Imagined archives: transatlantic conversations about the Read collections

One archive, two institutions, multiple connections. Join a conversation about the possibilities for dispersed archives in the digital age.

How do dealers and executors shape archival collections? How does digitisation and digital reunification reshape archives? If we privilege content over context does something get lost in the metadata?

Co-hosted by the Universities of Victoria and Leeds, this conversation will talk around the exciting possibilities and interesting questions sparked by international collaboration and digital interventions into dispersed archival collections.

Speakers

Ruth Burton (AHRC-RLUK Professional Practice Fellow, University of Leeds)
Heather Dean (Archivist & Associate Director, Special Collections, University of Victoria)
Matt Huculak (Head, Advanced Research Services & Digital Scholarship Librarian, University of Victoria)

Our speakers come to the Herbert Read collections with slightly differing perspectives. They will talk about current, potential and imagined projects and will try to unpick some of the knotty issues surrounding physical and digital collections.

These are conversations that are occurring across the sector and they look forward to hearing about your own experiences and ideas during the Q&A.

About the archives

The case study for the conversation is the archives of Sir Herbert Read (1893-1968), held at both the University of Victoria (British Columbia, Canada) and the University of Leeds (UK).

Read was a poet, literary critic, art critic, historian, publisher, editor and educationalist who significantly influenced culture in Britain, Europe and the United States in the twentieth century. He wrote prolifically about art, literature, education and anarchism, and his archives reveal a vast international network of cultural contacts.

In addition to notebooks, manuscripts, photographs and personalia, the archives hold a wealth of correspondence from writers, artists, philosophers and thinkers, including T.S. Eliot, Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Naum Gabo, Ezra Pound, Bertrand Russell, Henry Miller, Carl Jung, Kathleen Raine, and Graham Greene.

With the incoming correspondence largely split across two institutions, and the outgoing correspondence dispersed internationally, one question this conversation will ask is: what are the implications and possibility of bringing some of these letters together?