I agree strongly with about 95% of what Anthony Adolph had to say about
archives and TV. We certainly do need to think about what the outside
audience will find interesting and be prepared to strip back unnecessary
detail to make the interesting features show through, rather than clogging
the narrative with unnecessary footnotes and qualifications out of a sense
of intellectual completeness. We are, after all, talking about
communicating with outsiders rather than with one another, and it's not
necessary for a piece for the non-specialist to sound like something from
the JSA.
However, I do feel that the "dusty archives" thing is something that we
don't have to put up with. It's usually the result of lazy stereotyping
rather than accuracy (sadly, I think you can often show a journalist a
perfectly clean strongroom and the word "dusty" will still occur in the
final copy); it implies that we don't have physical control over our
environment, minimising our role in physical preservation of material;
applied to documents, it could imply that no-one has touched the thing for
centuries and thus that the archivist has no idea that the item is there,
which minimises our intellectual input in cataloguing etc.; and it plays up
the image of us as ivory-tower weirdos, pottering about in a Gormenghast
existence out of touch with the real world outside. I think a scientist
would object to playing up to the mad boffin stereotype for TV, no matter
how welcome the media exposure would be; similarly, a famer looking for
serious coverage of agricultural issues would probably feel they were being
devalued if he had to put up with being portrayed as an apple-cheeked yokel.
I'm not dusty and nor are my holdings (TV researchers wanting to come and
run a finger along the shelves to check are very welcome), so sorry, I'm not
happy with a lazy stereotype that says I am.
Dr. Christopher Hilton
Assistant Curator, Western Manuscripts
Wellcome Library for the History & Understanding of Medicine
The Wellcome Trust
183 Euston Road
LONDON NW1 2BE
Tel.: (+44) 020 7611 8481
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