Classification of Record, Place, and People: the Case of
the United Kingdom’s Regional and National
Audiovisual Archives
Thesis submitted to
Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image (Heritage Studies) University of Amsterdam
Thesis supervisor: Eef Masson Second reader: Mark-Paul Meyer
Thesis submitted by Simon Manton Milne
Table of Contents
Introduction 3
Chapter 1 - Classification and Identity Construction 17
1.1 Classification 17
1.2 Classification of regional/national significance 18
1.3 Identity of a region 20
1.4 Personal and Public Identities 24
1.5 Heritage and identity in the audiovisual record 26
Chapter 2 - Arrangement on the Web and Online Access Portals 30
2.1 Audiovisual records in online display 30
2.2 The World Wide Web as a medium 32
2.3 Online Catalogue Search and BFI Player 33
2.4 Challenges to archival control 37
Chapter 3 – Online participation in archival classification 41 3.1 YouTube and the analytical-synthetical alternative 41
3.2 The semantic gap and its bridging 43
3.3 Folksonomies and the participatory archive 44
3.4 The LSA online access portal: LocalEyes and commenting on records 46
Conclusion 51
Introduction
Public sector moving image archives within the United Kingdom (UK) operate at either national or regional levels. Additionally a number of these public sector archives blur this distinction,
specifically those located within the semi-autonomous countries of Scotland and Wales. In Northern Ireland meanwhile, the public film agency Northern Ireland Screen provides a small digital access collection – its Digital Film Archive (NISDFA) – with no other collecting or preserving activities. At a state level, the British Film Institute’s National Archive (BFI, BFINA) manages a collection on behalf of the UK as a whole. Nine moving image archives represent the regions of England, with all but one, London's Screen Archives (LSA), directly managing collections.
While the location and separation of the non-state level archives correspond to historical regional divisions, they are (with both the above exceptions of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and that of London) distinct from the current political arrangement of the UK. The regional archives emerged at different times and for different reasons, and it was only in 2004, with the publication of The UK Audiovisual Archive Strategic Framework (UK Audiovisual Archive Strategy Group 2004), that a cohesive approach was developed to coordinate and encourage their
development. The East Anglian Film Archive (EAFA) was established as the first such archive in 1976, quickly followed by the Scottish Screen Archive (1976) which in 2007 became part of the National Library of Scotland and has been renamed its Moving Image Archive (NLSMIA). The North West Film Archive (NWFA) followed in 1977. It took another ten years before there was further activity, with the establishment of the Wessex Film and Sound Archive (WFSA, 1988) and the Yorkshire Film Archive (YFA, 1988). Regional archives continued to appear in the following years, with the creation of the Screen Archive South East (SASE, 1992), the South West Film and TV Archive (SWFTA, 1993) and finally the Moving Image Archive for Central England (MACE, 2000). Two archives were unified in 2001 to institute the National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales (NSSAW). London has only the LSA, formed in 2005, which acts as a coordinating body for distributed collections within the London region and provides an online portal to digitised selections from these collections. While some of the collections coordinated by the LSA are of a more regional nature – such as those held in the archives of London’s borough councils – others seem to have greater national relevance, such as those of the British Deaf Association or those of BT (the private group which owns the formerly public-owned British Telecom). The establishment of the LSA meant that after nearly thirty years all of the UK now has some form of geographically specified
regional body identifying itself as a film archive. In fact, due to the BFINA’s UK wide collecting, all of the territory is covered twice, both by a regional\national archive and by the BFINA.
A distinction may be made between those archives whose situation and remit correspond to explicit structures and geographies of political power – the BFINA, NLSMIA, NSSAW, NISDFA and LSA – and those that instead correspond to historical and traditional regional geographies, of varying significance. For example, the WFSA takes its name from the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex of the 6th to 10th centuries, a regional designation in little usage prior to the re-establishment of its earldom in 1999, and comprising in five distinct regional councils. Meanwhile the NWFA covers both an urban area strongly associated with the Industrial Revolution and the British Empire's trading history, and the rural county of Cumbria with less of a role in that history. While the North West may be a generally applied and accepted term within the UK, its exact outline is not: the BBC place Cumbria alongside the North East as BBC North East and Cumbria, leaving BBC North West to handle programming for the rest of the area covered by the NFWA. While each archive takes responsibility for a cultural collection relating to the geographical region or country whose name it bears, the question of how public identities relate to these geographies – and the archives and collections associated with them – has yet to receive sufficient consideration. This thesis sets as its research goal the investigation of the central role played by classification in the creation of these identities at a time when archival activity becomes more visible, through the establishment of online access portals.
Two different manifestations of cultural identity are important here: a regional-cultural identity as it may apply to a geographical area and the people within it; and the classification of audiovisual objects within an archive as having a regional-cultural identity. These two differing conceptions of ‘identity’, while distinct in referent, obtain their correlative natures from the similarities between how identities are claimed and classifications are made. In this thesis I shall consider how these processes function and examine the relation between the classification of
regional objects and the use of these objects in the creation of heritage. In chapter 1 I will consider how this issue of the regional-cultural specificity of UK collections compares to the means by which public identities are established. That every area of the UK is covered in effect by two
audiovisual archives – its regional or country-specific archive and the nationwide BFINA – suggests an immediate problem of remit. The management of an audiovisual object by either the national level BFINA, whose leadership “across the film heritage sector” was endorsed by the UK government's Department for Culture, Media and Sport (2012, 76), or the regional\national
archives, asserts a claim as to the regional-cultural specificity and value of that object. In this chapter I shall also discuss several examples of records found in the archives that are problematic within the regional\national model.
Issues concerning the management of audiovisual collections held in the public sphere seem to be of particular importance in the current landscape. Technological developments, most
importantly the possibilities introduced by the growth in computer and Internet usage at an individual level, and the increasing sophistication of techniques for digitisation of analogue
materials and their digital distribution at an archival level, in principle allow for a discontinuity with historical access to audiovisual archival collections. Analogue materials, characterised by an
inevitable (if controllable) decay as consequence of their materiality – which can be further accelerated by viewing and handling – stand in contrast to digital objects, which if adequately managed are both lossless and infinitely copyable. A preservational argument against allowing access is therefore denied for both the digitised versions of content held on analogue materials and the copies of those that are born-digital. However, while the technological developments provide a means to overcome restrictions to access for the purposes of preservation, the limitations on financial and labour resources (not to speak of copyright restrictions) preclude archives from digitising all convertible materials.
