Cataloguing the World Netball Archive

 

Hello, my name is Tobias Leech, and I’m a  final year history student at the University of Huddersfield who has been undertaking a work placement as a cataloguing assistant for Heritage Quay.

I helped to catalogue the World Netball Archive, including everything from photographs at championship matches to trophies and sports magazines. Working with them all has been brilliant, but I especially loved cataloguing the donated photographs as they all served as their own little puzzle. It was so fun to piece together the story of the picture through nametags, articles of clothing, decorations dotted around the room or familiar faces and locations. It let me use an entirely separate set of skills I had not been able to use on my history course and made my hours spent at the archives the highlight of my week. The World Netball archive is now available for viewing here.

My time at Heritage Quay has not only been exciting and fun but also inspiring as I processed and researched the items I was cataloguing; they all began combining and correlating into a story. Across decades, people have given their lives to Netball, from playing, to refereeing, to creating and running organisations dedicated to it. Photographs of players and coaches smiling are a celebration of multiple lifetimes of hard work and perseverance. A snapshot of a player aiming to

shoot became a display of the discipline and effort these athletes went through as discussed in their interviews in newspapers, magazines and reports alike. Going through this archive gave me a new perspective on the sport I was certainly aware of but not particularly familiar with. It taught me the history of an international force built on the foundations of equality, fair play and humanitarianism.

Even better, working at Heritage Quay has given me a new appreciation of the heritage sector and a whole new understanding of how history works. I would read through an article from the 1990s, and then later see the same events discussed with hindsight

in the mid-2000s. History, and more broadly, time is always moving, and through cataloguing these items I was seeing first hand revisions and versions of history being made. When I handled official documents from World Netball, I was getting to see through their eyes what the last 30 years of progress has meant. It has been said history is written by the victors, but working at Heritage Quay has shown me it is more true that instead history is written first come first served, and that often people, organisations or other third parties will already have their thumbs on the scale. My time with the archive team has involved practical experiences as well, from handling items, cataloguing them, and wrapping and protecting larger items for storage.

Working at Heritage Quay has been fantastic, and I would recommend visiting the archive and viewing the collections (which can be found here). My time as a work placement has given me a new appreciation for archival work and for Netball as a sport and international phenomenon.

Tobias Leech, BA History Student

 

 

Discovering our Music Collections: CeReNeM Digitisation Project

Hello, my name is Colin Frank and I have recently completed my doctorate in music composition and performance at the University of Huddersfield. Since July 2021, I have worked as a Digitisation Assistant at Heritage Quay for the Centre for Research in New Music (CeReNeM). Over the past year I digitised programmes and journals in the archives at Heritage Quay including the British Music Collection (BMC), Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (HCMF), and Society for the Promotion of New Music (SPNM), which are now publicly available to browse online at the Divergence Press website.

As my job has entailed scanning and creating metadata for items in these collections, I’ve been able to leaf through concert programmes and composer magazines from 1942 up until the present. Even though I specialise in contemporary music, I never knew the extent to which these organisations were active in Britain over the 20th and into the 21st centuries until I dug into these collections. It was incredible to see the amount of new works created and performed in Huddersfield and across the UK, both by composers and ensembles I recognised and those not in the history books. On occasion I would find a professor of mine pictured when they were younger and styling long flowing hair, or I would recognise a composer from my home country, Canada, appearing in a Huddersfield concert. The international esteem of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival is certainly evident in this collection, with the likes of John Cage, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Steve Reich, Gyorgy Ligeti, Robert Ashley and other famous modernist and experimental composers having visited the town. I wonder if Cage foraged for wild mushrooms in woods I’ve walked in, or if Yannis Xenakis was impressed by architecture of the Queensgate Market Hall—a building that relates in design to his own designs and compositions.

Probably my favourite find that stood out historically was in the SPNM’s archive. In digitising programmes of the organisation, which started during the second World War, I came across a studio recital scheduled for May 8th, 1945. Written in pencil across the top is ‘Cancelled – VE day’. Clearly the musicians and audience were on the streets celebrating. I’m impressed to think that the SPNM started a series of new music in a bombed-out London, and it reminds me of the value of making art rather than war.

 

The materials that are now available online include the ‘Composer’ magazine that was published from 1958 – 1987; HCMF’s programmes and booklets since 1978; and SPNM’s journal, New Notes, that ran from 1990 – 2009. All these materials are also available to view at Heritage Quay.

I have had 2 other roles at Heritage Quay: Student Helper and Project Assistant for the Derek Bailey Cataloguing Project. My role as Project Assistant consisted of myself and my colleague Barbora Vacková cataloguing the archive of the British free improvising guitarist, Derek Bailey. This archive is now available to view at Heritage Quay by appointment. More information on how to book an appointment to view archives at Heritage Quay can be found here.

Expert Researcher Series: Inside Catalogue Structures

I blame google! That one little search box has become so ubiquitous that we expect it everywhere, and to reward us immediately with the right answers. Except… remember all those times – with increasing frustration – you’ve to click on to page 4 of the search results with no success? Well, you might on occasion find yourself in a similar position in an archives catalogue (Tip 1: Try adding info into fewer search fields. Just the keyword field if possible. Despite the number of options, less is often more in search). Although standards exist to try and ensure that archives are described in broadly the same terms everywhere, collections that have been processed by different professionals over potentially different decades may well have slight differences, and that’s before you take into account institutional quirks!

