Fun Fact: The round room at the center of the Great Court of the museum, shown above, used to be the reading room for the British Library, before it moved in 1973. It's closed while they figure out what to do with the space, but you can click here to see what it looks like inside.
Francesca Hillier, the museum archivist, took us down into the basement of the museum to see the archives. I think this was my favorite tour so far--not necessarily because of the collection, but because I got a sense of her professional approach to the haphazard collection she's inherited.
The museum was founded in 1753, but it has only had a professional archivist for the last 15 years. The archives consist of a chain of rooms of shelving, containing documents and materials dating back to the when a board was first convened to create the museum.
The earliest letters and minutes of the museum's first board of trustees are bound together in volumes, without any apparent reasoning for why certain items were chosen or bound together. The documents are all different sizes and are taped in in places. If someone requests a copy of one of these items, Francesca has to cut them out in order to make a copy. Not all like documents are bound together. There are sets of volumes organized by "Departments in General," "Departments in Particular," and by specific department.
After 1914, documents were boxed (not in archive-quality boxes). These contain things such as lists of heads of department, copies of Acts of Parliament that govern the museum, agreements for purchasing items, details on arrangements for exhibitions, excavation records (including one signed by Lawrence of Arabia), requests for funding for expeditions. Francesca mentioned one document where a person applied for funding to purchase guns and ammunition to protect their finds from the locals (this was in the Middle East, I think); the funding was granted.
The archive holds records for the British Library reading room (they're not kept at the library). There are reading card applications from John Lennon, Karl Marx, and Oscar Wilde, among many others. We were able to see Bram Stoker's reading card (I wasn't able to snap a picture in time). There are shelves of rolled-up maps and other images, because they are too large to fit elsewhere in the space.
You can tell this archive is rich in material, it just isn't organized in a way that people can find anything, because the museum never had a professional who knew the proper way to do it. Nothing is digitized or cataloged, so there's no way of knowing all that the archive contains. They're at the very beginning stages of creating an online catalog of the archive. Francesca was professional in her talk, but I couldn't help but get a sense of how frustrating it must be to be responsible for archiving such a huge, haphazardly organized mass of materials using different storage modes--few of them archive quality.
Many of the queries Francesca receives concern the provenance of an object in the collection or challenges to the museum's ownership of an object. Because there is no catalog to speak of, and various items are bound or boxed in different places, she must search by hand through the most likely places and hope she can find something. This makes it incredibly hard to prove whether the museum actually owns certain items or whether they were acquired by other means. Because it is challenged so often, Francesca has a section of shelving dedicated to records on the sculptures from the Parthenon, so at least she knows where they are.
Francesca is the only archivist. She manages the archive with the help of one or two helpers.
And this is just the central archive. Each department has its own archive just as haphazardly organized, with no professional librarian/archivist. Francesca provides guidance to the departments on how to archive their documents, so that the organization will be consistent from department to department.
Because the museum is primarily an object-based collection, it is less concerned with the documents below, which provide valuable information about them...if one could find them. With limited funding, cramped archive space, and miles of materials to sort through, Francesca has her work cut out for her. Though, she seems to have the mettle to advocate for her department and steer the museum toward a more organized, well-cared-for archive.
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