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Welcome to the third issue of The National Archives research enewsletter, which demonstrates the continued expansion of our research activities over the last six months.
A key aspect of our research agenda has been to build strong links with the social science community. In this issue we highlight the outputs of the research undertaken by five Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded doctoral students who recently completed three-month knowledge transfer placements at Kew. The interns worked on projects ranging from using digital resources to improve our understanding of eighteenth-century criminal law, to assessing the impact of the Freedom of Information Act; and from interpreting cases of neglect in Victorian England to analysing early twentieth-century Foreign Office correspondence. Add a project surveying aspects of national nuclear record collections, and you'll get a sense of the diversity of their work here.
In our news section we describe The National Archives' success in a number of funding bids: including three collaborative doctoral awards from ESRC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) with our partners, and receiving funding from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to undertake research into user requirements in Web Archiving.
Communicating this success has also been a priority - our inaugural 'Research Award' in February celebrated the high quality research being undertaken by staff from The National Archives; our joint event with the British Library on social science research into poverty enabled academic experts to demonstrate how they have used our collections in their work; and planning is well under way at The National Archives for the Fifth International Conference on the History of Records and Archives.
Caroline M Williams
Head of Research and Collections Development
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Making the links
Researchers have hitherto paid scant attention to the administrative context which produced a key set of records for the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century crime. Questions regarding the completeness and representativeness of Judges' Reports - held at The National Archives and used as the basis of many received accounts - have rarely been asked. Stephen Thompson's project ('Making the Links': Judges' Reports and the Old Bailey Online, c.1784-1830) sought to fill this gap by examining the links between individuals named in the record series HO 47 and the Old Bailey Online.
Stephen was supervised by experts at The National Archives, and his findings suggest that fewer reports on pleas for clemency were requested by the Home Office from the mid-1790s onwards, raising serious doubts about the extent to which HO 47 is representative of the pardon process. Future researchers, he argues, would benefit from assessing both sources in tandem.
Read more about Stephen's project |
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Assessing the impact of policy on academic research
In 2000 the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was passed in a highly publicised move towards more transparent and accountable government. The Act has significant implications for how The National Archives - as the official archive of the UK government - treats 'open' and 'closed' files transferred from departments. One particular consequence is that any information held by a public authority can be subject to an FOI request - even files shown as 'closed' in The National Archives' catalogue.
Amy Gibbons' project ('Assessing the impact of policy on academic research: the Freedom of Information Act 2000') examined one aspect of the FOIA - privileged academic access to 'closed' information - concluding that, although it has been widely assumed that the Act had repealed so-called 'Privileged Access Agreements', different arrangements persist across local and central government.
Read more about Amy's project |
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The world in action
Charlotte Hastings' internship project ('The world in action: Foreign Office Correspondence, 1906-1920') was part of a wider Foreign Office cataloguing project at The National Archives, which aims to transfer existing card index and correspondence files to a database. Charlotte's main research interest is colonial Africa, and during the project she worked on records in the Africa series in FO 367.
These records comprise negotiations between European colonial powers, such as France, Portugal and Germany, and are incredibly diverse. Only detailed cataloguing will make them fully accessible to researchers. Although Charlotte's research has found that the majority of the 1906 correspondence has survived (which is not the case with later years), many files were never added to the card index. Less than half of this Foreign Office material has been properly indexed, representing a hidden set of records of significant potential value to researchers.
Read more about Charlotte's project |
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Care and neglect
'Scandal' is a recurring theme in British history and welfare policy, and one which attracts a large amount of media attention. 'Welfare scandals' are not, however, a new phenomenon, as Samantha Shave discovered in her project 'Care and Neglect: Cases of Neglect in the Victorian Workhouse in England and Wales, 1834-1871'.
Before undertaking this project using the MH 12 records, it had been assumed that neglect was sporadic and straightforward (for instance, neglect to provide medical attendance); but it now appears that scandals were more frequent - and far more complicated.
