Today we were given the privilege of being allowed in the reading room at the British Museum. The archival collection began with the museums founding in 1753 and includes meeting minutes, legal documents, indexes, officer reports, ticket design drafts, original guidebooks, deeds, insurance documents, civil servant records, scrapbooks, architect plans, photographs, signatures of visitors to the reading room and objects relating to British history. The collection is open to any “studious persons”.
It’s been interesting to hear that so many archives, libraries and museums have the same problems, namely funding, staffing and storage. The archives of the British Museum had to be transferred up from the basement to the reading room because of a mold outbreak! One doesn’t think of an institution like the British Museum as having to deal with the same problems as the smaller institutions, but here we are! They also have challenges dealing with the massive amount of materials they have as the building was never designed to house a collection of this size. With only two staff members assigned to the task, they won’t be able to get through all the archival materials in their careers. Lack of staffing is a theme that we’ve come across in many of our visits.
Another aspect of the collection I found interesting was the index of antiquity. Franchesa mentioned that the way something was indexed originally may not be how we would search for it now, as the phrasing has changed over time. For example, "Abracadabra" is one of the terms in the original index. This is exacerbated by departments within the library changing, folding and merging over time. Even the most meticulously kept records can become obscured over time just by the changing nature of language.
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