MUSEUM ARCHIVES AS A CRITICAL POINT OF RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE: The UP Museums mark International Archives Day on 9 June 2023

The International Council of Archives (ICA) celebrates International Archives Day on 9 June 2023 as a commemoration of the date that the ICA was created under the auspices of UNESCO in 1948. The University of Pretoria (UP) Museum Archive and the Mapungubwe Archive both under the curatorship of the UP Museums join the global community to advocate for archives within the university museums.

The UP Museums joined the ICA in January 2023 as a means to grow their reputation as unique African archival repositories and to benchmark their efforts in professional archiving, source preservation, accessibility and research responsibility for university museum archives in higher education. During the first week of June 2023, the ICA will also celebrate their 75th anniversary with a series of webinars and the University of Pretoria will be well represented. The overall theme of this year is “bringing different voices to reflect on the ICA’s history opening and igniting discussions on its future and vision and celebrating with a spirit of cooperation”.

In line with the theme of International Archives Day 2023, the notable South African archivist Verne Harris was recently awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the Department of Historical and Heritage Studies in the Faculty of Humanities. Harris contends that archives are not neutral sources of information, and as a result, the inclusion of new voices into the archive is essential in order to safeguard cultural heritage, facilitate research, and ensure accountability and transparency.

Quoting from Harris, “Archival … work is work which stands responsible before the ghosts of those who have died in conditions of oppression, the ones being ghosted right now by oppressive power, and the ghosts of those not yet born. It is work that reaches insistently for the just society of our dreams.” In other words, the work of archives should be to listen to the ignored voices and bring these voices to light in order to safeguard and maintain tangible and cultural heritage. To do this university museum archives and other forms of institutional archives should prioritise source preservation, but also accessibility.

One of the aims of archives is to safeguard archival heritage, the archives that are part of the University of Pretoria Museums are working hard to make our records as accessible as possible. The Mapungubwe Archive holds archival records which date back to 1933 which form part of the contested history of Mapungubwe but also form part of the University of Pretoria’s institutional memory bank. Whereas, the UP Museum Archive also contains primary materials which are significant to the University of Pretoria’s institutional memory bank, with primary material from the artists whose works are part of the museum collections. The ultimate aim of these two relatively new archives is not only to preserve their primary or original contents but to make them accessible as widely as possible as part of the critical research infrastructure of the University of Pretoria. According to Ruby McGregor-Langley, the temporary museum archivist, “The museums run successful records management practices in all formats for enduring value to advance research services of both historical information and as curators of institutional records related to unique museum collections.”

The UP Museum Archives are aware that the Covid-19 pandemic has pushed people to consider hybrid models of working and as a result, there has been an increased demand for digitised archival materials. Both the UP Museum Archives and Mapungubwe Archive have transformed their digital strategy not solely digitising their archival content but making them more globally accessible on open curated platforms such as Google Arts and Culture. While this may still take some time and is a sustained effort, the UP Museums are devoted to traversing the digital universe and to date have digitized more than 11 000 archival records.

The museum archives are committed to making more archival resources available and accessible for research purposes in the future to ensure unique primary sources are used for research potential that is related to modern-day interests. As primary research resources both the Mapungubwe Archive and UP Museum Archive are rich research grounds for current avenues of decolonization, environmentalism, and gendered studies which are under-explored archival academic fields. The raw contents within both archives are ideally beneficial to transdisciplinary subjects such as law, history, archaeology, architecture, science, nature conservation, film studies, gender studies, heritage, information science, fine arts, and tourism, as well as museum and preservation studies.

The UP Museum Archives’ participation in International Archives Day and in fact, Archives Month for the whole of June, holds great significance. From an international perspective, this is beneficial for the University of Pretoria to be participating for the first time in the ICA’s 75th anniversary advocating university museum archives of which little is known to researchers around the globe and in sharing unique South African museum archives with the international community. By marking and participating in Archives Day, the UP Museum Archives and Mapungubwe Archives continue to demonstrate their commitment to the preservation of heritage, and the need to expand on the accessibility of archives to ensure museum archives are relevant to research infrastructure in higher education.

For further information browse the following websites:

https://www.up.ac.za/museums-collections/article/3103767/mapungubwe-archive

https://www.up.ac.za/museums-collections/article/3146901/up-museum-archive