Archives of living writers

This week has seen my return from holiday and the continuation of the cataloguing of Harold Pinter’s scrapbook series. One of the ‘political’ scrapbooks is the most recent item in the collection, containing an article dated 9 January 2008 – only 5 days before I started this project! I picked it up from Pinter’s office a few weeks ago. This is one of the strange things about cataloguing the papers of a living writer – the project can’t really be completed whilst the person is still a living writer. As the collection keeps growing, so does the catalogue. This means that the catalogue has had to be arranged in such a way that items can be slotted into existing series one year/ten years/fifty years down the line, if necessary. For the Harold Pinter archive, this has been achieved by a very exciting numbering system. There are also a few more data protection issues to be aware of when dealing with living individuals. However, there are advantages to institutions acquiring the archives of people whilst they’re still alive - it gives them the opportunity to advise the archive creator on the types of records that should be kept long-term and how to store them. This is especially important for ‘born digital’ records (e.g. emails), which may be lost (i.e. become unreadable) if technology moves on and systems are not in place to migrate them to the new technology. Also, from a cataloguer’s point of view, it is handy to be able to refer queries to the actual creator of the archive.