Opening Doors: Learning in the Historic Environment

Section E · Changing approaches to learning

E 10 · Use of documents and archives

An understanding of the historic environment is to a considerable extent dependent on the study of documents. The use of documents within archives by a broad public is one of the most important and interesting developments within the field of heritage learning over the past decade. The many innovations that have emerged are associated to a great extent with the development of the internet, as well as by an increasing realisation by those responsible for archives of the enormous interest that they arouse in the public. Within the national curricula, learning through the study of original material, notably documents, has become the central method of learning.

What we are witnessing is a transformation of the way in which documents are curated and made available to the public. While record offices, notably the Public Record Office and county record offices have for many years endeavoured to make their holdings accessible to the public, this public was relatively limited, with an emphasis on academics and on historians of their own families. This public is now expanding – though the resources available to record offices are not expanding correspondingly. However optimistic one may be about some aspects of this field, it remains true that many archives, particularly those in private hands, remain unsorted and effectively inaccessible.

Those responsible for the care of archives have responded vigorously to this growing audience. At the National Archives (the former Public Record Office at Kew) the staff aim to make their collections available and comprehensible to the public, by demystifying the process of consulting archives, by assisting potential users in dealing with documents, and in making their collections as available as possible on-line.

National Council on Archives

In 1999 the National Council on Archives set up a network of Regional Archive Councils, aimed at creating partnerships for County Record Offices (run by local authorities) and developing better links between local museums and libraries. This remit included widening access to archives and developing the potential for learning. The realisation that encouraging learning is a core activity in the life of an archive and that access is as important as preservation has led to the employment of twenty education officers for education around the country. It is hoped that all County Record Offices will have an education officer in the future.

Listening to the Past, Speaking to the Future

The role of archives is the subject of a major new report, Listening to the Past, Speaking to the Future (March 2004). At the invitation of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) established an Archives Task Force to analyse and review the state of the United Kingdom’s archives and to make recommendations for the future. In the belief that the ‘primary duty’ of those responsible for archives is ‘to help every student, every would-be family historian and every community group wishing to celebrate and record its own history and culture to benefit from this unique store of knowledge’, the Archives Task Force proposes a new Archives Gateway, ‘an electronic pathway and guide which will open up the whole archives world to wider use’. The document includes detailed recommendations on how public sector archives can be modernised, and the skills of archivists developed.

The Attingham Trust report does not seek to repeat the recommendations outlined in the Archives Task Force Report, but rather to suggest some of the exciting directions in which the use of archives in conjunction with historic buildings is currently moving.

The National Monuments Record

The National Monuments Record (NMR) is based in Swindon, except for the London Records kept at Fortress House in London. A new educational strategy is being formulated since the merge of the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England with English Heritage. The staff, working as a team, aim to make their immense resource accessible and explicable through events and activities including workshops and visits for older school children. They offer an excellent Teachers’ Handbook for Local Studies, put together with help from teachers and pupils from all over the country.

The NMR education department regards good links with other organisations as an essential part of its work, and has collaborated with the Victoria County Histories and other bodies concerned with the preservation of documents. The NMR provide educational centres with photographs – such as the aerial photographs used by the Hackney Building Exploratory – and works collaboratively with other organisations on their projects.

The NMR also operates through a comprehensive website. One-third of all those who use the NMR are personal callers, the rest are by remote access. Through the website this national archive is easily accessed and the material digitised to help teachers use the archival sources for their own purposes. This has been prompted by huge improvements in access to archives made by the website for the National Archives, A2A. The NMR website will also have information on education in local offices. Courses are held with archaeological students from Oxford University, to explain how to use the site.

Anumber of the NMR’s activities, highlighted here, suggest ways in which the work of a record office may be expanded for a very broad audience:
The Images of England initiative, a large scheme with HLF funding and involving many volunteers, aims to put photographs and descriptions of 370,000 listed buildings on a searchable database. It will be available for schools, local history groups and conservationists.
Wild Goose, an education consultancy working in partnership with the NMR, provides photographic aerial records of townscapes and landscapes made at the end of the Second World War, together with contemporary photography. This is an invaluable resource for schools.
Living Library provides a teachers’ guide written by specialist teachers for 8 to 11 year-olds to information on national curricula subjects held by the NMR.
London’s Past Online, a free online bibliography of books and other material relating to Greater London from the Anglo- Saxon period to the present, is being undertaken by a research team at the Centre of Metropolitan History. There are plans to extend the scheme to cover Roman London.

Archive initiatives

On a local scale, there are various examples of interesting initiatives, in both the private and the public sector. Northamptonshire Record Office has an active education programme, working in collaboration with village schools, helping with research into their local environment using appropriate documents, and it is hoped to expand this programme. In the private sector, Boughton House constantly receives requests for information from their archives, for example from people whose family have worked there or who are studying the landscape.

CANMORE and CANMAP

The National Monuments Record of Scotland (NMRS), part of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCHMS), provides a database with an index, CANMORE for information on their sites. A similar system, CANMAP, is available for mapping.

SCRAN

This Scottish charitable trust is an on-line resource base set up for cultural institutions in Scotland working in partnership with other organisations for licensed users. To date there are over a million records of collections and archives in the system, of which 183,000 are multimedia. It also contains 450 projects, from large national institutions to smaller local ones. It works as a tool to study culture and history and has a multitude of uses. Easy to search, it has a curriculum navigator for teachers to find resource packs and can be used as a topic bank where images can be put together in one album for teaching and retained as records. Its simple application facilitates research into buildings which are not easily accessible, while ‘hot spots’ enable movement into a further space. Audio can be added to go with the text as well as ‘before and after’ pictures. Images can be projected to illustrate how things will look in the future. Items can quickly be put together, including the visual re-construction of destroyed buildings. Institutions such as the University of Strathclyde and Glasgow School of Art have carried out research projects using SCRAN.

The National Trust’s archives

Many of the Trust’s rich holdings of archives have not been catalogued or made readily accessible. The Trust is, however, currently engaged in a ten-year programme to develop a Collections Management system which will digitise all information about its collections and make these available to the wider public. A working group is currently undertaking an inventory of all deposited archives in Trust ownership. This is in addition to preparing a bid for a Sites and Monument Record as a repository for records of its sites. Wider educational use and public access are planned, as well as an archive for experts.

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