 So, first of all, we'll have Lawrence Hill, so Lawrence is an independent curator and creative producer working primarily with digital artists. He's also a visiting research fellow at the Sussex Humanities Lab and a lecturer on the digital media art MA at the University of Brighton. Lawrence's curatorial practice is focused on working with LGBTQ plus, BAME, neurodiverse and disabled artists to explore representation and embodiment in digital spaces and the ways in which artists can and should be helping to create those spaces. So, next we will have Dr Sarah Perry and Cecilia Lovrato on the panel, both from the Museum of London Archaeology. And Cecilia is an archivist with a background in medieval archaeology history and museums. Her main interests are in museum collections and archives as repositories of knowledge, sources of inspiration and creativity, and how they exist as social tools in the present. She is director of research and engagement there and she's led a number of research projects, including the Emotive Consortium, focusing on the research design development and evaluation methods that can support the cultural and creative industries in creating narratives. She's also worked on international capacity building projects around recording conservation interpretation and education about the built heritage in the global south. Next we have Dr Katie Eagleton, director of libraries and museums at St Andrews University. Katie's career is combined library, archival and museum collections and after completing her PhD at Cambridge she became the curator at the British Museum. Then the British Library's head of Asian and African collections, and then associate director of curatorial affairs of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. And Katie's also a member of the AHRC steering group towards a national collection aiming to open digital access to cultural heritage collections. So welcome to all of our speakers today. And I'm going to hand over to Lawrence. Thank you Lawrence. Thank you Suzanne. Okay, I'm going to share my screen. Right, hopefully everyone can see that. I just wanted to say thank you to Suzanne for inviting me to take part in this panel. I feel honoured to be among people producing such great work and thinking. And thank you all for coming along. I can't see you sadly, but I hope one day we can do this all again in person. This morning I'm going to talk about a project called Voice Over Brighton that I commissioned in 2018 when I was director of Brighton Digital Festival. This was in essence about the creation of an archive or at least a possible archive. So as you'll see I'm coming at this from a slightly different angle, but I think this project illustrated good practice in working with communities that are not our own. Suzanne did a great introduction for me, so I'm going to skip most of what I'd written. I did want to just talk a little bit about the ethos that's behind my work. I'm interested in work that uses digital technology to offer a critique of digital technology and are increasingly digitally mediated world. And within that I tried to steer a course between unthinking tech for evangelism and decline this technophobia. In my work I'm driven by the concept of critical optimism. I spend a lot of time thinking about how different people navigate online spaces and technologies, the development of which centres cisgender straight white men, thereby echoing the offline world. So I'm interested at least in part in work where the technology is used or subverted to tell a different story. When I was thinking about commissions for Brighton Digital Festival in 2018, I was thinking specifically about participative projects. I record seeing Usman Hack, the founder of Umbrellium, speaking at an event and being impressed by the careful thought he expressed by talking about Umbrellium's development of large scale participative projects, which always seemed to centre their participants. Based in London, or at least they were in the before times, Umbrellium described themselves as, quote, a design and build studio dedicated to transforming urban environments and getting communities meaningfully involved. Once we agreed on working together we spent a lot of time thinking about projects and finally decided on an iteration of something they'd done before called VoiceOver. This image features the technology which was central to the VoiceOver project. It's the box that you can see just behind the man in this image. VoiceOver was the platonic ideal of digital projects. The tech was relatively complex, but its application was very simple and the outcomes of that application could be incredibly rich. For instance, participants would agree to have one of the boxes that you saw in the previous slide in their home for a period of time. The box worked both as a radio in that content could be broadcast to it and as a recorder so that participants could record to it and those recordings could be saved to a central server. That was the basic premise and beyond that what happened exactly would be down to the individual instance in which the tech was used. There have been two previous iterations of VoiceOver, one on a street in East Durham and one in a tower block in Finsbury Park which is the one you can see in this image. Another element to VoiceOver is the V shaped lights that you'll notice in two of the windows. These lit up as the boxes were being broadcast to or were being recorded on and this element is something that I'll come back to in relation to the specific community we worked with for VoiceOver Brighton. Both of these previous iterations had engaged geographically located communities and when I came to think about how we might use it for the digital festival here I found myself less interested in the idea of engaging participants in a particular geographical location and more interested in the idea of a dispersed community and I went very quickly to the idea of working with trans people in the city. In terms of Brighton, in terms of numbers there is significant trans community in Brighton but they're dispersed and remain vulnerable in many ways. From the outset of the commission with Unbrillium I had intended to lead to this project especially it was the big spend of that year's festival and until the moment I decided that we should work with the trans community that had remained the case but I'm not trans and therefore I was fully not the right person to lead it. Which brings me to the brilliant Emma Franklin. Emma is a performer, a writer, an artist and an activist. Through a mutual friend I made contact with her, she uses she her pronouns we met and agreed she would lead on the VoiceOver Brighton project. Part of our far-reaching conversation on that day touched on the dangers of these kinds of participative projects especially with marginalised communities, dangers that I wanted to assure were avoided. I wanted to lay out what those dangers are and then as I discussed the project further I hope it will be clear how they were resolved. In my time as a commissioner and programmer of work particularly for Brighton Digital Festival we were pushed to encourage work that engaged a wide range of the city's communities. There were a number of red flags that would make me want to question projects that were pitched to me although they came across in my travels. The first one is the idea that by working with a marginalised community that you are giving them a voice. I trust I don't need to explain how problematic that is. This kind of top-down, patronising attitude is thankfully less prevalent than it once was but I came across an example just the other day so it's still out there. Parachuting in is another issue. This happens when an organisation has decided that it wants to work with a marginalised community that has no relationship to and no part of. So they jump in, deliver a project and then walk away with no thought given to the longer term or delivering meaning to the participants. It's a box ticked and time to move on to the next group. The next red flag involves a lack of reciprocity. It is very common that an organisation has decided they want to work with a particular group and they're very excited about being able to gather the experience, the stories, the histories of that group and then