Working on an organisation’s archive is not just a technical venture aiming at ordering and filing documents.
Working on an organisation’s archive is working on an organisation’s history, on an organisation’s identity and primary task and on how this has been shaped over time and space.
Working on an organisation’s archive is working with ideas, artefacts, people, memories of people, and strong or faded memories of communities.
Working with an organisation’s archive is working with, on and through history.
Cataloguing an archive is at the same time digging and revealing physical objects, like an archaeologist, as well as making sense of ideas and relations, like an historian of ideas and culture. It is complex, challenging and exciting like working on an organisational intervention. As such it is a contextual, coproduced and emerging process.
This blog is conceptualised as a vessel for viewing examples from the digging and showing our findings, for sharing views from the project teams and from the various constituencies and for starting conversations.
This blog is for working on the emerging archive.