Online access provides for a greater utility of audiovisual content, with far fewer restrictions on access than those dictated by the requirement of a visit to the location of an archive, and the need to preserve analogue objects. Classifications of objects that are established within the archival context, including those of regional-cultural significance, will also more readily pass from the archive and in to the public space as a consequence the increased accessibility resulting from online access provision. The people reached by these new online platforms are limited in their abilities to evaluate and utilise those records which have not been digitised and published online. The digital copies of records accessible online are therefore of more relevance in this thesis’ discussion of the relationship between classification and identity formation. In chapter 2 I will investigate through examples of the online access portals that the UK’s various regional\national audiovisual archives and the BFINA have developed, how the technological paradigm has enabled additional
classificatory approaches and the influence this has on users’ ability to access records.
of archival practices which determine the arrangement of collections as a whole, the objects within those collections and the knowledge associated with them. The primary stage of accessioning, in which archivists decide whether or not to admit an object into their collections, is the most decisive in the creation of the historical materials accessible over time. Those audiovisual objects which are not accessioned are not only excluded from the public record, but are at further risk of being
ultimately lost – denied the specialist care required of them that can be offered by the archives. For those objects that have been admitted to a collection and are then added into a collection's
catalogue, audiovisual archivists perform an unavoidable act of representation, translating a non-textual object into a non-textual description. As a process, the creation of a catalogue entry for an object is an inherent act of classification, defining through the translation that an object is a specific thing (or things) and not others. Any further contextualisation will declare that this newly created archive record concerns certain subject matters and not others.
For those consulting a catalogue, this description as asserted within the archive is the determinant of how this object will be subsequently accessed. While computer-aided search of a catalogue may make the task less onerous, the public will only be able to access those records through the catalogue for which their usage of descriptive terms matches those used in the catalogue, either through agreement with, or knowledge of, the classification approach of the archive. When these are in disagreement the user will either fail to find the objects he/she may desire, undermining the usefulness of the collection, or encounter objects whose classification he/she disagrees with. In chapter 3 I will build upon the ideas discussed in chapters 1 and 2 by evaluating some of the solutions to this problem that have been suggested. In doing so I will consider as an example the LocalEyes project of the LSA which forms part of its online access portal as a method by which the relationship between people’s identity and audiovisual heritage may be developed in the current technological paradigm. Finally, as my research goal, I hope to come to some conclusions as to how taxonomical practices, as exhibited in UK public audiovisual archives are reminiscent of, and useful to the means by which people develop their identities.
Theoretical Framework
Every archival object – audiovisual or otherwise – has the potential to be selected, described and cared for in a limitless number of ways. This compels the recognition that all objects are potentially under conflicting of a right to describe or define them. French philosopher Jacques Derrida's
Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression(1996) outlines a view of the archive that is crucial to investigations of archival practices of classification in its analysis as to the consequences of how a record is interpreted within an archive. Derrida's discusses the archive's functioning in Freudian terms. He proposes that the desire to archive is akin to the death or destruction drive of
psychoanalysis. For Derrida, the archival desire is to inscribe memory, so as to avoid forgetfulness and the disappearance that forgetfulness consists in. However the act of inscription introduces a paradox as it will fail to capture the fluidity of memory. This archive/death drive:
incites forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory […] but also commands the radical effacement, in truth the eradication of that which can never be reduced to […] the archive, consignation [….] Because the archive, if this word or this figure can be stabilized so as to take on a signification, will never be either memory or anamnesis as spontaneous, alive and internal experience (Derrida, 1996, 11).
An object's classification and description (that which creates a catalogue entry for an object) serves to silence it, in the sense that its meaning becomes “stabilized”, fixed and inviolable. The archivalization of the record has mitigated against forgetfulness, but can only do so by incorporating forgetfulness within it. “The archive always works, and a priori, against itself.” (Derrida, 1996, 12) Derrida's analysis of the archive is one that seeks to highlight this configuring and silencing as central to archival practice. In that this practice is essential to archival work (as essential factor of classification), it is also all-pervasive:
This threat is in-finite, it sweeps away the logic of finitude and the simple factual limits, the transcendental aesthetics, one might say, the spatio-temporal conditions of conservation. Let us rather say that it abuses them. Such an abuse opens the ethico-political dimension of the problem. (Derrida, 1996, 19)
By this, records have their utility diminished. Groups who hold alternative or conflicting views of records are effectively side-lined. From all the possible interpretations of a record, one has been selected as that which receives institutional backing. While alternative views may be
sustainable amongst side-lined groups, they will not enjoy the same visibility and authority as the enshrined view. Within the archive a dominant ascription has been applied to a record which fixes its meaning while expunging all others.
An archive’s classifications of its collections are contained within its catalogues. Catalogues serve as the necessary means to both locate the records in a collection and to avoid compromising their conservation through the limitation of unnecessary access to the records themselves.
Catalogue entries are a form of limited access to the records they refer to, reducing the scope of a record to its archival classification and description and, in the case of audiovisual records,
inaccessible object is akin to the vanished object. However, the abstraction offered by the catalogue also places on a record a limitation of access through the fixing to it of a specific classification. Such objects remain inaccessible to those consulting the catalogue who would not consider such a record to be classified in that way and who might classify that record differently. A record as it appears in a catalogue is thus configured in to its classification, with all other classificatory views silenced. While a recognition of this functioning at the heart of the archive is required for an appreciation of any archival body, the structuring of collections of audiovisual archives in the UK along regional, national and state lines is of consequence to identities (spatial or human) relating to them. With reference to Derrida we see that archival practice is an activity in which both record and, consequentially, narrative of the past are circumscribed. Much as those objects which are not held within an archive are threatened by disappearance, so too are those interpretations of the records held in archives that do not form part of their catalogue entries. In this thesis I shall use Derrida’s view of the working of archival classification to show that such a practice entails significant loss.
