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[Vasundhara Mathur] Our first speaker is going to be Rosemary Grennan. Rosemary is a member of the MayDay Rooms Collective, an archive dedicated to the history of social struggles, resistance campaigns and experimental culture. The main work of MayDay Rooms consists in connecting historical materials with contemporary political struggles through collaborative education and research, digitisation and free distribution. Rosemary is interested in developing platforms and practices which aid different forms of collective engagement with historical material. She has recently been working on a collaborative online repository of political ephemera called Leftove.rs. She is also the co-founder of AGIT. Sorry if I didn’t say that right. A residency space in Berlin focusing on social movement, history and culture.

[Rosemary Grennan] I think I’ve never seen my Google slides so big. So apologies if there’s any mistakes. Thank you very much for having me. I’m really excited to be on this panel with such wonderful speakers and projects as well. I’m from an archive called the MayDay Rooms which is based in London, and I’m going to talk a bit about our own archival practice before going on to speak about a project called Leftove.rs, which is our digital project.

Is this how I do the ... yeah. So, MayDay rooms is an archive of social movements, mainly from the post-war era in Britain, although we have some international collections as well. And we generally represent the sort of anti-authoritarian left within British social movements. Our collection covers anything from workers’ struggles to women’s liberation to anti-racist struggles, prison resistance, peace and anti-militarisation campaigns, anti-globalisation and environmental movements as well. And this is just a sort of snapshot of some of our material. So MayDay Rooms is an, we are an archive but we have a remit to connect our historical material to contemporary struggles. So we don’t see the archive as somewhere where things go to necessarily be historicised or movements to die, but something that should be an active resource in the present.

And I just wanted to highlight this quote from the historian Peter Linebaugh in his book ‘The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day’, in which he writes about archiving at the MayDay Rooms. And he donated, amongst other things, a collection called NEPA News, which is the New England Prisoner Association, which was a newspaper produced by incarcerated people at Attica Prison in upstate New York. And this is why he’s referring also to George Jackson in this quote. So he says: ‘In our day, the traces of our radical movements are being thrown into rubbish pits, as state-sponsored “austerity” demands the commodification of every inch of space, and with sinister intent destroys the evidence of our past, its joys, its victories. Clear out the closets, empty the shelves, toss out the old footage, shred the underground press, pulverise the brittle, yellowing documents! Thus neoliberalism organises the transition from old to new. They must silence alternatives. We do not want the voice of George Jackson to be silenced. His words still eloquently describe a desirable, a necessary programme.’ And I thought that that really sort of sums up some of the ideas of the founding of MayDay Rooms.

So MayDay Rooms was founded in a context of the austerity cuts that started in 2010, where you see the enclosure of many kind of community libraries and collections. But also in the context of the squatting laws that came in in 2011, where a lot of sort of more social centres – which are really incubators for, and like preservers of, collective memories of movements – start to, yeah, shut down. And so we really thought, in this context of enclosure and how, kind of, cultural, local and kind of political movement histories are preserved, not through necessarily official institutions, but through these spaces, that it was very important for us to have a building for the collection that we were building. And not only just a building, but a building that is also part of that movement. So although MayDay Rooms forms a large part of the building as the archive, we also house a lot of different other organisations and something called the Building Collective, which goes from June Givanni’s PanAfrican Cinema Archive, we have civil liberties monitoring organisations, we have trade unions, we have radical research groups, we have migrant rights organisations. And it was really important that that archive sits within a context of that kind of ongoing struggle as well. So it’s not something that is separated from that.

I wanted to talk about three things in relation to our archival practice, which I think are key before going on to this project. So we, we’re very dedicated to the idea that, in relation to preserving these movement memories, that, the, of the primacy of use and open access. So we want people to come. You don’t have to have an appointment. We want you to handle that material. We want you to reuse that material in your campaigns. We want to, but also build spaces for people who don’t necessarily always come to archives as well. It’s not just for researchers, it’s for campaigners, it’s for activists. And this is a youth programme that we’ve been doing recently, which Lamya Sadiq will be here tomorrow presenting as well. And that was really trying to bring in younger people to the archive to think about how they archive and engage with their own histories.

The other is that none of us are actually trained archivists. And again, that’s sometimes a blessing and a curse. But it means that we can make up our own systems and ways of doing things. And so we also like to get people to kind of get involved in that as well. So we run scan-a-thons, we run cataloguing sessions, we try and build systems that reflect the material that we hold, rather than sort of hierarchical, imposed structures of data. And we also invite a lot of social movement groups in to look at the archive, to be in conversation with the archive. And we also bring the archive sometimes to those struggles. So we’re often doing teach-outs. We can see here it is actually photocopied. We’re not that bad at, we’re not that disrespectful of the material. But this is the archive as a picket line.

