Gerald Alymer Seminar at IHR, Senate House

23 Mar 2011

I recently attended the annual Gerald Alymer (a former President of the Royal Historical Society) Seminar which took place at the Institute of Historical Research (IHR), Senate House. The speakers included scholars of early records, teachers lecturing in the archive profession and palaeography, curators, PhD students and archivists. The main themes of the presentations included personal career histories of how individuals delivered teaching programmes to students, changes to the archival profession, a shifting focus away from transcribing early records and a Latin text, towards early modern records that do not require knowledge of Latin. This trend could potentially be problematic when our future generation of archivists take over in record office reading rooms: staff simply will not be able to assist researchers with deciphering the early records in their care.

A use of palaeographic skills can reveal context surrounding a record. For instance the type of 'hand' such as secretary hand can reveal who the clerk might have been or where they might have come from; clerks from other countries show very different writing styles in the history of early records.

A representative from the National Archives (TNA) made the point that administrative history is vital to the integrity of the record, something I am passionate about. Without a firm understanding of the past usage of a record in relation to its contemporary functionality; the interpretation of that record will be misguided. Take the Admiralty as an example, the entire governing body is a sum of its boards and sub-divisions which make up a functioning machine. Researching and locating records without consideration of this is comparable to navigating aimlessly and without an archival compass!

The sessions on the future of research for early records proved to be stimulating. The discussions regarding digital applications included textual modelling, geo-referencing and the spatial/geographical representation of data. Connected Histories: Sources for Building British History, 1500- 1900 is quite an innovative search facility to allow searching across a range of sources and seems to be the way forward for record search engines. This is to be released soon.

It would be interesting to conceptualise the NMM archive with regards textual modelling and spatial mapping of records. For example, the records of the Admiralty could be searched via a hierarchical, administrative design, where one could click on various boards. These would then reveal more categories with the actual record references provided at the end of the trail. The references could also be linked to digital transcripts or images available.  The possibilities are endless and, I think, very exciting.

Mike (Assistant Archivist)