The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu advances a valuable critique of the activities of those involved in cultural production, its dissemination and its appraisal. In 'The Market of Symbolic Goods' Bourdieu presents a strong characterisation of cultural objects which is of
particular value in characterising archived audiovisual materials. Bourdieu notes that in addition to “being a commodity that has a commercial value, any cultural object is also a symbolic good, having a specifically cultural value.” (1985, 13) This encapsulation is particularly suited to a view of the life cycle of audiovisual material. Frequently developed as commodities, through the process of their entering public archives, audiovisual objects (notionally) take on a new identity as (purely) cultural objects. For Bourdieu, cultural objects accrue their cultural value as a consequence of their “consumption and circulation”, a process “dominated by agents and institutions of consecration”. (1985, 13) As an agent which both consecrates objects through accession into a collection, and that which subsequently controls both “consumption and circulation” of these archived objects, an image of the archive as a particularly significant operator within the process of cultural valuation emerges. It can further be argued that though archives do not appear as producers in the ordinary sense, their activities in access provision bestow on them a semblance as producers, presenting to the public a collection that has been built, described and preserved. In other words, authored.
in determining meaning. Traditionally, the archival records Derrida describes are largely uncirculated, while Bourdieu’s cultural objects are distributed and thus more likely to attract numerous interpretations. The better circulated an object is, the greater the likely number of agents involved in its valuation. While any object may attract a multiplicity of interpretations, it is with the circulated object that these views are more likely to be explicit rather than latent. Bourdieu’s
appraisal of the contestations regarding circulated cultural objects is particularly relevant to those archival records which are now benefiting from a new (and possibly first) circulation through their appearance on online access portals.
Online access portals are a new instance of circulation for audiovisual objects. It must be remembered that while an audiovisual object (such as a print, or master tape) may have entered an archive, other instances of the object may have remained in circulation (on home release formats, online or additional prints remaining in circulation), allowing for the contest of consecration to continue. Alternatively, items within audiovisual archives may be the only instances of that material's current existence, either as a consequence of no copies having ever being created, or of all other copies being lost or destroyed. In such cases, the potential of an archive to dominate the evaluation of a cultural good is greatly increased. With online access portals now increasing circulation of some of the audiovisual records held within archives, the archival interpretation of these records becomes more visible at the same time that the potential for multiple interpretations becomes more latent.
Bourdieu’s analysis helps to build upon Derrida’s view of the magnitude of archival power in determining meaning through classification and contextualisation. While the activities surrounding the circulated cultural object are also expressions of power, they are in competition, and domination is less achievable than in the archival state:
the field of production and diffusion can only fully be understood if one treats it as a field of competition for the monopoly of the legitimate exercise of symbolic violence. Such a
construction allows us to define the field... as the scene of competition for the power to grant cultural consecration (Bourdieu, 1995, 24).
Using Bourdieu’s theory, I will consider how online access portals may (re)introduce latent contestations over archival records that had, prior to their new accessibility, been rendered silent by the archival control Derrida describes.
platforms – and those suggestions that have been made as to how institutions caring for cultural heritage could develop such platforms – I shall consider several theories advanced as to how individuals and communities use memory and heritage objects to form their own identities. From amongst these, the observations of Dutch archivist and academic Eric Ketelaar on the functioning of records within the collective memories of communities, will be valuable. Ketelaar states that a community bases its identity on “elective processes of memory, so that a given group recognises itself through its memory of a common past” (2005, 58). Archival users can assert a form of cultural ownership of a record through electing to recognise that record as constitutive to the memory of a community of which they thereby claim membership.
Importantly, collective memories are defined as essentially plural – there is not one collective memory(Ketelaar, 2005, 49). Such analysis suggests both the value and problem of records to community memory. An elective form of identification allows a community to choose records which it decides are constitutive of its members’ common past. This may serve to bolster an existent community identity, or to support the development of a new one. However, when the power to consecrate meaning to a record is located away from a community, as in an archive, a communities’ ability to make that record part of their collective memory is constrained. A record silenced, as per Derrida, will be of limited use in the formation of plural identities. If a community does not have control over its records, a community must then either reject records as contributive to their collective memory, or conform to the views expressed by them. I will use Ketelaar’s analysis, in tandem with theorists of identification and classification discussed below in Chapter 1 to consider the problem to – and suggested solutions of – the control of heritage objects and community identities by UK public audiovisual archives.
Literature Review
This thesis covers several topics that have been the focus of previous academic investigation. The most relevant of these within this thesis are the relationship between classification and archival power, the relationship between heritage and identity, and the more recent subject matter of online access to audiovisual archive records. This section will consider relevant literature of each of these subject matters so as to consider the debates within these fields, the stimulation they provide to this thesis and the areas where this thesis aims to build upon them.
Classification and archival power
Much attention has been given to the exercise of archival activity particularly as it relates to the purpose of archival activity and to the issue of objectivity in records. In the early decades of the 20th century archivist Sir Hilary Jenkinson proposed conceptions of archival duty which strongly emphasised the evidentiary nature of records, and the desirable neutrality of the archival
practitioner. Records would stand as evidence of action taken, and their faithful arrangement as to the manner in which they were created by their originating organisation would ensure they testified as an accurate record of events. In 1947 Jenkinson delivered an inaugural lecture on the occasion of a new course in archive administration that was to be taught at University College London. In the lecture he stated a succinct view of the ideal neutral practice, which can still be observed as motivational in much contemporary archival practice:
His Creed, the Sanctity of Evidence; his Task, the Conservation of every scrap of Evidence attaching to the Documents committed to his charge; his Aim, to provide, without prejudice or afterthought, for all who wish to know the Means of Knowledge… the good Archivist is perhaps the most selfless devotee of Truth the modern world produces (Jenkinson, 2003, 258-259).
Integrity of arrangement and content is of prime importance in Jenkinson’s description, while classification would be thought of as uncontroversial: a statement as to what a record was, with particular reference to its point of origin.
Archivist Terry Cook traces the development of theory on the functioning of archive with reference to the role of the archivist. In the Jenkinsonian view, the archivist is a “passive curator”, with subsequent archival paradigms developing in which the archivist’s role has moved
successively “to active appraiser to societal mediator to community facilitator” (Cook, 2013, 116). As the number of records being created expanded over the 20th century, unquestioning retention of all records became impractical. Archival selection, in which records created were thinned down into records retained, became an increasingly important aspect of archival activity, and catalogues had to record more simplified descriptions so as to make the collection more manageable (Cook, 2013, 107-109). Such changes can be considered as a move towards efficiency in the act of classification, rather than specificity. This altered emphasis prompted a disjuncture with the previous view of the essentially evidentiary nature of archival collections. While the aim of preserving evidence was still central to archival efforts, Cook notes that archival practice was characterised as an activity of memory: archives both preserve memory and create it by being tasked with preserving that which is “worth remembering, worth memorializing” (Cook, 2003, 101-102).
