The Tate Archive - Interview with the archive curator
So essentially the library and archives operate together so the research is all part of the same thing. So we run the two reading rooms jointly. The main reading room, then we’ve got a more second, more secure, room where people can see the library special collection materials and the archives. And the Tate archive, which is essentially a collecting archive, we get things like artists papers. People give us things or sell us things and the archive is built up that way. Then there is the galleries own records, the Tate’s archive and the more recent papers that are still in use or partially in use and the historic part of those is seen in the archive room.
This is the archive reading room. The stuff on the walls is all reference material, so lists of what’s in the archive and copies of particularly photographic material that we don’t want to be bringing out of the stores.
Our collections are actually up in the stores so they have to request what they want to see and then it gets brought out for them. So the boxes on the shelf there are things that people have requested in advance.
K: How many days in advance do you have to give notice?
You don’t have to give any notice. We do collections throughout the day, basically at every hour. Of course that means you could wait an hour or so for stuff to come out so a lot of people order in advance to make the most of their time.
S: Is the archive available online or to the public? How do people know what material is available?
There’s a catalogue online so its not the actual material but there’s essentially a listing of what we have on there so people can go over to them and do their searches and find what they want to order.
K: How long has it actually been online for? The catalogue?
Around about 2005/06.
S: How is the archive organised? I guess you have the archives that are related to the collections and the works but do you also have an administrative archive?
There is a division between the Tate’s own archive and the collected archives, sort of the personal archives. The Tate’s archives are basically part of the National Archives so they are arranged in the way that was sort of agreed with the National Archives, which is very much by which part of the function of the gallery they relate to. The collected archives, essentially each archive that we take in, that comes into us a particular time from a particular person is kept as one collection and each of those is given a number and when we catalogue them they are arranged within that number.
L: Since when does the Tate have an archive?
Since 1970.
K: With the information that people donate or that you collect from an outside perspective is there any that you don’t necessarily want?
If we don’t want it we’ll say no. There is a sort of collecting policy. Our remit is very much British art or art in Britain since 1900. And unless theres a very good reason we wouldn’t take earlier material or material that’s only really international.
S: So would that be specifically for the Tate Britain?
Its not, we’re actually a sort of central department but when the archive was set up that was the logical way to focus it. Partly because there’s not that much older stuff still in circulation so you cant really build up a body of excellence in that area. And in general with archives its agreed that things should go to the most appropriate place and generally for an international artist their own country is where you would expect to find their archives so we don’t really want to be poaching things from other people.
G: And what about the Tate’s that are not in London, they have their own archive?
No, everything’s here.
K: And is that hard to negotiate between the different galleries?
Not really, because the Tate is still very much one organisation, one body. Quite a lot of the departments operate centrally so there isn’t really that tension. And we send things out on loan for exhibitions and so on to all the sites.
G: When you mention about the private archive are there some bits that are correspondence? What are the private parts of the archive you mention? Do you keep track of the emails, letters?
Correspondence very often is a very large part of the personal archive.
S: When you say personal what does that mean exactly?
Really just personal as opposed to institutional. So for example the archive of a certain artist. For example Kenneth Clarke who was an art critic or Ben Nicholson, we have their personal papers. So that’s the archive of them as a person.
K: When you say you document your correspondence we noticed that when we were receiving emails from you said you’re able to keep this information and to use it. I know it’s a very standard disclaimer, but does that get sent out to everyone?
In theory yes, its part of the standard signature for everyone.
S: Does that mean that when correspondence that’s obtained by the Tate, e.g. you have a letter from Kenneth Clark or us, does that meant that letter can become public property?
Not as such. It means that if we had a letter from you and it was put in a file and kept it means that that information was maybe kept on file. There are a couple of laws in particular. One of which is Data Protection which says that we can’t give out personal data so anything about you personally would be covered by that. But there’s also Freedom of Information so we do have to answer questions. So if there’s something on file that you’ve sent us it may end up that we have to disclose that. Essentially Freedom of Information covers everything. There are exemptions; pretty much everything covered by data protection is automatically exempted from Freedom of Information requests. But it’s a matter of judging what is covered by data protection, so what is personal in that way.
S: Is it clear?
There are fairly extensive guidelines, what exactly can be exempted under Freedom of Information has actually shifted slightly since it came into force. Basically, what happens is people appeal to the information commissioner who gives the final ruling and on the basis of what has been said yes to and no to then people adjust the parameters.
G: What about the temporary archive? Emails, do you keep them? How long do you keep them? Are you keeping a digital archive?
