Schoolchildren meet special collections

Today was a first for me - I gave a tour of Special Collections and Archives to a group of schoolchildren aged between 12-15. The tour was organised by SHARE with Schools, SHARE being Cardiff University's School of History, Archaeology and Religion. The idea was to introduce them to the idea of studying history at University, through some taster lectures, and visits to sites such as Special Collections and Archives.

Recalling how chronically unimpressed I had been with everything the world had to offer at that age, this was something I considered with more than a little trepidation. My usual approach of pointing at Kelmscott Press books and illuminated incunabula and saying 'look, pretty!' wasn't going to wash here.

I turned to Twitter for guidance, asking 'anyone have any advice on engaging schoolchildren with special collections?' It was unanimously suggested that I introduce them to objects which have a good story behind them, and ideally that story should be macabre, gory, salacious, involve illegal activity... you get the picture. So this gave me a jumping off point to start from. We try to feature items with good background stories on our blog, so this was a good place to start looking for key pieces.

I needed a context in which to ground these items, however. Displaying a bunch of weird stuff and pointing at it is much the same approach as displaying pretty stuff and pointing at it - I needed to show why it mattered. This is something I have never really had to convince anyone of before, my usual audience for tours and presentations being PhD students and academics - preaching to the converted.

How could I explain the difference between our special collections section, and the rest of the University library? It struck me that the key division was between primary and secondary sources. This concept was always hammered home by the national curriculum - I can still recall the photocopied, typed extracts from Samuel Pepys' diary. Imagine if I'd been able to see Samuel Pepys' actual diary? I think I would have been a lot more excited about history.

As I didn't have Pepys' diary handy, I decided to start out with one of our strongest pieces - a bloodstained letter found on the body of the war poet Edward Thomas, when he was killed in the trenches. It was the last letter from his wife Helen, writing how much she missed him and promising him that soon the war would be over... powerful stuff. It had the desired effect of getting their attention straight off. I then held up a copy of a recent award-winning biography of Edward Thomas, and told them how the author had spent hours, sitting where they were now, reading Edward's letters, and this got us into the value of primary sources.

At their age I was only aware of libraries as a repository for secondary sources: rows and rows of intimidating books full of other people's ideas, telling me - this is how it was, don't argue. I wanted to get across one thing - primary sources allow you to argue, to rewrite history, and that's why we have them in a University. I asked them why they think people still keep writing history books - and pointed out that because of libraries and archives, new information is always coming to light, and changing what we think we know. I showed them what will probably be my life's work - a room full of uncatalogued, unlabelled cardboard boxes, waiting to be opened, and their previously unknown contents interpreted and described. Part of the reason I love working with young people - they are all convinced they can change the world. They talked about the possibility that they might find something ground-breaking in those boxes, write a best-selling book and become famous! I pointed out that if they did, we would probably want their papers for our archive, which caused much excitement!

From here, we talked about unreliable sources, where I pulled in some examples such as the book purportedly written by 'Belzebub', and the zoology textbook featuring bizarre illustrations of entirely fictional sea creatures. Finally, I showed them a Victorian copy of the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, and compared it with this month's Cosmopolitan. I wanted to emphasise that although we had looked at a lot of old books in the session, not all primary sources are old. I told them there was no difference between the two magazines except their age - they both told us what the women of that time wore, what interested them, their place in society, which products were marketed to them. People in the future would read the issue of Cosmopolitan to find out more about what it was like to be a woman in 2012. We also talked about how this was problematic - did Cosmopolitan represent all women? We know that they use airbrushing, for instance - in the same way, can we trust the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine to be representative of all Victorian women? Which sections of society might have been ignored and why?

We could have talked a lot longer, but before I knew it the time was up. I was surprised to found I had enjoyed myself, and they had too. All thanked me when they left, without prompting (!), and one boy came right up and said 'that was amazing, thanks miss!' High praise indeed!

Prezi and Slideshare

The prospect of writing about Thing 17, Prezi, has delayed me considerably on the CPD23 path, as I really wanted to have a go at making one. Unfortunately, no opportunities presented themselves over the summer, and now we're in the middle of term my feet haven't touched the ground. I think this is one of the Things I'll come back to when a presentation is called for.

I've seen Prezi in action at several events this year, and it seems a really interesting alternative to Powerpoint. We know that people think, and learn, in different ways, and I can see that the two tools allow for two very different types of approach - one linear and hierarchical, the other more free-form and mind-mappy. I'm always happy to try new things, but I strongly suspect that the archivist in me will always prefer Powerpoint. I know that you can import Powerpoint slides to Prezi, but this does seem to defeat the point of using this very imaginative tool.

For the time being, I'll watch and learn from others' use of Prezi, and hopefully it help me think about presentations more creatively.

