 Well, hello everybody. We are talking about material culture and established narratives, which is an experiment in collaboration between the Brotherton Library Special Collections in Leeds and the Gypsy and Traveller Exchange in Leeds. This is a very much alive collaboration, we are in the middle of it right now, so we have not got all the answers yet. Maybe some of them will come out of today. I am Joanne Ffitten, head of Special Collections and Galleries at the University of Leeds, based in the Brotherton Library, and I'm Vanessa Cardewi and I'm the Community Archivist at Leedsgate. So a bit of context about the project that has led, well my side of things to be involved in this collaboration then Vanessa will say a bit about her work. At the University of Leeds we have a historical print and manuscript collection, the Romani collection, which was started by a lady called Dorothy Unrathcliff who was the niece-in-law of Lord Brotherton, it's all a very small world, and the collection was focused on the Romani representation in art and literature, music and a lot of photography as well. An initial catalogue was published in 1960 but the collections continued to grow with the purchases and donations over the years, and we now have research papers of academics, writers and activists that have been added to in the last 20 years. So the breadth of the collection that really led to us getting designation status for the collection in 2007, and the catalogs are very much of their time and they don't represent all the acquisitions that we've had, and we've been putting a lot of data online as well, and it's really exposed the limitations of what exists. So we got a cataloging grant through the National Cataloging Grant scheme in 2015 to try and redress this, and GATE supported our application and our objective, which was to engage with the local Gypsy and Traveller community, and we intend to deliver a public exhibition in 2018 in our treasures of the gallery space at the university, which we hope to co-curate with the community. And then to say a little bit about LEEDS GATE as an organisation, we've existed for about 15 years in LEEDS, and it's a Gypsy Traveller led organisation which means that a majority of the exec board are Gypsies and Travellers. We do a lot of things advocacy, campaigning, arts and increasingly heritage, and currently we've got two year HLF funding to develop and catalogue and engage people with an archive of Gypsy Traveller heritage. So the Brotherton were and the Romani collection were very supportive in us getting that grant, and we're hoping that as well as engaging the community we'll also be able to engage other museums and archives and academics and professionals. So I was just going to say something about our assumptions and motivations. Well we all have tried to come to this project with open minds and we all know that from each side of it there's a lot to learn. I don't want to speak for Vanessa but we've talked about this before we came here today, and I think one of the assumptions that GATE probably had was that we would have quite different collections but in actual fact especially with the more modern material about activism there are a lot of similarities across what we hold at the university and what GATE will hold as well, and I think an assumption that I had was that all the items in our collection would always mean something to every member of the community as well. So somebody would always be able to give you context to things which might not be the case. Well our motivations for working together we both thought that there'd be different types of legitimacy that we'd bring to each other's projects so I thought that, and they do, GATE would give me access to members of the community that we wouldn't have at the university ourselves and that being introduced to the community through GATE would give us a level of acceptance and for GATE the legitimacy was really around access to researchers and the university academic community so I suppose giving legitimacy to the collections. So whilst the content of the collections might not always be that different what we are exploring is whether the context, so who keeps material and where, if that makes a difference in any way and does it change who wants to engage with the material. The other thing we wanted to think about the cultural keys, I mean GATE offer cultural awareness training through their organisation so at the brotherton library we took that opportunity to really find out more about the community to help us frame some of the important issues that would be in relation to heritage. So some of the things that have come up for us it's really important capitalising Gypsy and Traveller. Leedsgate stand by a zero tolerance approach to incorrect and disrespectful grammar and so what does that mean? Well Romanian Gypsies, Irish Travellers, Scottish Gypsy Travellers and Roma are all recognised in UK law as ethnic groups and as such should always be represented with capital letters and Gypsies and Travellers are not homogeneous groups. There are many varied communities with different heritages and different perspectives and British Gypsies and Travellers have distinct history compared to Roma communities in Europe for example experience of the Holocaust. Locations and family names are really important access points for the community. Family history is really popular and very important and there is a lot of interest in it and personal histories are really important with connections to places and events there's a real pride in culture and traditions and there are still issues around literacy levels but that really does highlight the importance of visual histories and photographs within the community. Right well the next thing we thought we'd talk about is the narratives of collecting that go through the history of collections around Gypsy and Traveller history because we thought that maybe not that many people in the room would know that much about what has been collected so what are Gypsy and Traveller collections in different places around the country actually like? Way back I think the earliest things that you could call collections were actually owned by Gypsy and Traveller families themselves so it's the stuff that you had yourself and that you archived yourself and looked after yourself. Those collections included objects they included oral accounts that were maybe never recorded but were handed down and they would also include skills knowledge of how to do things that is something that is quite hard to archive and it's something that we're quite interested in that kind of embodied memory but it was still an integral part of those very early collections that maybe didn't even define themselves as collections. There was of course other material in existence for instance mention of Gypsy Traveller people in law or in documents but they weren't really collected together anywhere so that you could say oh yeah that is what there is about Gypsies and Travellers. If we move on a little bit to the late 19th century onwards we get the rise of the non-traveller collector. These are people who often were fascinated with particularly Romani rather than Irish