Promoting your archives and special collections to potential users, both within and beyond your own institution, is an increasingly important activity in academic libraries. On the next four pages, we look at the ways in which two institutions have gone about this.
First, Katie Sambrook of King’s College London looks at motive, means and opportunity.
As any fan of detective fiction will tell you, the prosecution must be able to demonstrate to the jury that the accused possessed motive, means and opportunity to commit the crime. Without wishing to stretch the comparison too far, I would like to suggest that these three factors are a good starting point for librarians or archivists considering how best to promote their collections.
At King’s College London we have been particularly concerned with the need to promote our special collections to members of our own institution. In common with many colleagues in other higher education institutions, we knew that, ironically enough, it was often our own staff and students who were least aware of the special collections available on their doorstep. As a relatively new department at King’s (staff were first appointed specifically to the Special Collections team only in 1997), we had little tradition of internal institutional awareness to build on; instead it was up to us to find ways of becoming a well-known and well-regarded part of the college’s operations. Plenty of motive, then, even without considering the professional motivation of wishing to help users find their way to the right material as speedily and effectively as possible.
As for means, we knew we had in our special collections a large (130,000 or so rare books and other printed items) and comprehensive body of material of potential value both to the teaching and research needs of our institution. It was also a promotional asset in itself and an aid to the college’s own publicity and fund-raising programmes.
In developing our promotional plans we were able to draw on a number of characteristics of the collections:
- The collections spanned all subjects taught at the college, ensuring that there was material of potential value to all academic departments. Likewise, there was a good balance of older and newer material.
- As the collections had been largely amassed by gifts and bequests from members of the college, rather than by purchase or major external benefaction, they mirrored closely the major established strengths of the institution (Theology, Modern Greek Studies and Medicine, to take three examples) and were thus likely to be of direct relevance to current teaching and research needs.
- The development of inter-disciplinary fields of study was an important area for the college and our special collections could contribute towards this. For example, 18th-century medical texts could be of as much interest to members of the Department of English pursuing the new MA in Literature and Medicine, for their stylistic content and their treatment of patient narratives, as to members of the School of Medicine studying the progress of the fight against disease.
- Notable strengths in travel and natural history meant that there was lots of attractive pictorial material, some of it in colour.
- Not least, material from the collections could, if all stored on one site, be retrieved speedily and efficiently, thus saving King’s members needless visits to other libraries.
Which brings us to opportunity. In September 2001, after three years’ refurbishment work, King’s opened its new library, the Maughan Library and Information Services Centre, housed in the former Public Record Office building in Chancery Lane, five minutes’ walk away from the college’s main teaching site. Among the many undoubted benefits of the new library was the opportunity it provided to bring together all the college’s printed special collections, which had been scattered among a number of outlying sites, and house them in a self-contained section of the building, the Foyle Special Collections Library, with its own secure storage areas and reading room. The new library enabled us for the first time to offer quick and reasonable access to all our special collections. It provided the perfect opportunity to promote the collections to members of the college.
So how did we set about this promotion? We adopted a range of strategies, from open evenings for academic staff, co-hosted with the Principal of the college, and convening discipline-based working groups of key academic colleagues, to the re-launch of our web pages and new print publications. We did not neglect the interests of colleagues in other administrative units and have worked closely with the college’s fund-raisers and Press and Publications Offices. I would like to focus on two discrete and particularly rewarding strands of our promotional strategy – exhibitions and seminars.
One of the most historically and aesthetically interesting areas of the new library building is the Weston Room, the former Rolls Chapel, whose Jacobean funerary monuments and Victorian mosaic floor and panelled ceiling form an arresting combination of styles and periods. It also provided us with a stunning exhibition area, whose architectural features, meticulously preserved and restored, provide a dramatic backdrop to our seven display cases. Every new registered user of the library is led to this room by way of the audio tour which forms part of our induction programme and is thus made aware of the exhibition space on their first visit.
To date we have held 12 exhibitions, each running for two to three months. They have all been thematic, dealing with a particular subject, collection or person, rather than consisting of randomly selected highlights of the collection. While we have taken full advantage of attractive pictorial material in the collections – exhibitions are after all an opportunity to show such items off – we have not neglected some of their less visually arresting aspects. ‘Travels Near and Far’ was an exhibition full of colour, with depictions of voyages, landscapes and costumes, but ‘Miron Grindea and the Art of Literary Journalism’ tackled a more text-based topic, the story of the Adam International Review, told largely through letters, journal issues and narrative text.