Plus even if you hit gold on your first search, how do you know there isn’t an equally relevant stash of material you might be interested in (yes, I know, the Related Material field, see Part One!) but might not be related to the material you’re looking at (ha, gotcha!)? A basic understanding of how an archivist structures an archive catalogue can help you browse and discover new material. The sector is trying to make this more obvious via linked data, indeed you may have noticed tags starting to appear at the bottom of online catalogues that link to collections with a common subject/person/theme on some of the online portals. There’s an awful lot of work to be done to make all existing catalogues compatible with this, so being able to navigate a catalogue yourself is still a useful skill!

You might find it helpful, as I do, to imagine archive catalogues like family trees, although if they are displayed as a ‘tree’ they more usually look like computer file system trees. The broadest descriptions are at the top and the most specific at the bottom, or in our catalogue the broadest on the left and most specific on the right. The broadest description is the collection level description, in the trade we often call it the fonds record (it’s French but if you ever see it bandied about think: collection, as that’s broadly what it is). This record should be the broadest descriptor and encompass everything underneath it, from subject content to included formats.

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If you have access to an extract of a tree, you can often navigate up to the top and see if the ‘siblings’ of the records you were looking at are helpful, as they will contain similar levels of description. They are known as Series in catalogues, and irrespective of containing multiple records, may well be on a similar or related theme, as we can see by the numerous committees in the example. This is where browsing is most helpful, take this example from West Yorkshire:

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So if your results landed you in KMT18/12/2/13 Huddersfield Council Concerts Committee, you might not realise, until you get to this view of the catalogue that it might be worth looking in KMT18/12/2/3 Huddersfield Arts Committee, or to see if Lindley or Almondbury have an Arts Committee. Browsing has now opened up three other possible research avenues you may have not considered.

If you know a particular form of words is in use this might help you find it in other parts of the catalogue or even other archive catalogues. If you’re researching death rituals and have been searching for cemetery records, then KMT18/12/2/8 Burial Grounds Committee probably wouldn’t have come up, but you can try your search again with burial grounds to see if it brings new results. So jumping into search can be great if you have a specific query in mind. But if you want to widen your research net, or you’re struggling to bring up what you need through search, browsing a catalogue can often be worth a go!

Expert Researcher Series: The ‘Related Material’ field

Welcome to the Expert Researcher series. This is the first in a series of blog posts designed to clue you in on some of the parts of the archive catalogue you may not have paid much attention to before and how they can help you in your research. Whether you’re a budding family historian or a PhD student with a looming deadline, hopefully you’ll get something from this article. Requests are welcome! Whether you’d like to know what a particular catalogue field means, or which bit of the catalogue to look in to find a particular piece of information, just let us know, and we’ll do our best to help.

When I talk about ‘fields’ I’m talking about the fields of a database in our collections management software (we use CALM if you’re interested). There are 26 fields of data in the ISAD (International Standard for Archival Description) standard, although only five of these are ‘mandatory’ for a basic catalogue. Title, Creator, Date, Extent and Description. This is what you’ll find in all basic catalogues or finding aids. We’ll often complete lots of the other fields too, during the course of our cataloguing. This is to prevent all the information remaining in the head of the Archivist and inaccessible to colleagues or other researchers. As I approach the end of cataloguing the University collection, I am now trying to come up with ways to splurge (it’s the right word, trust me) all the information I’ve picked up over two and a half years poking about in the records into print as much as possible. Yet if it’s not in the description field, only a small number of you may ever notice it, and whilst it may or may not show up on an online catalogue or printed list, if you know the information potentially exists, you may end up asking your local, friendly Archivist to check their system for it. This is a good thing.

So… the Related Material field. This is where we can refer to other collections with a link to the one we are cataloguing. Also known as doing some of the legwork of your research so you don’t have to! Archives are collected on the basis of provenance rather than by subject. So we hold the records of the University of Huddersfield that were created and used here. But we may hold records sent from other institutions and vice versa. They will remain with that institution and we’d link to them. Or there may be close subject links with other collections. For example, we hold the records of JH Whitley, local MP and Speaker of the House of Commons, and related material might include links to the collections at the Houses of Parliament, to other local contemporary MPs at other local archives or universities. The link should also mention the level of detail the catalogue goes to, so Collection Name, University of Whatever (fonds) would mean a collection level description exists, whilst Collection Name, Name of Business (item) would mean each item in that collection has been catalogued. See this in action in the Related Material field of the University of Huddersfield collection: http://heritagequay.org/archives/hud*/?view=item Maybe it’s one of those things that you’ve just never noticed before, but here it is again in the Lister collection at our neighbours, West Yorkshire Archives: http://catalogue.wyjs.org.uk/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=CC00001

Knowing if there is any information in the Related Material field can help to kick start your research, by giving you links to other collections meaning you don’t have to start from scratch. Depending on the ways catalogues are displayed, this field might also contain links to articles written on collections or mini bibliographies the Archivist has used in cataloguing the collection. Strictly speaking, this belongs in the Publication Note field, but Related Material sometimes stands in for it when a catalogue is put online. And if the catalogue you’re looking at has no Related Material field, or doesn’t display this in the online catalogue, remember you can always ask your friendly searchroom staff or Archivist to check for you!

Next Time: Catalogue structure – What exactly is a fond anyway?