UEA Archives and Special Collections including the British Archive for Contemporary Writing  

While we may not have seen as many visitors in person, it's been a busy year of remote enquiries, digital engagement and online delivery of our teaching programme. Here is a round up of the last 12 calendar months of activities.

 

  • KEY HIGHLIGHTS
  • ARCHIVE LED TEACHING
  • EVENTS
  • ENQUIRIES – TOPICS AND THEMES
  • STATISTICS: VISITS AND ENQUIRIES
  • STUDENT PLACEMENTS
  • PUBLICATIONS

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

  • The Doris Lessing 100 exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre and its programme of events ended in February 2020 having attracted more than 2,599 visitors and participants. The initiative was a finalist in the Innovation and Impact Awards 2020 for Outstanding Social or Cultural Impact and received strong coverage in national broadcast and print media.
  • Fast Show at 25. The UK Gold TV channel commissioned a celebration of the iconic 1990s TV comedy sketch show. It involved extensive filming of the Charlie Higson Archive on 6 March and culminated in several broadcasted episodes reuniting performers with archival scripts. Our Chase Placement student, Emily Walker, who has worked extensively on The Fast Show material within the archive, featured in the programme.
  • COVID CLOSURE PERIOD: In line with Government and University guidelines, we closed the Archive Reading Room on March 23 and began working remotely, answering many visitor queries from collections knowledge and pre-existing digitised archive material.
  • DIGITAL AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT: From 27 March, we began a weekly release online of archived recordings from the UEA Literary Festival archive achieving 2,823 views
  • PROJECT WORK: From April-July, as well as answering enquiries remotely, we were able to adapt to remote delivery and make significant progress with important projects that did not require access to collections:
    • BACW’s strand of UEA’s flagship project, Future and Form, funded by the Arts Council for England through Future and Formwhich we will deliver an immersive digital exhibit to Norfolk’s libraries inviting participants to engage in the creative process with archived author, Tash Aw
    • progressing and finalising a key research bid with external partners in the field of born digital archives due for submission in January 2021
    • creating engaging new video content for open days and other events
    • preparing and launching a new Website and Archive catalogue
    • working on improving the integrity of the 28,500 archive catalogue records that migrated from the old system
    • converting all of our PDF catalogue inventories into new catalogue recordsUEA Archives Website
    • overseeing the Heritage iTeams consultancy project involving PGR and PGT students working on a consultancy project involving the Sara Taylor Archive
    • engaging in a free mentoring programme offered by The National Archives to help develop our approach to preserving born digital archives
    • engaging in training from the Digital Preservation Coalition to develop staff awareness of at risk material and processes for preservation
  • On 23 July, we were able to re-open the Archive Office and begin collections work again including digitising some archive material for remote access in response to visitor queries.
  • We also began preparing material for teaching online, creating videos and digital access to unique archival items
  • To help celebrate 50 years of Creative Writing at UEA, we digitised archive material from Ian McEwan, Malcolm Bradbury, Tash Aw, Tracy Chevalier and Louise Doughty for inclusion in the videos of our creative writing alumni
  • We released a new dedicated Blackboard site of Archives and Special Collections Teaching resources for Humanities with introductory videos and sample teaching content to encourage teaching staff to draw on archive collections in their teaching
  • We created a new online student guide to Archives and Special Collections to highlight the collections as part of UEA Library’s offering
  • On 21 September we reopened physical access to UEA staff and student visitors under Covid secure arrangements.
  • Autumn 2020 teaching with archives moved online with synchronous and asynchronous archive led seminars featured in 10 Humanities modules in the Autumn semester, including two new modules in AMA. We have reached 265 students across 20 hours of synchronous and asynchronous teaching sessions.

ARCHIVE LED TEACHING

Seminars provided within the Archive Reading Room or UEA Media Suite, prior to closure:

SPRING 2020

  • MA PUBLISHING MODULE 'AGENTS & ARCHIVES', 27 JANUARY. 
  • WRITING THE WILD (LDC, UG), 28 JANUARY
  • UG & MA CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOPS, 13-14 FEBRUARY
  • MA SCRIPTWRITING, 7 FEBRUARY
  • MA MODULE IN CULTURAL HERITAGE AND ARCHIVING IN THE DIGITAL AGE, 4 FEBRUARY within UEA’s Media Suite. ‘Digital Preservation in the Archives of Contemporary Writers’
  • MA DIGITAL HERITAGE MODULE, 10 MARCH . Theory and practical on creating an online exhibition.

SEMINARS PROVIDED WITH SYNCHRONOUS/ASYCNRHONOUS TEACHING AND DIGITISED ARCHIVAL CONTENT:

SUMMER 2020: MA Creative Writing Research Methodology Day Seminar

AUTUMN 2020

  • MA Crime Writing
  • LDC MA Induction
  • IIH MA Gender Studies: Feminist Research Methods
  • LDC UG Imaginary Endings
  • LDC MA Biography & CNF
  • LDC UG Creative Writing - Sara Taylor creative writing process session
  • LDC MA & UG MALT & Reading & Writing Translation
  • AMA UG Analysing Television
  • MA Literary Translation
  • AMA UG Documentary