usually plan to repackage them often in some deracinated way for example as a VR experience. My question is always, so this group of people that you're essentially mining for content, what do they get out of it? What is the value to them? Last of these general concerns is a question of power and control. Where does the power, the decision-making lay in your project? If one of it lays with the community you want to work with, then that's a big problem. Emma had much the same concerns on those general red flags and she added some that were specific to the trans community. Against increasing hostility, trans people are continually being asked to explain and defend their existence. To cisgender people, to lawmakers, to the media, all of whom are invested in making this a debate where none exists and continuing to stoke an environment antithetical to trans people. Emma was keen that as she approached potential participants, it'd be clear that we weren't asking them to justify their existence or using their existence, their experience, their stories as education and or entertainment. You might remember the element of the voiceover project that had lights in participants' windows. That aspect of it was a complete no from Emma. With visibility comes vulnerability and for an already precarious community, even in a city famed for its tolerance, something that would identify the home of a trans person was a no-go. So here you can see during the active part of the project the boxes in some people's houses. So the question of the lights was resolved in a different way for voiceover Brighton. You can see in this image, Umbrellum created an interactive banner and it was situated at Malbra, aka the Mali, a queer pub in the city and a hub for the trans community. The banner would light up as an individual recording was made and over the period of the project it came to be fully lit. Sadly, as far as I know, the Mali where I've spent many a happy time has yet to reopen after the closing of the last lockdown. The fragility of queer spaces is real. Having engaged Emma to lead the voiceover Brighton project and after facilitating a meeting between her and Umbrellum, whose role from this point was to support the tech requirements of the project, I had no further engagement beyond some questions of logistics relating to the project's role as part of the festival of that year. Although I was clear I was there to support and if and as necessary, I had no role in choosing participants, no role in how the project was run, no role in deciding what the final outcome would be, other than stating at our first meeting that there had to be some kind of public outcome as required by our funding. So Emma took it from there and over four weeks in the summer of 2018 she posed a series of provocations to the participants and their answers were recorded. In the end there were hundreds of individual recordings and as a way of thanking them for their participation, each week she commissioned a trans performer to create a new work that would be broadcast solely to the project's participants via the boxes in their homes. Crucially, the participants were invited to identify on making each of their recordings, whether they wanted their words to be made available to a general audience or whether they wanted them to be heard only by other trans people. At the end of the active phase of the project, Emma and her collaborator Juan Carlos Otero made two sound landscapes, one for a general audience and one that was only available on request and only to trans people. You can see here the exhibition A Gallery Space in Brighton where the public soundscape was played back through the boxes that were originally used to record them. In summary, I think that we took the concerns that both Emma and I had about these kinds of participative projects, especially with marginalised communities and crafted something that avoided those pitfalls, had meaning and value to the participants and ultimately was something to be proud of. My contribution to that was mostly getting over my desire to control everything and getting the hell out of the way. It was a much better and more successful project because of it. So in the spirit of getting out of the way, I'm going to give the last words to Emma. We're artists, right? We're digital innovators. We are thinkers in this room and it is our job to be challenging the status quo. We should be working with communities that are not our own. We should be expanding the conversation and the access to these technologies, but we should be interrogating how we are including those voices and bringing people into the room as leaders and giving them power. It's nice to see that Sharon, who couldn't be with us today, does actually appear on today's session. That's her with Emma and me on the stage at the conference that I organised. And that's me. I'm done. Thank you very much for listening. And those are the ways you can contact me if you would like to. Thanks ever so much, Laurence. That's great. And yeah, as you said, it's lovely to see Sharon just making a little appearance at the end there. And thank you. We will hold off on questions until we've had our speakers. So I'm going to hand over now to Sarah and Cecilia to share with us. Thank you. Hello. I'm just going to show the slides and then we'll pick it up. Hopefully that's all visible to you now. Thank you so much for welcoming us today to this round table. My name is Sarah Perry. I am, as you've heard, a director of research and engagement at Mola Museum of London Archaeology. And I'm here with my fantastic colleague, senior archivist Cecilia Liberato. Mola is an educational charity that offers archaeological excavation services around the UK to more than 400 archaeology projects per year. Cecilia and I are part of the research and engagement team comprising nearly 90 people who take the data artifacts and other records from these 400 plus excavations and interpret, synthesize, archive and engage specialists and wider public audiences with them. I oversee the R&E team, research and engagement team, and Cecilia is based in Mola's London office primarily working with the London Archaeological Archive, the largest archaeological archive in the UK. It's been in the Guinness Book of World Records and containing resources from 8,500 archaeological sites investigated in Greater London over the past 100 years. Given the brevity of this presentation, what we're going to do is have me briefly introduce the incredible potentials of the archaeological record, as well as the possibilities and challenges of more radical or critical forms of archival practice for better activating these potentials of archaeology. Cecilia will then introduce you to the very constrained workflows and requirements that archaeologists at Mola and stakeholders involved in archiving archaeological finds and records in general are bound by. And she will put forward some propositions for means to begin to unbind ourselves from these constraints. We will then leave you with a few questions that we might want to consider during the discussion period. I also suggested an empirical research confirms that archaeology is a wondrous subject matter. It has inherent in it sources of human enchantment following Jane Bennett's conceptualization of enchantment. So all of us here today, indeed everyone everywhere at all points in time are literally a top untold history is that we have never seen before that we may know nothing of, and that can surprise and transform us in innumerable ways. The very nature of archaeology as a subject that's open to interpretation as new techniques, new voices, new intellectual frameworks and new discoveries themselves are introduced, furthers this facility for archaeology's ability to surprise and transform. The archaeological archive then is exceptional because archaeologists are in fact assigning meaning at the earliest possible stages to materials that may never before have been encountered by present day humans. In other words, it is commonplace for archaeologists to be the origin point for meaning of objects and sites, and this meaning is then embedded into all subsequent products of the archaeological process from our primary recording forms to secondary archival descriptions to the circulation of historical