Any takers for an afternoon out at the local archives? It seems unlikely, doesn't it? But replace "archives" with "museum" and it is a different prospect altogether.
For many, the idea of archives is likely to evoke images of dusty books, manuscripts and tomes written in archaic English. Museums, on the other hand, boast comparatively dramatic collections of vehicles, guns, beautiful garments and shrunken heads, to pluck a few at random.
But despite the perception, there is undoubtedly increasing enthusiasm for using archive material and perhaps even piquing the public's interest in self-generated research.
The British Library has recently acquired the archive of playwright Harold Pinter for £1.1m, including manuscripts, letters, photographs and sound recordings. A temporary exhibition of a small selection of this material opened in January and the complete archive is being catalogued for general access by the end of the year.
Meanwhile, the National Trust for Scotland is putting together plans and funding for a £17m Robert Burns Birthplace Museum, which will feature an archive of the poet's manuscripts and artefacts.
Although such celebrity collections may have an innate allure, the general picture of archives as reams of recondite annals is essentially correct; that, of course, is the purpose and nature of record keeping.
Yet letters, scrolls, manuscripts and other documents can be the very point of origin for some of the great stories of history. In a way that no object could ever quite convey, a letter from Charles Darwin to publisher John Murray, written in 1859, represents the seeds of the science of evolution, as Darwin set out in On the Origin of the Species, published by Murray the same year.
And the letter itself provides a wonderful detail - a glimpse of Darwin's uncertainty about the work. "I have done my best, but whether it will succeed, I cannot say," he writes.
Such material is a vital part of the story, perfect for building narrative in a Darwin exhibition and supporting the display of relevant museum objects. But at the John Murray Archive in Edinburgh, the National Library of Scotland has gone a step further and made the letters themselves the centrepiece of the exhibition.
Designed by Event Communications, the permanent display taps in to the 150,000-strong archive of material spanning literature, science, politics, travel and exploration.
"The archive is usually not the star of the show [in an exhibition]," says Eithne Owens, interpreter at Event Communications. "It is often just a little illustrative document in a case. But you can turn it around so that the 3-D objects tell the story of the manuscript - so that they support it, rather than the other way around. The manuscript is the thing that changed the world. The original will always hold its own excitement and magic."
The John Murray Archive was developed with an £18m grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), but few other archives are likely to receive such generous investment.
Local authority archive services are non-statutory and "many are underfunded and at risk", says Justin Cavernelis-Frost, the head of archive policy at the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA). In any case, a vast quantity of archive material lies outside the public realm, beyond the reach of local authority services.
When Renaissance in the Regions brought central government cash in to revitalise regional museums, there was talk of a similar scheme for archives. An Archives Task Force was established in 2002 and undertook a major analysis of the sector, culminating in a range of recommendations published in 2004 as Listening to the Past, Speaking to the Future.
"The taskforce recommendations are still current, but very little is happening, and I want to breathe some new life back into it," says René Kinzett, who was recently appointed the head of public affairs at the National Council on Archives, a body that works with the National Archives in Kew (home to government records), the MLA and other relevant organisations to provide a voice for the archives community. "The ultimate aim is to create a central, digital UK gateway for archives, but at the moment, we are nowhere near that."
One problem is that there has been very little cash, and funding has declined in real terms over the past decade. Between 2001 and 2006, when the central government's financial support for museums rose, funding for archives via the MLA was about £300,000 a year. In 2007-08, the MLA will invest £250,000 on Action for Archives, a regional and national programme of support and development.
"The MLA has been hampered in the past by a lack of clarity from government about its remit for archives and the need for explicit recognition that archives are an equal, but under-resourced, part of our national heritage," admits Cavernelis-Frost.
Better engagement with the public about the wealth of archives is high on the wish list. "We have got to look more at the customer experience," says Kinzett. "Materials should all be online in one place, with source information, so that you can go and see the original. People don't care where information comes from - museums or archives."
Much of museums' own archives are often neglected or laying in storage. Digitisation and the internet are obvious routes to easier and wider access, although scanning documents is time consuming.
There are also more low-tech options to promote content - Owens at Event says the John Murray Archive's theatrical exhibition is more 19th century than 21st: "More museums and libraries are saying, 'We have an archive, but what can we do?' Access is increasingly something you hear people talk about, but two-dimensional material is among the most difficult to display."
