By marking and participating in International Archives Day and Archives Month in June, 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.

The International Council of Archives (ICA) celebrated International Archives Day on 9 June to commemorate its creation 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, are part of the global community that is advocating for archives within university museums.

The UP Museums joined the ICA in January 2023 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, the ICA will also celebrate its 75th anniversary with a series of webinars, and UP will be well represented. The theme this year for the day and for Archives Month this June 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 this theme, notable South African archivist Verne Harris was recently awarded an honorary doctorate by the Department of Historical & 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.

To quote Harris, “Archival work 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 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 as well as accessibility.

One of the aims of archives is to safeguard archival heritage. The archives that are part of the UP Museums are working hard to make the University’s records as accessible as possible. The Mapungubwe Archive holds records that date back to 1933 and form part of the contested history of Mapungubwe, but are also part of UP’s institutional memory bank. The UP Museum Archive also contains primary materials that are significant to UP’s institutional memory bank, with primary material from 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 UP.

“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,” says Ruby McGregor-Langley, temporary museum archivist.

The UP Museum Archives are aware that the COVID-19 pandemic pushed people to consider hybrid models of working. As a result, there has been 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 take some time and is a sustained effort, the UP Museums are devoted to traversing the digital universe, and have digitised more than 11 000 archival records to date.

The museum archives are committed to making more archival resources available and accessible for research purposes in the future to ensure that 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 decolonisation, environmentalism and gendered studies, which are underexplored archival academic fields. The raw contents within both archives are beneficial to transdisciplinary subjects such as law, history, archaeology, architecture, science, nature conversation, 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, it is beneficial for UP 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 International 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 that museum archives are relevant to research infrastructure in higher education.

For more information, visit 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