Digital Preservation at the Library of Birmingham: digital legacies of the Commonwealth Games and the Library

The recent Birmingham Commonwealth Games were an undoubted highlight of 2022, drawing huge numbers of visitors from across the world. The library became an operational hub for the City Council Games Team and a training venue for volunteers and other staff. Further to this, Archives and Collections recently received an archive documenting an associated project, as well two collections containing born-digital records, one relating to the Games, the other to the library itself.

In October 2020 the Birmingham-based Asian cultural organisation SAMPAD announced the awarding of a major grant by the Heritage Lottery Fund to curate two major photographic exhibitions alongside an extensive community engagement programme to coincide with the 2022 Games. From City of Empire to City of Diversity: A Visual Journey drew extensively on the photographic archive of the Dyche Studio. The project gathered an extensive digital archive documenting various aspects of the exhibition and outreach programme.

Dyche touring exhibition, Moseley Road Baths, 14 July 2022 [MS 5040 Acc. 2022/075]

The archive was recently transferred via a series of OneDrive transfers. Some of the digital photos were taken by professional photographers. Using applications like EXIF Tool I pulled out useful technical and structural metadata that can help us identify the rights information, date/time taken, and other technical information. However, many others were captured on a variety of mobile devices. File naming conventions vary, in some cases EXIF camera metadata has been stripped out and important contextual information lost, particularly where images may have been re-copied or converted from another format. Challenges aside, as a legacy record of project outputs the archive is extremely valuable, particularly the recorded memories of workshop attendees who had migrated here and contributed so much to the city during the decades after the Second World War.

Towards the end of September, we received a collection of largely digital photos taken by the Host City Volunteers recruited to greet and direct visitors during the recent Games, plus some digital film footage and training presentation slides. Most of the photos were captured on mobile devices, providing a street record of volunteers engaging with visitors across Birmingham. Others show volunteer recruitment and training sessions held at various venues.

Host City Volunteer Coordinators outside the Library of Birmingham, July/August 2022 [BCC Additional Acc. 2022/069]

The photos were deposited by a manager of the City Council Commonwealth Games Team towards the end of September. Similar issues to MS 5040 were identified – for example incomplete metadata and robustness of file formats. Some images comprise screengrabs from social media feeds. Duplicate images were also flagged and removed from the deposit post-transfer.

Metadata files were created detailing street location and subject matter of each image. The photos have been ingested into our Preservica digital repository system, where preservation monitoring can be undertaken more effectively – one file has been corrupted and cannot be rendered in the system, for example, whilst in other cases the characterisation process revealed various cases where file extensions do not match the technical characteristics of the images itself! For now, we can retain a duplicate copy of the archive outside Preservica, analyse the problematic files in more detail, and hopefully re-ingest content again later. The photographs capture the sense of energy and colour that was palpable here during those weeks, highlighting Centenary Square (where the Games Megastore was situated) as a focal area for volunteer activity.

In terms of the history of the Centenary Square site, a large collection of digital photographs and paper records came to us last year showing the construction of the Library of Birmingham a decade ago. The material will be added to the City Council archive and presents a detailed month-by-month visual record of construction works at ground level (taken by Perspective-I) and from above (by Commission Air) over the period 2010-2013.

Perspective-I photo of Library of Birmingham construction works, 5 January 2011 [BCCBCC/1/HF/D/1/3/8/1 Acc. 2021/019]

The images were taken using high-spec equipment – image metadata remains intact, image folders and storage devices clearly labelled, and image rights transferred to the Council as part of the contract. I have very recently got round to moving the images into Preservica. Although there have been no major technical issues, progress has been slow due to the large volume of material, amounting to around 30 gigabytes of data stored on 40 portable storage devices!

All these collections present their own innate challenges in terms of management and preservation, yet in all have intrinsic value in terms of documenting of recent heritage projects and events as well as the modern history of the city, making a persuasive case for the need to develop workflows and systems which ensure these resources survive and remain accessible for future generations.

Michael Hunkin, Digital Preservation Officer

Employment and Dyche

The Dyche collection is one of the archives’ largest photographic collections, containing approximately 10,000 photos and negatives. Due to the diverse heritage celebrated in the collection, it is believed that the photographs were commissioned in order for people to send positive images of themselves to close family and friends back in their countries of origin, showing their new, successful lives. This was as true for new employment opportunities as it was for big life events such as weddings and the birth of children. This is a trend we can see clearly within the Dyche collection, and something we aim to highlight in our upcoming exhibition starting next month, City of Empire to City of Diversity; a visual journey. In this blog post, I’ll discuss some of the images where celebration of employment is present and aim to give some potential context to the images.