EVENTS

  • Conference paper on preserving scriptwriters’ digital archives, given at AHRC funded international research conference. Justine Mann and Emily Walker (PGR)
  • DORIS LESSING 100: ‘Curating Ourselves’ - Teachers’ inset day, Sainsbury Centre
  • DORIS LESSING 100: Screening of the film ‘Memoirs of a Survivor’ (which was partly filmed in Norwich),  Cinema City with talks from Justine Mann and Iain Robinson
  • ACTIVISM SESSION FOR SIXTH FORMERS, Visit to Doris Lessing’s exhibition and the British Archive for Contemporary Writing to work with original letters from writers campaigning for political issues. Dr Katie Cooper (PPL, PGR) spoke about writers as activists and her archival research for project ‘Writers and Free Expression’
  • SNOO WILSON PRIZE FOR SCRIPTWRITING, The annual prizes were awarded at The Garage in Norwich, recognising the most imaginative, inventive & formally achieved piece of writing from both the UG and PGT scriptwriting programmes in LDC and AMA
  • MA GENDER STUDIES SPRING SEMINAR SERIES, UEA alumna, Lyndsey Jenkins (University of Oxford) spoke on Gender, Class and Feminism in Suffrage Activists’ Childhoods. Jenkins shared insights from our archive of working class suffragettes - Annie and Jessie Kenney
  • [DIGITAL] HERTIAGE OPEN DAY 2020. THEME ‘HIDDEN NATURE’. The Archive rescreened the acclaimed nature writer, Richard Mabey’s, UEA Literary Festival appearance from 2009 with an introductory lecture and Q&A from our Academic Director and Curator of the Nature Writing Collection, Jos Smith

ENQUIRIES – TOPICS AND THEMES

BACW COLLECTIONS

NAOMI ALDERMAN: The Power; DORIS LESSING: John Berger’s correspondence with Doris Lessing; CHARLIE HIGSON: The Fast Show; ROGER DEAKIN: radio recordings; notebooks, and the BBC programmes recorded at his smallholding in Mellis, the ‘House’ and ‘Garden’. LEE CHILD (biographer research); CHARLES PICK: Letters from the writer Winston Graham (novelist known for the Poldark series) mentioning the Indian writer R.K. Narayan. ALAN HUNTER: Detective novels; PATRCIA CRAMPTON: Nuremberg War Trials letters. MALCOLM BRADBURY: the history of UEA’s Creative Writing programmes; LORNA SAGE: BAD BLOOD; LITERARY CRITICISM. SARA TAYLOR: The Lauras and The Shore.

OTHER ARCHIVES

PRITCHARD PAPERS: Teachers of the Bauhaus recent history of the modernist Lawn Road Flats, Isokon Trust; Edith Tudor-Hart (photographer and Soviet Union spy); John Gloag (writer in the fields of furniture design and architecture); Marcel Breuer (architect); The blueprint of the Penguin donkey bookcase, designed by Egon Riss; Walter Gropius (architect); Leslie Bilsby (architect)

ZUCKERMAN ARCHIVE: Sir Julian Huxley (evolutionary biologist) and secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935-1942), a post later held by Zuckerman (1955-1977); RAF air raid on La Caine, Normandy in 1944; the British Bombing Research Mission (BBRM) and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI); Attacks on German headquarters, 1944; the history of Environmental Science; Hull family history

KENNEY PAPERS: Constance Lytton and Vera ‘Jack’ Holme (ambulance driver and chauffeur for the suffragettes); Annie Kenney’s speeches

GS CALLENDAR ARCHIVE: exhibition of climate change influencers

EVEREST COLLECTION: Joan Everest

THEATRE ARCHIVES: Feminist theatre

UEA COLLECTION photographs of the Chamber Choir in the 1970s; the history of Earlham Hall; and a 1976 discussion of the poets Empson, Gascoyne, Rickword and Spender; trampolining and badminton at UEA; Creative Writing research for 50th anniversary

STATISTICS FOR ENQUIRIES AND ARCHIVE VISITS

  • **2019/20*: UEA visits 402; UK visitors: 243; overseas: 29; Total: 674*
  • **Calendar year usage statistics (Jan-Dec 2020): UEA visits: 494; UK visitors: 161; International visitors: 23; Total: 678*

*In addition to the above totals there were 1,971 visitors to the Doris Lessing exhibition (Sep 2019-Feb 2020) *and 2,823 online views of our UEA Lit Fest archive releases (April-November 2020).

**Reduced visitor numbers due to Covid closure months (2020)

SPECIAL COLLECTIONS REQUESTS: 2019/20 = 49; Calendar year 2020 = 31

STUDENT PLACEMENTS:

  • Elspeth Latimer, Curatorial Assistant with the Lee Child Archive concluded her Chase funded placement with us in February 2020.
  • Emily Walker, Curatorial Assistant with the TV Comedy Writing Archives concluded her Chase funded placement with us in November 2020.

PUBLICATIONS

  • The biography of Lee Child ‘The Reacher Guy’ written by Heather Martin, which drew heavily on six months of research at the Lee Child Archive at UEA, was published in September 2020. Martin also wrote an article on her archival research process, which was published in Hinterland, the non-fiction journal and a UEA Live Blog highlighting her extensive use of archival material at UEA
  • Blog from Elspeth Latimer on the highlights of her Chase Placement which ended in February 2020
  • Blog from Emily Walker on the highlights of her Chase Placement which ended in November 2020
  • Blog via UEA Live from Sharon Tolaini Sage to celebrate 25 years since the first publication of Bad Blood, her mother, Lorna Sage’s, seminal memoir
  • Blog (forthcoming) from UEA MA Literary Translation student, Josephine Murray, on Patricia Crampton’s translation work at the Nuremberg War Trials