2B Or Not 2B? Ode To Our Favourite Pencil

I’m the archive 2B pencil

I’ve been here 15 years!

If a reader ever pinched me

Dusty would weep real tears.

You see, I’m dark enough to see,

Yet soft enough to erase,

So I leave no mark behind me

On an archive’s precious page.

I’m this archive’s  trusty friend,

Tho’ I be but old and wee.

To the bitter, shavings-filled end,

Orkney Archive’s faithful 2B!

Mystery Object Time

We have been spring cleaning here at the Orkney Archives and frankly, everything still looks the same and will look the same for ever and ever and ever. We have a lot of stuff.

We have found some cool things though, created about 2mm of shelf space and freed a staff member whom we all thought had retired but had in fact just gotten stuck under an enormous pile of uncatalogued maps and plans. (Sorry for that Hester.)

Whaddya think this is for hmmmmmmmm?

In The Hot Seat

In honour of the 139th anniversary of the birth of French author, Marcel Proust, we have subjected Orkney Archive to the famous 'Proust Questionnaire' as used by Vanity Fair magazine and James Lipton in Inside the Actors' Studio to quiz celebs.


What is your idea of perfect happiness?


Being left alone in a room that is not too dry, not too damp, not too hot and not too cold.

What is your greatest fear?

Rodents

What historical figure do you most identify with?

Greta Garbo

Which living person do you most admire?

Our archivist, Alison Fraser*

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

A tendency to crumble to dust.

What trait do you most deplore in others?

An insistence on using pens.

What is your greatest extravagance?

I play far too much online poker.

What do you most dislike about your appearance?

It’s all very beige…

What is your favourite journey?

Back to my strongrooms

What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

Relevance.

Which living person do you most despise?

Michael Landy

Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

Copyright – Not to be reproduced or published without permission.

What is your greatest regret?

The sun has not been kind to the old complexion.

What or who is the greatest love of your life?

Acid free paper

When and where were you happiest?

When I was accessioned.

Which talent would you most like to have?

If only I could sing…

What is your current state of mind?

Playful

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

If only I had discovered document repair tape earlier.

If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what would it be?

Neil Sedaka

If you could choose what or who to come back as, what would it be?

Craig David

What do you consider your greatest achievement?

Simply surviving, my love.

What is your most treasured possession?

My physical integrity

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

Grimy hands and a leaky fountain pen.

What is your most marked characteristic?

My organisation.

What is the quality you most like in a man?

Crisp, white gloves.

What is the quality you most admire in a woman?

The habit of using a pencil.

What do you most value in your friends?

An absence of mould-spreading spores.

Who are your favourite writers?

Any who keep their correspondence and manuscripts.

Who is your favourite hero of fiction?

Miss Havisham (but preferably with a controlled environment and a proper cataloguing system.)

Who are your heroes in real life?

People who hand old photos into archives instead of shredding them (Oh the humanity….)

What are your favourite names?

Derek, Millicent and Hester.

What is it that you most dislike?

Being filed out of order.

How would you like to die?

Whilst drunk on a yacht.

What is your motto?

Hoarding is good.

Thank you

Thank you

****************************************

Update: Alison is now retired. Please replace this name with Vikki Kerr. (Dusty, 2022)

Great Tait!

Cataloguing more Margaret Tait papers today and noticing that everything was done in her own way. Letters about copying negatives and chasing up fees are firm, clear and unyielding, interviews and film shoots are painstakingly planned and everything from the posters, to the programmes to the promotional leaflets and calenders are designed and made by MT herself.

True, this probably had a lot to do with economics, but it is obvious that Tait was an auteur through and through. She seems like the type of person who, even when making a simple cup of tea, would have a highly individual and personal vision of the outcome of the project.

Even the language used on the posters and invitations for the Rose Street Film Festival of 1955 was very her: she describes Rose Street on the poster as "the long, low street of pubs in at the back of Princes Street.", and directs visitors up to her projection room thus; "up two flights of stone stairs and follow the smell of coffee."

Here is a handmade leaflet to promote her films mixing text, handwriting, film stills and sketches...

