Five tips for archival research
Though I studied history at university, doing research for The Shoulders We Stand On was actually the first time I did archival research. Going from zero archival experience to visiting twelve of them for my research, I learnt a lot during the process. Here are my top five tips for visiting an historical archive for the first time:
Working Class Movement Library, Salford.
Allocate sufficient preparation time
Before you even set foot in an archive, you need to dedicate time to your visit. Firstly you will need time to figure out the logistics of your visit. Archives often have obscure opening hours, especially smaller local archives. When I visited the Black Cultural Archives they were open only on Thursday to Saturday from 12.30-16.30. And many archives want you to register in advance for a readers’ card, and book a slot if they have limited space, so figure all this out in advance..
Secondly, even without the strange opening times, your time in the archives is limited, especially if you are travelling. Do what you can from home first. Scour the online catalogue and note down the references for what you want to consult. Prioritise them so that if you don’t get to all the material on your visit you have at least hit the main ones.
Lastly, know the facilities and rules of the archive before you visit. Are you allowed to take in water? Do you need cash to pay for photographing permission?
Know what questions you want the archive to answer
What do you want to get out of the material? There will be so many juicy documents that it is easy to get lost in what you find. As we’ve established though, your time is limited, so write down your question(s) and refer to it when you find yourself getting lost in the swathes of documents. When researching the Black Education Movement in the George Padmore Institute one of the questions I had was: what did the Doulton Report say? No matter what else I found, as long as I had answered that then that was a good day’s work.
Talk to the archivists
Archivists are fountains of knowledge, tell them what you're researching and they will be able to point you to resources you did not find in the online catalogue, like a document hidden away in a random, unrelated collection. At the Working Class Movement Library I told them all the movements I was researching and the archivist gave me individual magazines from collections I hadn’t looked into previously.
To save time on the day, and as part of good preparation, you can also email them beforehand, tell them what you’re researching and ask if they can suggest any other resources.
Jot down thoughts as you go
At the archive you will have a lot of material you want to see and certainly not enough time, so you will end up just photographing most of it. As you go, jot down first impressions that will help you navigate the swathes of material afterwards. For example I would have a bullet point saying 'useful article on reactions to the uprising' so I would know what I was looking at later on.
I did this both for individual documents, and more generally for how I was going to incorporate the research into the book, under a category I imaginatively called ‘thoughts’.
Organise your notes and photos on the same day
As you have probably gleaned by now, you will have a lot of photos. A LOT of photos. Be sure to organise them into labelled folders and have notes to help you easily navigate them when the time comes. At the archive, every time I opened up a new collection I would note down the time so I knew that all the photos from that time onwards were part of that collection and therefore they were easy to organise later e.g. ‘Asian Youth Movements GB228/1/3. Photos from 13.28’
Even though you will be tired when you get home from a full day of archival research, do take the time to do it on the day while your awareness of the material and impressions are fresh. Future you will be thankful you did!
Hopefully now you’re feeling a little more confident to do your own archival research. This is a topic that is dear to my heart, so if you have any questions about the above or my process then do contact me and I will be happy to help if I can.