PEOPLE
What materials are to be considered for archives?
to work there. I spent the first ten years of my working life in this specialised library. When they wanted someone to start up a legal library collection for the Director of Public Prosecutions, I got a call; it was a promotion from foreign Affairs, so I went. While I was at the Legal Department … I started to think about and read up on archives and how an archivist preserves important documents because I saw that this was needed at the national level. I also realised that there was a dearth of trained archivists in the Caribbean. I wanted to study it formally but couldn’t afford it. … Therefore, I decided I would apply for a Commonwealth Scholarship … I went to The University of British Columbia for two years and it was an enlightening experience. We studied disaster prevention, preparedness and recovery. We had a court of appeal judge who lectured to us about the legal part of record keeping. It’s so wide and varied; I was excited by it all. When I was finished, I was ready to go back home. I got job opportunities in Canada and the United States, but I said, “No, the reason I came here is because of what happened in my country and I have to go back .” However, while in Trinidad for a year, some work-related challenges arose. I decided to move with my family to Barbados and I have been with The UWI since 1996. I originally worked at Cave Hill Campus, but then in 2014, I was promoted to the University Archivist post, with oversight for the four campuses at that time.
Everything! We are the life blood of the community, the organisation, the institution. We appraise records and look at the value they provide for ongoing decision making, as well as for the future so that people can go back and see the evidence of what was done. We ascribe value to records on a daily basis, including their administrative value, operational value, and financial value; we even go as far as look at intrinsic value. And we try to preserve them in the right environmental conditions to ensure that they last for as long as possible. What are the right environmental conditions, particularly for the Caribbean, that must be maintained? We have constraints in the Caribbean because of the weather/ climate. In a temperate climate, materials last longer. In the Caribbean it gets very hot, and we have to use air conditioning [AC] to try to counteract the heat. So, records are cold in the day because of the AC and warm at night because we tend to turn off the AC when we are leaving to go home. When we do this, paper-based documents expand and contract. This weakens the paper, and hence, they deteriorate much faster. In trying to combat the tropical climate we have to look at all of those things. Within archives, we need to have a constant temperature going whether we are there or not. We also have to look at the humidity because it means that moisture is infused when the material is exposed to heat, and that’s ideal for mould development. We integrated pest controls within our holdings and within our repositories … Additionally, we have to make sure when we set up archives that the building is not at the bottom of a hill where flooding could occur. I want to go back to one of the first things you said in terms of housing the records of the university. You talked about the finance records and the governing records, but what about our primary stakeholders like students and faculty? Are they also a part of it? Yes, all of that is a part of it. We have three stages in record keeping: (1) We have the active stage where you keep all of the records that are created for the day-to-day administration and decision making; (2) We have semi-active record keeping; these are records that you would need once a year or once every three years, and so they are removed from the active environment but close enough so they can be retrieved if needed; (3) Then there is the archival stage where records are appraised for their value and moved to the archives. That’s where we … make sure the environment is right. ... Continued on page 104
What is the job of an archivist?
What we seek to do is to preserve the records of institutions, organisations, and countries. We try to have the history there for generations to come and for current generations.
Former UWI Archivist Sharon Alexander-Gooding addressing an event
CHILL NEWS 103
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