Heather Romaine is archives project manager at the National Motor Museum in Brockenhurst, and also leads the Sharing Skills Archive Project, a programme set up in the south-east to give training to museums professionals on better care and use of their archive material.
Funded by the MLA South East, the project developed last year into the Archives in Museums Subject Specialist Network to deliver the scheme nationally. It demonstrates ways to tap into general audiences with popular subjects such as family or local history, or how to link material to the national curriculum for teachers.
"The major issue for archives is time," says Romaine. "They get put away and forgotten, even though they can tell you a lot about the objects in your collection, often acquired with the archived information. There needs to be more awareness in museums that their archives can supplement their displays a lot."
At the British Postal Museum and Archive, the focus is on merging the museum's object collection with archival material. As an integrated service since the closure of the National Postal Museum 10 years ago, it is one of the only museum and archive collections that is successfully integrated and co-managed, claims Adrian Steel, its acting head of archives.
"The public do not see the divide between the two," he says. "They don't care whether something has been curated or archived. But there is usually a big difference in the presentation. An archive has a catalogue which people can search and the item is retrieved, but without any context. In museums, material is selected and given context and interpretation."
Steel believes that it is beneficial for staff to regard the two collections as part of a single resource internally, even though they are managed using separate professional standards.
"It is very important that each side remembers the other is there," he adds. "The typical culture is to start with objects, but the archive can bring a lot too. This approach has helped our interpretation across all our media, as well."
Woodhorn Northumberland Museum and Archives is another example where the two resources are more explicitly brought together. Under a masterplan by Haley Sharpe Design, the site's £10m HLF-funded project integrated the county archives, local studies collection, colliery museum and historic building complex into a visitor attraction.
The venue picked up a 2007 Design Business Association Design Effectiveness award after more than doubling its visitor targets following the redevelopment. The number of visits to the archives jumped from 207 to 862 a month, with about 4,000 people now registered to use the facility.
"There is probably huge unrealised potential in properly merging the local museum, local archive and local-studies library," says Maurice Davies, deputy director of the Museums Association.
"Even when they are in the same building, they seem to operate separately in the experience they offer visitors. But I think there is a renewed interest in bringing them together."
Scott Billings is a freelance journalist
For many, the idea of archives is likely to evoke images of dusty books, manuscripts and tomes written in archaic English. Museums, on the other hand, boast comparatively dramatic collections of vehicles, guns, beautiful garments and shrunken heads, to pluck a few at random.
But despite the perception, there is undoubtedly increasing enthusiasm for using archive material and perhaps even piquing the public's interest in self-generated research.
The British Library has recently acquired the archive of playwright Harold Pinter for £1.1m, including manuscripts, letters, photographs and sound recordings. A temporary exhibition of a small selection of this material opened in January and the complete archive is being catalogued for general access by the end of the year.
Meanwhile, the National Trust for Scotland is putting together plans and funding for a £17m Robert Burns Birthplace Museum, which will feature an archive of the poet's manuscripts and artefacts.
Although such celebrity collections may have an innate allure, the general picture of archives as reams of recondite annals is essentially correct; that, of course, is the purpose and nature of record keeping.
Yet letters, scrolls, manuscripts and other documents can be the very point of origin for some of the great stories of history. In a way that no object could ever quite convey, a letter from Charles Darwin to publisher John Murray, written in 1859, represents the seeds of the science of evolution, as Darwin set out in On the Origin of the Species, published by Murray the same year.
And the letter itself provides a wonderful detail - a glimpse of Darwin's uncertainty about the work. "I have done my best, but whether it will succeed, I cannot say," he writes.
Such material is a vital part of the story, perfect for building narrative in a Darwin exhibition and supporting the display of relevant museum objects. But at the John Murray Archive in Edinburgh, the National Library of Scotland has gone a step further and made the letters themselves the centrepiece of the exhibition.
Designed by Event Communications, the permanent display taps in to the 150,000-strong archive of material spanning literature, science, politics, travel and exploration.
"The archive is usually not the star of the show [in an exhibition]," says Eithne Owens, interpreter at Event Communications. "It is often just a little illustrative document in a case. But you can turn it around so that the 3-D objects tell the story of the manuscript - so that they support it, rather than the other way around. The manuscript is the thing that changed the world. The original will always hold its own excitement and magic."
