 It's absolutely great to be at this conference. While there's something different about Raef that you might not be expecting, especially coming from an impact officer, I hope you can bear with me for the next 20 minutes. What I'm following on from is the conversations that were started yesterday in the morning panel session by King's College. There was a lot of discussion about university special collections and archives and how they can fit into the REF agenda. I hope I'm going to explore that for you and have some discussion around that. The way I see university special collections and archives, and by this I mean from the museums all the way through to a teaching collection, is there's a pull that these collections have. There are requirements that I've discussed with our archivists and curators at the University of Reading. On the one hand, there's the public engagement side, there's getting people from outside to come in and interact with the collection, interact with the museum and then inward looking there's the research engagement with researchers within the university and so there's this pull that these collections have that I think are quite special to a university collection. So there is evaluation before the REF. It did happen and it's been happening for a long time within the collections. The evaluation has to go to a number of different areas. So the first one is to go to the university itself to justify why the university has a special collection. Most universities were built around their special collections but now it's the reverse, it's the what place do they still have within the university as the university system is changing so dramatically. So there's things like the visitor data reports and such that have been occurring for quite a long time. Then there's also the funders, I apologise it's that inspiring learning for alls. This has been a system of evaluation in place for quite some time with Arts Council for England. So again these are evaluation systems that have been in place for a long time and then HLF funding for example as well that involves the evaluation reports and if you're doing a very long project then it is all about how to continue the funding as well as doing your final evaluation report. So before REF 2014 there were lots of things in place that everybody was already doing. The evaluation was already there just for different purposes. So along comes REF and 2014 it changed a lot of things, it changed the landscape, it changed the languages, the language that was used within a university about evaluation and suddenly everyone started thinking differently about what impact is and what evaluation is and it was very unfamiliar to some but having spoken to quite a few people it was quite familiar within the curators and with archivists. So it came as a bit of a surprise to many researchers but it wasn't much of a surprise to archivists and curators who were quite familiar with the whole system already. So the results were as we discussed yesterday the over 6,000 REF impact case studies for anybody who wants to have a look at them they are still available online. I have done a very very brief study of how it worked for the archives and museums. Please do look at the King's report it's much more detailed than the one I'm going to share but I'm hoping that this simplified version will help to make my points. So I did a very very quick look and of all of the impact case studies about 600 refer to archives any kind of archive just the word archive features in the impact case study and with museums just over 800 features the word museum. However the devil is in the detail with the archive and museum what does that actually mean who were these museums and archives and how did they fit in with this impact case study are they just seen as a resource or are they just seen as a partner and one of the things with the King's report also with the NCCPE report that was done a couple of years ago on museums in the REF case studies it's a lot more about being a resource rather than as a partner and then when we break it down even further to look at the university collections whether archives or museums very very few of these impact case studies actually feature a university collection at all 18 case studies mention a university museum there are more than 18 university museums in existence so there is a huge gap that we have here when it comes to REF and there's a lot of discussion that have been heard over the last couple of days about why this is the case why it is that researchers within universities don't look on their own front door to to work with museums and archives so what I'm going to try and do is find an answer hopefully of how we can start changing the pattern because the in-house knowledge and the best practice that is held by archivists and curators within universities is absolute gold dust it's wonderful information that can be shared with researchers so very briefly my donuts are nothing like the the beautiful graphs that we saw yesterday but my donuts so hopefully will explain a little bit about what happened with with REF and impact main panel D is in green here this is where all of the impact case studies for archives and museums mainly feature for main panel C that's where archaeology sits so that's why that's also quite big because archaeologists really like working with museums and archives as well and so then breaking it down you can see very clearly where the key subjects are in panel D history English language and literature and art and design work with the museums and archives and that's where those impact case studies all sit there are missed opportunities quite clearly with other subjects and this is something that the NCCP have also identified is that a lot of disciplines just aren't working with archives and museums in general never mind the university ones so then the type of impact