information in video games on YouTube in books and schools and everywhere else that you might encounter it. The archive and its requirements therefore crystallize all of this meaning. And with this point about crystallization in mind, we do need to be incredibly concerned by the overwhelming abundance of research that demonstrates that archives and keeping their local data their shared vocabularies ontologies and conceptual models class the digital and physical structures that house them are born of colonialism. They are complicit for Hughes Watkins in continuing to uphold oppressive and unequal systems. Realmeyer calls them assemblages of politicized decisions. Drake in his Keystone lecture on Libertory Archives notes just how obvious are the entrenched biases. Indeed the injustices embedded in some archives have led them to be deemed, deemed weapons of a fact. What we're learning here is that we're probably not lost on any of us that they that it is precisely through the seemingly universal effort to strip archives of a fact to standardize depersonalize and singularize them that they have become such weapons. In addition, some reveal like in the process to the creation of quote non interpretive tombstone labels. And by Drake's reckoning quote the traditional ways that archives do business or in many ways antithetical to the notion of a community. There are more promising approaches that we've been inspired by have been piloted to tackle systemic by a social and inequity and racial injustice in data repositories. There does seem to be a link to regional and national level policy change. In other words, it's larger social pressures and legal obligations that are mandating advancements in archival practice in different sectors. Archival might be through Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission where a push for quote quote more ethical hospitable response of empathic archive has been launched. But what is notable is that these policy changes and related commissions have yet to have any real impact on archaeological archiving in archival or non policy focused efforts to rectify biases including archival redescription revised ethical metadata standards felt experience conceptual model extensions for example decide CRM and alternative fluid fluid ontologies, which are things that we've been exploring. And we've been particularly inspired by the British Museum's research space and I vows indigenous knowledge graph. And imperative for change I think is overt yet recognition that this change must begin from the moment that the data are conceived, as opposed to the moment they are deposited into a repository has been slow in coming and furthering our argument is the rapid pace of innovation with data acquisition technologies, whose workflows still fail to capture important descriptive detail emotion human values and multiple viewpoints and archaeologists are readily taking on board these data acquisition technologies for a lot of different archaeological work. Community driven practices grow in popularity fundamental redesign of our workflows and data to embed communities and justice at their core is still lacking. So design justice frameworks, and, for instance, the work of as Sasha stands a chalk are enabling this kind of value led co created redesign and digital and other infrastructures, but their systemic youth in fields like archaeology is effectively non existence. So what can we do. How do we proceed. I'm going to pass it over here now to Cecilia. So firstly, I'd like to make clear that what I'm going to talk about makes reference to the archive department and molla. And that there are some community projects already happening in other parts of the organization, mainly in citizen and the time discovery program, which are doing great work with communities. But I think that as an organization we could and should be doing more to involve communities in the archaeological process, and in the creation of archaeological knowledge and archives. What makes me want to be involved in this conversation and work with Sarah is the realization that the archiving process of molla is quite linear. And that as it is at the moment, it doesn't allow participation from from communities in a creative and more radical way. I believe it doesn't allow participation in a creative interventionist way from people inside the organization itself, apart from to a certain extent the specialists in pottery, metal, animal bone, etc. The structure is such that it removes opportunities for being creative and thinking in multi directional fluid ways within and about the archaeology. This is not the case only with molla, but I think something of a trait of commercial archaeology in general. When a project arrives at the archive department to be prepared and curated for the position in a museum. It is considered to be finished. Everything that was supposed to be done with the archaeology has been done. And the task of the archivist is to physically prepare prepared for the position following guidance produced by the museum or other local repositories. The input of the archivist is very limited and their ability to add to or change the archive in a meaningful way is very small. As I have said, the archivist prepares both the record and finds archives, checking completeness, cross referencing labels, appropriate boxing, etc. and produces plans and a digital archive. The main area of creation for the archivist is within the digital, but here too, it is very rigid and linear and often amounts to adding a few annotations. As again, we follow guidelines that weren't conceived by the archivist themselves. Thus, as you see this process allows very little input from the archivist and therefore even less input from communities. The challenge is how do we get communities to participate in the creation of the archaeological archive when not even the archivist themselves can have a meaningful impact. I've thought of possibilities, but the following are only sketches. I think this round table is a good place to share these ideas and see your responses to get advice from you and from people listening about your experiences and better ways to include communities in our work. I believe that one of the paradigms presuppositions that needs to change in order to encourage greater community participation in the archives is the idea that when the archive arrives at the archive department, it is already closed. We need to change this negative paradigm for a more positive one, one of opportunities, one which sees the archive as very much alive during the whole process, right up to a deposition in a museum and further still. This will allow us to see the archive as something that can be changed, worked with, created, alive at all the stages. A first step towards such a change could be to make the process less linear. This would involve engaging the archive department earlier on during the creation of the archives themselves, enabling meaningful conversations between teams and as a consequence, opening up space for archivists and communities to intervene in significant ways. Such a shift would, I think, produce at least two ways in which communities could be a part of the development and further creation of an archaeological archive. One involves the addition of effective experiences to the archaeological archives. Often what is found in excavations, evaluations and watching briefs lacks evidence of past people's feelings, thoughts, emotions. Furthermore, the rigid nature and linearity of the archaeological process in a commercial organization makes it hard for archaeologists themselves to have a more holistic relationship with archaeology. One which is flexible enough to accommodate the possibility of more abstract and subjective interpretations. That is, one which is freed from purely instrumental descriptions to engage with more inquisitive and curious lines of inquiry. Because these effective response experiences, sorry, do have a value, and a value not only for future research. As we allow communities to forge a relationship with archaeology, perhaps local to them, and allow that relationship to go in different directions decided by and managed by the communities themselves, they perform and create a sense of longing of the right to have a more meaningful connection