I've used Slideshare in the last week - being required to host a workshop to music students at short notice, I had a dig around to get some inspiration. Although I found little which was particularly relevant to this specialist area, I found some useful introductions to using primary source material, and a link to a timeline builder, which will be very useful for a workshop I teach on the history of printing. Paul Dijstelberge, the Special Collections Curator at Amsterdam University and Associate Professor for the History of the Book, has produced and shared a timeline for the history of printing taken from all over the web - a very informative and well-researched resource which will be fun to explore in workshops.

I will certainly host presentations on Slideshare in future, and would recommend having a poke around - you never know what you might find.

Out and about

Thing 15 is conferences and seminars – attending them, presenting at them, even organising them.

Like many others, my attendance at these kinds of events has dropped considerably in the last year or so due to budget cuts for staff development. I’ve written elsewhere about how valuable I’ve found Twitter in allowing me to follow such events remotely; thanks are especially due to the kind people who post their presentations online after the event. But this is no true substitute for actual attendance.

One positive to come out of these budget restrictions is that I now consider very carefully which conferences to attend. I generally prefer smaller and specialist events. 

My worst conference experience was an annual conference of the then Society of Archivists. Hundreds of people were in attendance and I did not know a soul. I second my colleague’s advice to seek out others standing alone, but do you think I could find anyone?! Attendees seemed to have come en masse from local record offices - I am the sole archivist at my University, whereas our local record office employs ten! This inevitably resulted in a lot of groups talking shop – which is very difficult to break into. The fact that I attended for just a day was also a factor in hampering the possibility for networking, as most were sent for the full event and I imagine had already taken part in icebreakers and so forth on the first day. 

The talks were interesting, though lacked relevance to me, being focused largely on the experiences of public sector archivists. The Society of Archivists, now Archives and Records Association, also encompasses record managers and conservators, and talks related to these professions were equally represented at the conference, which left very little relevant content. Nevertheless I took notes dutifully – Katie’s line: “don’t view it like a day at school where you have to write down as much as possible in your colour-coordinated folders” made me laugh out loud as I definitely fell into this camp! There is considerably more to be got out of discussing the talks with others than writing everything down in your neatest handwriting.

My favourite conference was the one I most recently attended (last October), and it was the first one in which I actively participated. When the call for papers circulated, I had spent 18 months cataloguing a substantial archive collection belonging to the World War I poet Edward Thomas. Being so fully immersed in the man’s life and possessions made me want to find out more about him, and I had been reading several biographies which had been published at intervals throughout the last century. I was struck by the changing way in which Edward was presented by the different biographers, and I suspected that there was a link to the different ways in which the biographers had made use of the archive material, as a result of the rather haphazard process by which it had been acquired. The call for papers was on the subject of literary archives acquisition and its impact upon authorial representation: the prospect of being able to spend some time writing down and sharing the ideas which had interested me for so long overcame my natural shyness, so I submitted a paper.

I didn’t give it much thought until the conference programme came around with my NAME on it. The vast majority of the other speakers turned out to be academics and some were from the States and Canada. Now I panicked. How had I managed to sign myself up to speak at an international academic conference??? It was the best way for it to happen, as it was something I never would have agreed to, but I was committed now so had to go through with it. I had to speak for 30 minutes and I was up first, on the first day.

I wasn’t worried about the content of the paper. I had written and re-written and was finally happy with it. I had read it out over and over – it was the correct length and I could present it fluently with only infrequent glances down. What worried me was breathing! Public speaking has me tend to forget to breathe and become a gasping wreck. I think what saved me was having a nasty chest infection in the week beforehand which resulted in losing my voice almost completely. I fully expected having to cancel, and after all the work I’d put in, I was devastated. When I found myself recovered in time for the conference I found myself with a changed perspective - I was so grateful that I decided nothing as silly as nerves would stop me presenting my work.

The presentation went wonderfully. The conference, Reclamation and Representation: Boundaries of the Literary Archive, was held at Exeter University and it turned out that of the thirty or so attendees, almost all of us were speaking. I arrived early, oversleeping not being an issue, thanks to the insomnia. I put on my brave face and spoke to as many people as possible as the room was being prepared. This is the best tip I can offer for those of us with a nervous disposition. I find that having heard my voice out loud, in the room in which I will speak, and having people I can glance at during the talk, to whom I spoke moments ago, takes the pressure right out of walking up to a lectern and speaking to a room of strangers. There actually wasn’t a lectern, or a microphone, I just stood up and read it out. I forced myself to read slowly, and had marked up my paper in advance with a few hundred *breathe!* notes, which is so silly but it did work! I had lots of lovely compliments afterwards and I think that it was the single-most confidence building thing I have ever done.

The rest of the conference was absolutely brilliant. It was highly specialized and I made some very useful contacts. It had been organized by two PhD students who had every element under control. The result was a very informal, very friendly, and very useful conference, which has been extended long past the event itself thanks to a blog which continues to be maintained by the students. I would really like to see more academic events curated by students - I think they did incredibly well.