Within the collection there are many photographs of African Caribbean nurses. These are an excellent example of celebration of employment opportunities as the National Health Service, being newly established after the Second World War, recruited many nurses from Jamaica and Barbados. This must have been a very exciting job offer to many of the women who came to the UK as it also would have required being trained to do the job if they did not already have training. Many women would have chosen to have their portrait taken in their uniform to send back to their family and inform them of their new employment. The uniform would have indicated a certain level of professionalism, again showing their family their achievements in the new country they had settled in.

African Caribbean man in bus driver’s uniform [MS 2912]

Project Update: ‘From City of Empire to City of Diversity: A Visual Journey’

Coronation Street star helps launch major engagement programme across schools in Birmingham highlighting the important contribution made by those who settled in the city from the Commonwealth in Birmingham.

Sampad South Asian Arts & Heritage, working in partnership with Birmingham Archives & Collections, the University of Birmingham and Historic England has launched an extensive citywide engagement programme for schools highlighting the important contribution made by those who settled in Birmingham from the Commonwealth. Twenty school partners across the city will host and explore a touring exhibition and classroom resources involving over 1200 students aged from 7-16.

The engagement programme is part of Sampad’s  ‘From City of Empire to City of Diversity: A Visual Journey’ which will culminate in a major exhibition at the Library of Birmingham in March 2022 ahead of the Commonwealth Games. The exhibition is currently being created by Sampad from The Dyche Collection, one of the most important photographic collections within Birmingham Archives featuring over 10,000 photographs documenting post-1945 migration.

The launch of the engagement programme at Selly Park Girls School in Stirchley was attended by the Lord Mayor of Birmingham Councillor Muhammad Afzal and Coronation Street star and Project Champion Lorna Laidlaw.

Lord Mayor of Birmingham Councillor Muhammad Afzal and Coronation Street star and Project Champion Lorna Laidlaw at the launch of the engagement programme. Image reproduced with kind permission of Sampad. .

Re-housing the Dyche Collection

Regular readers of the blog and users of our social media channels may have heard the good news that together with Sampad, we were awarded funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund for the project ‘From City of Empire to City of Diversity: A Visual Journey.’ One part of this exciting project will be the re-housing of the entire Dyche collection (MS 2912).  

The Dyche collection is made up of a variety of materials including an estimated 10,000 photographic prints, photographic negatives, bound volumes, ephemera, various props (including a fake tree stump!) and photographic equipment from Ernest Dyche’s studio. The collection is currently housed in standard archival boxes with very few individual objects in protective enclosures. Some objects such as the photographic negatives are in their original packaging. Fig 1. shows us a typical example of how the collection is currently housed.

Fig. 1. Current housing of MS 2912 photographic negatives in their original packaging in a standard archival box

How to start an archive project in lockdown

Portrait of a couple, n.d. [Ref. MS 2192-0160]

Starting any project during lockdown can be a daunting task but it can be even more complicated with an archive project such as the National Lottery Heritage Funded project; From City of Empire to City of Diversity: A Visual Journey. Part of this large project is to have an archivist catalogue the photography collection of Ernest Dyche whose two studios in Birmingham were used predominantly for portraits from the early 1890s – 1980s. I was hired to do this job and started work on over 10,000 photographs at the start of January, however, I started this remotely from Manchester with little access to the collection. For this blog I will write a guide on how to start and archive cataloguing project in lockdown based on my experience and the challenges I faced.

When starting out on a project without access to the materials it’s important to have a plan for getting access to at least some of the collection. This can take a lot of negotiation and planning from both the archivist and the team around them. For my project I was lucky that some of the archive staff that live in Birmingham were willing to take scans of photos for me, so that even though I couldn’t get an overall idea of the collection, I could start making some box lists and getting an idea of the range of photos I would be dealing with. Within a box list I can collect the vital information that will be used in the catalogue such as date and description of the photographs. With access to these photos I can start making steps towards the full cataloguing of this material as listing the items on excel in the first instance means I can upload the Excel spreadsheet to our cataloguing system, CALM, once I have created a catalogue structure.

From City of Empire to City of Diversity: A Visual Journey

You may have already seen the announcement in the November edition of our Birmingham Libraries and Archive Service e-newsletter, that a project is underway to document migration in Birmingham through the eyes of the rich and varied collections at the Library of Birmingham. The project ‘From City of Empire to City of Diversity: A Visual Journey’ was awarded a grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to curate two major photographic exhibitions and an extensive citywide community engagement programme to coincide with the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham in 2022.

Montage of black & white and sepia studio and outside portrait/group photographs showcasing images from the Dyche Collection [MS 2912].