As the influence of postmodernism raised attention to issues of diversity and power
relations, claims of archival neutrality were further complicated. An inherent selectivity had been in effect, in which archives had previously primarily handled records powerful organisations and collecting agencies. Objects and documents related to the wider activities of a society, particularly those relating to less powerful groups, had been neglected. A renewed emphasis on “the broad spectrum of human experience” would reposition archives away from “underpinning the academic elite to becoming a societal foundation for identity and justice” (Cook, 2003, 111-112). However, despite the new emphasis that can be seen in this “identity” phase, a latent tension persists between the evidentiary intention of archives, traceable to early practice, and later emphasis on pluralistic memory. Archivist Mark Greene point to this as an ongoing problem in debates over archival activity (2002, 43-44). Greene’s own view of the evidentiary status of records is one that draws from the postmodern influence: “there is no universally valid conception of “truth” that […] documentation can transmit, only multiple truths” (2002, 52). Attempts to restrain archival activity to that which concerns evidence is for Greene “an attempt, finally, to make orderly and rational what is an inherently disorderly and arational (if nor irrational) universe of documentation, memory, evidence and culture” (2002, 54).
The tension between the evidentiary view of a record and the inescapable plurality of “evidences” to be found there is of particular consequence in this thesis’ discussion of
classification. The attempt “to make orderly and rational” is at the heart of classification. It is, however, as fundamental in an archivist’s attempts to assert “truth” in a record as it is in the equivalent attempt of any other user of that record who attempts to conclude what the record is about. While this problem has been identified in archival discourse, it does not seem its
inevitability has been given sufficient attention, as this thesis will aim to do. Ketelaar, however, points to what should be considered a consequence of discontinuity in classification that results from the plurality of interpretations of a record. For Ketelaar, archival records are never finalised, but are instead “reactivated again and again. Every interaction, intervention, interrogation and interpretation by creator, user, and archivist is an activation of the record” (2008, 12). The ability of any activation of that record to be dominant remains dependent on the ability to exert classificatory power over it.
Discussions of heritage and identity have gained a particular urgency as a result of what cultural anthropologist Sharon MacDonald describes as the “historical turn” in European societies. This turn is characterised by an increase in societal interest in matters of history and an increasing reference to the past in the management and designation of public space (MacDonald, 2013, 3-4). This trend was noted by cultural historian Robert Hewison in 1987 in his book The Heritage Industry, and he situates the development within a context of rapid change, brought about in the context of deindustrialisation and globalisation. In Hewison’s view, heritage is valuable because of its contribution to identity, particularly at times of change:
[the past] is irrecoverable, for we are condemned to live perpetually in the present. What matters is not the past, but our relationship with it. As individuals, our security and identity depend largely on the knowledge we have of our personal and family history; the language and customs which govern our social lives rely for their meaning on a continuity between past and present. Yet at times the pace of change, and its consequences, are so radical that not only is change perceived as decline, but there is the threat of rupture with our past lives (1987, 43-45)
A number of worthwhile points are contained here, which other writers have also
highlighted as important in considering heritage and identity. Political scientist Charles Raab points to the importance continuity plays in establishing identity, in providing “certainty” during times of change (2009, 232). The past offers appeal as a source of identity in such a view, due to the fixity with which it might be imagined; stemming from its “irrecoverable” existence, the past gives the appearance of being unchangeable, a stable point at which to anchor identity.
MacDonald, like Hewison, also highlights the inaccessible nature of the past and forwards the concept of “past presencing” as a way to describe how appeals to heritage are made, without having to engage accurately in any particular processes of remembrance (2013, 12). Cultural archaeologist Laurajane Smith suggests that these instances of “past presencing” serve to “lend historical and cultural legitimacy to claims to difference and particular claims to identity” (2015, 138). As claims which lead to the support or establishment of similarity and difference, such appeals serve to assist the classification of identity, expressed through heritage.
One further important aspect from the literature on identity are analyses of the means by which a group receives or forms an identity. Raab indicates that group identities may be applied extrinsically. Though any group (or individual) may either reject or accept an extrinsic identity, the identifier maybe be a source of authority, not just some “other” within society (2009, 228). A political dimension operates here, not only from any possible inequity of power, but in the process of classifying identities. For Raab “the selection of criteria for asserting, assigning, or discrediting
identities is political, in the broad sense that power is exercised in their application, or in their denial, and that these processes may be the sites of conflict” (2009, 231). Resistance remains possible, though may be cast in challenging conditions.
An observation of Smith and heritage geographer Emma Waterton on the composition and formation of communities bears considering as it relates to the group formation of identity. For Waterton and Smith, a problem exists whereby communities are uncritically assumed to exist within much social discourse, in the absence of explanation (2010, 12). The authors point out that recently studied communities do not show the homogeneity of composition or of purpose implied by the term “community”, containing both actors working either in concert with the community, or against it. Instead, understanding that community is something created by competing and fluid valuations (either from within the community or extrinsic to it), they posit that rather than being thought of as a noun “community” should be thought of as a verb, “an incomplete process through which people construct and create identities and bond themselves to others” (Waterton and Smith, 2010, 8). While Waterton and Smith emphasise the “incomplete” and fluid processes operating in their verb “community”, it provides this thesis’ discussion with a way of emphasising the
classificatory process in group identity. In this proposed view groups form based on their shared utilisation of classifications, particularly as it applies to their heritage. They “do” community through their application and control of the “selection of criteria for asserting, assigning, or discrediting identities”.
Online access to audiovisual archive records
Archival practice has been afforded strong new potentials for activity as a result of the spread of Internet access and the growth in computer usage. As the ability to access video files online has lagged in comparison with that to text and image files, the possibility to access digitial copies of audiovisual archive records is a comparatively recent development. Though the “distributed digital archive” musicologist Linda Barwick discusses (2004) is one that makes use of distributed local copies of video files rather than streaming delivery this can be seen as marker of how quickly technological infrastructure has improved. Nevertheless Barwick identifies two theme with continuing relevance in a discussion of online access to audiovisual archive records. First among these is a privileging of user classifications in access over that of traditional archival control of classification. The means of access should “reflect locally relevant means of knowledge management and organization. It must be searchable by locally relevant categories” (Barwick,
2004, 258). Secondly, Barwick encourages the integration of community-based knowledge in the cataloguing of objects (2004, 260) Such latitude would empower users by providing users of archival records with reference to the information they believe to be significant in those records with benefit to their ability to recognise them as relevant to their heritage identities. It would also empower their activations to leave tangible “fingerprints”, as Ketelaar describes, which subsequent users could likewise accept or seek to contribute to.
