Accessible Archives and Escaping the Black Hole

Guest Post: Jamie Andrews (British Library)

Modern Literary Manuscripts – my area of curatorial interest in the British Library – have been making the news in recent days. Good news stories (from the auction houses’ perspective) regarding ever higher returns from their summer sales of rare books and manuscripts have been balanced by a number of articles highlighting fears around where these items, and other collections, end up.

The Independent on Sunday reported Poet Laureate Andrew Motion’s warning that ‘future generations face a “black hole” in public collections of contemporary art and literature’ because ‘Britain’s leading authors are selling their manuscripts abroad’. And for abroad, read well-resourced and committed university libraries in the United States.

On Monday’s BBC R4 Today programme Motion expanded on the importance of preserving our literary heritage – drawing on Larkin’s famous description of the magical and meaningful value of literary manuscripts – and regretted their purchase by American institutions. One of the most significant of these institutions – The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin – recently enjoyed a lengthy puff in the usually more probing New Yorker, in which HRC director Tom Staley gave a dizzyingly energetic and impishly colourful insight into his work acquiring manuscripts for the Center. As I responded in my ‘Letter to the Editor’ (published in the current edition, p. 8), Staley’s delight in spiriting material out of the country (a lengthy – and one hopes apocryphal – account of sneaking Joyce material out of France on Ascension Thursday when customs officials might be supposed to be less than vigilant) and buying material sight-unseen is infectious, but revealing of the differences between publicly funded (and accountable) British institutions and HRC practice.

Due diligence in acquisitions may not sound as exhilarating as Texan tales of derring-do, but it is practised – alongside a publicly accessible collection development policy – for a reason. All British institutions aspire to the highest ethical standards relating to trade in cultural property, and need to be certain that material added to the national collections have been properly assessed for provenance, proof of ownership, and value for the public purse. No more than you might purchase a house without taking a look around, or a car without taking it for a spin, all potential manuscripts and archives are rigorously assessed by experienced curators to be sure of their research and economic value, and I was interested to see reference to a collection purchased by Staley sight-unseen that I had rejected for the British Library a month or so before.

It’s intriguing to note Staley’s attitude to fellow American universities, made apparent in the New Yorker article by mention of the contest between HRC and Georgetown to acquire a cache of Graham Greene letters. No one institution can hope to acknowledge and preserve the entirety of a nation’s literary output on its own, which is why institutions in the UK generally work together to try to make sure material ends up in the most appropriate location. Informal collaboration has gone on for a number of years, but we have recently started to establish formal structures to work towards establishing one truly national and coordinated collection, spread throughout the countries and regions of the UK (see http://archives.li.man.ac.uk/glam/index.html).

None of this is to be blind to the fact that some archive material of British writers does end up crossing the Atlantic, nor to claim that it isn’t well cared for over there. And yet a glance at the recent acquisitions listed on the website of the Working Group for UK Literary Heritage, chaired by Lord Howarth of Newport, shows the range and depth of literary archives acquired by home repositories; and in the past month alone, material of Rupert Brooke, Rudyard Kipling, and Peter Gill has been added to our own collections (I hope to blog in more detail about individual additions in the future). More can and should be done to iron out anomalies in the tax system to ensure a level playing field for those who want to sell their archive material to British libraries (currently there are financial advantages for those who sell aboard), and to this end the Working Group has proposed small incentives that received support in last week’s report by the House of Commons Culture, Media, and Sport Committee into ‘Caring for our Collections’ (linked from the UKLH pages).

The final impression I got from reading the New Yorker article was of puzzlement as to what actually happens to the material purchased by Staley. The thrill of the chase is relayed in stirring detail, but what happens when he’s tracked his prey? From my point of view, I find it invigorating to see the variety of users of our own collections – scholars in our Reading Rooms, of course, but equally school-children taking part in workshops, or tourists taking advantage of our exhibition spaces. And yet I never really got a sense of who might have access to their material… or how. Staley makes it clear that digitisation is not a priority for the Center, and yet –as another letter to the New Yorker points out- without it, the archives become ‘impossible to view for vast numbers of people’. It’s unclear as to whether his disinclination for the digital object extends to born digital collections, an issue British institutions are working hard to address, and perhaps the subject of a future blog post…