is very very clearly cultural and it is also societal and that's where the impact takes place and considering the discussions this morning about digitisation and all of the innovations that are going on at the moment the technological impact that was reported in 2014 was really small and considering digital projects that were going on at the time before 2014 again there seems to be another wasted opportunity to look at the technological impact that research can have especially when it comes to working with archives and museums because that's where digital innovations are taking place another feature that is very apparent is how inward looking the the impact is when it comes to archives and museums 68 percent of the impact is UK based so that is very inwardly focused just in the UK but then within the UK breaking it down England dominates and England dominates because London dominates and that's where everybody is working with they're all working with the big national archives and things which is absolutely fine everybody wants to work with big partners but again it's missing opportunities to to work with with your local museums and archives and collections and also missing the opportunity to work with your own institutions so that's the sort of the the landscape that that we had in 2014 that was reported so since 2014 what's been happening within an institution the main thing to appreciate is the huge increase in the researcher interest in impact I think there's something that we've all been discussing over the last couple of days is that more researchers are looking for more impact however they're driven by their own passion or by their division their management saying we've got to have more impact so it's increased amount on there there's increased interest in researcher interest in archives and collections what is one of the problems is this is still interest in the large archives and it is still in the larger institutions and there is a real potential opportunity there for these researchers to come and talk to their their collections within their own institution because that's where the best practice lies that's where information lies that's where somewhere that a researcher can look in their own their own front door and the researchers are looking to increase their skills development and they're looking for public engagement and they're looking at the archival museum skills and they're also looking for evaluation so there should be an increase in the demand for in-house knowledge in the archives with knowledge exchange and all the practice that is my dream that is my vision that they will see it in house and I know there's some there are some phases looking at me going that's a lovely idea but that's not going to happen and this is something that I know is is going to raise a lot of people saying but it's just not happening at the moment but I think that this is something that can happen and should happen and I'd like to give some examples that we have at the University of Reading to show that it is possible it can happen it does take a lot of hard work and it's one project at a time so please don't despair and look at me as I say this isn't going to happen I think it can happen and I hope I can explain some ways that it can happen the other thing that that I'm keen to emphasise is that impact is not just about the ref impact is much bigger than that it's much more important than that ref is just one way of reporting and I don't like the idea of university archives feeling like they are being shut out because of the ref they should be included because they have a lot of experience to bring to researchers who are aiming to have impact for the ref so I'll give one example the ua museum at the University of Reading for those of you who don't know this is our collection for classical archaeology and our art and it's a beautiful museum and it does fantastic work for outreach and engagement schools absolutely love it it even featured on tea cup travels for those of you who know tea cup travels very exciting and of course they were considered for a ref impact case study in 2014 and use the database that they have that is publicly available and it's a wonderful database however disappointingly for them the impact case study did not achieve what they expected it to achieve in ref because the research was not convincing enough to support the wonderful impact that they are reporting and so they've had to sit and rethink about how they can change the way they look at how they report the impact that is taking place so we've been working together over the last year to look at the projects that the ua is working with that are within classics there's very strong research behind it and they are very deeply embedded in supporting two impact projects not going to call them case studies at the moment they're projects and they're specialising in the outreach and public engagement that these projects are taking place the researchers have sat with the curators and have said we don't know how to do this please can you help us please can you share your best practice with us so that we can take this forward and that's going to form the basis of this case study eventually in 2021 so that's one example of how the ua museum is working another is the museum of english royal life the museum of english royal life has just gone through a major regeneration itself it's got had hlf funding and it's been starting to work much more closely with the researchers at redding the main project that has happened since 2014 is glaston briaby that has been run by rebertia gilchrist and she is working with the museum curator at glaston briaby but the museum curator at glaston briaby said i need to know how to do certain things i need some best practice and they got some follow-on funding to do a knowledge exchange program and the knowledge exchange program was run by the