Discontinuity of practice is identified by library and information scientist Karen F. Gracy as the most significant challenge facing audiovisual archives as a result of the ability to access video files online. A new model is suggested, believes Gracy, which features users performing a range of tasks to records in a collection, that were previously performed by archivists. This includes the uploading of material (accessioning), tagging records with keywords and linking them to other records (classifying and structuring), and developing increased documentation of a record by appending comments to it (contextualisation) (2007, 184). As the core focus of this thesis here concerns classification and access, uploading of material is considered to beyond the scope of this investigation (nor has any UK audiovisual archive has yet introduced the facility to do so). Tagging, linking and commenting do fall within the investigation of classification however, and the enabling of users to perform these tasks would reconfigure the archival dominance of power here, as
Barwick also recognises.
Gracy draws inspiration for her model from the form of non-archival online video
platforms, such as YouTube. As the preeminent site of online access to video it offers a distinctive means of engaging with audiovisual heritage objects from that offered by online access portals of the UKs audiovisual archives. Notwithstanding the incomparable means of YouTube and the archives, YouTube has a freer hand as it need not focus on preservation, nor worry about the disappearance of a video from its collection, expanding and contracting with comparative freedom. Its users are handed curatorial responsibilities. Media and culture researcher Sheenagh Pietrobruno questions whether a practice of “social archiving” on YouTube could come to challenge official heritage discourse (2013, 1260). Pietrobruno’s analysis follows Gracy’s in identifying the radical repositioning of the user in a view of YouTube-as-archive. Though once again uploading is covered in a way beyond the remit of this thesis, Pietrobruno’s case study is suggestive of the ongoing importance of classification and search of records, which forms part of this thesis’ discussion of online access. While uploaded videos of the Turkish dance of the Melveli Sema Ceremony evince the previously underappreciated participation of women in the ceremony, it is only thorough
searching for videos that have been tagged ‘Melvila Sema Ceremory’ that the narrative of male-only participation can be challenged. Classification and contextualisation remain key to the use of “records” of YouTube.
Ketelaar advocates the same user-reorientation in what he terms “Archives 2.0”. This encapsulation of the theme addresses the benefit to engagements with archival records in the expression and formation of human identity. As Archives 2.0 enables participation in the classification and contextualisation of records it avoids the pitfall present in archive-dominant classification of “speaking for the other” (2008, 17). Archives 2.0 reconfigures archives as “social spaces” through “a new generation of access policies, tools and practices” (2008,18). These “social spaces” may enable communities to form identities through “recognise that record as constitutive to the memory of a community” (Ketelaar, see above). This thesis proposes that it is verb-quality of community, as outlined by Waterton and Smith (above) that primarily facilitates this forming. By coming to agree as to the same way in which to interpret a record or collection of records, the community finds form around an identity utilising heritage records.
Chapter 1 – Classification and Identity Construction
A concern with the activities involved in classification and identity construction sits at the forefront of this thesis’s discussion of archival power as expressed through the structure of UK public
audiovisual archives. Arranged predominately as archives managing regional or country-specific collections, archives within the UK demonstrate an engagement with geographically arranged identities. How geographical identities come to be expressed in regions, and how people in turn develop regional identities shall be discussed. However, prior to these discussions it is necessary to consider the practice of classification which is essential not only to the workings of the above identities but also to the arrangement of objects within an archive as records.
1.1 Classification
The need to classify can be seen as a pre-requisite for any form of useful communication. Words must be used in such a way that the objects and concepts to which they refer be considered sufficiently discreet as to convey an agreed upon meaning. That to which the word refers and that to which it does not, must be clear, its meaning agreed. Sociologist Richard Jenkins stresses the importance of this delineating activity:
All human knowledge is dependent upon classification. Identification – the specification of what things are and what they are not, entailing at the same time some specification of their properties – is basic to classification. Two interdependent processes are necessary to
classification and identification: the specification of similarities, and of difference (2000, 24). Classification therefore stands as the establishment of classes of things that are similar, based on the identification of specific properties that all members of the class adhere to and
separating them from those differing classes, with differing properties. As a systematic approach, it establishes the bedrock of scientific inquiry and enables the structuring of reality (Jenkins, 2000, 8). As such, it is also a central practice in the arrangement of archival records, a means of indicating which records are of a certain class – and which are not – and thus arriving at the structuring of order within an archival collection.
Information resources specialist Elaine Peterson outlines a classical view of the objectivity of the process of archival classification. “Although they do not construct ontologies, cataloguers and indexers are the inheritors of the Aristotelian tradition of categorizing things. […] When a
cataloguer applies a subject term [...t]he cataloguer is naming the work and distinguishing it from other works, yet is also grouping the work with similar entities” (Peterson, 2006, n. pag.). While
Peterson’s cataloguer may not be constructing an ontology he/she is both privileging and asserting one. The tendency is to aim to classify as to the creator’s intent, though Peterson acknowledges that this may be difficult (2006, n. pag.). In traditional archival practice, as outlined by Jenkinson (above) the intention is to privilege the view of the ‘author’ agent from amongst those valuers engaged in Bourdieu’s contest of consecration. However, given the difficulty that Peterson
acknowledges the cataloguer cannot help but result in asserting their own view of the author’s intent
as it fits in to the applied ontology. For example, curator Janet McBain highlights the example of
what is now the NLSMIA having collected television material – sometimes from the threat of imminent destruction in a skip or a bonfire – without any collaboration from its creators. While the NLSMIA is careful to provide qualifications as to the provenance of information in its catalogue (explained on its "Understanding catalogue records.” webpage, Moving Image Archive, n.pag.) this is not extended to the matter of the Title, Genre, or Subject applied to records, all of which are presented matter-of-factly, without qualification. In those examples in which collaboration has not been forthcoming, it appears that some other interpretation has been substituted.
As a process by which an object is identified and a classification given to it, the archival handling of an object may, but need not entirely, overwrite the original meanings of an object, as considered in its origin by its creator(s). Further, as Bourdieu outlines (above) identifications of an object may develop and increase as they are encountered by new audiences, and the potential also exists for an archival handling of that object to retain this history of its development and
distribution. Canadian archivists Terry Cook and Joan M. Schwartz describe the capacity for archival documents to serve in these regards, and as “reflection of... the broader legal, technical, organizational, social, and cultural intellectual contexts in which the creator and audience operated”.(2002, 3-4) For audiovisual objects, unless the archive is able to collect the associated materials from its production, distribution and public reception, the archival object will only be able to retain this contextualisation in a sympathetic catalogue entry. How an archive performs in this regard determines the meanings (and contestations of those meanings) that are recorded over time. While the archive will still retain a determining power as to the contextualisation of a record by its selection of which materials to collect and associate with that record, such an approach could provide the record with additional, non-archival appraisals.