..and I also found a lovely little twiddle of water-colour on the back of an envelope.

Reference D97/24

Reality Bites

 We are frequently able to fill a blank in a family tree or answer a customer query but a lot of the time we hit a dead end. Sometimes these dead ends can haunt you, and you wish that you could uncover the truth that has slipped through the cracks in time.

I recently had a query from a gentleman whose ancestor died on Orkney after taking (being given?) an overdose of an epilepsy medicine. She was not from Orkney and neither was her husband who was left with two children. They were not even listed at the house they were staying in, so what were they doing there? Her husband was a doctor; was it foul play? Her medicine could also be used to treat depression, had she been sent to Orkney to recuperate after a breakdown? I fear that I shall never know the truth.

Sometimes we wish that we had not heard the endings to stories.

Those family history queries which tug your heartstrings are usually the ones to stay with you: the pensioner who is looking for the siblings she was separated from when their mother was no longer capable of caring for them; the family historian who traces their line to an unmarried girl who was rejected by her family for bearing an illegitimate child; the teenage boy who went missing whilst lodging away from his islander parents in Kirkwall and whose body was eventually found in Kirkwall Harbour.

Some of the reading here can be very sad and it is often hard to pass on information to our customers.

Luckily, all this is balanced by the joy when someone finally finds an elusive relative or when we are able to produce a photograph of an ancestral home. Orkney archive is generally a cheerful place to work and always interesting. There are millions of stories and personal histories contained within the piles of boxes, books and papers and it is a great privilege to be able to uncover some of them.

GWA (Geeks With Attitude)'s Ode To Archiving in Honour Of Ice Cube's B'Day

You are about to witness the strength of geek knowledge...

Straight outta storage, dusty letters from dead dudes,

Catalogued by geeks with attitude

When I'm called on, I get my gloves on,

Open the folder and get my read on,

You too sir, if you read the rules

The archive staff are gonna hafta come and shush you,

If you chat, or get a mobile out,

If you eat a twix or a bun, we'll throw you out,

Readers start to grumble, they wanna copy stuff,

Over five percent and man you've had enough!

Goin off on an archivist like that,

When all she doin is protectin old tat,

So give up the phone,

I'm just doin my job, so no need to moan,

Here's a heavy weight to keep yo stuff flat,

It's in old writin, how you like that?

Paeoleography is the name,

It's just part of the archivin game,

Me n you can make it out, no maybe,

I'm takin records out the box, daily,

Yo weekly, monthly, yearly,

Until them dumb, dusty letters read clearly,

And I'm there with the archival sticky tape,

Sir, you can't fix like me,

So when I'm in the searchroom, you better wait,

Coz archivist is packin up stuff,

As I leave, believe I'm clompin,

But when I come back, I'm comin straight out of storage...

Rapped to the tune of Straight Outta Compton by NWA. There can be no youtube link to such a profanity filled song on this innocent blog, (and our firewall restrictions make it hard for us to access anything related to NWA.) but you probably all own it anyway, I am sure.

Have At Thee, BBC's 'Who Do You Think You Are'!

A celebrity walks into an archive, or a quaint country home. A cheerful archivist greets them pleasantly, offers them a seat and immediately opens a book the exact page on which said celebrity's ancestor's details are recorded. The television/film/musical star sits rapt as the librarian/archivist/historian weaves a wonderfully detailed tale catered solely for this particular person's family history.

Supporting documents are plucked from thin air, photos appear at the click of fingers, a previously stern figure weeps thrilling tears because his great granny once had to lift a quite heavy bucket of water. The End

Wrong! If you look carefully, there are book marks in all the weighty tomes which are supposedly lifted from shelves by the archivist for the first time and it would be impossible to give this level of detail without several hours of research beforehand.

Sadly, the curse of WDYTYA? has encouraged visitors to libraries and archives to expect this magical service. They present themselves, tell us their last names and wait for us to produce the book of their family and move them to tears. It doesn't really work like that. Sorry.

