Latest news with #archives
RNZ News
2 days ago
- RNZ News
Millions of NZ's most precious historic documents to be moved
history media 27 minutes ago The huge task of moving millions of New Zealand's most precious documents to their new home begins in Wellington this week. Archives New Zealand is moving just across the road from its current location in Mulgrave street to Heke Rua, which is linked to the national library. It's a building which cost $290 million and has been eight years in the making. Chief archivist Anahere Morehu spoke to Melissa Chan-Green about how the prized pieces of history will be transported safely.
CNN
08-07-2025
- General
- CNN
These artists are racing to save forgotten photos of Lagos life
In the old photo studios of Lagos, Nigeria, negatives were being burned. No longer needed or wanted, they were too difficult to store, the subjects had moved on or died, and the photo labs that printed them had long since shuttered. Those that were not discarded or set alight were left to degrade in rice bags and cardboard boxes, the humid Lagos air slowly destroying the emulsion. When Karl Ohiri, a British Nigerian artist, first heard about this, he was shocked.'I was witnessing this history that was on the verge of being destroyed,' he told CNN. These analog photographers captured life in Lagos from the 1960s to the early black and white portraits of young men in their bell bottoms, to a woman praying in front of a backdrop of the Islamic holy city of Mecca, to color photos of people showing off their new cassette players, the images these photographers made were a glimpse into Nigeria's biggest city before the advent of digital photography. However, they had never been digitized or archived — there were no backups. In countries like the UK, Ohiri said, museums might have taken the photos, adding them to their vast archives; London's V&A Museum has 800,000 photos in its collection and the National Portrait Gallery has 250,000. But in Lagos, Ohiri explained, 'there wasn't anywhere to house them.' Ohiri and his partner Riikka Kassinen launched Lagos Studio Archives to save the collections. They have spent the last nine years hunting down studios and photographers, cataloguing their archives, and creating exhibitions of the work. It has not always been easy. 'Lagos moves fast,' Kassinen explained; many of the photographers have since died, their studios torn down and new developments built in their place. There is sometimes so little trace of the studios that 'it's almost like (they) never happened,' said Ohiri. Even if the pair could find the photographers, sometimes they were too late. 'We've gotten to some photographers who had three or four decades of work that doesn't exist anymore,' Ohiri said. 'All of that history and heritage and there's nothing left… it takes all of that time to amass, and just half a second to put some kerosene on it and light it up and that's it. Just gone.' Initially, many of the photographers did not understand their interest. 'They just thought we were crazy,' Ohiri said. Now they have the work of at least 25 photographers in the archive, though they cannot be sure of an exact number as some of the troves they were given contained multiple photographers' work. Nor do they know how many negatives are in the collection, only that it is in the hundreds of thousands, piling up in Ohiri and Kassinen's studio in Helsinki, Finland. 'We might not be able to (digitize) everything in our lifetimes,' Ohiri conceded. The '70s was a period of rapid change in Nigeria. The country's civil war had ended, Nigerian oil had boomed, and an increasingly urban population was enraptured by Fela Kuti's Afrobeat. Photo studios became a place for people to document their everyday lives, show off their accomplishments and celebrate events. 'It was a theater of dreams where people could really show their aspirations,' Ohiri said. In the midst of these social and cultural changes sweeping through Lagos was Abi Morocco Photos. Made up of husband-and-wife photographers John, who died in 2024, and Funmilayo Abe, Abi Morocco Photos worked from the early 1970s to 2006. First from a studio on Aina Street, and later moving, the pair took portraits at the studio, as well as visiting customers' homes, attending events and ceremonies, and shooting portraits in the streets. Ohiri and Kassinen recently curated an exhibition of the Abes' work from the 1970s at the Autograph gallery in London, and have plans for a photobook of the couple's work. The show followed the archive's inclusion in the New Photography Exhibition at New York's MoMA, in 2023. 'Archive of Becoming' was an experimental series of images, culled from damaged negatives. Ohiri and Kassinen had to wear masks to protect them from the fumes and mold that had grown on the discarded negatives as they painstakingly preserved them. Now the archive is planning a project on female photographers and they want to make the overall collection accessible to citizens of the megacity through books and exhibitions. Despite exhibiting the work around the world, the pair have never met any of the paying clients — the closest they have gotten is a friend who recognized their uncle in one of the pictures. They hope that people might one day recognize the scratched black and white portraits, the mold-stained faces, and time-faded colors, so that the thousands of negatives can become not just a document of the city, but 'a family archive of Lagos.'
