What do we mean by archives…?
Archives are records or documents which people have used in their everyday activities and which have been kept as a historical record or evidence of those activities.
Archives are created by organizations, including businesses, universities, hospitals and charities, and by individuals. The latter are often called personal papers.
Although archives are commonly understood to be old documents, this is not necessarily the case. The Library’s archive collections date from medieval times to the present day.
Many different types of document can be found in archives: letters, diaries, minute books, financial accounts, photographs, sound recordings and any sort of digital file. Documents can be hand-written (manuscripts) or produced by mechanical technologies (e.g. typewriters, personal computers).
The archives of individuals and organisations originally accumulated as a product of their everyday activities. These documentary accumulations reflect how their creators thought and acted, and how they interacted with others. Archives will include documents received through transactions with other people e.g. incoming letters.
Archives are important as historical sources because they provide contemporary evidence of the activities and ideas they describe. They have great potential for supporting new and original interpretations of the past, and they have a quality of immediacy which cannot be found by purely relying on published, secondary sources.
Archival sources are not however neutral; they reflect the interests, beliefs, prejudices and biases of their creators, and researchers should appreciate these limitations as well as their strengths as source materials.
The quality of the content of each archive reflects the record-keeping practices of its creator. The archive’s creator selects what is preserved; they may dispose of ephemeral documents (or even important documents if these showed them in a bad light). Some archives provide comprehensive coverage of their creator’s activities, while others are more fragmentary, whether by accident or design.
Using archives can require particular knowledge and skills, for example, the ability to decipher past styles of handwriting, or understanding of how particular documents functioned. The archive’s context also needs to be understood: how documents within it relate to each other and how they connect to other similar archives.
Archives can be very large with a complex internal organization. To make archives more accessible, the Library creates catalogues (finding aids) which describe the content and context of the archive. Catalogues help researchers understand an archive in advance of using it, so they can focus on the most relevant parts and identify the documents they need to order for consultation in the reading room.
Catalogues vary greatly in the degree of description they provide, but all include an overview of the collection. The catalogue will then describe the constituent groups or series of documents (e.g. financial records, correspondence files), and in many cases there will be descriptions of the individual documents (the items) which make up the series. Each item will have a unique identifier, which is used to order the item.
Some archives have been digitised, so an online copy of an original document can be used. Although this is convenient, it is still rare for complete or even major sections of archives to be available in a surrogate digital form. In most cases, using archives means consulting the original documents in a library reading room.
Some archives, especially more recent ones, are not fully open to researchers. In particular, legal and other restrictions apply to information about living individuals found in archives. Documents may be closed to researchers or only available conditionally e.g. personal information has to be anonymised. In other cases, such as digital archives, technical processing is required before they can be used for research. Recently-acquired collections may not be accessible until they have been assessed, and extra notice may be required if researchers wish to consult them. The archive catalogue will indicate where restrictions exist and how they are applied.
In addition, as archives are the products of the connected activities of organizations and individuals, it is often the case that several different archives will need to be used when researching a topic, and these may be kept at different repositories. Researchers need to be aware of the logistical issues of accessing multiple collections in different locations.
Find Out More
The archive collections of the John Rylands Research Institute and Library are held at three sites: the John Rylands itself, Main Library and the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre.
Many of the Library’s archives are described in summary form in the Special Collections A-Z. More detailed catalogues are available in ELGAR (although not all of our collections are catalogued). ELGAR is part of the Archives Hub, a resource which brings together archive catalogues from many different UK repositories, especially in higher education. The National Archives’ Discovery catalogue includes contains descriptions of archives and details of where they are kept across the UK.