It’s a mixture, most organisation are still in a mixture of digital on paper. To some extent depends on who the person dealing with the stuff is and how their happy to file things and some people are much more keen on printing things out than other people. You’ll get some people in an organisation who will work by printing out their emails
L: But are there internal guidelines?
There are guidelines and a sort of preferred way of doing things. As always reality and theory don’t always entirely touch so there’s a little bit of you have to keep things in whatever way is practical. It’s a working environment so if you make things to rigid and fixed for people then they just wont bother.
G: What about the team who’s working in the archive? How is the structure? How many people are involved in the archive?
In the library and archive as a whole there are about 25 of us. That includes the librarians and also the, what we call reader services team, who do a lot of the operation of the reading rooms so they do the retrieval the shelving and so on.
……
(In the archive)
As you can feel its air conditioned so its kept at a steady low temperature and humidity which is designed to be reasonably ideal for storing paper which of course is most of what we have is. This section of things is the library store, we’ve got sort of books and exhibition catalogues and so on. And follow me round….
…….
If you can see these numbers along the stacks, these are the collection numbers. And as I say each collection gives a number, which refers to that whole archive. You can see that each one is the archive of a different person or organisation.
You were asking about how many of us there were…?
So for the archive, for the Tate archive there’s the archivist, John and myself who are the 2 archive curators and we have an assistant archive curator, that’s the permanent staff. Then on top of that we have various people on short-term contracts on particular projects, mostly to catalogue particular collections.
K: And do you have interns as well?
We do sometimes, it does depend a bit. At the moment there’s very much a push away from the traditional unpaid internship because of course that’s not a terribly good thing to be relying on, it’s fairly discriminatory to employ people who can afford it. So there’s a pressure that any internships have to either pay a reasonable wage or it needs to be something fairly specific that wouldn’t be done by a normal member of staff. So we sometimes have archive students doing placements with us. Because that has very definite educational purposes.
K: Does the characteristic of the archive change depending on the head archivist? Because of the ISAD(G) standing order, is it just regimented against that?
ISAD(G) is actually a fairly flexible standard. Its more saying you need to include these things and follow these principles rather than being regimented. We do at least try to follow it but also developed our own in house guidelines on cataloguing. Even so its quite hard to regiment cataloguing and each cataloguer will have their own slightly different style and it all depends very much on what you come across when you start looking at the collection and what makes sense of that particular collection.
L: What would be the difference between the archive curator and the archivist?
The archivist is basically the head of the archive, the archive curator is to some extent left over from because we are in the gallery and the gallery has always operated with curators and so fairly automatically the posts tend to get “curator” just because that’s what the gallery tends to call people.
G: At anytime does the archive actually become an exhibition?
We get involved with exhibitions sometimes.
G: How do you perform the archive in the exhibition?
Mostly we support and advise curators in the gallery. Occasionally we get to be a bit more actively involved and we do occasionally get to create displays or parts of displays ourselves. A couple of years ago we had our 40th anniversary and we had a room in the gallery upstairs to help celebrate that and we put on a display.
S: Saying that the archive was started in the 70’s…
1970, yes.
S: …we were speaking to the archivist at the British museum and she said that at that time there was a shift, the archive changed. Before it was more about holding things, keeping them inside, as the 70s came it was about opening them up to the public. Have you seen this evolution in the way the Tate archive has grown?
I suppose to some extent and I suppose we’ve always been part of a research focused part of the gallery, we’ve always been there for researchers to come use the material, there was always an emphasis on access for them. There’s more of an emphasis now than there used to be on widening access and giving access to people who wouldn’t otherwise necessarily come in and do research in the archive.
G: When I was reading to contact you I saw really bizarre questions to fill out before coming here like prepare a letter, proof of address…
That’s for registration for the reading rooms. Much like registering with a library, much the same as the British Library’s procedure. You need to fill out a form with your details and show some proof of who you are so we know who you are.
G: Just comparing to what we were looking at yesterday in the British Museum the application process was very interesting.
Ours actually changed about 5 years ago. Much like the British library we used to ask for a letter of reference which was all very well for people in academic circles but we found that was very difficult for people who had more general interests or personal interests or practicing artists who didn’t necessarily have an employer or institution they could go to for that sort of thing and they found it quite difficult to work out how they could get a letter of reference.
G: So since when has that changed?
I can’t remember exactly but it would have been about 5 years ago.
S: So do you have a procedure in selecting people, do some people get denied access?
No. If you can prove who you are, if you’ve got that proof so we can see you are who you say you are and you live where you say you live…
G: And if you don’t live in London?
Then we ask for proof of your permanent address, your home address.
S: It’s a security thing?
Yes, so if there is a problem we have a verified address that we can say, right, this person was there at this date. Just in case something gets stolen. We haven’t had to use it in that way that I can think of but it’s just that bit of legal security.
