LIBRARY LIFE

Gladstone's Library, Hawarden

Alexandra Foulds, archivist

Archivists in films and on TV tend to be elderly men, shuffling around in cardigans. They tend to work in dark basements, surrounded by a mess of paper, and they never really see anyone.

Honestly, that’s not how it is. For one thing, I see those messy offices and turn to my partner and go: that’s a bad archivist!

If someone goes into archiving to avoid people, then they have chosen the wrong job.

A lot of what I do involves talking with people and helping them with their research. That’s probably the part of the job I like best.

I’m not sure many people know how an archive is different from a library, or how an archivist’s job is different from a librarian’s.

I suppose the quick answer would be that an archivist provides similar functions to a librarian in that they care for and provide access to collections, but the items archivists deal with are, for the most part, unpublished - while librarians tend to deal with published materials .

How we order collections is different as well. Archivists keep collections in the original order in which they are given to the archives because that order can reveal a great deal about the owner of a collection and its context.

I spend a lot of my time with book manuscripts, drafts, private letters, photographs, diaries and recordings , and sometimes objects, like the smoking pipes which rest in our Reading Rooms display case, and items that belonged to a member of the Russian royal family - which are kept in the safe - and William Gladstone’s old travelling case. Not to mention the artworks in the library.

Nowadays, the big thing is digital preservation, which I will talk about in another column - because it deserves its own space.

I’m the first full-time archivist at Gladstone’s, which is a sign that the library is really investing in its archives.

I have been at Gladstone’s for about a month, and my main job at the moment is looking after the records, both physically and in terms of putting together a system that can be used by any archivists that come after me. I am also involved in the Carnegie-funded Gladstone’s Writing project, which will run with the help of our new digitisation offer, reading room assistants and volunteers.

I have to pay attention to things like copyright, data protection, and the ownership of the documents, and the wider ethical issues relating to the collections, as well as working out how to keep the actual documents themselves safe and in good shape.

My actual work is both mental and physical. I have to think about the shape of the archive, but there’s also lots of lifting and carrying: I have been moving boxes around all day!

The system I’m designing will be unique to Gladstone’s Library but what I am doing is making sure that the library is complying with the standards and current best practice that should be adopted by all archives.

But more about that next week...