with their own history. The communities would perform the right to interpret archaeology, certain that these interpretations would also have great value in informing future work with the archive. Following from a similar preoccupation with what is lacking in the archaeological archives is the involvement in the creation of communities who tend not to be represented by them. That is, adding the voices of those silenced by historical processes, which are in part responsible for the archaeology we dig up today. Most archaeological archives attest to a heterosexual, male-dominated Christian adult world. And a way for the archaeological profession to reckon with its exclusion of prescribed minority voices in the past would be to provide the space in the present for those who represent those communities today. I am referring, for example, to communities of women, LGBT plus ethnic minorities, religions other than Christian children, Egyptian traveler communities. Furthermore, these communities tend not to be represented in the archaeological profession itself, which is not very diverse, meaning that there is a shaming lack of multiplicity of voices interpreting archaeology. As with the previous suggestion for the archives to truly become a space of emancipation and inclusiveness, the communities themselves should be empowered to decide the shape, the relationship with the archaeology will take, and the kind of responses they will want to record and share. As commercial archaeology institutions like Mola have tight schedules for delivering work to our clients, I believe the archive preparation stage with its slower pace and less tight deadlines to be the most suitable for allowing the aforementioned communities the space to work with the archaeology to create a more holistic, radical and creative archive. With time, this would hopefully feed back to the whole archaeological process, transforming it into a less linear static one, one that would have added hearts collaboration with multiple communities, which would inform our relationship with the archaeology itself. Thank you so much. Thank you very much Cecilia and Sarah that was that was really interesting. Thank you. Maybe realize how ignorant I am about archaeology so I've learned a lot from from just those few minutes so thanks very much both of you and right going to hand straight over now to Katie. Thank you. I'm just going to share some slides with everybody, but thank you for inviting me to be part of this session it's. Sorry, I will get the slides started and then start talking. There we go. Really delighted to be part of this session. I'm going to talk about a couple of different projects and a different kind of partnership, but then think about how that relates to the communities that museums and archives serve. So, and let's start by talking about the university museums in Scotland network. And this is nine universities with collections that are members and it's the universities that have accredited museum collections in Scotland. So what's quite interesting about these universities is in many of them, although not all of them. The archive and museum collections are part of a converged service. So it's, it's a really interesting and quite permeable definition of museum hearing includes quite a lot of different kinds of material. The five of the members of you miss the university museums in Scotland group have recognized collections these are collections of national and international importance. And we sometimes think of ourselves as having a sort of distributed national collection I'll say a bit more about that in a moment. But this is who we're talking about so the list of the nine is here and you can see the range of types of institution from Glasgow School of Art to universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow through to all sorts of other institutions including the University of St Andrews where I am. And I mentioned this point about the collection between us we look after 1.8 million objects and this is just a museum object so I'm sort of leaving photographs and archives out for a moment here. And that's 32% of Scotland science history 31% of its coins and medals, 24% of its fine art, 20% of its natural science and 18% of its world culture. So this this this network of museums working together holds a collection that is very big and very important across Scotland. But it holds it from within universities and that gives us an interesting relationship to the communities in Scotland and beyond and to the museum sector in Scotland and beyond. A couple of really practical points we benefit from having a shared coordinator post this is her in the in the circle in the middle she's called Sarah Barry Hayes. She really helps us be a tight network and supports projects and advocacy. And we're also lucky enough to have funding from the Scottish Funding Council which acknowledges the way that these collections on these museums, make a much bigger contribution than just to the specific universities that hold them. There's also huge differences between this group. There are wide variation in the number of staff wide variation in the size and scope of the collections, wide wide variation in the kind of position and remit within the universities for this group. And what we really try and do is work together to to support each other and to draw strength from the differences as well as the similarities within our network. There's also big differences in terms of whether there's a dedicated venue or not in how much funding within the organization and from grant funding there is, and in the different levels of activities so we're really interesting kind of microcosm of lots of different kinds of organization while still being within the university sector. And we work together in quite a lot of ways like I said we've been developing much closer working much more tight and active advocacy, a joint strategy joint annual report, all of that kind of thing. But that's not what I'm here to talk to you about today what I'm here to talk to you about today is a couple of projects we've done recently which draw strength from this network to deliver in two different ways to two different communities that we are here for. And, you know went dwell on this but this is all really starting to think about how we've had to adapt in relation to covert and its impact, because just like everybody else. Everything changed when we all went into lockdown everything about the way we normally work with our overlapping and different communities, and everything about the way we work with our collections changed. The core business from universities of teaching and learning changed our venues closed our collections ended up very much restricted access and in some places close completely. So what we did at that point is to work even more closely together, we decided that there was a real risk in a crisis situation of universities ending up being in competition with each other and in ways that we thought weren't helpful. And actually collaboration and mutual support where the best thing we could do as a partnership and if you think of this as a kind of sector community, we met more frequently we worked much more actively together on joint projects. And there's two examples that I'll just mention very briefly to bring out here because I think they work with different kinds of communities and they have different kinds of relationship to the collections and those communities. But they bring out this theme of what a network and a group of organizations can do together that probably none of us could have done on our own. The first is a project called capturing lives, which brought young people from across Scotland into a project to explore and document their lives in their communities. 