BBC News
05-07-2025
- General
- BBC News
Jersey Archive: Contract from 14th Century returned by Canada
A family contract dating back to the 14th Century has become one of the earliest records held in Jersey's public de Gruchy-Pallot family papers were transferred to the archive at the family's request from the University of Alberta in collection, which documents the life of Charles and Annie Pallot (née Giffard) and their six children, includes an inheritance contract that has been dated to Heritage archivist Jane de Gruchy, who is also a distant relative of the family, said: "We are absolutely delighted that this unique and important family collection has returned home to Jersey after so many years." Jersey Heritage said the collection first came to its attention when Herb Reynolds, a Canadian descendant of the Pallots, contacted the archive last family had emigrated to Canada with a number of documents relating to the Pallot, de Gruchy and Giffard families in the 1970s they were donated to the University of Alberta alongside more recent family material relating to Canada. 'Gathering clouds' Other highlights from the collection include the 1502 will of Mathieu de Gruchy of Trinity, records relating to Adèle Haarseth, nee Pallot, from her military nursing career, a biography of the three Pallot brothers' time as pioneer settlers in Canada in the 1900s and correspondence that gives a "vivid sense of the gathering of the clouds before the Second World War and the Occupation".Mr Reynolds said the family was encouraged to return the collection to the island after meeting Jersey historian Guy Dixon, who has researched the de Gruchy said it led his family to understand their history and "ignited our interest in returning the records to Jersey where we feel they will be better cared for and appreciated".
Harvard Business Review
01-07-2025
- Business
- Harvard Business Review
The Best Leaders Encourage 'Spacious Thinking'
Soren, an executive in charge of the archives at a global arts institution, was told that he needed to deliver immediate cost savings and that layoffs were likely. Rather than thinking narrowly and simply demanding budget cuts from his direct reports, Soren convened a meeting with his department to discuss the broader question of its purpose and sustainability. The team's conversation led to the recognition that there were overlooked assets in the archive that might be used for a new program. This idea eventually led to a top-line contribution of tens of millions, and reductions in workforce were avoided. In contrast, other departments in the institution simply moved forward with cycles of layoffs which reduced morale and led to burnout. For the last few years we have been researching two modes of attention that people use at work: doing mode, in which people pay narrow attention to a specific task in order to control, predict and get it done efficiently; and spacious mode, in which people pay attention more expansively, without hurry, making them more receptive to relationships, interdependencies, and possibilities—like Soren's approach to cost-cutting. Spacious mode leads to critical benefits in the workplace, such as gaining insight into challenges, thinking strategically, spotting opportunities, building relationships, and sparking joy and motivation. Unfortunately, we've found that spacious thinking is regularly suppressed in favor of doing mode in organizations. This is hardly a surprise. We are living in a time of cultural obsession with productivity and achievement across all spheres of life. Our research—which has included a global survey of more than 3,000 employees, ongoing discussions with 50 global professionals, and interviews with leaders and those they lead—shows that employees looking to excel worry that shifting into spacious mode can be interpreted as a lack of efficiency or urgency. As a result, it feels career-limiting, and like it requires permission from a manager, so few employees do it regularly. While all employees have some agency to shift to spacious mode, leaders play a crucial role in making it more accessible at work because they can legitimize it as a good way to spend precious time (or not). In this article we'll show how leaders often unknowingly discourage spacious thinking on their teams, and what they can do to help instead. How Leaders Get in the Way Leaders and managers are the key to encouraging spacious thinking because their behaviors signal what is acceptable. Too often, managers are narrowly focused on achieving the next short-term deliverable which means their teams are stuck in doing mode too. And though the team's to-do list gets ticked off, there is no way of knowing whether those to-dos were the right ones, no space for a team to grow, no joy or interest to discover what is possible. This can suck the life out of a team. One senior manager we came across in our research was infamous in her organization for her catchphrase: 'Be clear, be quick, be gone.' In our conversations with her team and colleagues, it became clear that less-confident employees kept quiet around her and declined to raise complex, important challenges that would require inquiry and exploration. You may think that, unlike this manager, you already engage in spacious mode, so you don't need to worry. But leaders tend to overestimate how spacious their own behaviors are. For example, our research has shown that the more senior we are in a hierarchy, the more we think we are open to hearing others, when we are really not. Similarly, in our experience facilitating meetings, leaders almost always underestimate how much airtime they take up. Leaders also tend to mistakenly believe that it's easy for their direct reports to move into spacious mode without permission—or that it would be easy to ask for that permission. This is driven by ' advantage blindness,' which can cause those with higher standing in a hierarchy to underestimate the power they hold and the impact it has. Therefore leaders