Read more about Samantha's project |
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Nuclear policy and British politics
The National Archives holds a rich collection of material relating to civil nuclear energy policy. Elizabeth Rough explored this diverse and fascinating collection as part of her project ('Nuclear policy and British politics: changing debates about energy since 1945') which aimed to improve awareness of, and access to, civil nuclear records for researchers.
Her work involved scoping the current usage of these records and identifying the specific types of records held by The National Archives, and by external organisations and institutions, in order to establish the scope of existing data. The project demonstrates how nuclear records at The National Archives have barely been used by social scientists and historians, and has given us a clearer understanding of the types of records held by local and county records offices, universities and other institutional archives - information that has been fed back to the National Nuclear Archive, which is currently writing its collection strategy.
Read more about Elizabeth's project |
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CORRAL: UK Colonial Registers and Royal Navy Logbooks
Funded by JISC, CORRAL aims to capture the rich historical and scientific content produced by voyages of exploration by digitising a collection of ship's logbooks held at The National Archives. The logs of Robert Fitzroy, captain of HMS Beagle during Charles Darwin's famous voyage, are a notable example. The logbooks are a record of the daily activities of such explorers, but also of the weather they endured. They are a unique source of meteorological data, invaluable for the scientific community's knowledge of historic climatic change. CORRAL will run until 30 September 2009, by which time the team will have digitised every one of these documents - as well data from the archives of the UK Met Office (now jointly administered in Exeter by the Devon Record Office) - and made them available online. |
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I-CHORA 5, 1-3 July 2010
The National Archives, in partnership with University College London and the University of Liverpool, is organising the Fifth International Conference on the History of Records and Archives in London on 1-3 July 2010.
The conference will explore the theme 'Records, archives and technology: interdependence over time'.
Find out more about the conference and keynote speakers. |
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Research award
The National Archives' new annual Research Award - established in recognition of the most outstanding peer-reviewed article written by a member of staff - was won Dr Louise Craven for her article, 'Epic, group identity and the archive in the modern world'.
External judges Professor Michael Moss and Dr Andrew Prescott also commended runners-up Dr Daniel Gilfoyle (for his article on anthrax in South Africa, featured in our winter 2009 issue), Dr Adrian Ailes (for his paper on heraldic visitations) and Malcolm Todd (for his study on the application of archival methodologies to contemporary thinking about privacy). Louise presented her paper at an event hosted by Natalie Ceeney, Chief Executive of The National Archives, on 11 March 2009. |
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Collaborative doctoral awards
The National Archives and its partners have been awarded three collaborative doctoral awards by the AHRC and ESRC. The ESRC CASE award on the business of the Poor Law will be co-supervised by Dr David Green (King's College, London) and Dr Paul Carter (The National Archives). Dr Andrew Flinn and Dr Elizabeth Shepherd (both of UCL) will co-supervise a doctorate on archival theory with Dr Louise Craven (The National Archives). And Dr Andrew Wareham's (University of Roehampton) supervision of a doctoral project on the hearth tax will benefit from the expert input of Pete Seaman from The National Archives. |
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Researching poverty
In April, The National Archives and the British Library held a joint seminar on sources for the study of poverty in the social sciences. Speakers included records experts from both institutions, and Professor Pat Thane of the School of Advanced Study, Professor Peter Scott and Dr James Walker, University of Reading, and Richard Berthout of the Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of Essex. |
Web Archives:
now and in the future
The National Archives has recently won funding from JISC to undertake a study into how archived websites are collected and made available to users.
The study will take place in collaboration with the UK Web Archiving Consortium and aims to: investigate how UK web archives are delivered to users now, and how they might be delivered in the future; define the long-term historical and research value of online content in the UK; and look at different organisations that collect web archives, and their interests.
The project team is keen to involve users and potential users of web archives, so please email us if you would like to take part in surveys or discussions. |
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The National Archives, Kew, Surrey, TW9 4DU, UK
www.nationalarchives.gov.uk |