S: So you keep archives of these applications?
All the information goes onto our database, people are then registered for a year, we can renew it for them at the end of that year. If they don’t then because of DP rules we can’t keep information that isn’t current so after a year without renewal the info gets deleted.
G: Do you use your own software, how do you work? The British Museum was actually using Excel to keep track of the documents.
We have data propriety databases so the library uses a fairly standard academic library system. In the archive we use a system called CALM, which I think is probably one of the most common archive databases in the country.
K: Do you look after all the archives for the departments or do they have sub-archives?
We have the archives. In terms of the Tate’s own archives it’s a relatively limited number of things that get kept permanently. So what does get kept permanently does come here. Some of the more important current files get kept here, things like the directors correspondence and exhibition records tend to come over a few years after the exhibitions happened and they’ll be kept in the semi-current records for some time before they get transferred into the archive-proper. But a lot of the current material stays in the department where its been created and a lot of the paper work never actually needs to go into the archive so never needs to come over here at all.
S: So the semi current records are like an archive that’s still live?
There is current, semi-current and historic. So current is what actually is being used now, the open files, active material. Semi—current has basically been finished with but might be needed for reference. Like the project you were doing last year that you want to hang on to the paperwork for because you might need to refer to it again for similar purposes. And historic is no longer being used at all for its original purposes its just there for research purposes.
S: So do you organise that according to space?
With historic records, because its all part of the national archives there’s a lot of legislation that determines what gets transferred across. There used to be something called the 30 year rule that said 30 years after a file has been closed it becomes archival, a historic record that can go into the archive. A few years ago that was amended down to 20 years and its all a bit fluid because of the Freedom of Info act, people can expect to see info of any age as long as its not sensitive. So that does have an impact on the way that sort of thing get managed.
SB: I guess that national archive is central to that?
K: Going back to the correspondence that you had by email, are you ok with the fact that the other participant could use the info that you are giving them and archive that. And even if they don’t necessarily say it in their first email?
Yes, I think you have to assume if you send someone something in writing its going to be documented. You’ve created a document and let it loose into the world!
SB: At the British Museum, they had all of these letters before they had computers, every letter that left the BM they had a record of…
Of course in the Tate’s own files there are lots of copies of letters that have been sent out as well as come in. Of course technology changes…
And then again in collected archives, there are various archives that have been in correspondence with the Tate and we will have our letters that were sent to them that come back to us.
L: Are you trained as an archivist?
Yes, I did a degree in history, then I did a bit of practical experience in an archive and then I did a Master’s in archives.
S: What was your MA like, how did you ‘learn the archive’?
It was all sort of based on discussion of a mixture of theory and practice behind it. You get the experience before hand because its very hard to teach something like archives in a class room environment. You need to have got your hands on the stuff and that’s why you are expected to have experience before hand.
S: What kind of readings did you do?
The course I did wasn’t terribly theoretical; it was a lot more of particular archival theories about how you arrange things etc.
S: So did you do research into archival environments?
A certain amount.
S: Because it’s a really nice design this archive.
G: Yes, its interesting know who is the designer of the archive, how its decided to keep the objects in those places. We are interested in the space and the unfolding spaces. We were wondering who was the one thinking how to project this, an interior designer? An architect? The archivist?
Well this area was originally one of the painting stores for the gallery back in the early days and of course it got out grown and then around 2000, maybe slightly after, they converted them for us. In fact our main reading rooms are just the other side of that wall but they are currently shut up because of all the building work going on. They redid this whole area for us back then and I believe there were architects working on it…I think one that the Tate has used for several other things in the past. And we had a very kind donor who gave money to actually do it all.
K: Do you have an inventory of all the paintings that are in your store and is that in a separate archive?
The artworks in the main collection – that’s completely separate.
S: So this is correspondence?
Yes things like correspondence, sketches, photographs…
L: The photographs would be the documentation of works?
Some of them are, generally not art works. So the art works are completely separate. They are mostly stored out in Southwark and various other places scattered around the country.
K: So the inventory, the logging, is all contained within the artwork archive?
S: They have their own system of archiving?
Yes, that’s completely different, we are not really involved with that.
S: So this is the information archive?
In some ways, its background.
S: Do you think there are specific books, texts that are referred to in the education of an archivist? Some kind of theoretical bibliography that’s common amongst archivists?
There are various standard text books but it all gets revised every few years.
K: Is there anyway we could find a reading list or get back to you at a later date?
S: Maybe we can contact an institution.
The main course in London is at UCL so they may have a reading list. That’s where I studied so they will have a more up to date list than when I studied. The other one to look at is Glasgow.