Tues 19 Aug: The beginner’s mistake is to rush in the door and (try to) replicate the archive, by jpeging everything. Indeed, I’ve been told that student Z or Y really doesn’t have time to read anything, it all has to be copied so they can work on it at home. [And yes, it has really happened, and I’ve kept a straight face.] But they don’t, because all they’ve done is to defer the problem. And this is that there’s a lot of stuff, not all of it obviously directly relevant, so what on earth are they to do with it. My response to this practical problem will be no surprise because it’s referred to in various earlier blogs. It’s a very practical response and goes as follows:

• do the background reading first;
• read every finding aid there is;
• call up everything interesting and/or relevant;
• sample and skim-read these collections;
• make notes on your computer about all of this;
• focus only after you’ve done the above.

It’s actually much better for people to have their initial archive research encounters somewhere where photography is forbidden. Then they HAVE to read, preferably skim-read, and to struggle to make sense of what they’re reading. And in this regard, as well as the practical things listed above, there’s something else that is needed. Write about it! That is, keep a research notebook (for me, a Moleskin with French-squared pages works best) and every night, or in my case every early morning, write even just a small amount about what you’ve been doing, its puzzles and its possibilities. This doesn’t have to be rocket science, it’s to get your mind thinking about it all in a more analytical sort of way than is possible when carrying out the everyday routines that compose archive work.

So puzzling and pootling in the notebook is a different kind of activity from writing descriptive notes on documents and collections in computer files. The notebook is for me a wild space, where anything goes. The computer files keep orderly track of all basic information. The beginnings of analytical thinking are what happens in the notebook. This is what the research is for, thinking analytically, not going home with 27,403 jpegs that you don’t know what to do with, and anyway you don’t remember what they’re of because you haven’t kept track of all the archive reference numbers of documents as well as of collections. [And by the way, this too is a real example of what someone did. Don’t worry, it came right in the end.]

Last updated: 19 August 2014