When starting your family tree, always do as much research as you can within your own family before trying a records centre. Ask your parents and grandparents (if they are still around) as many questions as you can. Don't just ask for the names of your grandparents' parents; ask about their brothers and sisters too as this will make it easier to find them on a census. Middle names are also useful, as are any professions that you know of.

Take your research with you to the archive. We have several visitors every year who describe the reams of research and acres of carefully compiled scrapbooks that they left at home in loving detail. We need to see them.

Lastly, research takes a lot of time. Some of our visitors have been doing their family history for 10 years! Sometimes people are lucky and their relatives had an unusual name, were landowners or didn't move around very much and so can be traced easily from census to census. everyone else has to work at it. (It is fun though, you feel like a detective.)

Two particular episodes made every one here swoon with rage. First, was the Matthew Pincent episode where he was traced back to God. Don't get me started on that.

The second, was David Mitchell's episode. The morning after it aired, three of us all burst into the search room at 9am and shouted at each other "that lady was keeping Church Records in her HOUSE!"

Amazing Rap About Archiving.

Perhaps only people who work in archives will find this funny, but Dee Dee at Derangement and Description has made us snigger this afternoon.

Ode to pulling rusty staples from archives and replacing them with colourful plastic paper clips...

Copyright, On Being Blameless Protectors Of...

One of the most stressful and boring parts of working in a library or archive is explaining and upholding copyright. There are certain rules that we are expected to adhere to but, when we do so, we are made to feel like jobsworth nerds.

Readers can copy 5% of a published work, (or a chapter, whichever is bigger) and prospective house builders are only allowed an A4 section from maps which are less than 50 years old.

The majority of our wonderful customers are very understanding and lovely about it all, but some take it to heart in a most alarming manner.When we calmly and patiently explain these rules, some customers snort with derision, grunt mutinously, or gaze down at the map in their hands in a highly tragic manner and wait for us to change our minds. It makes us feel awful, like we are tattle tailing swots at school or puppy murdering sadists.

These copyright protesters seem to think that we are so personally attached to copyright restrictions that they can wound us with threats of information-related skullduggery. One customer said "I'm going to buy a tiny little hand-sized scanner and scan all the books that I want and you'll never even know!" Another said, "I'm going to come back when you're not working and then get more copies. Of the same map!" I wonder what craziness they'll get up to next. Eat their pudding before their dinner maybe? Sleep at the wrong end of the bed?

We don't make the rules, or cry if they're broken,  it's just our job to try and work with them.

We have had a department meeting about this and have decided that the next customer who tries to make us feel emotionally compromised for trying to uphold perfectly reasonable restrictions on copying the artistic works of other people, shall be shut up in one of the metal map cabinets for the rest of the day with nothing but a copy of our tediously complex copyright flowchart to while away the time.

My old work's a dustbin

Do you know that horrifying stage in the middle of tidying up, when everything's lying on top of everything else and you wonder why you bothered starting?

Welcome to middle-of-closure-week archives!

On the plus side, no customers means that we can choose our own lunch-breaks and swap Loose Women for This Morning.

W is for wasted youth

Naming capital cities. Times tables. The past participle. Burning peanuts and then weighing them. Naming cloud formations. Holding a netball for 3 seconds only, whilst travelling no more than 1 1/2 steps. Working out how many square tiles to put around an oval pool. Swimming whilst wearing pjamas.

All of the above are 'skills' that teachers assured us we would be using every day of our lives. However, apart from basic literacy and numeracy, the one school days task that a librarian or archivist uses more than any other is putting things into alphabetical order.

How completely unexpected. Of all the tedious exercises that we were given to complete, the lists of words that were provided every day from primaries 4-7 to alphabetise seemed like the biggest waste of time. Burning stuff was part of our leisure activities anyway and one day we just might own an oval pool. If retired and left with absolutely nothing else to do, joining a netball team might be an option and pub quizzes could account for the rest; but shuffling words around endlessly was the dark horse.

Archives closure week

The Orkney Archive will be closed to the public the week of the 22nd - 27th of February 2010. This closure will not affect any of the library facilities.

We try to have a closure period every February so that we can drink tea, play winky murders and sardines in the strong-rooms, make prank calls and generally have a laugh.