1.2 Classification of regional/national significance
Records within the collections of UK public audiovisual archives receive a classification as to their regionally-specific cultural status from the archive by which they are held. As was mentioned above the separation of region and nation within the UK is complicated by its being comprised in part by the three semi-autonomous countries of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. While each of these countries may lay claim to a distinct national identity backed up by varying degrees of governmental independence, the BFI's Collection Policy suggests that the activities of the NLSMIA and NSSAW are comparable to those of the regional English archives, all of which stand beneath that of the BFINA as it “collects material of UK-wide significance” (2011, 10). The critical question of what determines whether an object is of regional or UK-wide significance is left unanswered. The implication is, however, that if audiovisual material is held by a regional archive alone, and not also by the BFINA, that the material is of regional as opposed to UK-wide
significance. This inscription of a regional or national identity to an object, therefore, seems at least partially to emerge as a result of the overlap in remit between the BFINA and the of
regional\national archives: records will appear to be of regional or national significance depending on which archive’s collection they belong to. As the principal stage of classification within the collections of the UK as a whole, the attribution of regional or national identity prioritises the interpretation of these objects in this way. This may not have been intended by the original creator of the object, or have been felt to be relevant to its audience. Whether or not the catalogue entry for an archival record retains evidence of the object’s genesis and historical context, the consistent application of a geographical aspect to the identity of objects appears a significant act of (r)evaluation when applied to all audiovisual material located within a collection.
The distribution of non-fiction films produced by the Mitchell & Kenyon film company across two archives will help to illustrate this issue. This company, while based in Blackburn (in the North West), travelled around the UK in the first decade of the 20th century, filming a variety of
documentary scenes, such as work and leisure scenes, sporting occasions and public ceremonies. Their travels included the exhibition of these films, with bills geared toward local interest. Seven of these titles are located at the NWFA, while approximately 830 titles are held at the BFINA. The much larger collection of titles at the BFI is the result of a discovery of 826 original negative reels in two large barrels during building work in Blackburn, which were deposited at the BFINA in part due to the onerous responsibility of preserving such a large collection of early film reels.
Blackburn, while the remaining four are faked depictions of events concerning the Second Boer War (1899-1902). The titles at the BFI were filmed in many locations across the UK, including the North West. There seems to be no overriding consistency in the relationship between the content or the filming location, of a Mitchell & Kenyon film, and the particular archive in which it is
managed. Those Mitchell & Kenyon titles at the BFI enjoy a valorisation denied those at the NWFA, having been added to UNESCO’s UK Memory of the World Register in 2011. There is no compelling reason for those titles at the NWFA to have been excluded from this register, other than that they do not form part of the collection at the BFINA. However as a consequence of their arrangement, the titles at NWFA have been denied the national significance explicitly bestowed upon the BFINA’s titles.
1.3 Identity of a Region
The regional archives declare a consistent concern in their approach to acquisition: the maintenance of collections comprising in material made in or about their respective regions.1 Though a film or
collection of films may be considered more suited to a particular archive because of preservational concerns (as in the case of the tranche of Mitchell & Kenyon films, above), or donor preference, the collecting aim of the regional archives is clear. While the regional archives undeniably collect materials made or originating in geographically delineated areas, it is not evident that such regions should be considered sufficiently distinguishable as they are currently constituted, as to warrant the primary classification that they are “about” these regions. Political geographer John Agnew
remarks that “[t]he 'region' typically conjures up the idea of a homogeneous block of space that has a persisting distinctiveness due to its physical and cultural characteristics. The claim is that it exists 'out there' in the world, even if there is a prior requirement to think that the world is divided up in this way” (1999, 92).
At this point it is useful to make clear the relationship between the identity of a region and the regional identities applied and/or claimed by the people living in it. Finnish political geographer Anssi Paasi writes that the identity of a region consists in:
those features of nature, culture and people that are used in the discourses and classifications of science, politics, cultural activism, regional marketing, governance and political or religious regionalization to distinguish one
1See for example; “About the Archive,” East Anglian Film Archive, accessed 27 May 2017,
http://www.eafa.org.uk/about-the-archive.aspx; “About MACE,” Media Archive for Central England, accessed 27 May 2017 https://macearchive.wordpress.com/about/; North West Film Archive, accessed 27 May 2017,
http://www.nwfa.mmu.ac.uk/; “YFA and NEFA,” Yorkshire Film Archive, accessed 27 May 2017 http://www.yorkshirefilmarchive.com/yfa-nefa
region from others. These classifications are always acts of power performed in order to delimit, name and symbolize space and groups of people (2003,
478).
Correspondingly the regional identity of a people (which will be discussed further below) is held to refer to the “multiscaler identification of people with those institutional practices” (Paasi, 2003, 478). The activity of identifying either physical or cultural characteristics which may distinguish a delineated area reintroduces the problems described above of classification. The particular approach of London‘s Screen Archives (LSA) in engaging with this matter shall serve to illustrate these problems.
The LSA declares its primary purpose as to “represent and promote the moving image history of London as a region”, significantly describing its approach as “recognising that this history is inevitably inextricably interwoven with that of London as the UK capital but prioritising the city's local specificities over its national capacities” (n. d., 1). This attempt to classify the moving image collections it seeks to co-ordinate as having regional identity is notable in two regards. Firstly, that it indicates the institutional ideology of the LSA to actively present London as
a region rather than in any other way. Secondly, that the LSA holds that London's national activity
is divisible from its “local specificities”, and that it is desirable to separate the national and the local the presentation of London as a region. An identity for the region is assumed, though only through exclusion of some of those characteristics that most distinguish it from the other regions of the UK: its pre-eminence in national activity, as a centre of national government and administration and as the location of the majority of national organisations. Here, the issues of exclusion as an inevitable factor of regional classification, and the difficulty in distinguishing between national and regional significance seem especially apparent. If, as the quote states, London's history is undeniably characterised by its status as UK capital it cannot be a simple matter to distinguish that which derives from its capital status and that from its regional identity.
