Meeting my mentor

At the Stationer's New Members Evening late last year, I finally met my mentor for the first time. Sarah Mahurter, is the current Manager of University Archives & Special Collections Centre (ASCC) at University Arts London (UAL) and she invited me on a tour of her workplace.

It was interesting to learn that the Centre were created around 2007 with the Stanley Kubrick Archives as one focal point of the collections. As a mainly film and design archives and special collections, the layout of centre is a futuristic glass reading room and office space with red chairs, modelled after a clip in the movie Odyssey. The centre does not hold any university records (as they are located elsewhere) but the collections are embedded into the university courses curriculum. Furthermore, half of all users are students and the other half are external users such as film historians and actual film companies which is an exciting prospect.

In my opinion, the major strength of these collections is that they truly support academic teaching and foster learning development, as the student has physical resources to use as reference. The academic staff and library staff also understand the need for these resources and support their use. However, one downside is that there is usually only one copy of each resource and if damaged the chances of it being replaced is slim. Conversely, this explains the importance of the collections and why trained archivists work with the collections and supervise their use.

I asked Sarah similar questions I asked a subject librarian in one of my previous posts and she gave me some points to think about.

1. How did you come into your role? How do you spend most of your day? How do you see your career progressing?

Sarah started out working in libraries and transitioned into archives and special collections due to variety of project opportunities. For example, she became the project coordinator overseeing the acquisition of the Stanley Kubrick collections and assisting in moving them to the archives to which she became the manager. 

2. Degree vs job training?
"Both are important however a professional LIS qualification helps develop you as a person to successfully do the job". Professional training also adds to this foundation of knowledge. (I thought it was interesting that at UAL there is a staff development policy for all posts).

3. Describe the collection development policy for your collections.

There is a large focus on conservation for all collection development due to the film nature of resources. As a result, there are electronic rolling stacks with temperature and light control, plant chests for posters and conservation equipment are stocked up in advance based on available budget. To save on some costs, there is a conservation project to repackage resources giving work experience to conservation students such as those at Camberwell College of Arts. Some items are kept in cold storage that needs to be acclimatised before use, so a risk assessment is also carried out.

4. Subjective acquisition or patron-driven collections?

All resources collected are based on research value, which is discussed in conjunction with library policy, which follows a similar policy.

5. Cataloguing and classification

As with most archives, Calm is used to catalogue all materials in MARC format with Dewey Classification (although it is not consistent for all resources).

6. New trends affecting your role in the next 5 years.

The focus is to get a professional archives accreditation, which is a mark of quality for the service provided at the centre for stakeholders, the care and conservation of the resources and the degree of accessibility to the collections. There is also growth in special collections interest so getting involved with social media is increasing. 

7. Online advocacy and digital collections

There is a Twitter account for the archives and a digitization strategy underway to provide better access to the collections. There is a visual arts data service of 23,000 items, which is still small compared to all the universities collections but progress is being made.