On 26 March I presented my first paper during a series of Digital Heritage Workshops organised by Lancaster University and IIT Indore. It was really scary and weird. I didn’t feel looked after at all. I also presented something that had already been discussed by previous speakers. Anyway you live and learn.
Script
This is Seaton Delaval Hall. Built in the 1720s the hall and its residents, the ‘Gay Delavals’ became renowned for wild parties and other shenanigans. In 1822 the hall went up in flames severely damaging the property. This history is represented very well in the collection that is housed at the hall which is now run by the National Trust.
What is less represented is the more recent history. The community that looked after the hall after it burnt it down, when it was a prisoner of war camp during both wars and later when the late Lord Hastings invited the local people to parties after its restoration.
This history lives within the local community. Luckily we have the wonderful field of oral history that allows us to capture this predominately undocumented history.
However oral history has a deep dark secret. After recordings have been made and analysed, they are locked into an archive or into a historians cupboard and never heard from again. They are like a box of unwatched home videos.
This in the context of Seaton Delaval hall seems sad as its strength as an institution lies within its deep connection with its surrounding area. It would therefore be a shame if the community who gave these histories cannot access them. I also personally think this to be ethical dubious as the lack of access to these oral histories brings up issues of power inequality where an institution like the National Trust happily takes the oral histories but not giving something in return.
SO this is the challenge: we want to make oral histories reusable for the visitors of the hall.
To make the rather complex problem more tangible I have focused in on the idea of sustainability:
I would like to point out here that I am using the term storage system instead of archive because I feel that the idea of the archive is very loaded and cultural represented as not particularly accessible to the masses.
Let’s start with the visitors and volunteers. This particular group, especially the volunteers, are the people who will contribute and donate their oral histories to the hall. Now because of the standard time and financial constraints the period of recording will not be able to capture all the stories. So this system that will house the the initial recordings needs to be dynamic and sustainable enough for the visitors and volunteers to keep adding and reflecting on the history.
For the staff the term sustainability addresses user friendliness. It needs to be easy for a new staff to learn how the system is use and managed.
This is where I believe the digital can help.
The digital as we are all fully aware has the amazing capacity to allow people from across world to upload, download, browse all sorts of content. It’s awesome. Also as time goes on more and more people are getting familiar with the digital sphere. Especially with the pandemic which forced to many use it more. This is not just individuals but also the case for most institutions notably those in the culture sector who have been very busy trying stay afloat by working out how they can use all these digital tools to keep their audience. The digital and its tools have become and are increasingly becoming part of everyday life.
The dynamic and sustainable requirement of the system, where people can easily add information and stories is pretty covered by basic digital systems.
The user friendliness can be achieved if the staff are involved right at the beginning with the design of the system. Allowing it to mould to the staff’s digital habits and knowledge.
What the digital can also help the staff with is storage. The digital is able to store documents in also sorts of formats and in all sorts of locations. I personally find that the internets ability to duplicate (think memes) might be a possible tool that could help storage issues but that simultaneously brings up all sorts ethical issues around permissions and copyright.
However what the digital also has done is created this desperate need to record and store everything and therefore also a huge sense of loss when something isn’t captured. Because as you are able to capture and store something you also create a whole bunch of things that arent captured and therefore lost. Technology has always played a huge role in this, just look at the field of oral history which relies completely on the ability to record someone’s voice. So then the question is should we record everything? Do we need to record everything? It’s tempting when you can record everything. But then you have everything and that is also useless because you cannot reuse everything. One of the archivists at the Parliamentary Archives once told me that they had calculated how long it would take for them and their colleague to digitise everything and it was 120 years. This paradox brings up issues around value. What do we value? Whose voices do we value? But an even bigger problem is what will we value?
This one of the bigger I imagine we will be dealing with in the next couple of years. Trying to keep the digital eco system healthy and not complete collapse under its own weight.
The digital is still very young. Which is proven by what it can do really enthusiastically like record everything and allow everyone to contribute. But it is also proven by the gaps that has. For example many search functions on online archives are difficult to use and don’t deliver that same serendipitous feeling that brick and mortar archive has. A search bar is not close to being the same as an archivist who knows the collection. Robots are not completely ready to replace humans just yet. For now humans will have to fill in the gaps that the digital has.
A good example of this blend of human and digital is that people who are unable to do their research because they cannot go into archives or the digitisation of the document they are interested in is not good enough. What I have seen many people do now is use their human network to access these documents by ringing people up and asking them take pictures of documents. I thought this was a funny cyborg-y moment where people needed both technology and a human person to achieve their goal.
So what we are looking at is how the digital can support the needs of humans at Seaton Delaval Hall by adapting to their needs. But at the same the humans are free and able to fill in these gaps that are present in the digital.
However there is one more layer I would like to add to this challenge of building a sustainable storage system. And that is the environment. Our environment heavily influences whether we can access archives. A pandemic can shut us off from the brick and mortar archives. A power cut can take down the servers where the digital archive stored. Or an earth quake or storm can destroy both completely.
This in addition to digital gaps is why I do not believe that it is sustainable to solely relay on either a digital or a brick and mortar storage system. A system that floats between these two worlds and at its centre has the humans that are reason for its existence, that I believe is the closest we might get to having something sustainable. Something that will allow Seaton Delaval Hall and its community continue telling stories for generations to come.
Slides
