Tapuaka Draft Abstract – individual 30-minute paper

We don't believe in marriage, but we love a bit of engagement: rebooting engagement with our heritage and archive collections post-COVID

Tapuaka is the heritage & archive collection at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington. Our mission is to preserve and make accessible the social and cultural history of our university for current and future generations.

We also hold many other collections of archives, developed over time to support teaching and research at Te Herenga Waka and in the wider community. Our archive is a treasure trove of historical materials that includes rare books, manuscripts, photographs, maps, pamphlets, objects, and other unique items.

This paper will detail an array of strategies and initiatives we have used to reestablish engagement with our collections during our first couple of years at the helm of Tapuaka. A two-person team, we started in our roles in late 2021, both coming from other parts of the library with a range of applicable skills and experience but limited hands-on time with heritage materials.

As an additional challenge, the previous heritage & archives librarian had retired two months earlier during lockdown and the adviser role had also been vacant for some time prior, leaving us scant opportunity for face-to-face handover for our positions. All classes and physical engagement had been reduced or ceased in 2020 and 2021 during COVID, and the temporary change to wholesale online teaching led to a significant loss of engagement with our heritage and archive collections.

Tapuaka had a a steady stream of core users, but many relationships had dropped off and our visibility across the university and externally was low. However, a fantastic report had been written by staff summarising key parts of the collection and the research and classes that had previously been supported.

Within the paper we will discuss various engagement strategies and initiatives employed over the past two years such as:

Implementing Recollect and leveraging its potential to reach diverse audiences and promote collections more widely

Rebranding, refreshing physical spaces, and enhancing display cases to create more inviting environments conducive to exploration and learning

Building meaningful relationships with academics and other key individuals from across the university, providing opportunities for teaching and research support, interdisciplinary collaboration and knowledge exchange

Outreach efforts to groups such as the university Rainbow Research Network and the Marae Committee, acknowledging the significance of connecting collections with relevant communities and cohorts

Public engagement initiatives, ranging from public talks during heritage months to sessions with local schools, again serving to broaden the reach of our collections and foster deeper connections with groups outside of the University

We will also discuss some of the challenges we face such as limited resources, developing technological proficiency, and the inherent workload associated with engagement, prompting a concerted effort towards capacity building and skill development.

Finally, we will take time to look briefly ahead, outlining possible future endeavours such as object-based learning in classrooms, expanded internship opportunities, and increased collaboration with other local organizations such as the National Library and Te Papa.

In summary, this paper is just two pals describing and advocating for a holistic and adaptive approach to engagement; one that embraces innovation, collaboration, and inclusivity – and not being “wedded” to any one method - as central tenets in reinvigorating heritage and archive collections post-COVID.

On the 6th of February 2022, a ‘freedom convoy’ of hundreds of vehicles driven by people protesting Covid-19 vaccine mandates arrived at the parliament grounds in Wellington, New Zealand. Some of the protestors stayed, and with more supporters arriving daily, a collection of tents quickly grew and was given the title ‘Freedom village’ by those involved. Protesters represented a wide variety of groups and individuals, and the occupation lasted 23 days before being ended by police amid extensive property damage and escalating anti-social behaviour.

This occupation represents the formation of a grassroots movement from which, theoretically at least, community archives are said to spring as a way of articulating ‘independent, minoritized’ and ‘self-validating’ (Caswell and Robinson Smith 2023, p.1) expression ‘in response to highly charged political environments, battles over the boundaries and makeup of group identity, and damaging stereotypes of the community in the mainstream’ (Kaplan quoted in Caswell, 2014, n.p.). Yet to date, only a small amount of protestor created material (mostly placards and a handful of leaflets) exists in mainstream collections, and there has been no formal attempt to advocate for protestor-created documentation. Online material is found on personal websites, YouTube channels, messaging apps or social media accounts, and while the crowd-funded documentary movie River of Freedom exists, there are no online projects ‘that provide a platform for counter-narratives’ (Hughes-Watkins, 2018, p.6). As a result, this situation raises potential not only for archival silence but also for archival ‘ghosts’ (see for example, Harris, 2015), and the perpetuation of material that repeats a dominant perspective.

Our wider desire as archivists is to ethically balance evidence of systemic power in mediated collections with ‘new forms of scrutiny and new interpretive voices’ (Popple, 2020, p.19). The presentation will use the Freedom Village occupation as an example from which to discuss aspects of community identity (Kaplan, 2000; Gould 2010) and relational ethics (Rhodes & Carlson, 2018) to explain how the current dominant culture of mainstream archiving can negatively affect our archival relationships with ‘the contentious other’, reducing our ability to create more honest inclusivity, diversity, and representation within the archives. The presentation will introduce the notion of ‘archival ferality’ – a concept created by the speaker to summarise an intentional state where the archivist acknowledges their bias and adopts a state of radical vulnerable and often discomforting teachability when collecting or describing archives from those they may personally or professionally disagree with. This may help to ensure the vital, continued expression of subversive discourse.

Bibliography:

Caswell, M. (2014). Community-centered collecting: Finding out what communities want from community archives: Community-Centered Collecting: Finding Out What Communities Want from Community Archives. Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 51(1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1002/meet.2014.14505101027

Caswell, M., & Robinson-Sweet, A. (2023). “It was as much for me as for anybody else”: The creation of self-validating records. Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies, 10(Article 10). https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1189&context=jcas

Gauld, C. (2010). The fantasy of the corroborative and transformative archive: The authority of archival beginnings [Doctor of Philosophy, University of Glasgow]. https://theses.gla.ac.uk/1511/1/2010gauldphd.pdf
Harris, V. (2015). Hauntology, archivy and banditry: An engagement with Derrida and Zapiro. Critical Arts, 29(sup1), 13–27. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02560046.2015.1102239

Hughes-Watkins, L. (2018). Moving toward a reparative archive: A roadmap for a holistic approach to disrupting homogenous histories in academic repositories and creating inclusive spaces for marginalized voices. Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies, Volume 5, Article 6, 19. https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1045&context=jcas

Kaplan, E. (2000). We are what we collect, we collect what we are: Archives and the construction of identity. The American Archivist, 63(1), 126–151. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.63.1.h554377531233l05

Popple, S. (2020). Disorderly conduct: The community in the archive. In S. Popple, A. Prescott, & D. H. Mutibwa (Eds.), Communities, archives and new collaborative practices. (1st ed., pp. 19–38). Bristol University Press: Policy Press.

Rhodes, C., & Carlsen, A. (2018). The teaching of the other: Ethical vulnerability and generous reciprocity in the research process. Human Relations, 71(10), 1295–1318. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726717741530