Collecting OtherwiseCollecting Otherwise

Based on the ‘artist rider’, which meets the needs of performers in the period around a performance, the Archival Care Rider aims to provide a method of care for the archive around the archival acquisition process. This proposal is the work of the Archival Care Rider cell, namely Michael Karabinos, Harriet Rose Morley, Hetty Berens, Ernst des Bouvrie and Setareh Noorani, with additional contributions from Mayim Frieden and Lidewij Tummers.

The Archival Care Rider (ACR) is a tool that can be used to tilt the axis of the archival process, specifically the period around and after acquisition. With the Archival Care Rider, we seek to reposition the roles of creator, donor, archivist and user by providing a method of care for the archive that can be practically applied by members of the institution and the surrounding community. The Archival Care Rider is the result of the efforts of the Collecting Otherwise working group at the Nieuwe Instituut. Collecting Otherwise is one of the research projects currently being developed by the Nieuwe Instituut as part of the Rethinking the Collection initiative and under the umbrella of Disclosing Architecture. Collecting Otherwise proposes to read the collection and the practice of collecting and archiving from a perspective in line with current social changes.

It does so by focusing on the development of alternative methodologies for the acquisition, classification and distribution of cultural heritage. One of these alternative methodologies is the Archival Care Rider, which aims to gather additional information about the donated documents, to create archival spaces where multiple voices about the sources can coexist, to offer co-constituted ideas about the care and maintenance of the archive, and to underline its present and future relevance. The Archival Care Rider allows us to rethink and redimension the phases of acquisition.

Archival networks are extensive and intersect between people, stories and historical events, contemporary social contexts and material content. We therefore understand care as a concept and practice that extends through and between the archival material, the people who work with the material, those who have been the custodians of the archives, the narratives referenced within the archives, and much more. We can use the definitions of care in relation to archives as expressed by Caswell and Cifor, who state that care “stresses the ways people are linked to each other and larger communities through webs of responsibilities” (2016, p. 28), and that through the act of archiving “the archivist enters into a relationship of care with the record creator in which the archivist must do her best not only to empathise with the record creator, but also to allow that empathy to inform the archival decision-making processes”.

The Archival Care Rider is based on the concept of an artist’s rider – the technical and logistical needs of an artist before and during a performance. Sometimes, this rider is written with an artist in mind – assuming the authority to describe the care needed for them. Our group sees that archives also need care, and questions can be asked of archivists, donors and users about the technical and logistical needs of the people around the archives, and of the archives themselves. How can an archive be cared for? How can the institution look after the donor, and ensure that their needs and wishes are met?

Our first case study, whose acquisition process we use to rewrite the institution's active acquisition policy, is the Vrouwen Bouwen Wonen (VBW) network. Although based in Amsterdam, this network has been active throughout the Netherlands since the 1980s. By hosting this archive, created by a diverse and dispersed group of women, the Nieuwe Instituut can begin to redress the gender imbalance in its collection and change the narratives and perspectives of Dutch architecture in the late 20th century.

Through this case study we will explore the theoretical foundations of the Archival Care Rider and incorporate it into a new active acquisition policy for the Nieuwe Instituut. Traditionally, archival institutions can acquire archival collections through passive donation, where donors seek out the institute as a space for archival disposition, or the organisation can actively acquire by engaging with and identifying potential donors through an outreach policy. For us, however, the term ‘active acquisition’ does not refer to who finds whom – whether the donor finds the Nieuwe Instituut or the Institute finds the donor – but rather to how the donation process proceeds after the initial contact has been made. By ‘active’ we mean a deliberate acquisition policy in which the institute is actively involved with the donor throughout the archival process. This policy, and with it the Archival Care Rider, is necessary to provide a framework for how the institute should proceed with such outreach to architects, networks, communities and other archival creators in relation to the collection of their material. Structuring the active acquisition policy within the Archival Care Rider is a choice, but one made with multiple actors and concepts in mind. For the benefit of the various actors involved in the process from archival creation to archival use, we see ‘care’ in all its forms as indispensable.

Archivists, records creators, donors and users are all central to the Archival Care Rider. For this reason, part of the theoretical underpinning of this work comes from the concept of the Community of Records. The transitions between these actors, and of the document from ‘record’ to ‘archive’, are fluid and require a continuum in understanding of the collections acquired under the Archival Care Rider. Finally, the Archival Care Rider is heavily influenced by notions of radical empathy and a feminist ethics of care. Through these concepts, we will explore our first case study and the more general aspects of the Archival Care Rider as they can be implemented in an active acquisitions policy.

Works cited:

Caswell, Michelle, and Marika Cifor. “From human rights to feminist ethics: radical empathy in the archives.” Archivaria 81.1 (2016): 28.