 Rwy'n fawr, mae'n bwysig i'ch gael i'r hyn o'r prydyn ni'n fawr. Mae Amedic Bolo Llyfrgellwyr Rhywbeth Cymru a Llyfrgellwyr Gwrsdraeth yn fawr yma yn ymgyrch o'r Llyfrgellwyr dros yma, o'r llei, ymgyrch, a'r migraith. Mae'n bwysig i'r Llyfrgellwyr, ond mae'n bwysig i'r Llyfrgellwyr dros ymgyrch, in the public library here in Manchester. And alongside our collections work we have always done community heritage work, community heritage projects. So, title of our presentation is Coming in from the Cold, narrowing the gap between community engagements and collection development. So Coming in from the Cold is also the name of a piece of research we've recently completed, looking at the relationship between, among other things, community heritage projects and heritage collections. Yn y gallu'n cefnogi ar y cyfnodau yma yw'r cyfnod, yn ymgyrch am ystod y ffawr ond. Felly, ydych chi'n ymgyrch am ymdyn nhw'n gwybod a'i ddweud y prosiect sy'n golygu, yng Nghymru i August 2017, a wedi'u gynhyrchu, ychydig, ychydig, yng Nghymru Cynllun a'r Gweithreith Cymru, mae'r prosiect yn ddegwr â'r prosiect o'r prosiectau ymdyn nhw. Mae'r prosiect yn ymdyn nhw'n ddegwr Yn ymgyrch i Manchester, yma ar y dwylo 2000. Mae'n ddweud ychwanegol ym mhwng i'r ddweud ymgwrs o'r ysgolwch a'r bydd yn fawr o'r ddweud yma yn ymgyrch i'w ddweud. Yn ymgyrch i'r ddweud, ydych yn ddweud a'r ddweud a'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud a'r ddweud o'r ddweud a'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud. Mae'n ddweud hynny i'w ddweud yn ddweud o'r ddweud a'n ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud a'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud. Fe gyngyrchu bytyn gwych yn fawr i ffrind y Lletwy Chyfar mae gennym nhw cymhwb o hyn yn ddweud ein llynwr wneud rywbeth iddo yn ddweud gan unig i'w frei argynnu'r Lletwy Chyfar a'n allu ychwanegol o'r ddweud ac ymgyrch ar y cyddiad yn y ffordd. Felly ymddiad yw'r peth yw'r bwysig ar y lleol yma, a'r gilydd, gynnig, hyd yn sylfaenwyr, ymddiad cyflwynt o'r gyfrifonau gael yng ngyflwydoedd, i gael ei gael i'r digwyddau i'r archif. Felly, mae'r amgueddfeydd ychydig, ychydig yr ysgol yw'r cyfrifonau, mae'n rhoi'r amgueddfeydd. Circle funding for black and Asian minority and ethnic community led heritage projects has increased since 2000 but their visibility has not so they are attempt to be quite tempor llywer projects that focus on engagement. Just to clarify that our definition of community lead project is the project run by people who aren't heritage professionals but are engaged in heritage activities Felly, mae'r prosiectur wedi bod yn wirwm yn gweithio'r yrwymiad, i wybodaethau, ac yn ffwrdd wedi gweithio'r yrwymiad, ei wneud cymryd, y byddai'ch cyfan, ac ymhell gwirwm yn gweithio'r yw cyfanydd ar chir pobl yn gweithio y mynd y holl Felly, ar y gwirthyn nhw'n rŵr, rydyn ni wedi cael ddweud mai gweld mewn cwestiwn i ddwylos yn dda'r cwestiynau hynny'n meddylch ar gwn. Rydyn ni'n gallu bod yn ymddangoddii ddweud yn y ddweud. The three questions that we're going to address specifically are what happens to the outputs of community-led heritage projects. Why are they so rarely accessioned into registered collections and can we create a model for projects that benefits both communities and collecting organisations? Again, just to clarify once I say that by outputs we mean both the physical outputs of a project, so research material publications, film, photographs and ephemera, that sort of thing, as well as temporal things such as events, performances, websites and exhibitions. So what happens to the outputs of community-led projects? Our research showed that of the 97 projects that we managed to contact, just 36 confirmed that they donated material to a museum, library or archive, which means that a large number of projects had no long-term legacy or visibility. This kind of reflects the fact that funders place a lot of emphasis on engagement, but also kind of shows that record keeping and collecting are kind of sometimes secondary. We personally believe that the two are intrinsically linked and we're going to explain a bit more about how that works in our organisation later. We also found that material stays in-house quite a lot, so people collect boxes of stuff, it's in their office in a desk drawer, and often it's really well known by the project worker on that project and because the funding is temporary that person leaves, nobody knows what's in the box, so what the relevance of that material is. We also found that original research materials often discarded in favour of output, so people collect interviews, they scan photographs for publications, but they don't keep the raw material and see a value in that, so we end up with a nice glossy publication, but none of the original research. We found that there's no record of temporal outputs, so communities are busy engaging, they're not busy documenting that engagement, so quite often there's no evidence of that, and there's also an over-reliance on online platforms as a kind of means to an end. Some people think that by putting things on YouTube, they're kind of preserving it forever, but they're kind of not necessarily considering the long-term management of that material, or the fact that it can become out of date quite quickly or is vulnerable to potential misuse. So the second question that came out of our research was why these outputs rarely accessioned into registered collections. It's quite a complex picture, but there's a lot of points and they're all kind of interconnected. The first point is a lack of awareness, so quite often relationships aren't established, collecting organisations don't know what's happening in their borough and what community groups have in mind for projects, whereas communities are unaware of collecting organisations or why establishing contact might be a beneficial thing to do. So we found that only 32% of the community-led projects confirmed that they had an active heritage partner, so they may have sought a letter of recommendation when they made their application, but only 32% followed that up with an active kind of partnership, and we believe there's a lot more potential for developing those partnerships