an archive of the large cultural infrastructure project.
• Doing the practical work to ensure that an archive of the project is collected.

It will be important to articulate this anticipated body of work to senior decision-makers, and that public access and collections management work will also need to continue.

Similarly, it will be useful to discuss your capacity with the bid/delivery and/or creative teams, highlighting the level of service that the archive service can reasonably support. Senior decision-makers may also assist you to develop a solution or find ways of working that will help minimise the impact on the public service. You can also be proactive in delineating what will help you. For example, if an artist wants to draw upon archival content ask them to share a ‘wish list’ prior to visiting the archives. This advance notice will give you time to identify potentially relevant items or collections or possible alternatives.

Securing additional suitably qualified staff to support the archive service will make a big difference and exploring with senior decision-makers how the large cultural infrastructure project’s budget can facilitate this, and/or what the possibilities are for other internal or external funding, will be useful early in the process.

We have already noted (see ‘born-digital archives and digitised material‘) that the large cultural infrastructure project’s archive will primarily consist of digital records and ensuring that your service has the technical capacity to safely receive and process digital archives is critical.

The need to archive the large cultural infrastructure project’s digital records can therefore act as a vivid example you can use to advocate for the archive service’s wider need for digital preservation resources and capacity if these are not already in place. Without digital preservation, much of the evidence of the large cultural project will be lost. Similarly, without digital preservation, your local authority will not be able to fulfil its wider statutory responsibilities relating to archives, which includes digital records.

Further resources

The Resilience Indicator commissioned by the Archives and Records Association and the partners of the UK Archive Service Accreditation Standard allows you to assess the resilience of your service in areas including digital preservation. The findings from this exercise can support a discussion about your archive service’s current capacity and future needs.

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There is an understandable association with the concept of the archive being aligned with legacy – something to think about at the end. However, this will have a significant impact on the quality of the archive. Creating an archive of the project will be a key visible legacy. But in a similar vein to the monitoring and evaluation work it is important to stress in your discussions with senior decision-makers and bid/delivery and creative teams that this work needs to be planned from the outset.

If the archive is only considered at the end of the project delivery, there is a significant risk that key documentation will already be lost. As the project draws to a close the loss of staff from the delivery and creative teams is to be expected. This results in a loss of knowledge and potentially access to information and documentation; for example, logins/passwords may not be usable. Consideration of the archive only at the end will also mean the opportunity will be missed to develop relationships with communities and result in less chance of securing material from project partners.

New ways of working

New ‘ways of working’ are often referred to in the context of legacy outcomes as a consequence of a large cultural infrastructure project. In past application rounds, the London Borough of Culture application guidance has referred to ‘new models for delivering culture’ as an expected legacy outcome, for example. A new way of working might be adopting an engagement programme that is directly co-produced with the communities. However, the phrase could equally be applied to an archive service developing the technical infrastructure to manage and share its digital archives. It is always worth thinking about how you can align how you describe the archive service’s needs with the language used by bid/delivery and creative teams.

See ‘Seizing the opportunities‘ for some practical suggestions – whether the large cultural infrastructure project is in the past, on-going or ahead of you.

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