Only joking. Because the majority of our working day throughout the year is spent front of house, there are many behind-the-scenes jobs that get neglected. The closure week is a good opportunity to accomplish tasks that need more than two people working on them at the same time, or that have acquired some urgency.

Last year we completely rearranged our Orkney Room, catalogued an entire collection, made great headway with another enormous collection and brought some semblance of order to our Aladdin's Cave of uncatalogued deposits. This year we hope to broker a peace deal in the Middle East, work out who killed Archie in Eastenders and invent a recipe for instant tea granules that doesn't taste rank.

Yeah!!!!!!!

At long last, the sun has re-appeared and we can see our colleagues' faces once more. There were a couple of days last week that literally didn't ever get light and it felt like we were all doing the night-shift.

In fact, we are a little giddy with this unexpected sun light and some mirth has been experienced despite some of us having to do some quite complicated sums to work out the volume of archives that we hold.

Working out statistics is an important part of archive work. We calculate visitor statistics, photocopying statistics, spatial statistics, volume of requests per customer, type of archive requested, daily requests, monthly requests, yearly requests etc. etc. etc. Consequently, administration is also a large part of the job.

Wuthering Heights at the archive

We may roll our eyes at some of the names people dream up for their children these days, each more ludicrous than the next. I, however, welcome women called Heaven-Leigh naming their son Suzuki, or fathers known as Terminator christening their baby girls Kahlua. In years to come, their family trees will be so easy to compile! Different names for each generation, some of them datable to a five-year period of a certain decade of pop culture. Simple!

I am currently wading through a family tree where nearly every woman is named Catherine and all the men seem to be called Peter or James. One Peter, the son of Peter and Catherine, has married a girl who is not only named Catherine, but has the same maiden name as his mother! His brother married a Catherine too. Then called his daughter Catherine. And his sons Peter and James.

Drawing diagrams helps but a few infedelities and their illegitimate results are making things very complicated indeed.

They keep swapping houses too!

Pity us

We are the walking wounded in the Archive today. Yesterday's humphings and stackings have taken their toll and there is many a bruise to be seen. Muscles are stiff and shoulders are bowed.

The work of an archivist or a librarian is a fairly physical one. One may think that the signing of a deposit form or the stamping of a book is as manual as it gets but au contraire mes amis, it is a work out for the arms! Carrying boxes to and fro, stacking shelves, moving furniture, assembling shelving... it is my perfect gym; full of books and not a sweaty towel in sight.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Like Bowie, Will Young and Ozzy with Kelly we have been going through some changes today in the archive.

Desks are being replaced (good), heavy boxes are being moved back to almost the exact location we moved them from nine months ago (boo) and new shelf units have arrived (hurray! Nothing is more exciting in an archive than extra shelf space.)

We are all trying to forget the fact that the boxes will be moved back again in about six months time and the new shelves will be heaving with books and papers before we know it...

Hoarding is good.

This week we received a gift of a carrier bag full of old Orkney photographs. The depositor asked if we would be interested in them(Yes, always, very), and said that if we hadn't been, then the precious cache would have just gone into the bin.

We get told that quite a lot and being sensitive, hoarding souls, it never fails to make our blood run cold. Sometimes, upon receiving a potential archive, we listen as the depositor cheerfully describes the letters, photographs, scrapbooks and documents that they destroyed before thinking of the archive. A few weeks ago, a lady told me about the bonfire of photographs and legal papers that she made when clearing a relative's house. Oh the humanity...

We are always interested in your family papers and documents as they can contain so many clues to the past. If ever in doubt as to what to do with interesting old documents that no longer seem relevant, always think of us please!

24th April 2009 - Mess mess mess

We’ve had a lot of visitors today, both local and transient. I’ve been in and out of the crammed corner of our end store room three times already, extracting enormous rolled-up estate plans and we’ve had to clear the archive trolley twice.

The search room is strewn with maps, photos, shipping registers, plans and random pieces of paper. It is the same debris that always results from a few busy customers who are getting really stuck into their research…