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!

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.