64% of participants in this project had never really engaged with the university before. And we knew we wanted to target school students in areas that were what we call widening participation backgrounds. So that's areas of economic deprivation areas from which students are less likely to aspire to or go to university. So we had some multiple aims for this project one was a sort of project that was about using creativity it to explore life. And this was summer 2020 so life and the impact of covert and the restrictions on that on the lives of these students, but also to pair the school students with university student mentors to start to create relationships and mutual understanding between those two groups, and the participants created work which we then featured digitally. So we never brought this into our permanent collection but we featured it we connected it to the art collections held across all the partners in the university museums in Scotland group. And it was something that we're really proud of because of the layers of ways that this connected to our communities into our collections. Really delighted sort of breaking news as of this week is that we were highly commended in the volunteering award at the museums and heritage awards because of the role of the student mentors. So a project that really, I think many of us have done these kinds of projects where you do an art project with a community group. We obviously made sure there was an arts award attached to it so the participants got a real kind of qualification and a credential that they could use for whatever they want to do next. But we found one of the greatest benefits from this project was this this partnership this mentoring and volunteering and the connection between university and school students. There's a link there to blog about the project if you're interested in finding out more but it's, it's an example of how I think the impact of COVID made us rethink a kind of fairly classic form of project and do something that's much stronger and much deeper and richer than we could have done before. And then the second example, a very different kind of community here because obviously universities work with communities in the way that the capturing lives project us. But also our community our internal community and the way we support research and teaching and learning is a hugely important thing for university collections. And that was just as disrupted by COVID as anything else, but that gave us an opportunity to really think about how we open up collections to the communities for whom we hold them, including our own staff and students but also beyond that. So we're doing a project at the moment, which is researching that question about how we support teaching and learning with digital and digitized collections. And that's making us question all kinds of assumptions we might previously have made about what we should do and where we should invest and what we've done as adaptations to a crisis that should actually become permanent changes to the way we work. So that's very much work in progress at the moment. There's a link there to a microsite about the project. And we're doing a survey at the moment, which is capturing information across anybody who's in a higher education context who's been teaching online with digitized collections in the last year. There's not too much more about that because there's been other sessions at this conference about it, but it's another way of thinking about how how we make these collections active and relevant and useful to the communities that we hold them for. So I will stop there now so that we have plenty of time for what I'm sure will be a really interesting discussion and look forward to it. Thank you. That's great. Really interesting stuff. And as you say, I think there'll be lots of questions for more detail on some of your projects that you talked about. I'm going to ask the other panelists to sort of come back in and switch their cameras on so we can see everybody again. Hello everyone. Great. Thank you. So just just a reminder then if if if anybody would like to ask a question it would be great if you'd like to ask in person just put your hand up and we will pull you in if you prefer to just put it in the chat that's fine we can pick them up from the chat. We've got some questions in already so if we'll do those in order so perhaps could we first of all bring in Maria might take just a moment to make that happen. Okay I think she's just about to join us. We might have lost her. Well, we might have to come back to Maria I think we've just got a technical hitch. We'll start with another question that came in, which was about. Oh, no, sorry I spoke too soon Maria has joined us so let's let's do Maria first. Thank you, Maria, if you want to unmute yourself and then we can hand over to you to ask your question. Hi, hi, thank you. Yeah, I kind of lost you for a minute or two. If I've missed an important point, forgive me. No, I was I was interested but all of the all of the presentations were really interesting. Thank you very much. They were great. Took a lot from from all of those interested in Lawrence's work around you know how you engage with marginalized communities and I'm from Dorset's archive. I'm tailing off an LGBTQ plus project and I'm working very closely with our GRT community at the moment on on shaping a bid with them. So I think Lawrence really highlighted a lot of a lot of pitfalls that can lie along that way in terms of where power sits in terms of who who who is able to instigate projects you know we're often able to instigate things from within our institutions because we understand how to apply for a bit of funding or what have you and then start start doing the outreach. So yeah, it's it's really hard and I loved all your points and I just underlined all those to myself you know that reciprocal kind of element that really needs to be there and designing that in which other people touched on as well. I just was interested to know Lawrence what what happened to the recordings were you able to place them with an archive at all. Not yet. I mean I think I should be clear that I mean that it was conceived as an arts project. Yes, the archive came, you know, out of that. So we didn't have conversations at the time the recording set with Emma as the leader of the project. In fact I just got in touch there last week because I knew I was doing this just to see what her intentions were and she I know that she wants to use them to do something with them. So the participants gave the copyright to Emma. Yes. Right, right. Interesting. Yeah. So yeah, what's the space really nothing's happened with them at the moment. I think we did this in 2018 so sometimes it's, I think it can be quite useful to sit on things a little bit and see what the best value for those recordings would be in the long run. I have made out that something will be done with them. They might be repurposed into some kind of online space where they can be made available. Yeah. So I guess that is a kind of a bit of a dilemma for us where we where we cross into arts projects as well because I would sort of take a view that if people have contributed such personal material. I want to discuss with them from the start what might be the possible uses of that and to ensure that material isn't recorded and then lost to the historical record really, you know, and ends up a kind of siloed somewhere. So, yeah, I would really be interested here if other people have have thoughts on that as well. Thank you. I don't need Katie Cecilia or so I don't know if you want to come in on that on that point and obviously Lawrence again as well if there's anything else. I think I would just say that those kind of ethical questions about what happens to the materials that people have recorded are really key. I think it's it's it's really worth trying to as you're saying on the project and a future prefeit in essence. There was a kind of major oral archive that was collected here in Brighton. It's called Queer in Brighton archive. Well, yeah. So it was one of our reference points for our project down here is one of the things we sort of looked at and wonder what we wanted to do the same or differently or what have you. So one, well, so one of the things I think that Sharon may have talked about this if she'd been here is I worked with her a few years ago on kind of looking at that archive which was essentially sitting on a memory stick under someone's bed in the book. And, you know, how we might reanimate some of it at least. And some of the and we did that through we ran an open call for an artist to use some of the material and installation. One of the problems that with that is that when they collected that information they didn't necessarily and it was a while ago. So if