going forward. The second point was a lack of diversity, so 50% of museums, libraries and archives reported that they had no BAME-related collections and because there's a lack of BAME-related material, they were getting low numbers of audiences as well and people were less engaged. We believe that that figure's probably higher but because of historic cataloging, those collections are invisible and also that, again, stuff changes mean that the collections aren't as well known to the stuff that we're reporting to us as perhaps they might have been. The fourth point was incompatibility. This is to do with what communities and organisations value and they're slightly different, so a lot of communities were speaking to themselves to different generations within their own community about what they felt was important to pass on in terms of their own culture and traditions, but that's quite niche and difficult to sell to an organisation that's tied to a collecting policy, so quite often the institutions were refusing donations when they were approached with them at the end of projects. Also, communities weren't considering how to reach wider audiences as well as making connections with existing collections. Lastly, there were different ways of working, so both sectors vary quite a lot in their timescales budgets and priorities that they work to, so there's a bit of mismatch between communities' expectations and the organisations' expectations. We found that a large, a significant proportion of projects included a neural history element, so 38%, and we believe that's because it's accessible. It's a kind of immediate thing to be able to reach. It's easy to collect without very much equipment or funding, and it stands in place where there's an absence of material culture, so it's quite relevant to a lot of the community groups. The types of material range from short vox pops to full life story interviews, and the end products were audio and audio visual files through to publications, digital stories, animations and documentaries. But yet there are a lot of inconsistencies in how stories are collected and cataloged and how these are shared as well. So some organisations accession oral histories as objects in their own right. Others collect them as additional interpretation for physical objects, and oral histories are also collected for the purposes of exhibition and then often discarded at the end of the exhibition. So most museums in Greater Manchester don't collect oral history, but some of the local authorities have an agreement with their partnered archives. Until recently, donations used to be signposted to the North West Sound archive, but since its closure there's a lot of confusion across the region about what to do with that material subsequently. So the third question we're going to look at is this idea of creating a model for projects that will benefit both communities and collecting institutions. So if we're successful in getting the funding for the second phase of the coming in from the coal project, that is going to be a three-year programme of work that will allow us essentially to fill some of these gaps and address some of these issues that Jenny's just outlined that we found in phase one. So in part this will include carrying out targeted heritage projects with underrepresented groups, but also developing some best practice guidelines and models that we can roll out to the sector. So, you know, how to run projects that achieve meaningful engagement, but also create historically significant outputs. So as an organisation, we have a little bit of expertise to draw on here. So we're an organisation of two halves with the Ahmadic Ballola Race Relations Resource Centre and Education Trust. So the Education Trust carries out community heritage, among other work, projects. The outputs of those projects are accessioned into the resource centre collections where they form the basis of future engagement work. So it's kind of a cyclical approach really to community engagement and collection development. Now, this is by no means a kind of perfectly formed smooth running model of working. We still have got a lot to learn and it's something we're hoping to develop over the next three years. But I'm just going to show you now some of the key principles that we work to on the project side and the archiving side of our work and how we can refer back to the name of our presentation and how we try to narrow the gap between these two areas of our work. OK, so I'm going to start with some of the key principles that we kind of have developed for running heritage projects. The first one of these and it's absolutely the headline really is developing relationships. So it sounds really obvious but I think it's very easy to underestimate the amount of time that needs to go into developing a relationship with a community group that we want to work with. So as a heritage organisation, we can't expect to go into a community and immediately start collecting oral histories and carrying out interviews. Have to spend a significant amount of time building a relationship, building trust identifying sort of mutual benefit in the project. So for each project we will identify a community partner, so a community partner organisation, and really build time into the project to get to know them to do any capacity building help them with any capacity building work establishing a joint steering committee. So an example of this is our last major heritage lottery funded project. We partnered with Anana, which is the Manchester Bangladeshi Women's Organisation and they were really instrumental not only in steering the project but also acting as a bit of a gateway to the wider Bangladeshi community helping us to identify participants and to navigate some of the cultural differences. So just one very small example of this they helped us to rethink some of our reminiscence sessions that we plan to run because it turns out there isn't a word for reminiscence in Bengali so they helped us to rethink how to manage some of those sessions. So that really leads into the second sort of principle which is this idea of needed to build in flexibility so that you can really respond to the needs of