 Yn gwybod, ac mae'r ddweud i'r ddweudio ddweudio, dwi'n ddweudio chi'n ddweudio. Rwyf wedi'i ddweudio'r Llyfr Black, ddim yn ymdilligol, i ddweudio'r llyfr yng nghyd-ddiol am ymddilligol ar y taeth. Yn gwybod, mae'n gwybod, unrhyw ymdilligol, unrhyw ar yr ysgol, lwyddoedd yn 500 o bobl, o'i ddweudio ar argyfrifon a'r oed yn y cyfrifon yn ymddilligol ar y llyfr. The Senate House we have one archivist in a library context, but the other was of course that as a university At the Senate House we are a teaching and learning organisation we are full of students and we are about training up the next generation of professionals. My remit when I arrived at Senate House was to bring in money to set up licensing partnerships between content and publishers which I have been doing for decades and I wouldn't say I could do it in my sleep but it was kind of the day job, ychwphe ddim i gydag i ddim yn ystod o'r unigol fyddai yn ffraeg i gyda'r unigol. iawn i ddweud y cysyniadau, i'r ysgolion a'r tyfu byddai yn ymlaen. Rwy'n cael ei gael i gydag o'u'r pender o Baby Panda. Rwy'n gweithio i'r ddweud yma'r ysgrifennu. Fyddwch chi'n ei wneud oherwydd y prosiectau o'r radar oherwydd ei wneud eich bod yn gwybod y newid ymlaenau o'r partyn ystod oedd ymlaenau is the archive of the Cusich Archer Trust. Just to light a bit bright to see the pictures, isn't it? I hope you can focus on them. To give you a bit of, thank you, a bit of context about the archive itself. The organisation started out of UCL in 1977 when archaeologist Dr Ann Kendall set off into the high Andes and her aim was to rediscover and if possible reconstruct the Inca infrastructure up in the very high Andes, which had made some incredibly challenging terrain rich and productive until the Spanish colonists arrived. The Incas, we think of archaeology as the prehistoric unwritten past. Of course, in their last throw, the Incas were contemporaries of Shakespeare and their civilisation was extremely sophisticated and expert at managing a very, very challenging landscape. Steep slopes, high altitude, poor soils, and making a very productive landscape. When the Spanish arrived, they saw this landscape through European eyes, mountain slopes are for grazing, and a lot of this infrastructure fell into disrepair, collapsed, silted up or was otherwise left unused. So when Ann arrived in 1977, supported in the early days by the British Army in pre-Forkland days, her mission was to see how much of that infrastructure survived and how much, if any of it, could be reconstructed to bring a bit of life and productivity back into the valley. What started as a purely academic archaeological curiosity grew with each summer's digging season into a project which brought not just archaeologists, but soil scientists, ethnographers, anthropologists, engineers out from the UK, many of them from the University of London. Over the years, they succeeded in reconstructing and reinstating a lot of that infrastructure. They redugged the dupons that collect meltwater at the end of the winter and feeds water down through those terraces all year. They reconstructed traditional dwellings, they re-established native crops for food and medicine, they revived traditional weaving and land management systems, and pretty much returned self-sufficient productivity to what was a very empty valley when they arrived. They faced wildfires, altitude sickness, alarming levels of disease, but every year, as the work built up, over our summer, the Andean winter gave them the dry, bright conditions that they needed to dig. Over those 40-year digging seasons, they've succeeded in reviving the valley. It's repopulated and the trust's work has been handed over to the Peruvian government and now runs as an NGO called the Associación Andina Cusichaca, which continues their work and protects the legacy on the ground. However, all of that work over 40 years produced a lot of written evidence in archaeology, as I'm sure many of you know. Record keeping of what you do is absolutely vital because the minute you dig a site, you've destroyed it. Layer by layer needs recording. The paper records and photographs built up, there are about 120 linear metres when the collection came across our notice. It's a substantial, unique archive that has really remained relatively untapped simply because it's inaccessible. For many years it was in a Peruvian monastery, then a British Airways hold, then to Anne Kendall's house in the Cotswolds. When she retired to Spain, it was put in a shipping container, which you can see here, a very well-appointed one, a shipping container in a barn in Warwickshire. The reason I'm talking about it today is because the Secretary of the Trust was an ex-student of the SAS Institute of Latin American Studies. He'd studied under Linda Newsom. He came to her in the summer of last year with a plea. The trustees are now, as you can imagine, a little bit beyond their digging years, and they wanted to find a permanent home, a legacy for that record of all their work, ideally in the institution where it all began back at the university. Better still, with some digitisation thrown in to ensure that the material is widely used around the world by everyone who works on inkier archaeology. Now, as I'm sure most of us have experienced, if you go to your boss and say, can we bring in a shipping container full of unsorted papers, instinctive responses, no. Mainly, in our case on the grounds we don't collect archaeology. Conversations began initially as there's someone who's doing digitisation, isn't there? Can we talk to her about finding a partner who would just do that for us? Initially I was brought in as a matchmaker to bring companies who might want to publish this material to the trust. Two publishers with strong records in Latin America and archaeology came and had a look and soon began to salivate. The fact, of course, is that 80% of US archaeology courses teach the inkers. There are very few, if any, new digs and this is real raw material that no-one's seen before. The archive was already receiving between eight and nine PhD research requests a year while it's still in a barn. So we really do know that there's raw material there with immense research potential. It also became obvious quite quickly as you've heard already that it isn't just archaeology. There are all sorts of allied disciplines and after effect disciplines, if you like. There's the engineering, the anthropology, the ethnobotony, the soil science, the social history, the politics, shining path interrupted a lot of the digs during the political unrest in Peru. There's post-colonial history and, of course, there's the record of the times itself, the 70s and 80s when this team were out in Peru. The world that they found, these indigenous life styles that had remained largely unaffected for many years have now long gone. So the professional photographers and documents that are coming out of this archive record the world of Peru in the 70s and 80s every bit as