UNIT III
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THE ROLE OF A UNIVERSITY: LIVERPOOL
It is notoriously difficult to re-enter ordinary employment after foreign experience, however educative that may have been. Soon after my return to the UK I was appointed to the post I was to hold for the next 27 years, at the University of Liverpool. I am grateful to the university for having allowed me the space to develop the ideas crudely formulated in my earlier experiences. My post was based in the central administration, reporting to the Registrar, who in those days was a sort of chief executive, but I was contractually bound to join in the teaching needed for what was then the Diploma in Archival Studies. Beyond this, there was no clear brief. I set out to establish what became recognised for a time as a distinct academic unit, with a programme of research, teaching and operational services. There were then no models for such a thing.
The operational services began with records management, and this service has now operated sufficiently long in the university to be regarded as essential. In a period of severe funding cuts and radical restructuring, it remains a lively and viable operation, and indeed it is hard to see how the university could abandon it, even if it wished to. There are serious constraints in developing records management to a proper standard in a university. Chief among these is perhaps the impossibility of identifying relative costs; the expense of the central services is clear enough, but those operated by departments are not. This feature of the university appears to be surviving even the cost controls of the 1990s. Other difficulties are presented by the impossible maze of committees and boards, mostly serviced not by professional administrators but by academics taking it in turn; and by the labyrinthine complexity of the financial controls.
Throughout the 1970s university archivists - a small but growing band - looked for a role in the more general field of archives. The lack of a possible role was to prove the main difficulty at first. There was at that time no observable place for university activity in the area, because of the entrenched position of the local record offices. The problem was tackled by several studies, including one by the British Records Association, but no clear result ensued. In about 1970 the Liverpool Polytechnic (now the John Moores University) mounted a conference aimed at arriving at a national policy on collecting archives, but this collapsed when the British Library announced that it would not co-operate in any such scheme, and the proceedings were never published. The situation in Scotland was quite different. The general absence at that time of local archive services made it possible for large-scale surveys to be mounted from universities, and these have since developed into important central services. For good or ill, Liverpool was prevented from following the path that was taken by Glasgow.
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Gradually, however, a role for the university began to emerge. We took a strong part in helping local archive services to develop, and in co-ordinating them when they appeared. This collaboration worked best during the brief period of the Merseyside Metropolitan County, which is when the organisation now known as the Merseyside Archives Liaison Group was set up. We were active participants in the formation of the Specialist Repositories Group, which was a by-product of the Society's annual conference in 1977. It became increasingly clear that the territorial services could not provide for many large and important archives, not based in any particular place. Into this empty space several universities moved during the 1970s and 1980s. Though in a sense this movement has now been ratified and to a degree paid for by the higher education funding agencies, we still lack a national agreement that recognises areas of interest and seeks to provide for those still unsupported.
Liverpool's main field of activity began to be defined during the 1980s. The deposit of the Cunard archives some years before had set out one agenda, involving co-operation with what became the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, but this aspect could not be developed since it was already strongly supported by the local archives services. The deposit of Dr Barnardo's archives set a better path for development. When this was reinforced by the archives of the National Children's Home, the Fairbridge Association and Family Service Units, the university became an important centre for the study of social work with children. The achievement of this aim was tested in the international multi-disciplinary conference held in 1998.
In 1992 the archives unit was, as a result of a general restructuring, removed from the administrative sector and established as a department of the library. This change was ratified in 1995 by joining it to the library's special collections, so forming a much larger department. The new entity was further enlarged by the addition of a number of
contract staff paid for by the Higher Education Funding Council's non-formula funding. On the academic side the foundation of the Centre for Archive Studies in 1996 completed what we hope may be the basis for greatly extended action in both the development of the archival holdings, the reconstruction of archive training, and the opportunity for research.
(Cook M. Changing Times, Changing Aims)