mill it was run by the curators there who worked with the curators at glaston briaby's museum and built in this wonderful program for tactile collections and so that was that was how they built themselves in there and so following on from that project the success of that project the success of the engagement with the researcher with the curators has actually inspired a further project that we are hoping to get funding for i had a researcher who is a paleo ethno archaeologist i can get that right who came to me with a funding application and he said i want to do impact with a museum i said well that's a lovely idea a museum in Bolivia that's wonderful do you know anything about museums not really so boy you better go and talk to everybody at the mill and so he went and spoke to to Kate Arnold Foster at the mill and she's helped to embed the expertise and the best practice that they have so we are now at a stage where we are looking at embedding the expertise that we have in our special collections and in our archives with research projects right at the very start and i think this is the key is trying to build in at the very beginning another example i have is Theresa Merjass who is theatre and that's her area of research and she was brought in by special collections and to work on their collections in a number of different ways we have the Huntley and Palmer collection and she has taken a different view of how that collection works and she has worked incredibly closely with the archivist guy back to there on how to do this and she is deeply embedded in it and she has also produced the war child archive i urge you all to have a have a look at this it's a beautiful interpretation of an archive and this is the evacuee collection that we have at in special collections and she worked with Guy Baxter to produce this beautiful website which i thoroughly recommend you take a look at so again it's it's this researcher is one fine example of how she has become embedded herself within the collection but is also now sharing it with other researchers across the university this is not to say that a collection itself can't have impact and we are currently working with the typography collection that has a researcher embedded in it and we have funding to do a couple of projects with it and so the isotope collection is becoming a big feature of this project and again it's all about sharing the knowledge and best practice and sometimes the impact itself is is the actual collection we have the international cocoa quarantine centre and i'm very proud that we are preserving chocolate for the future if we're doing one thing at redding we are saving the chocolate and and this collection was actually built on the research that started to take place at redding in the 1970s and is still going on now to the point that a collection was given to the university by the Royal Botanical Gardens at Q in 1985 and it has become a centre and it is having an impact worldwide on cocoa and so be very grateful that we are preserving the genetics of of cocoa beans to fight against disease and all sorts of things so there are all these different examples that we have within redding that i think can show that you can start to work with the researchers it does take time but from success breed success one project will lead on to another as we have for it as example with the Merl so just some final thoughts everybody working in the archives and special collections universities and otherwise are experts in evaluating impact it's been done for for years before the ref and it's just slightly changed now now that the ref has come into place this expertise can be shared you can have an impact on researchers and then you can enable best practice in impact and there is a huge demand from researchers so there's an opportunity for them to look within their institution and and find a way of doing that the ref has raised the importance of impact and that has raised an opportunity that can be grasped with both hands i think within an institution to help researchers build further impact by using the expertise in house but also by using the connections that the archives will have to the outside world of course this does need a bit of help this needs a little bit of of jiggery pokery coming from within the institution as well as without we were talking yesterday about how small archives you don't have the impact at the moment i'm like the society of antiquaries archive how they can have have that reach and there's always a broker that needs to be in place there's always that expert help of putting these relationships together and so university archives and special collections need individuals within an institution who understands the strengths and the needs of the the collection and the archives and the specialists within it they also need somebody who understands what the researchers are up to as well and to help to put together and understand the needs and the strengths of those researchers but also somebody who understands the full agenda as well so it's it's finding that person who can do that whether it's a grants manager whether it's an impact officer there are lots of different ways of doing it um it's very easy for me to say in 20 minutes just go off and do it and i know that there is there are more complications to it but i think it's one way of possibly looking at it is finding the champion who can help broker those relationships so when it comes to to impact is there one way of of looking at evaluation that will cover everything that a university and special collection archive a museum can achieve and i think that is it's already there um impact is already in place um when it comes to the ref we just need to view it with a different lens it's not about returning a case study to the ref but it's about supporting those projects that will be returning case studies in the end thank you