much as it does the inkers. When the trustees got out there, they encountered extended families like this, in thatched huts, in tiny fields. They'd walk into these huts and find guinea pigs scuttling round on the floor at dinner, not as pets, unfortunately. Babies hanging from hammocks in the rafters. It's a land that has in many ways disappeared and in many ways for the better, but the 70s are beginning to look as much like a lost world as the inkers, especially for the archaeologists staggeringly inappropriate work wear. I don't think any of us would turn up in somebody else's landscape. Dressed quite like that these days. The 70s almost looking as historic as the past that the archaeologists were excavating. As I said, we started out with 120 unsorted linear metres, but there was a good file level description in the form of a spreadsheet which the trustees have spent a long time taking. They grouped every type of document into archaeology, admin, publicity, etc. A conservation survey was undertaken in the spring of 2016 which showed that neither the thin air of the Andes or the cold wet air of Warwickshire seems to have done that much damage except to that photograph, obviously. So far so good, but obviously the missing ingredient for any putative accession with or without a box list is a catalogue. And that's where the next piece of the jigsaw comes in. I mentioned I've been at TNA and one of my ex-colleagues there who I'm sure many of you will know is the wonderful Dr Jenny Bunn who is now running Nextdoor's the UCL Archiving Records Management Masters programme. I wondered if they used real live unprocessed archives to teach archaeologists what to do. So we had lunch and yes they do. And then we spent one of the coldest days on record standing in the shipping container getting more and more excited by what we found there and we hatched the plan to use that material after a good old sort out and de-duplication over the summer as the teaching material for their curation and processing course this very term. We spent seven days over the summer de-duplicating getting rid of masses of printed books off prints of articles, stacks and stacks of the same publicity leaflet and we've got it down to about half of what it originally was and we boxed it. As you can see this is work in progress. It now fits in 300 archival boxes apart from those maps and plans which are still standing up in cupboards. And then in September out it went loaded onto two vans and it is now installed in the Durning Lawrence Library within the Senate House. This was a Shakespeare scholar's original library in cupboards and that's the teaching room that the class are using this term to sort it all out for us and hopefully describe it. We're now well over halfway through the term from a predicted course occupancy of 20 once the teaching material went up on the moodle and the news that you'd be working on real live Inker Archaeology we had 37 students start and here they are crammed into the room, working away the bright sharp-eyed wolf spot the Wiener Library's ex-library in here at the front, one of the students we have two archaeology graduates and even more stunningly a Cusichaka baby one of the students' parents met as archaeologists on a dig for the Cusichaka trust no one knew that before she arrived and they are learning their craft from the start with this material that's come down from the mountains. Their first exercise was pick a box any box, you have one hour then tweet your box everyone rummaged, everyone tweeted tweets came up on screen in the room and they began to critique and find the terms that they were sharing, common ground comparing what they were doing then they swapped boxes, swapped for another medium if you had slides before go for publicity if you had publicity go for admin etc now you've got five minutes then tweet your box it's a little bit like Bake Off and the result is a very buzzy hive mind approach to archival description which I think a lot of certainly my generation of archivists would find slightly unnerving the traditional approach is one person a long time one brain getting intellectual control over a collection and then we describe it this method very very different and it's a fantastic example of the disruption of having that digital as well as a group of people to change not just how we can take material in but the very act of archiving and describing material at all there is of course a bit of grumbling a bit of resistance, it's not ideal our 300 boxes too much for one term and 30 people yes, yes they are next year we've been told any more than 100 box and we get slupt wrists but you have to start somewhere and this was the most phenomenal opportunity we're hiring a project archivist to work on a paid basis for at least six months from January to tidy it all up and pull it together so that I can run a competition to get one of those commercial publishers to scan it, digitise it make it freely available in Peru and put it to work for us in the US universities outside that system no profession changes shape or nature in the space of one term maybe even the space of a generation but one thing is clear from that exercise this exercise that without the benefits of experimental risk taking projects like this we simply would not be able to accession anything like this sort of scale of material certainly within one year and I'm not claiming that partnership in this sense is unique or original it's been going on for many many years as we know but I do think it's worth setting this particular approach in the wider context of these future special collections and archives within universities as reported on in the RLUK TNA report this year special collections and archives are what differentiate us from each other they do have amazing brand value when you're talking to your vice chancellor they reek of heritage and specialness and they're great for a prospectus I'm not arguing that we should accession only things that are of the moment or fashionable but we do have to keep pace today's researchers in our institutes are looking at postcolonial Latin American that are absolutely buzzwords for the institute and for the wider university so we have got under that wire if we don't take archaeology which is to return to the idea that a partnership approach like this actually fits strategically with how the library sits within the university as opposed to my role just being purely about bringing in money when we as curators look at the digital landscape and the financial pressures of providing world-class research and reader resources I believe a strategy that prioritises bridge building and partnerships to bolster, enable and sustain our special collections in cyberspace is the most sustainable way ahead and that's why the title of my paper is building happy bridges because here she is and on the Cusichaka bridge Cusichaka is a Quechua word that's the native language of Peru and it means happy bridge thank you for listening