A record such as Topical Budget: The Cup Final, Wembley (1923), may submit to many different readings and will have differing significances in differing contexts. The film is a topical newsreel of the (national) FA Cup final, held at Wembley stadium (the national stadium), London, between West Ham, a London based team, and Bolton Wanderers, from Lancashire. The approach of the LSA to ascribe a regional significance pertaining to London to this record without reflection on the object's content (a national competition played in a national arena, between two teams from different regions), indicates prioritisation of some or all of the following facts: that this is “about” a location in London, that it features a London-based club and that the film is currently managed by a
London based archive (in this case, the BFINA). That it also features a club from the North West, and features the two clubs competing in a national competition has been given less importance through the decision to provide access to the record through the LSA’s online access portal. The record is not accessible through the online access portals of either the NWFA or the BFINA. Only through exclusion of the significance of this record to another region, or to the UK as a whole, does it appear possible to claim the record as relating to London as a region. Classifying the record as relating to London as region then serves to act as an expression of power as described by Paasi, above. London specificity (of team, location of events, or location of a record) has been asserted to the exclusion of its Bolton specificity or national subject matter, and despite the comparable
importance of those aspects in the content of the film. London specificity is being claimed despite the fact that the events depicted took place in London precisely because of its “national capacities” as home to national stadium. This contravenes the stated intent of the LSA to distinguish between London’s local specificities and national capacities. Further, this act reserves the record to those who approach it through the online portal of the LSA, inhibiting access to those who would approach it through consulting the online portal of either the NFWA or BFINA. Such a restriction then serves to limit the utility of the record to groups looking to use it and to limit the potential for contestation, through this limiting of access.
Classification of regions is attractive in much the same way as it is attractive to classify other objects and concepts: in trying to establish an order on the world around us. It is also the case that the division of territory into regions is how people tend to think about the world (Agnew, 2012, 2). Historian J. F. Standish posited a common approach to how territories come to be seen
regionally when describing a model for the regional governance of England. While it privileged “natural geographical regions”, his proposed English regions had historical precedent in Medieval Kingdoms (Standish, 1966, 65) (see Wessex and the WFSA, above). Indeed Standish’s proposal shows a high degree of correlation to the regions covered by the regional archives, even going so far as to recognise London as deserving of the status, despite lacking the geographic character (1966, 65). The arrangements differ only in that Standish considers the South West as part of Wessex (more in keeping with its historical boundaries) and considers both counties of the North East – County Durham and Northumberland – to form a region with Yorkshire. Coincidentally, NEFA (which covers County Durham and Northumberland) partially merged with YFA in 2012, maintaining a separate staff, but operating a unified digital access portal.
views of the composition of England invites reflection on how historical practices of geography influence subsequent views as to the appropriateness of contemporary arrangement of regions. However it is important to note that the regional audiovisual archives within the UK were established in a piecemeal manner, without any coherent strategy. Film archive scholar Heather Norris Nicholson highlights the mixture of individual determination and governmental efforts that led to the development of the various regional archives (2001, 153). It was not until the
establishment of the Film Archives Forum (now Film Archives UK) in 1987 as the body
representing the public sector archives that efforts began to be coordinated. By this point only two – in East Anglia and in Scotland – had been formed. Three more, in North West England, Wessex, and Yorkshire followed in the years immediately after. By 2000 the Film Archives Forum was still calling for the development of governmental strategies to “complete the network” of regional archives (2000, 2). The UK Film Council2, created by the UK government to promote the film
industry and develop film culture, echoed the calls of the Film Archives Forum later in the year (2000, 23). While a regional or indeed a regionally-comprehensive approach to collecting audiovisual material may not have been intended by the early pioneers of sub-national regional archives, the strategy became established. Paasi points to the relationship between the historical practices of geography and subsequent administrative approaches. Regions result from the “formal or functional classifications of empirical elements […t]he resulting ‘regions’ […] show the power of geography in shaping the spatial imagination and spatial action” (Paasi, 2002, 804). Though historical conceptions of geography may influence how areas come to be both perceived – with significant consequences for how they may be governed – newer approaches within geography attempt to capture greater nuance in the classification of regions.
Political scientist Howard Elcock provides a system of classification which helps to distinguish between the different types of region: Definite, Contested, Marginal and Functional. These classes are distinguished by the degrees to which cultural identities within them have coalesced and can be seen as unitary. As these senses of cultural identity diminish from class to class all that remains of their regional character is their functional status (Elcock, 2003, 87-88). Such a view is useful to this discussion in a number of ways. Firstly, it would support any analysis which indicated the existence of regionally specific cultural identities corresponding to the regions and nations of the UK by allowing for discontinuity in the strengths of such identities. Secondly, it
2 The UK Film Council existed between 2000 and 2011, at which point it was abolished, with its responsibilities passed
highlights that regions can have a functional existence in the absence of any strong cultural identity. Audiovisual archives in the UK could still help to constitute their regions functionally, despite the lack of any correlation between their collections and identities in their regions. Thirdly, they restate the centrality of classification in evaluating regions. As with its application in archives, the
classification of regions may be useful as a system of arrangement, but it does so at the expense of detailed and pluralistic knowledge of the regions themselves, privileging the ontology used by the classifier, and their usage of it. Derrida’s critique is not restricted to the operation of classification within an archive (Brothman, 1999, 65-66). Classification’s ability to convey a meaning while precluding others, is as relevant to regions as it is to objects.
1.4 Personal and Public Identities
Unlike objects and regions, people are not passive in the processes which form their identities. This license enables them not only to play a leading role in the constitution of their identity, and in the identity of groups to which they align themselves, but also to react to the identities applied to them externally. Jenkins describes how we see ourselves – our social identification – as “the emergent product” of “the internal and external moments of the dialectic of identification”, which never fully resolves (2000, 7-9). Internal moments relate to how we identify ourselves (as individuals, or in groups), while external moments derive from the identification others make of us (again, as individuals, or in groups). Likewise we attempt to classify others, in much the same way as we do with objects and regions: through the assertion of similarity and difference. As internal
identifications and external classifications may vary in relation to the same person or group, a number of states are possible over time. External classification may be roughly equivalent to the internal identification, and reinforce it; may operate attractively, whereby the external and internal views differ, but subsequently morph into shared agreement; be accepted as legitimate, in
recognition of authority; be internalised, as a result of force; or be resisted, while still being recognised as the classification being denied (Jenkins, 2000, 21). As with objects and regions, classification of people is still intimately involved with power. As a model in which an individual or group identification never becomes fully established they remain resistant to the classificatory power described by Derrida’s as held by the archive in its classification of objects and more in line with Bourdieu’s contestations over the monopoly of power.
as described above it is also important to consider how the actors involved consider the process and their motivations to so act. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall highlights what may be regarded as an essentialist theory, relating to the ontologies of peoples and places. “In common sense language, identification is constructed on the back of a recognition of some common origin or shared characteristics with another person or group, or with an ideal, and with the natural closure of solidarity and allegiance established on this foundation” (1996, 2). A principal attraction of such a characterisation is that it readily allows for third parties to classify non-contingently. It does not require agreement from the classified, indeed, in the case of people and groups, believes it to be irrelevant, though it may be received in the in the above described ways. This of course, is the only method for an inactive entity, such as an object or area, to receive an identity. As such, its character is archival in nature: it seeks fixity and arrangement of a world and offers an ontology to support it.