The exhibitions fulfil several functions. They draw people into the collections, providing a taste of the riches available and encouraging further use. Seeing a real copy of the first printed edition of the works of Homer or Aristotle can inspire an undergraduate who has only read modern paperback editions; as one student wrote in our comments book, ‘Seeing these ancient books has made studying the texts more meaningful to me’. Similarly, A-Level Theology students from local schools enjoyed a talk on ‘The Bible in Translation’ and the opportunity to see rare early Bibles in a range of languages. We hope that this event, run in collaboration with the college’s Widening Participation Office, gave them an insight into the wealth of study opportunities that the collections of a research-led university can provide.
Remounting exhibitions virtually
Exhibitions can become a resource in their own right; once we have dismantled an exhibition physically, we re-mount it virtually on our web pages1 and have been pleased by the number of hits these pages continue to receive. The room where the exhibitions take place is often used for college lectures and conferences, and we have liaised closely with the organisers to tie in with the theme of these. Thus, ‘The Rhetoric of Medicine’, which looked at the connections between medicine and literature, tied in with the college’s 2005 Dialogues in the Humanities lecture series on the same theme. The regular use of this room for VIP receptions and fund-raising events also means that important visitors and potential benefactors are made aware both of the riches of the college’s collections and of the high value the college places on them.
While most of our exhibitions have been curated by members of Special Collections staff, three have been prepared by colleagues in academic departments, who have selected the exhibits and written the accompanying text. We were delighted that our first exhibition, on Modern Greek poetry, was curated by a senior member of staff in our Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, particularly as he was Head of the School of Humanities at the time and an extremely busy man. His imprimatur got our programme off to a flying start, impressing on his colleagues that the exhibitions deserved their support and involvement.
Medical students’ enthusiasm
We have deliberately set out to ensure that our exhibition programme reflects the breadth of the collections and thus the breadth of disciplines taught at the college. King’s being a multi-site institution, we have been mindful of those disciplines whose teaching is not conducted near the Maughan building, such as Medicine, and whose staff and students might not otherwise have much call to visit the site. We were keen to ensure that the special collections were not seen as a resource largely of interest to the humanities (in fact, nearly half the stock is concerned with science or medicine) and have held a number of exhibitions on medical and scientific themes (‘Robert Hooke and His Circle’; ‘Of Foods in General’; and ‘The Rhetoric of Medicine’). These exhibitions have resulted in an unprecedented level of interest in the special collections from staff and students of the School of Medicine, many of whom had never visited the Maughan Library before.
The School of Medicine has also responded enthusiastically to our offer to run seminars for undergraduate and postgraduate students. When we began to promote this to our teaching colleagues, we expected that the highest take-up would be from departments representing the humanities – and several have indeed run seminars with us. But the School of Medicine is known for its innovative approach, its students being encouraged to supplement the core curriculum with special study modules on a variety of topics, including the history of medicine and ‘Bodyworks’ (the study of the depiction of the human body in art). We have played a full part in these modules, running introductory sessions on our collections and on the history of medical illustration, as well as providing detailed individual guidance to students studying specific topics.
We have found undergraduate students among the most rewarding to work with; they are genuinely excited at the opportunity to handle old and rare material and, although sometimes daunted by the prospect of undertaking original research for the first time, they have appreciated the one-to-one help we have been able to give them. The medical students otherwise have no reason to visit the Chancery Lane site during their studies and, as one of them said after a seminar, using such a large library gave them ‘a better picture of what the whole university was about’. The structure of the special modules, in which seminars are concentrated in the first two or three weeks of the programme, leaves the students the remainder of the semester to work on their chosen piece of original work. This means that they were able to come back to the Foyle Special Collections Library regularly to study material, and we saw them become more adept at using the library catalogue and associated finding aids, something they had not had much need to do before, being to a large extent reliant on their lecturers’ reading lists.
Just as important as raising the profile of your special collections within your own institution is their promotion to users further afield. Here, Sue Donnelly describes how the Archives at the London School of Economics have captured new audiences.
In planning how to develop an audience for an archive or a library it is important not to forget the basic building blocks of promotion. These might include a website, online catalogue and the inclusion of holdings in subject portals and other resource discovery systems. The website is a vital tool for conveying information, from opening hours to details of particular collections, subject strengths and specialisms.2 It is also a vital way of fielding enquiries once your outreach programme has proved successful! Finally, it is useful to check that your access arrangements match your audience development ambitions. As an archivist in a higher education library I have found that family and local historians are surprised that they can obtain access to our collections. Where restrictions are necessary it may be possible to provide virtual access for some types of collections and materials.