Traveller people. They could be a little bit romanticising and exoticising but they still had quite a strong connection quite often with those communities. Sometimes it led them to put a gloss on things that maybe didn't accord with how Gypsy Traveller people themselves experienced it. For instance they would see a lot of things around freedom and timelessness that maybe Gypsy Traveller people didn't particularly see. This kind of collector is the basis of many of the older public collections so we're talking about the Gypsy Law Society. To an extent we're talking about Dorothy Una Ratcliff who is the mainstay of the Romani collection. As we get on a little bit later we get to you know from the 70s onwards we identified three parallel strands that we think started to emerge. One of them we would call the non-traveller activist so a little bit different from the non-traveller collector. These are people who worked closely with Gypsy Traveller communities in education or in health or in advocacy and began to collect things because they came across them quite a lot and thought they might be interested. The picture you see in the background there is something produced by the Spanish government in the 80s intended for using schools about educating people about Gypsies. And often the narrative that comes out of those collections is one of anti-racism and of solidarity. We also in this period see the Traveller led organisation beginning to collect stuff on their own behalf and the narrative that we see there is quite often this one of looking out from inside the tent. Very often other material in earlier collections was looking in and sort of from the outside studying the community from the outside but these narratives by Traveller organisations began to look outwards from the position of being Gypsy or Traveller. And very often those narratives focused quite a lot on the connections between the settled community and the Traveller communities and where they interacted, where they touched. There's also the emergence of revisiting collections initiatives in this period even if they weren't called that yet because revisiting collections is about 10-15 years old. But this is the idea that people who ran professional or publicly funded archives began to ask the community what do you think of the stuff we've got. This was great because it valued Gypsy Traveller people's knowledge but maybe it wasn't always so great because it did suggest that the most valid place for that knowledge was in a professional existing archive so there were sometimes some tensions there and it also depended on what had already been collected and to an extent rested on what metadata and information there already was. Then if we get into the last decade we see digital projects beginning to emerge. Some of them are publicly funded, some of them are collaborations, some of them are led by Gypsy Traveller organisations independently and quite often they focus on creating new material to archive rather than necessarily digitising stuff that already exists. Just a couple of examples I could give you, if you want to have a look I should have put them on the slide but there's the Patrin project which is a few years old now but was done by a combination of different Gypsy Traveller organisations particularly Derbyshire Gypsy Traveller Liaison Group and a very recent one called proudgypsytraveller.org.uk I think it is which has recently been collecting photos and other images and well worth a look. We've also in the last decade seen Traveller-led organisations beginning to dig where they stand and archive their own history and recognise that their history as organisations is important. We've also seen a massive growth in sharing the personal archive, the photos under the bed, the stuff that is not in a collection anywhere. It's often been shared on social media and that can give questions around giving people like Facebook the responsibility of looking after your heritage. There's often a lot of people who put something on Facebook and write it's done, it's shared, it's safe and obviously there are huge questions around that. I'm talking a lot. The next thing we wanted to talk about is some of the new narratives that have emerged through our collaborations and some of the things that have come up so we've picked a couple of examples just to give you some interesting stuff. The first one I wanted to talk about is something that we did see on Facebook and is a narrative around family history. So there's a couple of things there. This is a photograph by a 50-60s photographer called Barry Law. You could almost call it the Gypsy Traveller equivalent of the Hayway. It appears in a lot of people's homes and a lot of people have a copy of it. You can buy copies of it in you know affairs, Applebee, stuff like this. And somewhere there is documentation of who's in it but it often gets reproduced. You'll see it on coasters and placemats and you'll see it made into something that looks like a painting. A little while ago, July it was, somebody on a Gypsy Traveller heritage group on Facebook posted you can see that it's been made to look like a painting and mentioned that somebody in it was a member of their family. And then a massive discussion ensued where people were saying well no the person standing up is definitely so and so. No no no it's definitely so and so. And what was brilliant was just the fact that those parallel narratives were just allowed to coexist. Nobody got our see about trying to keep some idea of truth or absolute objectivity. Everyone was just discussing what they thought and what they, who they thought was in that picture. And it was a really interesting use of social media for sharing those ideas and the parallel narratives just coexisted which was brilliant. The next object that we wanted to say something about is what I've come to with capital letters now refer to as The Brass Box. It's a little box that's in the Brotherton's Romany collection and in the catalogue there's a narrative that says that it was a treasured possession of the Lee family, a Gypsy family, and it was given to a 19th century social reformer as a grateful gift from a group of Gypsies for his help in educating their children. When members of Gates and other Gypsy traveller people that we know have seen this, very often their first reaction has been hmm I'm not sure about that, I'm not sure if that rings true or if it makes sense and there's been some questions around whether that is the only story to be told. Some people have said that doesn't really look like the sort of object that would be an incredibly valued possession in my family or in Gypsy traveller families at that period. So what we're getting is the fact that very often if we find an actual narrative in a catalogue and it's not only that but it seems to reflect something about what Gypsy travellers themselves feel about the value of an object we sort of go yay Gypsy traveller voices in the catalogue that's great but there are a lot of reasons why that narrative might not be quite accurate over time you know maybe things have changed but certainly back then I think there were a lot of reasons why a collector might have got a slightly