CHAIR: Simon Côté-Lapointe

Michael Marlatt

In the Stacks but Rarely Behind the Desk?: the Disabled Archivist and the Medical Film Archive

Film has been used to document disability since the earliest days of the medium. Many were used as teaching aids in medical schools and as forms of mockery/entertainment. The importance of the preservation of audiovisual materials to study this history cannot be understated. The first question to ask is where are these films preserved? A few examples of such medical film collections include the Wellcome Collection, John Hopkins University, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and the National Library of Medicine. The second, and more pressing question is who are the archivists caring for this material? A 2021 salary and demographics survey conducted by the Association of Moving Image Archivists reported that 16 percent of respondents were moving image archivists who identified as having a disability, chronic illness, or are neurodivergent. Two percent identified as having either a physical or neurological disability. The ever-growing popularity of community archives have presented opportunities for more disabled voices in the archive than ever before. This presentation focuses on how the disabled perspective needs to be further implemented within institutional archives as well. This presentation uses the medical film collection as a pertinent case study as to why there is a need for more disabled film archivists in the field. How this material within medical film collections is preserved, catalogued, and even programmed not only benefits the disabled community but also archival researchers and medical professionals. The presentation will conclude with strategies on how to get more disability representation in partnership with the medical film archive. 

Natasha Kitcher

Archives and Accessibility: Researching a Forgotten Medium during a Global Pandemic

Researching a forgotten medium where archival sources are scarce, and digitised sources scarcer still, became insurmountably harder when coronavirus struck; archives closed, and researchers were forced to rely on limited access to physical documents or objects that were already digitised. Digitising more archival sources may seem a solution to the challenge of remote research, however we already know this process is costly and highly selective. Sources from local archive collections, about ‘forgotten’ media, or focused on moments of ‘technological failure’ are less likely to be digitised. This paper will reflect on the problem of accessibility in archives using my own experience as researcher and archivist of a forgotten medium. Since 2019 I have researched the Electrophone, a telephone device that streamed live theatre, church services, and more into the home in the Victorian and Edwardian era. The history of this object has rarely been told, owing in part to the closure of Electrophone Limited in 1925 and the subsequent loss of files as well as remaining apparatus. Despite the loss of this material, some of the necessary information still exists today in BT Archives’ holdings from the General Post Office. I used these files as a starting point for my research, but it soon became clear to tell the full story of the Electrophone I needed to look further a field. I visited thirty archives across the United Kingdom to understand the national history of the Electrophone and locate evidence of user experience. In 2022 I joined BT as a member of the archive team, using resources there as well as research I had done across the UK to make the BT collection more accessible to those that will come after me. I created an online Finding Guide which explained the Electrophone story, and I also enhanced many of the object records to make them easier to search. My paper will reflect on my work to make the BT Electrophone collection more accessible for future research, and discuss the advantages and challenges of using a broad range of archives to construct media histories.

Sian Barber

Social Hygiene Pictures in the UK Regions 1930-1950: Exploring Control, Consent and the Cinema Space within Local Archival Records

This paper will examine how local council archival records can be used to explore historical attitudes to sex education, birth control, social hygiene, venereal disease, and teen pregnancy. Building on work undertaken by Annette Kuhn (1998) which focuses on how ‘social hygiene’ films were considered in the earliest days of UK cinema, this work explores material from the 1930s -1950s and identifies how local councils frequently extended their licensing powers to include control over the auditorium and the audience when films of this kind were being shown. From its founding in 1912, the British Board of Film Classification refused to certificate social hygiene films as they deemed them to be vehicles for propaganda thus making them unsuitable for general exhibition. Yet the two-tier system of film censorship in Britain provided a loophole and permitted local councils to show uncertificated films if they chose to do so. Many local councils allowed the exhibition of films such as Damaged Lives (1933), Marriage Forbidden (1937), Birth of a Baby (1938) Street Corner (1953) and Should Parents Tell (circa. 1950). Championed by organisations including The British Social Hygiene Council, and the National Baby Welfare Council, the widespread exhibition of these predominantly American-made message films, which included no explicit content, reveals a great deal about the expressed desires for social moderation of behaviour highlighting what Paul Addison termed a post-war effort to ‘improve the minds and the morals of adolescents.’ (1985:134) As well as approving or refusing the exhibition of these films local councils often added additional layers of safeguarding to further control how these filmic messages were disseminated to local residents. Drawing on material from Hampshire, Berkshire, Yorkshire, Scotland and Sussex, this paper will highlight how local archival records provide much needed detail on the policing of social behaviour and the active role played by local arbiters of taste. While such work may seem little more than a footnote in broader debates about censorship, it indicates how surviving committee records can help local areas construct their own histories of film censorship of social issues which vary from region to region.