we wanted to use it again for another purpose. It became a process with by we had to go back and find those people and say, is there a right to use it for this purpose which is not what you originally. Yeah, that that can be really tricky. I mean, we've got, I guess everybody every county's probably got the same problem in essence that all around museums and archives across doors that we know there are things sitting as you say on memory sticks tapes, beta max kind of But but if those materials are from marginalized communities and I think it especially important that we try to gather those materials up because in effect the same communities are being asked again and again to give their impressions to give their voices to give their memories to give their feelings. And if we don't kind of take care of those and bring them together then they will become fatigue in the community, and we will have missed, you know, stages of the story, including the story of their involvement with institutions such as our own part of that will be lost. So I did just speak to Dorset Museums Association yesterday and put forward the idea that we should jointly fund, which was another really interesting thing from Katie, you know the power of coming together, whether we should look at a kind of a joint funding of a project to find all those materials. Bring them into DHC where we are used to risk assessing those packages and managing them in a restricted manner for a long time if that's what's necessary to preserve them. So working with a local archive like the keep might help with that risk assessment process. Sure. Thanks very much Katie do you want to come in on that. And really on that last point I think the interesting challenge for all of us is always, when is it the right thing to bring material in. And this is to Lawrence's point about the relationships of trust when when is something more like post custodial collecting where you support the community taking their own, their own care of their own things. And how to make sure things don't get lost or damaged or disappear without necessarily being always looking to bring everything in, because that's that's not feasible. But it's also sometimes not appropriate. Sometimes it's better to sort of empower and help somebody take their own care of something that it's important to them to retain ownership of. And, you know, the temptation is so strong to say, bring it bringing it in we'll look after it, but I don't always know the relationships of trust are there to make that feel comfortable for the communities we're working with. Thank you that's totally sorry just to come back and I totally agree Katie and working with community collections and archives yeah I would see in a slightly different box to working with our local museum partners. So yeah I was I was restricting the thought of that post to other, you know, specific archives and museums. I totally agree that material should often sit sit with the community. Thanks, thanks Maria thanks for thanks for being brave enough to join us and posing some really interesting questions that that's great so thank you I'm going to move on to the next question that's come in, which I think from somebody who can't join us on the screen but they've asked that question how are the archaeological archivists deal with computing histories the same object. So I'm guessing that's a question for Sarah Cecilia. I think there's a couple of different parts to this, the answer to this question because I think that a lot of time competing and interpretations usually get encapsulated in the kind of synthetic work so in, you know, the blog posts that are produced or the videos or whatnot and that this is the major problem which is that the archives themselves, for the most part are unable to to incorporate those competing interpretations and as you might imagine, all the time, and virtually at every moment when you're doing an interpretation you are, you are navigating multiple different interpretations so that's the kind of high level response that I think Cecilia might have some specific. Yeah, I was thinking that sometimes you don't need to decide in which, like which interpretation to keep, like, and which one to discuss sometimes that kind of conversation between interpretation is what makes the archaeology rich and which makes it advance. So, yeah, so when they are two interpretations, just let them kind of exist both at the same time because like, yeah, like sometimes just trying to choose one of them actually doesn't allow archaeology to to grow and to kind of incorporate new ideas. So I don't think it's bad to have more than one interpretation at the same time. Yeah, you can get a sense from the workflow that Cecilia presented in the slides that there isn't a lot of space to do anything at all. And, you know, we're bound by a series of requirements that are almost impossible to change without massive sectoral change. And the various initiatives that we have been inspired by which links to one of the next questions in the chat so I'm just going to preface that the answers to that question. And, you know, where they where we've been inspired by communities that are working for instance with conceptual models like PsyDoc and others to create the space to be able to deal incorporate felt experience, but we continue within archaeology to be bound by such strict and guidelines where the archivists themselves can't can't even participate in that in the conversation. So you can get a sense that I think I feel at least I don't want to speak for both of us are the entire profession, but but I will. And that we are incredibly far behind, and there's a huge amount of work to do. I mean decades worth of work to get us to the position where you might genuinely be able to have multiple interpretations embedded in the archive itself. I think that happens more maybe in universities that with commercial archaeology, but I think it's important that commercial archaeology starts dealing with it because as more and more like archaeology departments in university are under threat of closure I think the responsibility to have like a barrier conversation of discussions about what archaeology is and different interpretations will will be in the commercial archaeology profession more than in university. I think it's important that we engage. Thank you. I don't know. Katie Lawrence if you have anything you want to add to that if not, I will move on. So what I did is I completely agree that that we have challenges as a sector in that. I mean, the really basic stuff our databases are standards the fact that we talk about terminology control like this this is all speaking to a view that there is a right way to do it and a right set of information. And I think we, we know that there's often around objects a process of decontextualization as they move into a sort of controlled managed collection. And we have work to do as a sector to work out how to make that much more, much more, much more open and I'm I like the concept that came out of years ago of the generous interface like letting people in to make their own meaning with our collections, and finding room for that within the really, really basic stuff like our databases and our terminology and all that kind of thing, but we have, we're nowhere close to being able to make that a reality. And I think that's where the sector has to work together because it will need to push for very large change to make that a reality, and to stop us perpetuating the same problems for the future around not all the information all being kind of captured in the right as a kind of master and primary documentation rather than as I think it was Sarah Cecilia said the kind of interpretative overlays to make that call rather than add on I think it's going to require a big change in our sector. Is that is that you're both talking about kind of massive sexual change is that conversation even starting to happen or is it or is it just happening in kind of individual. It is starting it is starting but the scale of it is a bit daunting, I think there's some interesting proof of concept kind of technical solutions and workflows and that sharing those I think will help but it's it's a big challenge. Thank you everyone, and we've got another question that's coming