Weds 13 Aug: If the past is infinite and its remaining archival traces are immense, how then to go about finding a way through this and work in a reasonably methodical way on a ‘something’ that is relevant? Some ideas.

Step 1, start with a broad interest (NOT a very specific one, you’ll miss everything important) – ‘whites writing whiteness 1770s to 1970s’ will do – and get some ideas about it from things other people have done and/or you yourself have done previously.

Step 2, Compile a list of things you’ve read about which are in different archives, together with detailed archive references or call numbers. Pack, travel, take your notebook and pencils as well as computer. Work every hour the archive is open, don’t fritter time there.

Step 3, ‘Scoping’ is the term I use to describe what happens next. Yes, there is a list of things to work on that you arrive with. BUT, you don’t want to stay within the limits of other people’s knowledge, gained for different purposes than your own, so… Go hunt for new things.

Step 4, Tell the archivists your broad interests and that you’ll be reading very widely, as well as telling them your focused interest in collection X, in our cases Pringle (Sue), Price (Andrea) and Moffat (Liz).

Step 5, Get the archive’s list of accessions and read it cover to cover. Note anything even vaguely interest in it. Ditto any other finding aids that are available. Take this step very seriously, spend time on it.

Step 6, Combine working in detail on something with scoping other collections and their contents – go through card and online catalogues making notes of anything interesting (ignore relevance at this stage, follow your nose), call them up, skim through all of them and make notes on their contents. And NO, this is not a waste of time! You increase your knowledge base considerably and you also find out how the archive you’re in works.

So my working in detail on Mary Moffat’s letters has been combined with less intensive scoping work on everything else I’ve looked at, including the Lovedale, Henderson, Shepherd, Consolidated Gold, Findlay and other collections. Turning up the Stritch and Pringle diaries has been a major bonus produced by doing this – Stritch is uncatalogued though in the list of accessions, the Pringle diaries are on computer but rather misleadingly and are not in the card catalogue (because a late arrival after this was closed) but they too are in the list of accessions.

The list of accessions isn’t the kind of thing that most researchers would read – at Cory, it consists in about 35 volumes. Tsch tsch to you. Using it to fuel my scoping activities has produced two important directly relevant collections that would probably not have been found in any other way. It has also made me much more knowledgable about the range of things in the Cory collections, how various of these might hang together, and also opened up possibilities for future projects. To wildly mix metaphors, don’t develop tunnel vision, for you might end up at a brick wall, so remember to look up and look out from the specifics of what you’re doing. It’s an iterative process.

Last updated: 13 August 2014