project partners and project participants in the communities that you're working with. As we were collecting material for the last project with the Bangladeshi community it turned out that Anana had a really large organisational archive that was just languishing in a damp cupboard. So collecting this archive wasn't a core bit of the project but it was something that through the course of the project we realised was extremely important so this became a bit of a kind of a parallel project so it really requires us as project lead to relinquish a bit of control over some of the projects and lead a bit of serendipity lead the way. Third principle is taking a professional approach to oral history so it was generally outlined before oral history is popular because it's accessible, it's quite easy, it's quite cheap but there are also some quality and ethical standards that need to be really rigorously observed so we ensure that our interviewees it's one right there on the slide are properly trained in taking oral histories and on the other side interviewers are properly trained interviewees are fully aware of the implications of giving us an oral history. Finally the creating an understanding of archival needs and standards from the start of a project so this is about thinking about a project in terms of creating material for the historical record from the beginning as opposed to archiving the project outcomes just as a thing that happens at the end so this again is about being very open with your community partners about what's a valuable historical document and what isn't I know with the Anana archive Jenny spent a lot of time working with Anana on raising the material identifying what would have a historical value and what would be better off staying within the organisation and sometimes before this some communities we work with don't have a particularly good understanding of what an archive is so we may need to do visits, handling sessions so key principles for collection development and this is about carrying through those principles of relationship building and flexibility into the archiving side of the work so an iterative approach to appraisal and documentation we find that when project material comes into the archive because we're quite close to it it can take us a while to reconceptualise it as an archive as opposed to the story of the project so this involves quite a lot of dialogue between the collection staff and the project staff to identify what the stories are that the material is telling beyond the story of the project so we end up with a lot of iterations of the catalogue as we try to reach that balance connected to this is the idea of capturing when I describe a soft metadata so often material collected in a project will have significance beyond what you can see at face value and it's very important that this is captured in the documentation so one example of this is we had a donation of newspapers from an individual about a racist attack that took place in Manchester now the newspapers were largely held by Manchester Central Library which is where we're based so we wouldn't, an archivist looking at our collecting policy wouldn't think to keep them however the stories the newspapers told a personal perspective on this story a personal perspective that was backed up by an oral history that we'd collected so it was very important to us to keep this material so this sort of this soft metadata these significance is beyond the obvious, it's important that we capture those during the project but also in the catalogue for the longer term I think we're getting a bit short of time so controlling levels of access this is just about being very I say we had an ethical approach to collecting oral histories so we also have an ethical approach to how we collect and provide access to them so we'll provide access to our oral histories in three different ways we'll have the audio recording which is in the archive researchers can look at these on request in the search room, no copying is allowed and in some cases interviews might be closed for a period of time if the interviewer has instantly the interviewee has disclosed something that they wouldn't they don't want to be immediately accessed we create written summaries so these are agreed with the interviewee and these are made available in our library and then we might also create a number of extracts so these are short quotes again these are agreed by the interviewee and these are things we might use in exhibitions or on social media and just the final point is about creating visibility so it's not just about collecting this material it's about them making it visible and creating ongoing engagement with the history so through digital exhibitions social media that sort of thing it's a sort of thing we're really well placed to do at Manchester Central Library which is great so there are a number of challenges we face with this approach just to highlight a couple of them a large amount of projects material is born digital so this very much connects to the temporal and temporary outputs of projects so things like photographs, film material websites, tweets these sorts of things are becoming increasingly important outputs of projects and we do have some digital preservation expertise in our organisation and we do have some policies around this but it's still a very new area it's a very steep learning curve and we find that the workload can be very unpredictable and so the flip side of that is the digital access so there's real expectation on us to make particularly the oral history material more widely accessible to people who can't, for instance come to Manchester or perhaps for purposes other than academic research but as I said we have a real duty of care towards the interviewe and their wishes and we don't always know the implications of making this material available on online platforms particularly new and emerging ones so that's an issue that we're still grappling with I just want to reiterate our point and our hopes for the next phase of the project which is that better engagement leads to better collections which leads to better research material and it hopefully is a model that we can adopt and follow