in I don't know if the Robin can join us so I shall read out Robin's question but if Robin you appear then that's fine I'll just hand straight over. So the question is, how do you think we can resolve the tension between professional archives wanting to give autonomy to community groups collecting and telling their own stories and ensuring these collections and stories can be captured and shared in a way that fits in with archival standards. So that's probably a question for all of you actually isn't it. So who wants to go first. I don't know. I don't know how you resolve that tension. I think you have to ask the question, you know the community that you know, whichever community you're working with has to be involved in answering that question and I'm not sure that there is a blanket solution or a blanket answer for that. I have no expertise in in kind of kind of formal archiving so I can't speak to that side of it but I think. Yeah, I think I just said I think so I don't think there's a blanket answer and but you know the community you're working with has to be involved in that conversation, because they have to have they have to have the power to direct what happens. And I also can I say something, and they like archival standards for archaeology are a bit different than like normal archival standards, but just also to have in mind that archival standards were created by humans. And so they can also be changed. And so maybe we shouldn't always try to be kind of thinking oh okay we have to always can follow those guidance start their written in stone we cannot, but also kind of have in mind that, okay maybe we have to start thinking about what maybe we need to change those standards to allow maybe the community is still kind of yeah haven't not going crazy but like having a kind of. Yeah, I understand that but but allow it to be a bit more fluid to allow exactly different communities, each with their own particularities to be able to work with the archives. Having like more than one. Maybe they should be 100 or 1000 or whatever say that there is, you know, a model that fits, you know, most opportunities. I think there's also room potentially for us as a sector to get better and clearer about explaining why. Standards are standards but but where they're required because there's a good good reason we need to say why we need to sort of bring people into the, the sort of mystery of this stuff. Because I think sometimes just asserting it has to be that way because of standards sounds a bit like putting up a wall, whereas we could be much more open about saying, here's here's how we think about this here's why we're worried about this. And then start a conversation because it's always a balance right if, you know, I'm just thinking if you've got an object and it's so important for example that it's handled. You might take a controlled risk of damage to that object because the importance of it being active and used and, you know, valuable and inaccessible. So essentially you balance that against the release of real risk of damage and you make those decisions all the time as somebody managing a collection. You just cannot like put standards and shut the doors and stop like hold back time essentially. So I think being more open about why we make those decisions and how those decisions are always balances of risk and opportunity and bring people into that conversation will help. It's not an absolute it's always a decision and a professionally thoughtfully done decision, but it's the standards don't ever tell you everything you need to do. Thank you, everyone. We've got, we've got a few more questions that have come in. If you want to, and Mike yourself and ask yours next. Thank you. Thank you so much for the speakers and it's really really good conversation that we're having here and link to what Cecilia and Sarah were talking before I was just wondering. So I just just linking back to the archaeology. This being for the past 10 years conversation to the archaeology world or how to make accessible through visualization multiple interpretation of the same data. And still after 10 years, but probably just being close to see something that might actually work from a student user perspectives. I was just wondering if we, of course we are quite behind in terms of library and museums in that conversation, but I'm just wondering if there is a space of the interest or if something like archaeology have done with the London Charter where there was a group of researchers from different across the world that got together and I'm just mentioning for people that are not familiar with the London and civil Charters, but they're trying to actually set the standards to get together to define what they were. How do we use in the tools, the technological tools into to allow those interpretation and visualization and mainly to cover transparency intellectual transparency but also from the researchers perspective point to be setting some of the standards is starting those conversations that have led 10 years down the line to be in a situation where we just seen some of those kind of results outcomes popping up. And I'm just wondering if maybe where the stage, even with this one and to start having a conversation and sitting down the table if we actually need something similar where we're all committing to maybe do a small step in the same direction. And again, explain a little bit better as KTS says, why do we need those standards, which is again it could be a basic naming it could be metadata to have it more discoverable but also talking about sustainability. How we're going to keep those files available why are we suggesting them maybe library or not libraries or community might actually have a system. That protect them and preserve actually all the work that they've done. So I'm just wondering if this is something that the sector might be interested in working on exploring this as an opportunity. I mean, I saw your question come up I was thinking we're lucky enough to be working on one of the towards a national collection emergency projects where the foot where to cut a long story short looking at and small museums as you use and work from the competency I guess with the fair principles so findable accessible interoperable reusable and I my instinct around this is that those the fair principles that the care principles and and the trust. The overall kind of trust approach to data repositories provide a bit of that foundation. I think the early findings from the work with the tank emergency project is that, and you know people are working from such a base level that the principles, and I don't mean that in a very disparaging way at all I mean people are just trying to get by, especially right now. And, and the, those principles will become I think more and more important and offer a bit of that baseline that you're talking about going, going forward and certainly in complement the fair and trust. And I think I would say the other part of this is that I do think that there is, and Katie mentioned it as well that there are a significant number of pilot studies that demonstrate we can actually evolve the standards as Cecilia was saying, and that they work well, or and the course to working well I mean that towards a national collection and discovery projects that I'm familiar with, I think are on course to demonstrating some of this potential for change and the work that has been done by the Yale University libraries has been doing some incredible work the British Museums work there's so many inspiring examples of how, how we've already got the foundations there and so it goes back to that bigger point I think that you're and everyone is making about drawing people more concerted particularly into the conversation and evolving it, perhaps slightly faster, and some of the work that was done in the 2000s by Streny Basson and colleagues where they were building the kind of foundations for fluid ontologies I don't, you know, we're still kind of working from the basics of that right now but it's 20 years at 20 years on so sorry I just like Thank you very much. We have we've got somebody else has joined us we've got we've got Jill. Good morning, if you can hear me. We can. It was just about when we were talking about standards, and I think most people look