Why the ‘New Era’ Archive?
The Mosquito Press Archive provides unique insights into aspects of radical social, cultural and political campaigning movements active in Britain during the last quarter of the twentieth century, 1975-2000.
The sources of the Foundation Collections, which collectively still account for around half of the material in the archive as a whole, lie in the activities of a number of public campaigning organizations active during the last quarter of the twentieth century. In most cases, these were bodies of archival material which remained in the care of participants in campaigns who have subsequently remained in communication with each other due to the fact that a number of the campaigns had some shared goals. As a consequence, the collections of documents that remained in their possessions shared some principal themes in common, and it was agreed that this constituted a strong case for aggregating them and placing them together under common ownership and management as this specialist collection, under a common name, the Mosquito Press Archive.
This specialisation of our archive, and consequently also the specialisation of the research activities that we promote around it, enables us to develop closer engagement in academic and wider public circles than would be the case if the archive had spread its range of acquisition into more general fields. It gives our work a sharp focus and a deeper interactive engagement with specialists than would have been possible if the archive had broader, though inevitably thinner, coverage. For this reason, the purpose of the organisation explicitly takes its Foundation Collections as its fundamental point of reference for its present and future activities. Accordingly, additional collections are taken on strictly on the basis that they complement and reinforce the strong points in the Foundation Collections. (See Policy for acquisition of new collections.) Such a sharp focus enables our archive and its research impact to establish itself as authoritative in its particular fields of speciality, for example by streamlining its collaboration with other library, information and archive resources to bring about the most efficient and systematic cross-referencing of unique and newly-available material in the archive. Such collaboration would, for example, be relevant with the British Library of Economic and Political Science (the LSE Library), the British Library, and the many other national and local information resources with equivalent material.
Any archive of material of this type risks being under-represented in major information resources. Not only does it risk falling into the category of “ephemeral”, but much of it not only remains unseen, but was unseen even in its own time, consisting as much of it does, for example, of correspondence, agenda and minutes of conferences and other meetings and defence. Yet such material is of priceless value to researchers, and indeed ultimately to the wider public as well, providing as it does otherwise unavailable testimony from eyewitnesses and participants in the wide-ranging campaigns of that eventful decade – a decade which saw burgeoning campaigning activity from all manner of social organisations, from trade unions to political and cultural groups, national minority organisations, peace and international friendship organisations, and so on.
Furthermore, this kind of archive is particularly vital in the case of our particular period, the last quarter of the twentieth century, since these were precisely the years in which the new information technologies were becoming established, seeing a transition away from the hardcopy world of typescripts, handwritten notes and duplicated paper of which the vast majority of this archive consists. Thus, whereas in the twenty-first century it can almost be taken for granted that campaigning activities leave a record in the websites and digital records of the organisations concerned, the information in our archive is endangered by disappearance if not made available online as we are doing. For precisely such reasons, this kind of initiative is gaining increasing popularity, as illustrated, for example, by the work of the British Online Archives, and of the many public and private institutions which are concerned that their history does not disappear from the record.
Besides gaining such increased attention from researchers, the general public constitute a further potential user of our of our archive, particularly in view of the fact that this country has among the highest density of online users of any country in the world. Accordingly, the wider public’s requirements are also catered for by our website, which provides an initial “Quick View” of selected documents from within each collection which are likely to be the main items encountered at ‘landing’ level by searchers from the internet. This allows some principal documents from each collection to be immediately seen in straightforward display, without, of course, restricting full access to all the archival details for those wishing to explore these or any other items in the archive in detail.
And between these two extremes – the general public on the one hand and the more intense researcher on the other – lie many intermediate levels of potential beneficiaries of the use of our archive. For example, schoolteachers might wish to construct a local curriculum for their pupils and might find valuable illustrative material for this in information about campaigns that have taken place in their area. Our website’s dual presentation thus provides a suitable gateway for those who land in the archive via a general internet search to move on to follow up their searches in more detail through our state-of-the-art Quartex archive sorting and searching system.
This broad range of potential users, from specialists to the general public, illustrates how apposite and topical it is to make our archive available at this time, containing as it does so many lessons for our own time from the experience of these particular currents within the campaigning life of that eventful quarter-century, before it became taken for granted, as it largely may be now, that the world of paper has been superseded in ever-widening fields of interaction by the new information and technology.