But what I really wanted to talk about today is a project called Leftove.rs. But I wanted to introduce some of our approaches, because Leftove.rs as a digital archive and repository really comes about through thinking through those principles, but in a digital sphere as well. And I think often when people go about digitisation, they often just mirror the paper catalogue. You usually have a digitisation that sits on the catalogue but is just there to kind of give more information to that. Or often digitisation is also used for preservation, but we didn’t really have the resources to do that kind of digitisation. And it was also from an acknowledgement that open access doesn’t often mean open access.

So Leftove.rs is a shared online archive of radical, anti-oppressive and working class movements. So MayDay Rooms contributes its digitisations to that and sort of initiated the project. But it is by no means the main contributor. And we have around 19,000 digitised documents on there and they are all, you can download them as a PDF. You can read them. It’s not just information about a document. The document is very much there as well. And we have a number of different other contributors. So these can be smaller archives who contribute their digitisations. That’s been a great way of building networks with those archives. But also I think it’s a, it was an interesting process of looking at smaller online collections. I think the left has a really strong tradition of publishing and preserving its own history. And so we spend a lot of time going round the internet looking at where people have put small collections of journals online, and these websites often look like they’re from the 1990s and, are, yeah, a real testament to like, an enthusiasm and people’s real passion to kind of like, preserve and make that stuff available. So although Leftove.rs looks like a big work of centralisation, actually all of that material goes back to the sources that it came from.

And I’m going to talk a bit about those sources as well. Again, we really tried to develop metadata that speaks to that material as well. And it’s a sort of non-hierarchical system which links very much to other objects. Most of the fields are kind of hyperlinked. And we’ve also made up our own fields. My favourite is called ‘Tactics’. And so, and this we felt like, transforms it from being a repository to a resource. So we did a workshop with some people from London Renters Union, where we looked at every aspect in the archive where ‘rent strike’ is, is mentioned. So you can click on rent strike. It comes up with every document about rent strikes. And so we think that that’s a much better way for organising a kind of resource-based movement archive than, actually, probably author. Author is the least filled in field in all of this because it is all collectively, often collectively or anonymously authored as well.

As I said, you can download all the PDFs. You can read them. We think that’s very important. We’re not so interested in metadata about the object. We’re interested in the object itself. And as I said, it’s an archive of archives. So these are some of the contributors that we have, who’ve contributed their scans. But equally, we have other sources, and this is one of my favourite. This was a sort of anonymous torrent sent to me of the whole of the digitisations of the Black Panther Party papers. And someone had digitised that, and circulated it, and we OCR-ed it, put it up and put the metadata in. And that’s what I mean, this sort of like testament of like how people preserve and disseminate collective memory online is actually really important. And we’ve really been able to look at the sort of contours of that in, when working on Leftove.rs.

Another, I thought, interesting, opposite example of this is the digitisation of Spare Rib magazine that happened at the British Library. So they digitised all of Spare Rib. Excellent. Spare Rib is probably the most successful and long-running women’s liberation magazine. And so they digitised all of that, and that was available. And then when we left the European Union, the Copyright Directorate which covered that meant that that could no longer be available online as well. Now none of the British Library is available online, but that’s something else. And this is a sort of graphical representation of how they did that digitisation as well. And so they obviously as an institution had to really keep, they had to ask permission to digitise every single part of that as well. And, and now again, this is no longer online.

And I think it really brings up this idea of sharing data. So we host these archives, we build an archive around that. They also host their own archives. And it’s a way of smaller archives backing up each other’s collections and making connections between those collections as well. And I think it also shows the limitation of some institutional approaches. This is not necessarily an anti-institutional, kind of, I do believe that the British Library should exist. But it’s just showing how actually these kind of smaller initiatives that really have these principles at heart can really kind of lead the way in how to share and go around digitisation, which breaks from just mimicking a kind of other archive as well.

And then finally, I want to go to one of our core principles, I think, of how we have gone about building our digital archive. And this is from an archive based in Mumbai called Pad.ma, which stands for Public Access Digital Media Archive. They wrote a great text called ‘Ten Theses on Archiving’. I’m going to summarise it rather than read it out. But basically, this is a quote from the founder of the Cinémathèque française, Henri Langlois, who said ‘The best way to preserve a film is to project it’. And so we think that the best way to preserve collective memory in a digital sphere is, and also as a form of preservation, I really think this is a form of preservation. It’s not just, yeah, around, I think that’s a very key point. So we stand for use, the use value of those objects as a form of preservation. And actually on top of that, to be able to circulate that material freely, things that have been part of movements, and have previously been public, should remain part of those movements and public. And so we also think of dissemination as a form of preservation.