at standards as a way of making their material discoverable. And I think there's a push at the moment to make everything available to everybody. And perhaps some of the communities that we work with aren't so concerned about that at this stage. Maybe they just want their material captured maybe it was just the experience of being heard. And perhaps when we offer to work with a community, it's their priorities as to why they're wanting to join that will drive what standards we do or don't use. And we might be keen for everybody to have access to data and I think that's really important that we open up and use as many voices as possible. But if some of those voices are not at the same stage, perhaps we need to think about how we can accommodate that. Thank you very much. Jill does anybody want to respond to jail. I think I just agree 100% of what you just said Jill, I mean, it has to be down to the community. You know, and the part of the voice over project in Brian was that there would be an aspect that would not be made available publicly. And that felt like a really important thing to me. You know, and often to say that there was a few kind of eyebrows raised I didn't really get any serious pushback on it but it was a bit like well this is public money should be, you know. And it was very easy to kind of to talk around that but I think that the question of meeting the communities needs first and foremost is the most important thing as far as I'm concerned. I think there might be an option to explain why their contribution is so important and to ask, would we be able to keep it for 70 years 100 years whatever it might be. Because it's a point of valuing their voice, but as at the same time as giving them control over what happens to the material we shouldn't be giving control. Giving is the wrong word, helping them to manage control of their data, perhaps because we have some capacity for that. And to explain that it's important what they have to say, and would they mind if we kept it and didn't share it until 100 years or whatever later. But to have those conversations is about what they feel they were achieving with working with us, and it isn't about us capturing their data is it. You're muted Suzanne. Thank you. Does anybody else like to respond I just said that what you missed was me saying thank you Jill. Any other responses to Jill if not I can move on to the next question. Sorry, can I just add one thing I just think also that people's that there has to be some kind of fluidity within this because people's feelings about what they've shared also changes over time. And I think that's one of the issues that they had with the very bright and all archive, and you know really kind of revisiting it in order to kind of make me think about using it in a different way that people would have said, you know, had said things at the time that they were happy for happy to be shared but had since changed their minds and weren't happy for that stuff to be shared. So I think we just have to remember that an archive an oral archive, or any kind of archive is actually a living thing is, you know, as long as the people that contributed to it are still around. Then, you know, it's not set in stone. Thank you very much and thank you very much Jill for joining us on the panel for that we've got Ruth now on the panel so Ruth, do you want to unmute and give us your question. Hi, can you hear me. Yes we can thank you. Hi. Yeah I don't know whether you saw I wasn't putting a question I was making a comment about the situation where I am in South Africa. And I was interested that Eleanor mentioned sustainability, and it's something. I mean everybody uses the word these days mostly in connection with the environment and so forth. But in terms of archival collections, we are in a very very dire and sad situation here where archival collections not so I mean, you know the issue of communities and you know who has control and access and all of this. And, you know, we have communities who are becoming more involved in trying to collect material within themselves and so forth and taking care of it or getting someone else to. But what's actually happening with major collections of national international importance is that they are just shutting their doors. So, most recently the Maya Buya archive which was based in at Robin Island. And kind of managed to some extent by the University of the Western Cape just like I think it's two weeks ago to shut its doors. And the collection is a longer accessible now all kinds of people. There are personal papers there people who were involved in the, you know, the freedom struggle and so forth. It's an absolutely critical collection photos videos, papers, objects, t shirts flags. It's a really good geological collection in the city of Johannesburg which is concerning the history and you know Johannesburg big mining city and so forth. Situated within Museum Africa in Johannesburg, where they're also two critical photographic collections which are no longer accessible. So, for us, we're just in a completely different situation and and even universities are seriously struggling I work, I'm a freelance I work mainly in bits university. And we just, we're just not getting funding and even more critically, younger people most archivists are female white and over 50 or over 55. People are just not coming into the profession they're not interested, even if they know about it the salaries are dreadful. So, you know sustainability for us is just, yeah it's just absolutely critical and and obviously we're trying to involve communities and and and making it more accessible, leaving aside the whole covert business we're in a very bad stage with that at the moment. So, yeah, I just thought it would be useful just to comment, really, rather than ask a question. Thank you really thank you for joining us and sharing that that way this sounds like a very difficult situation that you've got there I don't know if any of the panelists want to feel they have anything to respond to to Ruth. I don't have anything to respond to just that where I'm from I'm from Uruguay in South America. And it's not a strategy that's what you are saying but it's more or less. I think the economic background is probably similar museums and universities in Europe I have very little funding. And the museum and archival profession in Uruguay is it's it's existent but it's very small and there's not really training for example there are no like museum studies. So if you go to work in a museum you you go but you study somewhere somewhere else or something else and the same way like archival studies. So also like most of the people that work in museums and archived tend to be older people. So yeah I sympathise with with Ruth. Thank you. Thank you Cecilia. We're just having a look through to see if we've got any more questions coming through. I think there were a few space specific questions which were for Cecilia and Sarah but I think you've added a link in the chat to follow through on some of those. I think that's. Oh yeah yeah so question about this is a question actually for Katie then how did how did the network advertise the project to the school students, and what was the selection process. And did you already have links with the Arts Awards scheme so maybe just a little bit more detail about your, your project with school students. So at this point, admit to the fact that I was more involved in the second project around teaching and learning and less in the Arts Award project so I've put a link to the blog in the chat. We as a group, various members of the University Museums and Scotland Group had worked with Arts Award projects before. But doing it at this scale together as a as a network of University Museums was was a new development and a kind of new way of working. I didn't know that I could give all the detail without risking getting it wrong. So I can connect anybody is interested to the people who know that stuff the blog has got some stuff as well. We were over subscribed for people who wanted to participate, which means we're now looking at how to, how to continue this model, because it's clearly something that there's real demand for once you set it up in a way that feels like participation is both kind of easy but also something to do.