Attended the Business Archives Council conference earlier this week, which was great, as always! One of the afternoon sessions really caught my interest as it featured three sets of speakers highlighting their joint academic-archivist collaborative projects. Ryland Thomas, from the Bank of England spoke about how daily transactional ledger data from the bank’s archive has been used to test whether, and to what extent, during the mid-nineteenth century the Bank of England adhered to Walter Bagehot’s rule that a central bank in a financial crisis should lend cash freely at a high interest rate in exchange for “good” securities, and found that the bank’s behaviour broadly conformed. Another set of customer ledgers has shown that the securities the Bank purchased were debts owed by a geographically and industrially diverse set of debtors and, using data on the bank’s income and dividends, they found that the Bank and its shareholders profited from lender of last resort operations.

The full paper can be read here: http://www.ehes.org/EHES_117.pdf

It was a fascinating insight into the academic use the bank makes of its own archives and the parallels it had been able to draw with practices today. Interestingly, during the Q&A session, the bank’s archivist admitted that they are not keeping the equivalent ledgers from today…

This year’s Business Archives Council conference (21 November) focused on the rewards and realities of diversifying your service. There was a wide range of speakers, not just from the business archive sector, so there were different perspectives and lots of great ideas to discuss, including working with volunteers, reminiscence therapy, community engagement and novel and exciting ways in which to involve employees in significant company anniversaries. In my role as a PhD student (gamekeeper turned poacher!), it was good to hear how the Boots Archive is being extremely proactive in its approach to the academic community. Wonderful hospitality from HSBC during the day and also from Barclays for the evening reception for the Wadsworth Prize, where the HSBC history The Lion Wakes by David Kynaston and Richard Roberts was the worthy winner. Thanks too to HSBC for giving all conference delegates a copy!

Great to see Sophie Clapp, the Boots archivist, featuring on this BBC2 programme and such a natural in front of the camera! The concept of the series is that a family give up all their modern technology and live life as if in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and so on, where they find, of course, that their lives – and roles – would have been very different. Sophie talked about the revolution in makeup and how it started to become a necessity, rather than a luxury, for women.  

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It was great to hear that the Boots Archive has been successful in obtaining funding from the Wellcome Trust to make the archive more accessible to academic researchers, including digitisation of much of its content. A Wellcome-Boots Advisory Board, comprising representatives from Boots, including the archivist, Sophie Clapp, and from the Wellcome, as well as academics from Warwick Business School, will recommend how best the archive can be opened up and suggest potential research themes across disciplines. Following on from the ICA conference in Milan, this is a great way of demonstrating how the archive can provide a good return on investment. 

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Just back from the International Council on Archives’ Section for Business Archives annual conference in Milan, which comprised two days of interesting and thought-provoking papers under the above heading. I chaired session on ‘Innovative models of management for business archives’ and gave an introductory overview to the topic before the three speakers presented case studies of their own particular model. Other topics included inter alia the role of advocacy, both internally and externally, and the issues in managing multimedia collections and of finding the right people for the job.

The spectacular venue was Pirelli’s headquarters, the auditorium being within a former cooling tower, which had been re-purposed and surrounded by a glass box. The site is also home to a 15th century villa in traditional Lombardic style with amazing frescoes, where we were privileged to have our conference dinner (accompanied by a tremendous thunderstorm!) and the Pirelli archive, which houses an incredible array of advertising. They even have their own Pirelli monogrammed boxes and researchers’ gloves! We were also given a demonstration of the tyre testing within a soundproof room in the R&D building. The day before the conference we were able to visit to the Gallerie d’Italia, opposite La Scala opera house, which holds the art collections of the Banca Intesa Sanpaolo, our hosts, and on the last evening we visited the Galleria Campari which, again, has an incredible display of advertising and promotional material.

The humidity and thunderstorms aside, it was an excellent conference and the SBA continues to go from strength to strength. Next year’s conference will be in Atlanta, hosted by Coca-Cola and 2017 will see the SBA in India for the first time, in Mumbai – can’t wait! 

It’s been a busy week for archives!

