British Museum Archives

On Wednesday, July 6th, we visited the archives of the British Museum. The archival collections are housed in a room in the basement of the museum, and take up a sizable amount of space. The collections include papers, account books, maps, architectural drawings, plans for exhibitions, and photographs. The archivist for the British Museum, Stephanie Clarke, showed us around and gave us an overview of the collections that are housed at the museum.

The British Museum Archives holds mostly internal records, covering the actual administration of the museum. The collections are split up into six different series, including trustees, staff, finance, exhibition, building, and reading room records. Before Ms. Clarke began working in the archives, there were 117 different series that comprised the same materials, so much of her time has been spent organizing  and simplifying the records. The reading room records are actually from before the 1970s, when much of what is the British Library today was housed within the British Museum. Their records span from 1753, when the British Museum was created up until the 1960s for the board of trustees minutes.

The archivist usually answers about twenty to thirty reference inquiries per week by correspondence, and there are about 5 or 6 researchers who come in to the museum each week to do their own research. These researchers are mostly students or scholars wanting to write papers on certain subjects dealing with the British Museum, or genealogists doing family history; one interesting bit of research she mentioned was a scholar investigating the number of women who were granted access to the library reading room in the 18th and 19th centuries. However, it is somewhat difficult to know what the Museum Archives has because there is no catalog for the collection.  The organization of the materials is currently laid out in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, but as with other libraries and museums during these tough economic times, there isn't enough money or staff time to create a more accessible and detailed catalog. Researchers can always e-mail the archivist if they have questions about what the collection contains or if the archive has certain materials.

The trustees records consist mainly of the minutes of the board of trustees as well as correspondence with members of the board concerning the business of the museum. The staff records contain staff directories as well as a random sampling of staff applications from 1850 to 1950. Ms. Clarke showed us the application of a man called Aaron Hayes who was a footman who included some drawings of the collections within his application. She said that the staff records are often used for family history research, but that archivists have to be careful because of privacy issues; the records are restricted 72 years after a person's birth or 5 years after their death. The building records include architectural plans from the architects of the museum--Sidney and Robert Smirke--as well as deeds for the land that the museum sat on before it was what it is today. The British Museum was previously an estate called Montague House during the mid eighteenth century. The exhibition records are made up of plans for exhibitions housed in the museum from the 1960s through the 1990s. 

http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/libraries_and_archives.aspx

I thought the most interesting collection housed in the archive was the reading room records--these were actually records of the British Museum Library before the library split off from the museum in the 1970s. The records consist of reading room logs and applications to use the reading room of the museum library--the records span the years of 1790 to 1970. It was very difficult to be approved to use the reading room in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the librarian had to think that applicant was using the room for a worthwhile purpose and the applicant had to have a house holding person write them letters of reference stating they were an upstanding member of society and they would treat the books with respect. There are many famous people who applied to research in the reading room--some that Ms. Clarke showed us were Karl Marx, Beatrix Potter, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, Rudyard Kipling, T.S. Eliot, and Oscar Wilde; however, there was no record kept of the books each person looked at in the reading room, which would have been great for those who do research on history of the book and the history of reading practices. 

It would have been nice if we had been able to see the archival reading room--we only saw where the materials were kept. In order to use the archival materials, one has to make an appointment with the archivist.  The collection was impressive and was in surprisingly good condition for being 300 years old. I thought it was interesting that Ms. Clarke said that a lot of what she does is advocacy--justification of the archive's existence as well as why the archive is used and who uses it. She also discussed how she is trying to get the eight different departments that do exhibitions within the museum to adopt some archival principles in their department libraries. Overall, the collections were very interesting and historically important, but if resources permit, more should be done to promote the collection, make a catalog and finding aids more accessible for researchers, and begin to digitize materials housed within the collection.