Producing a range of leaflets and handouts allows you always to have something to give visitors and to send out to related archives, libraries and museums. Printed leaflets look professional and attractive but they can be expensive and date quickly. Recently at LSE we have experimented with using a Word template to produce A4 Archive Briefing Papers on a range of topics. The template ensures that all the handouts comply with the house style, while giving archive staff a great deal of freedom in producing text. All the leaflets aim to have a minimum of two images, with a colour image on the front page wherever possible. Large-scale printing batches are produced professionally by the LSE Reprographics Departments but there is always the option of printing supplies locally when necessary. Changes to opening hours, telephone numbers and the addition of new collections can easily be accommodated. To date, the Archives have produced four briefing papers: a general overview of the collections; a guide to the archives of social investigation; the Hall-Carpenter archives of lesbian and gay activism; and the archives of the Ionian Bank. A series of subject-focused guides are planned.
An active programme of promotion will be greatly helped by identifying individuals and offices within your own institution with responsibility for communications and promotion. At LSE a key partner in the Archives’ internal and external outreach has been the Press Office. This is responsible for all internal LSE publications including online briefings, fortnightly newssheets, the LSE website and the LSE magazine which is sent to all alumni. The Press Office also provides news and information about LSE to the media worldwide. It has a constant need for suitable images, stories and information about the LSE, and the Archives, in their role as LSE’s memory, can provide a wide range of images and facts and figures. This has allowed the Archives to develop a role in maintaining and developing the LSE’s outside profile.
In recent years the LSE Library has employed a Communications Manager, to support its publication and outreach activities. Their role includes supporting the Library in promoting its services and includes reviewing text, producing guides and assisting in the production of publicity plans for individual projects. Working with the Communications Manager has helped the Archives to think clearly about publicity and promotion. It is also invaluable to obtain an outsider’s view of any information to be published externally. Simply finding a colleague outside the Archives willing to read and comment on text and plans could be a first stage in providing this external ‘eye’.
Another support in external outreach is making use of other campaigns and programmes. In recent years the Archives have used the London Open House programme and the national Archive Awareness Campaign,3 led by the National Council of Archives. In 2003 we held an exhibition in our Reading Room during London Open House weekend based on the themes of the Archive Awareness Campaign, ‘Love and Hate’. ‘The Heart’s Heat’ exhibition ran for two days and had as many visitors as the Archives Reading Room usually receives in an entire month. The exhibition deliberately displayed a wide range of material to impress visitors with the scale of the Library’s archive holdings. Existing campaigns usually come with their own branding, listings and publicity support, an enormous help where publicity resources are in short supply.
A final element in any outreach programme is having enough information about gaps in your current audience to identify areas for development. This might mean maintaining statistics on the origins of researchers on a monthly basis. We keep general statistics on our users, whether they are academics, in the UK or overseas, members of the general public or the media (including journalists, television and radio researchers and publishers). We also maintain details of those who register enquiries by email, telephone and letter wherever possible. This has highlighted that the main areas for extending audiences at LSE are internal users (LSE staff and students) and, externally, members of the general public.
Moving beyond the basic elements of promotion requires time and commitment but it can reap enormous benefits. A first step is to ensure that every project, whether internally or externally funded, includes appropriate publicity and outreach activities suited to its audience. Ideally these should have at least some funding, but a great deal can be done with a relatively small budget. Projects must develop a publicity plan at an early stage. The plan should include the project audiences, the publicity materials required and their distribution and timescales, appropriate publications to receive press releases, dates and locations of exhibitions, talks and seminars.
Charles Booth Online Archive
The development and launch of the Charles Booth Online Archive4 taught us a lot about promoting an archives project to an academic and general audience. The archive was funded by the Research Support Libraries Programme and launched in 2001. Charles Booth was a Victorian businessman based in Liverpool and London who in 1886 set himself the task of finding out how many Londoners were living in poverty, which he defined as a family earning less than 21 shillings a week. The result was a full-scale investigation into life, work, society in London in the late 19th century, including interviews with workers, employers and clergymen, and investigations into sweated labour, women’s employment and the Jewish communities of East London. The final edition of Life and Labour of the People in London (1902) ran to 17 volumes and 12 maps of London, colour coded to indicate the social condition of the inhabitants of each street. Behind the printed works were almost 500 manuscript and typescript notebooks full of information on Victorian London. The project delivered a detailed catalogue of the collection (allowing searching by street name, borough, individual or free text), digital versions of a series of notebooks recounting walks taken by Booth’s survey officers with members of the Metropolitan Police Force, and a searchable digital version of the Maps Descriptive of London Poverty, capable as acting as an index to the main series of notebooks. The catalogue also covered the Booth family papers held at the Senate House Library, London University, and digital versions of The Colony, the family magazine. It won the Multi-Media and Web category in the CILIP/Emerald Public Relations & Publicity Awards 2002.
