Revisiting Archive Collections: Developing Models for Participatory Cataloguing

Against the backdrop of a flurry of legacy projects linked into the 2012 Olympics this article takes the work being done by the archive participants of The Mandeville Legacy project in the South East Region as a way of appraising the recently developed Revisiting Archive Collections (RAC) cataloguing methodology. In order to look at the way that this participative approach to cataloguing has developed, the article first reflects on some of the core professional assumptions that archivists hold about the ‘cataloguing voice’—that it should be single, neutral, informed, anonymous—and considers the way that some recent archive theory and practice has begun to qualify these previous certainties. The development of the Revisiting Collections model, first for museums and then for archives, is then described. Finally, the article summarizes and evaluates the work of the five South East Region record offices which have used RAC over the past 18 months. Each office worked with groups of disabled people to look at selected records reflecting the historical treatment of disability; and then sought to capture the responses and contributions which these generated and to incorporate them within catalogue descriptions.