The John Murray Archive was developed with an £18m grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), but few other archives are likely to receive such generous investment.
Local authority archive services are non-statutory and "many are underfunded and at risk", says Justin Cavernelis-Frost, the head of archive policy at the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA). In any case, a vast quantity of archive material lies outside the public realm, beyond the reach of local authority services.
When Renaissance in the Regions brought central government cash in to revitalise regional museums, there was talk of a similar scheme for archives. An Archives Task Force was established in 2002 and undertook a major analysis of the sector, culminating in a range of recommendations published in 2004 as Listening to the Past, Speaking to the Future.
"The taskforce recommendations are still current, but very little is happening, and I want to breathe some new life back into it," says René Kinzett, who was recently appointed the head of public affairs at the National Council on Archives, a body that works with the National Archives in Kew (home to government records), the MLA and other relevant organisations to provide a voice for the archives community. "The ultimate aim is to create a central, digital UK gateway for archives, but at the moment, we are nowhere near that."
One problem is that there has been very little cash, and funding has declined in real terms over the past decade. Between 2001 and 2006, when the central government's financial support for museums rose, funding for archives via the MLA was about £300,000 a year. In 2007-08, the MLA will invest £250,000 on Action for Archives, a regional and national programme of support and development.
"The MLA has been hampered in the past by a lack of clarity from government about its remit for archives and the need for explicit recognition that archives are an equal, but under-resourced, part of our national heritage," admits Cavernelis-Frost.
Better engagement with the public about the wealth of archives is high on the wish list. "We have got to look more at the customer experience," says Kinzett. "Materials should all be online in one place, with source information, so that you can go and see the original. People don't care where information comes from - museums or archives."
Much of museums' own archives are often neglected or laying in storage. Digitisation and the internet are obvious routes to easier and wider access, although scanning documents is time consuming.
There are also more low-tech options to promote content - Owens at Event says the John Murray Archive's theatrical exhibition is more 19th century than 21st: "More museums and libraries are saying, 'We have an archive, but what can we do?' Access is increasingly something you hear people talk about, but two-dimensional material is among the most difficult to display."
Heather Romaine is archives project manager at the National Motor Museum in Brockenhurst, and also leads the Sharing Skills Archive Project, a programme set up in the south-east to give training to museums professionals on better care and use of their archive material.
Funded by the MLA South East, the project developed last year into the Archives in Museums Subject Specialist Network to deliver the scheme nationally. It demonstrates ways to tap into general audiences with popular subjects such as family or local history, or how to link material to the national curriculum for teachers.
"The major issue for archives is time," says Romaine. "They get put away and forgotten, even though they can tell you a lot about the objects in your collection, often acquired with the archived information. There needs to be more awareness in museums that their archives can supplement their displays a lot."
At the British Postal Museum and Archive, the focus is on merging the museum's object collection with archival material. As an integrated service since the closure of the National Postal Museum 10 years ago, it is one of the only museum and archive collections that is successfully integrated and co-managed, claims Adrian Steel, its acting head of archives.
"The public do not see the divide between the two," he says. "They don't care whether something has been curated or archived. But there is usually a big difference in the presentation. An archive has a catalogue which people can search and the item is retrieved, but without any context. In museums, material is selected and given context and interpretation."
Steel believes that it is beneficial for staff to regard the two collections as part of a single resource internally, even though they are managed using separate professional standards.
"It is very important that each side remembers the other is there," he adds. "The typical culture is to start with objects, but the archive can bring a lot too. This approach has helped our interpretation across all our media, as well."
Woodhorn Northumberland Museum and Archives is another example where the two resources are more explicitly brought together. Under a masterplan by Haley Sharpe Design, the site's £10m HLF-funded project integrated the county archives, local studies collection, colliery museum and historic building complex into a visitor attraction.
The venue picked up a 2007 Design Business Association Design Effectiveness award after more than doubling its visitor targets following the redevelopment. The number of visits to the archives jumped from 207 to 862 a month, with about 4,000 people now registered to use the facility.
"There is probably huge unrealised potential in properly merging the local museum, local archive and local-studies library," says Maurice Davies, deputy director of the Museums Association.
"Even when they are in the same building, they seem to operate separately in the experience they offer visitors. But I think there is a renewed interest in bringing them together."
Scott Billings is a freelance journalist
