NRAM Newsletter Articles on Registers of Archives

Life after NRAM

Penny Feltham

Unlike my NRAM predecessors I fled Wellington in 1993 for shores farther away than Auckland and I went off to live in Manchester. This had nothing to do with a predilection for Coronation Street nor with any strong desire to support a football team [other then the mighty Tranmere Rovers] but a general liking for the North West of England and my wish to start a new life there. The job I'd heard about at Lever Brothers vanished into thin air and I spent the best part of six months on the dole and learning all about how to administer an indoor live-action site in Burnley. I had committed myself to living in the North West which cut me out of 80% of the job market and turned down an archives job on moral grounds because I was expected to make myself available should Baroness Thatcher choose to visit on a Saturday.

By September 1994 I was inputting data for the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester and within six months I had a 12 month contract to firstly sort out the archives of an old and established Liverpool Law firm and then to implement a records management policy for them. I continued to live in Manchester in the middle of the City, right by the main rail line to Liverpool and across the road from the Hacienda and commuted to Liverpool each day. Within a year two gem jobs were advertised. One was a contract to manage the archives at the John Rylands Library in Manchester and the other was a permanent position as Senior Archivist at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. I was offered both but chose the latter and have been in my post at the Museum since November 1995.

The Museum has been collecting archives since it first opened in the 1960s. These range from the records of local industrial firms like Ferranti International through to national collections like the Electricity Archive which was created by the pre privatised industry and transferred to the Museum in 1994. The acquisition policy is to collect, catalogue, preserve and create access to material which relates to Manchester as the cradle of the Industrial Revolution and to its later and current and future development in the fields of science and industry. The archives and object collections number in the thousand and cover the usual range of media. My current acquisitions list includes some of the following.

Coats Viyella.: Records relating to the discovery of Terylene. 1929-1968 Terylene was discovered by Calico Printers' Association [CPA] Chemists at Broad Oak Print Works Accrington in 1941. The records relate to both the research into the discovery and to the patents filed by the CPA and their commercial partners ICI and du Pont.
Perkin, Sir William Henry 1838-1907.: Research Papers. Perkin was an academic and later an industrial chemist who discovered and patented the first aniline dyestuff in 1856. This study of aniline and derivatives of Coal Tar has been described as being the foundation of Organic Chemistry. It was the foundation of the dyestuffs industry which developed in the Blackley district of Manchester.
Factory Records.: Records relating to the Factory Companies c20 linear metres. c1977-1996 Factory Records interests were far and wide and from the late 1970s to the 1990s included a number of operations [Hacienda Club, Dry Bar] and bands [such as the Duretti Column; Joy Division and New Order] which gave Manchester international prominence in the popular music industry. The collection, which includes financial as well as administration, publicity, artists and personal records is very wide in terms of archival media and represents one of the most comprehensive modern popular music industry collections known to exist. We hope that this comprehensive collection will form the basis for the Museum‘s music industry collections and that it will attract wide research interest and new audiences to the Museum.

We report our major new accessions annually to the National Register of Archives [NRA] which is run by the Commission into Historical Manuscripts in London. A new accessions list is published every year by the Commission but it is more immediately accessible through their Internet site. A copy of completed cataloguing is sent automatically to the NRA as is an annual accessions list. Hardly a time consuming activity when the benefits are so immense.

I guess that the beauty of the NRA is that they accept information in the format provided by the holding institution. The caveat to this is that the vast majority of people working in British archives are professionally trained and qualified so whatever the in-house style of the reporting archive it can be relied upon to meet the elements of the current ICA descriptive standards. Institutions also send in completed catalogues for archives collections and they are held and made accessible both physically and electronically by the NRA. Intellectual access to the collections is enabled by main title, date, name and subject index. References lead the researcher to the relevant catalogue whether real or virtual.

The NRA was never intended to dictate standards. Its purpose was and is to act as a huge collections location clearing house and its major client is the researcher - whether they are pure researchers or a reference archivist trying to locate the whereabouts of a particular collection for another researcher.

The pros of this approach are that most archive collections whether private or public can be located through the NRA. This makes my life easier when I am undertaking my own research or when I need to redirect the research of others. It also means that I can check that an intended acquisition for the Museum will not be treading on the collecting interests of any other institution in Great Britain. It means that researchers are aware of the collections held by the Museum and their time and resources will not be wasted chasing the wrong institution for the wrong collection. It also means that researchers will not take up our time asking for collections that we do not hold. It is in effect free and valuable publicity for the Museum's collections. Close contact with the NRA enables our institution to keep our finger on the pulse of archival developments. It also means that we are better known in the archives community and that fact may benefit us in terms of lottery grants and the future distribution of public collections.

I can't truly see any negatives to this situation - the NRA is there is a public, professional and personal benefit. Long may it continue!