There is a door on the top floor of Murray Health. It is a door to different worlds - to the world of mining unions in the North East of England from the late 1800s to the 1990s; to the life of a BBC broadcast journalist travelling the news hotspots of the world; to the public policy work of a renowned film producer in the House of Lords, London; in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century; to the academic life of a social and economic historian who escaped Nazi Germany as a child to become a leader in his field in the second half of the twentieth century. The building blocks of these worlds within our Library Special Collections are the records created and left by the people who lived those lives, giving us the opportunity to see and understand them today. 
It is too easy to say that archives (often described by critics as ‘dusty archives’!) are a waste of time and money and tell us nothing, and that nobody is interested. Evidence from the media and personal experience tells a different story, of a keen community and personal interest in what archives can tell us about the past and about ourselves.
We can understand who we are as a community and our place as individuals through what we remember,
and through the stories and objects which are left for us.
A visit to an archive can be a visit to a particular time, community, place, or life.
For example, our mining collection health & safety registers provide information on the injuries of named miners giving us a clearer picture of what health was like for miners working underground, and the very real dangers they faced day after day. The minutes of union meetings give us information on wages and welfare and the challenges faced by actual families, and photographs and membership records provide a window into life in the unions.
More than this, community memory and personal memory are bound together - we are part of continuous communities stretching from the past into the future. Our personal memories stretch back to people, things and events now gone, but not forgotten, and the stories told us by previous generations take us further back through time. Archive records illuminate these memories, make them real, provide evidence, and often reveal things we didn’t know or had misunderstood.
In taking archive information and records into the community at heritage events, we have seen people experience a variety of thoughts and emotions. We have been with people moved to tears by an index entry which gave them closure on an event from years before. We have watched people passionately arguing about the rights and wrongs of a strike long since ended but still alive in local communities and families. We have seen peole sharing the experience of loss of community in the lives of families, and appreciating the things which have got better in the way we now live. We have seen the challenge of researchers discovering that they need to refocus their research as the evidence from the archives shows a different picture from the one they thought had been true.
Archives, even though they have been created by a particular person, group or from a particular point of view, are windows, or doors, into the past or into aspects of the present which we have not personally experienced. They can help us to understand our lives and they can influence our future.
All this and more. Material from the past is preserved in the hope and belief that it can illuminate the way we live now.
…those words in THAT voice are part of the soundtrack of my life. Watching the
television news from the 1980s through to the 2000s, I would see Kate Adie reporting from around the world, her presence underlining the seriousness of a situation and her words helping to make sense of it. Now I am engaging with Kate Adie’s work afresh, as I begin the process of cataloguing her archive, which is held in her hometown at the University of Sunderland.
If you haven’t encountered her work, Kate Adie is a British journalist who was the Chief News Correspondent of BBC TV news from 1989 to 2003. She is particularly known for her reports from disasters and conflicts, including the 1980 Iranian Embassy siege and the Tiananmen Square student protests in 1989, as well as wars in the Gulf and the former Yugoslavia. Her reputation for reporting from areas of conflict also permeated broader public consciousness, evidenced in the collection by a number of newspaper cartoons riffing on the idea that having Kate Adie turn up was a signal that a situation was a serious one.
This isn’t a neat institutional archive with ordered series, but a personal collection that reflects a life being lived: a ticket for a Sunderland football game might sit alongside a BBC assignment, notes for a speech at a charity event with the proceedings of a conference on journalism in conflict. That’s part of the joy of this particular archive, but also a professional challenge as I work to make it navigable by others.
The starting point, and my main focus for the year ahead, is to produce a catalogue that makes the collection accessible. It’s a piece of work made possible through Archives Revealed, a partnership funding programme between The National Archives, the Pilgrim Trust and the Wolfson Foundation to ensure that significant archive collections, representing the lives and perspectives of all people across the UK, are made accessible to the public for research and enjoyment. Two months into the project and I can already see that there is a wealth of material that will be of interest to students and staff here in the University, as well as to local communities in Sunderland, and to groups, such as veterans’ associations, further afield.
We’re also planning digital packages of material that support engagement with the richness of the collection. Drawing upon Kate Adie’s reporting from Libya, for example, we have the opportunity to draw together recordings of her news reports and the handwritten notes on which they were based, together with souvenirs and artefacts collected during her time on assignment. We have the contemporary reaction to that reporting from the Government, newspapers and public, as well as Kate Adie’s later reflections in speeches and public lectures on the experience of reporting conflict, ideas of impartiality, and the practice of journalism.
I am really excited about the challenge ahead. Do check back over the coming months for updates on the progress of the project and as I share a few of my personal highlights. If you are interested in knowing more about the Kate Adie collection or would like to discuss a future visit, please contact us: specialcollections@sunderland.ac.uk.