Attended the Business Archives Council (BAC) annual conference on Thursday  in the spectacular venue of the Royal Albert Hall. It attracted a large number of delegates, including some from as far away as Switzerland and Japan. The programme, entitled ‘Let the Right One In? – Challenging Perceptions of Access to Business Archives’, discussed ideas and issues around access with the aim of producing a policy statement on access.  Kiara King gave a fascinating run-through of different types of social media with examples of how business archives had used them, so there’s no excuse for not giving it a go! It was interesting to hear from the director of Pentabus, a small community theatre company based in Shropshire and recipient of the first cataloguing grant for business archives related to the arts.  She outlined the value of their volunteers to the project and how receiving the funding had been the basis of building a new working relationship with Shropshire Record Office. There was an opportunity at lunchtime to look at some of the treasures from the Royal Albert Hall’s collections, including Queen Victoria’s commode from the days before lavatories were installed in the building! Some of us also managed to have a peek at the auditorium from a box. The day was rounded off with a celebratory drink in a nearby hostelry in honour of the BAC’s 80th anniversary and more opportunities for networking!

Explore Your Archive 2014 was launched on Monday. The successor to Archives Awareness Week, the Archives & Records Association (ARA) aimed to build on and exceed last year’s success. They seem to have achieved it as Twitter traffic was high and some national press and media coverage was gained although it was probably more successful at a local level.  To read some of the stories click on the link – http://exploreyourarchive.org/#about

Finally, and closer to my heart, last week also saw the launch of Unilever Archives’ online catalogue as part of the service’s 30th anniversary celebrations, accessible here  http://unilever-archives.com/ or from the Archives page on the Unilever website.

The Wedgwood Collection, which was under threat of sale to meet the pension deficit of its parent company, Waterford Wedgwood, has been saved thanks to thousands of members of the public who responded to an appeal by raising £2.74 million within one month.   Waterford Wedgwood Potteries collapsed in 2009 with a £134 million pension debt and the museum contents, including over 80,000 works of art, ceramics and archives, were threatened with sale at auction to help meet the deficit.   The public donations will be added to the £13 million raised with support from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Art Fund and a number of private trusts and foundations.  The collection will be gifted to the Victoria & Albert Museum but remain on display, as a long-term loan, in the museum at the Wedgwood factory site in Barlaston, near Stoke. 

But why did it have to come to this?  Why aren’t such pre-eminent collections, which are a key part of Britain’s heritage, better protected?   The Wedgwood Collection was held as a trust.  Yet, in December 2011, the High Court ruled that the collection could be sold to pay the company’s creditors.  Nearly two years later the Administrator agreed a value of £15.75 million for the collection and gave the Art Fund one year to raise the amount to keep the collection intact.  Selling the collection would have meant splitting it into lots and being scattered across the globe.  How have archives come to be treated as a commodity to be bought and sold in such a cavalier fashion and to have such high prices put on them?   How vulnerable are other collections that have moved to trust status, believing that this afforded them some protection?  

Following on from my posting about the JWT anniversary and the great website, I’ve recently completed a piece of work reviewing the web pages of a well-known business archive.  My research looked at the websites of business archives in the UK and overseas and it threw up some interesting results, not least the number of major businesses which, seemingly, do not allow their archives to have a presence on their website.  I looked at almost 30 sites and more than half concentrate on the history of the company or have timelines with only a cursory page devoted to the archive and how to access it.  Which is all very sad when the archives can be a great advocate for a company in drawing people in by helping to demonstrate a business’s corporate social responsibility agenda, as well as the longevity of its brands, amongst many other positives. 

There are some great examples out there, carrying a lot of information about their service and collections, which are easy to navigate.  Even though they are restricted by corporate branding, both Lloyds and BT have excellent sites and Barings is visually attractive as well as informative.   

If you’re looking for inspiration, check some of them out!

J Walter Thompson (JWT), one of the world’s largest advertising agencies, celebrates its 150th anniversary this year.  Founded in 1864, JWT continually moved and adapted with the times and changing technology, being pioneers of firstly radio, then TV and now internet advertising.  Their client list covered not just well-known American companies and brands such as Kraft, Ford, Kellogg and Eastman Kodak, but also European ones that are known globally like Shell Oil and Lux soap. 

JWT’s archives are held in the John W Hartmann Center of Sales, Advertising & Marketing at Duke University, North Carolina (USA).  To mark the anniversary an interactive timeline has been created online that highlights the company’s achievements and innovations, some of its key clients and also the real ‘Mad Men’ who created the advertising campaigns.  There are some fantastic photographs and adverts, as well as links to the archive collection itself.  It’s a great example of a clear, easy to read and use site.  Take a look for yourself –

http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/collections/corporations/jwt/