Curatorial Director, Dr. Catherine Moriarty, made a presentation about research in the Design Archives at the University of Brighton Research Initiatives Awards Ceremony on Monday 4th April 2011.The event highlighted the wide range of research taking place across the university.

The text of her presentation follows.

I am pleased to have this opportunity to talk to you this afternoon about some of our research successes in the Design Archives. I particularly want to talk about research processes and the principles that underpin and shape what we do – and why and how we do it.

To describe the context briefly, the Design Archives is, quite simply, a group of archives about design. If you want to know more about what we have then you can find out a lot from our web pages. But it is also two other things – it is a group of people with specialist skills and shared values, and it is also a network, a network of research relationships that extend within and beyond the University.

What I want to describe is the way we use the collections we have as a jumping off point. In themselves they have a value although, as the University Insurance Officer will testify, it isn’t actually very much in financial terms. Rather, it is the quality of the research they provoke and the quality of the stewardship and interpretation performed by the staff, and the way we describe these processes that is where their real value lies.

Some of you may be watching the BBC2 series The British At Work. Here’s Kirsty Young in the first programme talking about some of our photographs. The researchers first contacted us last year because they had found the images they wanted to use from one of the online portals that describe our collections. Certainly, it is our work in digitising our material that has attracted significant funding in recent years, particularly from the JISC. Here is our page on the Archives Hub, which believe me, really is at the centre of great research, and you can get to detailed descriptions of each of our eighteen archives from here. We’re busy combining textual catalogue descriptions with images. This is an example of the record relating to a photograph album in the archive of the architect Joseph Emberton, and drilling down through the archive in this way unlocks unimaginable research possibilities.

And this is the soon to be released Mediahub which is a new portal delivering moving and still material from various sectors to the education community. This incorporates Design Archives material that was scanned last year as part of the JISC Images for Education initiative.

Those of you who have seen the British At Work programmes will know that it comprises mostly archive film footage and increasingly this is the way television programmes are being made. Indeed, the use of the BBC’s archive, and planning how to make their digital resources public is now a key remit of the Corporation. I sit on a committee that’s made up of cross-sector representatives debating digital futures and future learning and research environments, and it is our role in refining and debating archive processes, our role in policy-shaping, in peer-review and in being part of the discussion about the future of digital content, which is what really defines our work, and indeed, our reputation. Here I’d like to mention some of the conversations that have taken place with Professor David Arnold and his cultural informatics research team in recent years. This cross-University relationship has informed our work in all sorts of ways and is very important to us.

As I’ve described, it is best to think of the Design Archives as a platform for research and extending the ways it can operate as such is central to our strategy. The AHRC’s Collaborative Doctoral Award scheme is an example of a powerful mechanism for building stakeholders both in terms of the partners with whom you build relationships and for ensuring succession, in that younger researchers take forward work founded on the archives, they add to the ‘field’, and through their work achieve impact in all kinds of inspiring and interesting ways. Our current project is with the Chartered Society of Designers and this is our student’s research blog. As some of you know well, thinking about research paths and processes is a particular fascination of mine. Likewise, with the aim of developing our extended family, we nominated a Faculty Fellow last year, Dr Harriet Atkinson, and she too is busy publishing and promoting the archives, and extending our networks.

The archives we look after are those of individuals and organisations who had strong values about making the world a better place in the period of re-construction that followed the Second World War. This is important and our collections have a place in reminding people of the role of optimism and commitment for the long term good, rather than the short term-ism and retrenchment of the current time. Indeed, as a team, we believe that the quality of the way you do things and the relationships you build are really significant. For it is in these that the strength of one’s reputation rests. We have been working on this for a long time, we are not starting from zero, and we believe that true partnerships are not just marriages of convenience or opportunistic drives to secure funding. Here is the conservation blog that our Digital and Media Technician has launched recently and it epitomises the importance of taking the time to do things well.

The University has invested in us – as a resource and a staff team – and we have demonstrated our value by producing high quality research outputs. You can see the research portfolio pages of our team on the web site of the Centre for Research and Development – Professor Jonathan Woodham’s; Archivist, Sue Breakell’s, Deputy Curator, Lesley Whitworth’s and my own.  As well as these we have also, as I’ve described, brought in research funding from a range of sources, and last year we received probably the most significant award, recurrent funding from HEFCE’s Museum & Galleries fund to the value of £180K, which for us meant a great deal in terms of kudos and a great opportunity to extend our role, for it acknowledged in no uncertain terms the contribution of our work to the wider research community.

We, like everybody else, have worries about the future and recognise the need to be explicit about what we do, what we contribute to whom, and how we do it. We value the academic freedom that has allowed us to flourish. All research should be nurtured on this basis and any attempt to reduce it to quantitative terms, to lines on a spreadsheet, misses the point. Indeed, research leadership, I believe, is about setting an example of excellence and giving everybody involved in research processes an opportunity to contribute. Our administrator plays an important part in research discussion and project planning, and here are the Design Archives technical staff delivering research at the RIBA.

None of this would be possible without the endorsement to develop and run with ideas that we receive from Professor Jonathan Woodham, Director of the CRD and, particularly our Dean, Anne Boddington who has shown a trust in our ability as researchers, relationship managers, and project leaders without which our distinctive creative profile would not have matured in the way it has. This is an ethos that we value hugely, it is embedded in the University’s Corporate Plan, it underpins the way we do things, it is a powerful driver and incentive that, as I have said, builds an intellectual wealth, a research capital, that brings in rich dividends, be it recurrent funding, or strong support within and beyond our sector.

Catherine Moriarty
April 2011