overestimate how approachable they are and how able those lower on the hierarchy are to choose their own course of action. How to Encourage Spacious Mode To give employees permission to spend time thinking, learning, innovating, and collaborating, you'll need to rethink how you communicate and which behaviors you reward. For example, Toni, a regional manager at a large U.S. retailer we spoke with during our research, counted herself lucky: 'My chief people officer has a real sense of spaciousness around her and the way she shows up. I feel like I've got a lot of permission and protection from her in my role.' Our research points to three behaviors of leaders and managers who enable their teams in this way: Focus on ideas instead of tasks. One of us (Megan) was working with a CEO who wanted his senior team to focus more on the bigger picture rather than day-to-day operations. Through their conversations, he realized that in his meetings he almost inevitably focused first (and often solely) on quarterly results. To expand the team's thinking, Megan suggested that he begin some meetings by asking, 'What hasn't gone well over the last few weeks, and what have you learned from that?' or 'How have you developed your team recently?' Over time, the team's conversations naturally began to shift more toward group-wide perspectives that bolstered their learning and development. Our survey showed that many employees feel that tasks are consistently prioritized over more spacious topics. They ranked learning, values, purpose, creativity, and relationships as topics they'd like to talk to their managers about above tasks. Managers need to structure meeting agendas in a way that includes these spacious-mode topics. Bring in novelty. We often meet in the same places, follow the same agendas with the same people, and assume that the same process can meet any number of different outcomes. It's almost heretical to suggest that a meeting doesn't have to end with actions to add to our already over-stuffed to-do lists. However, other outcomes might be far more important. For example, at a recent meeting at a life sciences company, participants told one of us (John) they found it 'cathartic and hopeful' that the agenda had been specifically designed to be an inquiring conversation rather than their usual action-focused drills. In the weeks following the meeting, participants' senior leadership reported feeling an increase in the team's energy to the point that they felt comfortable shifting away from their usual directive control. As a result, speed of decision making ramped up and the market agility that had been espoused came to life, as staff in the U.S. and Europe felt trusted to use their own judgment in co-ordinating their work. External facilitators and invited guests can bring in fresh ideas and perspectives. For example, different venues can inspire different sorts of conversations: a walk-and-talk or meeting outside might engage a more open mind than the goldfish bowl of a glass-walled meeting room in the bowels of a building. One manager we worked with bought his team a new book every quarter, which focused on a different sector or a broader industry- or society-wide issue, and then put some time aside to discuss what they'd read together. Other executives encourage their teams to get out of the office to experience the world as their customers do. When they do, the teams explain to us that these efforts help them to bring the wider context back into view, and that leads to valuable conversations about strategy and purpose. Encountering novelty jolts them to course-correct, keeping on track with customer demands rather than losing sight of those amidst shorter-term tasks and targets. The conversations also strengthened relationships in the teams, through sharing experiences and listening to different viewpoints. Value and reward spacious mode. Typically people who are visibly busy and get things done get rewarded. While there is nothing wrong with this—certainly doing mode is vital to high-performing teams—it needs to be complemented with recognition of team members who listen, explore, challenge, and invite the rest of the team to look up and around. Elaine was introduced to us by her peer, Ben, who had recommended we speak to her for our research. He noted that in the high-pressured transformation project they were leading, Elaine had, on several occasions, challenged the team's viewpoint in a meeting and forced them to consider alternative courses of action. At the time, he reflected, there was some frustration in the team at being held up, but the team agreed that the decisions they ended up making in the spacious mode that Elaine had brought into the conversation were wiser than those they had been about to make while in doing mode. Elaine and Ben's manager recognized this not simply by complimenting Elaine, but by spending time explaining how her attention had benefited the program. After this, when the team faced an important, adaptive challenge, they were more comfortable in pausing to examine and challenge key decisions. Spacious mode might be hard for you to see as a manager. Consider how your biases might play into this: The same behavior that in one employee may be labeled as annoying, wasteful and lazy, when practiced by someone else (especially someone who is already more powerful) can be seen as strategic and evidence of their readiness to continue moving up the managerial hierarchy. If you are dismayed to see a team member step back from doing mode, ask yourself whether they're actually engaged in spacious mode. We have created managerial and organizational norms which over-privilege doing mode and hide the value of spacious mode. But only when insights from spacious mode guide teams' actions in doing mode can leaders be sure that team members are focused on doing the right work in the right ways. There needs to be a rebalancing of the relationship between these modes if organizations are to thrive and perform.
