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[What is an archive?]
The definition of archives is usually things that are unique. So, it’s items that exist only in one form, and if you suddenly lost that item, you wouldn’t have another one just to bring out. And that’s a big difference between archives and libraries, because if you think about a library, if you have a book in a library and you lose the book, you can buy another copy of it. I think people understand that. But with an archive, if you lose things, you can’t just replicate them with another one you have because you don’t have another one. So, archive material tends to be more unique.
There are some things that people, some archivists, aren’t very keen on like ephemera, but I’m a huge fan of ephemera actually. And that can be everything from newspaper cuttings to menus, and to some extent photographs as well. And these are things that can exist technically as multiples. Some archivists aren’t sure whether that counts as archives. I totally think it does because I think that those items can fill in gaps in the narrative where you don’t have other archive material to back things up and it’s really useful. So, I’m a big fan of things like that, and they do get used a lot as well. So that’s another positive for them.
But essentially that’s what an archive is. It’s a way of keeping files and information and a lot of what you see publicly, particularly the photographs and the pictures of menus and things like that. This is almost the tip of the iceberg. And what’s much more interesting is we’ve got an enormous amount of sort of files and information about how the business was run, going right the way back again to the beginning of the 20th century. Mostly there’s a little from before, but mostly from the start of the 20th century going forward. And this tells all the stories really, and it helps to back up our stories as well, because you can actually find the evidence, and that’s the point, really, in these unique files.