The latest Shock of Record partnership seminar with the Institute of Historic Research is now available to view on YouTube. The video has captions.
The webinar considers how memory institutions and other organisations conduct rapid response archiving to capture the digital records of crisis, how they decide what to include and exclude, and how and when those born-digital archives should be made available to researchers and the wider public. It will also consider how huge digital archives, which may contain multiple forms of misinformation, can be effectively described and contextualised when close reading and cataloguing are not possible.
Thanks to speakers Valérie Schafer (University of Luxembourg) Friedel Geeraert (Belgian Royal Library) Kees Teszelszky (National Library of the Netherlands) for a fascinating discussion.
Entry to the 2022 Janette Harley Prize is now open. The prize is intended to generate interest in archives, and raise awareness of research and achievements in the world of archives.
The prizewinner in 2021 was Dr Amy L Erickson, Robinson College, Cambridge, for City Women in the 18th Century, a free open-air exhibition in autumn 2019 about women who ran luxury businesses in the City of London in the 18th century; and a supporting article, ‘Esther Sleepe, fanmaker, and her family’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 42 (2) (2018), pp.15-37.
The closing date for entries to the 2022 Janette Harley Prize is 31 July. The winning entry will be announced in November. We hope to hold the Prizegiving at the same time as the BRA’s annual Maurice Bond Memorial Lecture, early in 2023.
Terms and conditions and further details about how to apply can be found here:
The BRA’s Maurice Bond Memorial Lecture, delayed by Covid, was delivered at Guildhall Library on 23 February 2022. The speaker was Martin Daunton, Emeritus Professor of Economic History at the University of Cambridge and Visiting Professor at Gresham College. His subject was ‘Covid and the Historian’.
In a wide-ranging survey, Professor Daunton reflected on how the experience of the Covid pandemic will cause historians to look afresh at past crises, with greater understanding and from a new standpoint. The 1919 epidemic of Spanish Flu was one of his examples. He found it strange that scholars writing soon after the event more or less ignored Spanish Flu in their near-contemporary accounts. This was worth examining afresh.
He also discussed how important it is to ensure that there are adequate records of the Covid pandemic for the future. He was keen to ensure that there were detailed records to explain one day why the death rates in different parts of the UK were not only far different from each other, but also much worse than several comparable European countries. He was also keen to see the informal WhatsApp messages and thoughts of protagonists such as Sir Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance preserved for the future, so that we can understand how information came in, and plans were developed. We will also be able to see how mistakes were made, as they must have been, on the basis of the information that was available at the time. It was also important to ensure that there were adequate records to prevent myth becoming accepted fact. For instance, was it true for Downing Street to assert that it had “got all the big calls right” about Covid?
Over 45 people attended the Lecture, which was preceded by the award of the 2021 Harley Prize, Dr Amy Erickson. We hope that a version of the lecture will be published in due course in Archives, the journal of the BRA.
Dr Amy Erickson on the left, winner of the 2021 Harley Prize
Thanks to BRA Council member Stephen Freeth and BRA Chair Matti Watton for this write-up, and BRA Secretary Amanda Engineer for the photographs.