Public use soars
Prior to the project the survey archive and family papers were well known to academic researchers but underused because the original catalogues were difficult to use. There was little public knowledge of the collection, apart from the maps, even among family and local historians working on Victorian London. In 1999-2000 the Archives had 30 visitors using the Booth archives and 111 items were issued from the collection. By 2003-04 issues had increased to 618, the highest at LSE. For the same period the archive received 78 email enquiries about using the Booth material. The Booth website received 103,728 visits during 2004, rising from 41,508 in 2001. The archive has also received some media attention and has been used in several television programmes, including Home Stories (Channel 4) in 2001 and Working Class in Channel 4’s 2004 series The Story of Class.
The high level of use has been encouraged by an active programme of publicity running since the launch in 2001. From the beginning the project maintained a high profile, with the production of leaflets and bookmarks to give away and attendance at a range of conferences either in person or at poster sessions. In the final stage, the publicity changed to providing more information about the content of the website and the advantages of using it. This included sending short notices and full articles, as appropriate, to a range of publications, e.g. genealogy magazines. We also ensured the site was registered with a range of portals.
In first planning the project it became clear that beyond the academic market Booth’s enquiry into London life and labour was of particular interest to two specific audiences: schools and family/local historians.
The provision of resources for school-age children was an area in which neither the Archives nor the Library had any expertise at the time. However, we knew that the material, and in particular the policy notebooks, included vivid and fascinating material likely to capture the interest of school-age children. In order to produce materials for this group we looked for an expert partner – first, Holnet5 and later the London Grid for Learning.6 Holnet, a charitable undertaking funded by the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, was established to provide online history resources for schools. Working with Holnet we were able to provide teachers with resources for Key Stages 2 and 3 via the Charles Booth Online Archive and contribute to a fuller resource hosted by the London Grid for Learning. The site provides ‘stories’ for each of the London boroughs covered, including extracts the police notebooks, with transcripts and added materials.
Family historians
The promotion of the Charles Booth Online Archive to local and family historians has been a continuous process in the past five years. The Enquiry provides excellent contextual material for those investigating families and histories of later Victorian London. A small number of users will find precise references to their own ancestors but for many more the notebooks provide a way of illuminating the streets in which they lived, their work and their places of worship. Here the main objective was to ensure that genealogists were aware of the resource and that they knew how to use the materials online and how to obtain access to the notebooks available in the Archives. This process began by providing support specific to local and family historians on the website and a programme of announcements and press releases to appropriate mailing lists, websites and magazines.
This has been followed up with a continuous programme of articles and talks to interested groups. Giving talks and training sessions is a time-consuming but often effective way of increasing knowledge of your collections, particularly if the talks are closely targeted. One example in our case was leading a seminar at the Society of Genealogists where a significant proportion of the audience were involved in teaching courses for family historians. We have also arranged visits to family history societies within London and the neighbouring counties, where a high proportion of the attendees can trace their relatives back to London.
These events always include a demonstration of the site and hints and tips about using the materials, along with handouts, leaflets and free pens to take away. The hope is that the listeners will go away equipped to use the online service and confident of coming into the Archives in the future.
There is no doubt that libraries and archives need to keep expanding and diversifying their audiences, as levels of use become one of the most important measures in securing funding both from internal and external purse-holders. The good news is that, with planning, commitment and sometimes a small amount of funding, librarians and archivists can integrate promotion into all aspects of their work and ensure that their profile is raised with both users and funders.
References
1 www.kcl.ac.uk/specialcollections
2 www.lse.ac.uk/library/archive
3 www.archiveawareness.com
4 http://booth.lse.ac.uk
5 http://holnet.lgfl.net/lgfl/accounts/holnet/upload/index.htm
6 www.lgfl.net/lgfl/flash/html/index.php
Katie Sambrook is Special Collections Librarian at King’s College London. She is a committee member of the CILIP Rare Books Group (catherine.sambrook@kcl.ac.uk).
Sue Donnelly is Archivist at the London School of Economics. She is a committee member of the Society of Archivists’ Specialist Repository Group.
Updated: 24 January 2006