Born Digital – kickstarting the next phase of our archive strategy.
We are excited to announce, following a trailblazing application from Dr Liz Cory-Pearce and Juliet Scott, that the Tavistock Institute has won a Scoping Grant to begin the second and ‘Born Digital’ phase of the Tavistock Institute’s archive strategy.
Provided by the National Archive the Scoping Grant will fund work that offers the Tavistock Institute expert advice on a range of areas relating to Born Digital collections management and the development of the Tavistock Institute’s collection. As a result of the Grant, we will create an open source tool that enables us to gain an overview of the current status of our collection: analyse its overall condition, significance, existing and potential use, levels of access; sort and weed the material prior to depositing at the Wellcome Library as well as offering recommendations about next steps.
Having established the paper archive at the Wellcome Library in early 2018, which has been hugely popular, the archive project is now moving into the second stage of work, progressing from paper records to all the digital records we hold.
It soon became clear this was not going to be an easy task; unlike paper archives, digital archiving involves technical skills and requirements that go beyond our capability. So since summer 2018, the internal archive team has worked alongside a Digital Records Management Consultant, Frank Owen, Head of Development at
Max Communications.
We are ahead of the curve in this work, the majority of organisations have not begun to address their digital archives. The creation of digital material is a crucial issue of our modern age – taking up server space and including numerous duplicate documents. As a result of archiving our digital material, we hope to make available the Tavistock Institute’s more recent heritage of social sciences work in industry and society for use by scholars, practitioners and the public.
This Scoping Grant will allow us to do all this and more, and we are very pleased to be working with the National Archive and Wellcome on this exciting next phase!
‘TIHR’s decision to reactivate its archives has stirred an interest among scientific staff and professional partners to explore some combination of current practice and past action-oriented research. Sometimes within scholarly practice, there is a tendency to constrain the past into a narrow description as a jumping off point. It takes courage to go into the TIHR archive and make of it something relevant and applicable to the present.’
Juliet Scott, Business Curator and TIHR Archive Lead.
To find out more please visit our archive blog.
More information on the: Scoping Grant.
To find out more about the first stage of our archive held at the Wellcome Library.
To access material held within the Tavistock Institute archive at Wellcome please email collections@wellcome.ac.uk