Yahoo
28-06-2025
- Yahoo
The dark secrets of Bolton's past uncovered to mark National Crime Month
The intriguing dark chapters of Bolton's history have to come to light once again to mark National Crime Month. Bolton Library is marking the month with a series of events, including visits by crime authors - and a trip to the archives where secrets of the town's past dating back to the 1500s are kept. (Image: Leah Collins) The tour, which was led by archivist Caroline Furey, shows Bolton Library and Museum's collection of historical, court, business and church records taking back to 1525. READ MORE: Located under the Grade II listed building on Le Mans Crescent, the Bolton archives currently have two miles worth of shelving, with about three miles in total when combined with Bolton documents stored at other sites. The tours are led by archivist Caroline Furey. (Image: Leah Collins) Other records include old newspaper articles from the Bolton Chronicle, including detailed court coverage of previous crimes of the past. Caroline said: 'These sessions are ongoing to get people interested in the work we do here at the archives. A lot of people don't even know that they exist under here. 'Bolton library was actually the third public library in the country, so people here really did have a thirst for knowledge.' One of the documents in the collection include an indictment file relating to a 15-year-old pickpocket, James Costello, who was prosecuted for stealing a silver box containing coins from a lady in Bolton. The tours are proving popular with residents for National Crime Month. (Image: Leah Collins) Old court records show that he pleaded guilty to the offences and was transported for ten years to Tasmania. Police records describe James as 'bad and idle, bad in every respect' with records from his time in Tasmania describing an incident when he purposefully damaged his boots so that he couldn't work. Other records detail an Anges Lawless, who stole £5 from her employer in Bolton in 1881 and was sentenced to six months of hard labour as a result. Records from an old police book detail the crimes of James Costello. (Image: Leah Collins) A rather unusual case detailed in the records was Betty Eccles, an elderly lady from Bolton who was convicted for poisoning children with arsenic. Caroline said: 'We have lots of information on the criminals here in Bolton. With James, we know that he passed away in 1892 aged 66, which is a long life for someone of the time. 'We are keen to get in contact with anybody in Tasmania who might be part of his ancestry. The Bolton Library archives have about two miles of shelves in total. (Image: Leah Collins) 'All the information kept in the archives has to be original, and it must be about Bolton. We are keen not to have information that is duplicated and, in the case, when collections become too big to store, we would have to keep a sample. 'It is not all digitalised, this would be a massive job. Some stuff has been digitalised, it's normally external companies that come and do this for us, but it is a long and slow process.' Also discussed was the 1838 murder of Scotch traveller, George Henderson, on Winter Hill. He had set off early one morning across the cloud-shrouded hill, but never arrived at his destination. Later that day, a young boy found him moaning in a ditch, grievously injured by a gunshot to his head, which hours later claimed his life. The man charged with his murder was acquitted, so it's a crime that remains unsolved to this day. Crime author Shari Lapena will be at Bolton Library on July 16 and free tickets available on Eventbrite.