Why the ‘New Era’ Archive?
The Mosquito Press Archive provides unique insights into aspects of radical social, cultural and political campaigning movements active in Britain during the last quarter of the twentieth century, 1975-2000.
The sources of the Foundation Collections, which collectively still account for around half of the material in the archive as a whole, lie in the activities of a number of public campaigning organizations active during the last quarter of the twentieth century. In most cases, these were bodies of archival material which remained in the care of participants in campaigns who have subsequently remained in communication with each other due to the fact that a number of the campaigns had some shared goals. As a consequence, the collections of documents that remained in their possessions shared some principal themes in common, and it was agreed that this constituted a strong case for aggregating them and placing them together under common ownership and management as this specialist collection, under a common name, the Mosquito Press Archive.
This specialisation of our archive, and consequently also the specialisation of the research activities that we promote around it, enables us to develop closer engagement in academic and wider public circles than would be the case if the archive had spread its range of acquisition into more general fields. It gives our work a sharp focus and a deeper interactive engagement with specialists than would have been possible if the archive had broader, though inevitably thinner, coverage. For this reason, the purpose of the organisation explicitly takes its Foundation Collections as its fundamental point of reference for its present and future activities. Accordingly, additional collections are taken on strictly on the basis that they complement and reinforce the strong points in the Foundation Collections. (See Policy for acquisition of new collections.) Such a sharp focus enables our archive and its research impact to establish itself as authoritative in its particular fields of speciality, for example by streamlining its collaboration with other library, information and archive resources to bring about the most efficient and systematic cross-referencing of unique and newly-available material in the archive. Such collaboration would, for example, be relevant with the British Library of Economic and Political Science (the LSE Library), the British Library, and the many other national and local information resources with equivalent material.
Any archive of material of this type risks being under-represented in major information resources. Not only does it risk falling into the category of “ephemeral”, but much of it not only remains unseen, but was unseen even in its own time, consisting as much of it does, for example, of correspondence, agenda and minutes of conferences and other meetings and defence. Yet such material is of priceless value to researchers, and indeed ultimately to the wider public as well, providing as it does otherwise unavailable testimony from eyewitnesses and participants in the wide-ranging campaigns of that eventful decade – a decade which saw burgeoning campaigning activity from all manner of social organisations, from trade unions to political and cultural groups, national minority organisations, peace and international friendship organisations, and so on.
Furthermore, this kind of archive is particularly vital in the case of our particular period, the last quarter of the twentieth century, since these were precisely the years in which the new information technologies were becoming established, seeing a transition away from the hardcopy world of typescripts, handwritten notes and duplicated paper of which the vast majority of this archive consists. Thus, whereas in the twenty-first century it can almost be taken for granted that campaigning activities leave a record in the websites and digital records of the organisations concerned, the information in our archive is endangered by disappearance if not made available online as we are doing. For precisely such reasons, this kind of initiative is gaining increasing popularity, as illustrated, for example, by the work of the British Online Archives, and of the many public and private institutions which are concerned that their history does not disappear from the record.
Besides gaining such increased attention from researchers, the general public constitute a further potential user of our of our archive, particularly in view of the fact that this country has among the highest density of online users of any country in the world. Accordingly, the wider public’s requirements are also catered for by our website, which provides an initial “Quick View” of selected documents from within each collection which are likely to be the main items encountered at ‘landing’ level by searchers from the internet. This allows some principal documents from each collection to be immediately seen in straightforward display, without, of course, restricting full access to all the archival details for those wishing to explore these or any other items in the archive in detail.
And between these two extremes – the general public on the one hand and the more intense researcher on the other – lie many intermediate levels of potential beneficiaries of the use of our archive. For example, schoolteachers might wish to construct a local curriculum for their pupils and might find valuable illustrative material for this in information about campaigns that have taken place in their area. Our website’s dual presentation thus provides a suitable gateway for those who land in the archive via a general internet search to move on to follow up their searches in more detail through our state-of-the-art Quartex archive sorting and searching system.
This broad range of potential users, from specialists to the general public, illustrates how apposite and topical it is to make our archive available at this time, containing as it does so many lessons for our own time from the experience of these particular currents within the campaigning life of that eventful quarter-century, before it became taken for granted, as it largely may be now, that the world of paper has been superseded in ever-widening fields of interaction by the new information and technology.