wrong impression of the meaning and value of an object to the community and maybe Gypsy travellers felt at the time that they might have not you know they might have felt they wanted to be careful about what they said to a collector or possibly they just preferred to just let the non-traveller make their own meanings and think of it for themselves. So again we have this situation of parallel narratives existing and just because one of them is attested in a catalogue it doesn't make it truer. Okay so I'm going back to Dorothy Oonor again and we've got a couple of images that are in her collection and the information that we have has been well it could have been provided by her or it could have been provided by one of the librarians in the late 50s putting together the original catalogue so we tend to know about the images when it was taken if we're lucky where it was taken but we won't know anything about the people and the images or the objects and the images so this first image we know that it was given a title at some point Gypsies at Appelbefer 1950 and we know that the photographer is G Bernard Wood who was based in Leeds but we don't know anything about his motivation for taking the images how they were distributed did he have any conversations with the people who was taking photos of you know was this staged in any way when the pitch was taken and we don't know anything about how Dorothy Oonor herself acquired the image and why that was important to her to add to the collection and we don't know she knew the photographer. The second image that we've got we've got a caption for that which is Appelbefer summer 1939 NP but what we do know is NP was the photographer Noel McGregor Phillips who was Dorothy Oonor's husband and we do know more about Dorothy Oonor she was a dialect poet and she sought out opportunities throughout her life to meet and speak with Gypsies and travellers and she did live just down the road from Appelbe so she would have visited the fair and she took lots of photographs all across Europe of the communities that she came into contact with but what we still don't know are who the people are in the image she just doesn't seem as set up in a way as the other image but we don't we don't know anything about the people what their what activity they're involved in and we don't know whether they were aware that they will be in photograph by her or you know how much how much that was a collaboration in its own right so we're able to tell the story of Dorothy Oonor Radcliffe as a collector um but it still leaves us knowing very little about the community itself and I think what we have an opportunity to do now um is to start to collect that narrative we might not be able to identify all the people and maybe you know we might not be able to name them but what we can do is we can talk to members of the community about the activities that would have been going on and the scenes that we're seeing and you know these photos were taken time people are still around who would have first-hand experience we've got we're probably in for some of them it the last point of an opportunity to get that kind of first-hand experience back about it whereas I suppose the very very early story of the brass box would be lost in the 17th century somewhere right so we we wanted to talk a little about some of the challenges that we face through our collaborations and the responses that our collaborations have enabled us to start making the one that has been that is most interesting for us at gate at the moment is this question of original objects or digital surrogates we've heard a load of interesting stuff today about digital collections and how well they engage people and I've also said a little bit about how people are doing that on facebook for themselves but there is sometimes there are questions there of do we feel legitimate if all we're collecting is digital surrogates and that has raised questions for us um we have a lot of photographs but we're not really in a position to preserve them in the conditions that ideally an archive should do and so we're moving now to begin to think that maybe what we should try and collect on that score is scans and you know high quality scans and the stories the metadata they're what is important and they are what maybe we can collect that wouldn't be collected if they just stayed in people's own um under the bed collections but there is the issue that a lot of people have really interesting photos but they don't want to give them to an archive they don't want to donate them obviously they're personal they want to hang on to them but they would be happy to have a scan taken and to give the information I can't just we've not got that much time but um so um yeah our primary objective at the grocery and we've got to create a catalogue and we've got a scholarly audience to um make that work for as well as um the general community as well so um we've got to making a ICIG type catalogue and that you know is our focus but we're also thinking very much about the locations the place names that we can index the collection with as well we want to create different types of guides um to the collection and maybe not just use a kind of our usual kind of standard descriptions but do that through podcasting um different methods um that aren't always the written word we'll be doing um some revisiting histories type um activities but not trying to revisit everything in the collections that would just be too much you know there might be certain stories that we can tell and we're thinking of using the platform yarn that was discussed quite a lot at this conference last year which is a community digital platform um where people can share their own stories so we can provide content and then we let the community tell the stories that they want to tell about it um we are also working um with gate on public engagement um festivals as well so in a few weeks we're going to be doing a verbatim verbatim theatre performance at the university so um animating current research on the issues of hate crime and targeting a general public audience with the narratives that the collections can invoke digital platforms are really important to us so like I say um you know we might provide some content but we leave it out there for the community to pick up and we're not the only ones doing this there's a really great project going on um called ROM archive um in Berlin it's being hosted from and that's about um Roma storytelling and art um being put on the web and we're providing content for the Roma community themselves to reinterpret that um I just want to mention that we are talking about the question of a UK strategy for gypsy and traveller heritage and we held a symposium in August where gypsy traveller organisations involved in heritage came together to talk about this you know there's a few things we thought about how can you know what is needed and what can we do but one of the chief ones is some kind of inventory of what is out there because there's so many collections they've got little bits and bobs so it's something we might be looking at in the future and if you do have stuff please do get in touch with us yeah and there we are