Hall describes a second account, which operates at the level of the self-identifying individual or group, and sees their identification as a “discursive approach... a construction, a process never complete – 'always in process'” (1996, 2). While this second view of identification affords individuals and groups greater freedom in asserting their identity or identities, it
simultaneously weakens the notion of what an identity constitutes. Instead, it becomes non-essential and contingent, harder to establish as a classification. Recalling Ketelaar's observations above on community memory, a community is both strengthened by this contingent reading of identity, affording it liberty to develop its identity, and weakened through finding this liberty curtailed by the need to be in agreement with dominant classifications of records and regions it claims relation to. As Hall writes regarding this second account, “[t]hough not without its determinate conditions of existence, including the material and symbolic resources required to sustain it, identification is in the end conditional, lodged in contingency. Once secured, it does not obliterate difference.” (1996, 2-3)
It is important to recall in this discussion the centrality of difference to the question of classification. As a process of definition, classification (of an object, or a region, or a person) places a marker which declares what something is in relation to the things it is therefore not. It establishes boundaries between the permissible and the non-permissible. While Hall is correct in characterising the “discursive approach” as one in which self-identification is fluid and nuanced, the activity of self-identification within this approach persists in the establishment of difference, of a declaration of what makes a person or group identifiable as distinct, to the exclusion of other persons or groups.
Distinction and exclusion become harder in the classification of regional identity as a result of social developments. As populations become increasingly migratory the areas an individual may live in and elect to identify with become more numerous. The ascription of (essentialist)
classifications to an area also becomes more imprecise as homogeneous distinctions are
undermined by both the arrival of new populaces with differing cultural backgrounds and practices and the dispersal of prior populations. Hall considers these developments as an aspect of
globalization(1996, 4), which political theorist Benjamin R. Barber proposes has instigated two oppositional trends. The first operates as a strengthening of cultural distinction, based on “renewed tribalism” of a people against others. When applied to an area, this essentialist reading emphasises distinction and excludes those within that area who maintain a differing identity for themselves. The second posits a “postmodern commercial identity rooted in consumption that sees women and men as clients and consumers of economic, technological, and market forces that demand
integration and uniformity”(Barber, 2001, 58). With reference to the two accounts of elective and contingent identity discussed above, we may consider “tribalism” to correspond to the essentialist account, while the “postmodern commercial identity”, one that refutes an emphasis on essentialist geographical distinction, instead appearing to offer the opportunity to perform fluid
self-identification through the performance of contingent choice within the market.
The association of people from specific places as having distinct cultures is an essential aspect of the tribalist view. However, it is not restricted to views suggesting conflict between cultures. As sociologist Bella Dicks highlights, historical conceptions of culture, in which cultures and cultural objects are considered hierarchically have given way to more egalitarian models such as multiculturalism (2004, 27). Multiculturalism, while more permissive, remains founded on an ontology that sees the cultural practices of people as classifiable based on their regional heritages as opposed to their current regional location. In this view, cultures are a product of regional heritage, but they may be pluralistic in contemporary practice: several heritage cultures can exist concurrently in the same region.
1.5 Heritage and identity in the audiovisual record
Both Dicks (2004, 133) and Estonian ethnologist Kristin Kuutmu (2009, 6) emphasise the contemporary nature and purpose of heritage; while heritage concerns the past, its identification with people is intended to establish a form of ownership over “cultural objects, sites or practices” (Kuutmu, 2009,6) which will serve them in the present. Individuals and groups may thus lay claim to cultural objects – or have those classified as applying to them externally – through the control of
heritage.
Regional archive collections themselves are useful sources for the tracking of the change in cultural practices over time. Nicholson proposes the view that the content of audiovisual archive records provide evidence as to these changes in practices, as the material “attests to the patchwork of local, regional, and global links that existed at earlier times. Moving imagery also points to the uneven erosion of regional differences across space, time, and socioeconomic boundaries”
(Nicholson, 2001, 153). On this reading, such imagery serves to document change while also providing a potential source of cultural identification to communities who may either oppose or celebrate these changes over time. Imagery which depicts regional variance over time therefore exhibits the potential to be interpreted by groups who would draw differing conclusions from its content. Such regional collections offer records with which those electing to “tribalism” can claim a threat to the continuity of the essentialist identity of a region, while also providing material to the market-orientated elector, picking and choosing from records. While Barber uses his description to identify the extreme trends of “Jihad” and “McWorld” (2001, 58), the characterisation serves to indicate how divergent and oppositional views may develop in response to the same changes in cultural practice visible in the heritage record of a region.
While a regional collection may provide the kind of valuable testimony that Nicholson describes, and succour to those groups keen to find examples of change (to the disappointment of tribalists) the organisation of collections by region will inhibit recognition when cultural practices do not correspond to those boundaries, with evidence to them stored across various archives. One such example of a record is to be found in the collection of the NLSMIA. Pakistani People in
Scotland (c.1960) shows young schoolchildren learning to write Urdu in Glasgow and the
attendance of a mosque by the Muslim community. A digitial copy of the film is viewable on the online access portal of the NLSMIA, alongside its catalogue entry. Contextualising text is kept to a minimum: individual shots are described on the basis of what can be seen. However the sidebar links allow you to navigate to ‘Related Films’ (seemingly on the basis of the ‘Subject’ classification of all films within the collection), all of which concern religion in the 1960s: Mission Picnic
(1963), Consecration of Bishop James Ward (1960), In Thy Hands (1976) amongst others. The ‘Related Films’ contain no other records which feature British Pakistani communities (amongst the NLSMIA collection these include television documentary Ethnic Minorities (1982) and director Ken Loach’s Ae Fond Kiss (2004)). Pakistani People in Scotland has thus been classified in such a way that it is not situated within a narrative of immigration and cultural diversification (positively
