This month we are joining our colleagues in the US as they celebrate #AskAnArchivist Day on 16 October, with our own European version! Come with us behind the scenes as we talk to the archivists who work with the ESA collections about their day-to-day work and about the ways that the ESA Archives supports cutting-edge European research.
One team, two locations
The ESA Archives exist in two different physical locations in Italy. The Historical Archives of the European Union (HAEU), based at the European University Institute in Florence, has hosted the historical archives of ESA since 1989. And in 2002, the European Centre for Space Records (ECSR) was established at ESRIN in Frascati as the repository for the technical documentation related to ESA projects and missions and for administrative material.
Despite this geographical dislocation, members of the ECSR and HAEU teams work in close and friendly collaboration and meet in person frequently to exchange information and best practice and plan joint activities. Colleagues have even been known to move between the different bases, and as a result, there is a real sense of belonging to one ESA Archives team with a shared purpose and vision for digital archives.
Archives as research facilitator for global concerns
One of the most fundamental of these purposes is to preserve ESA’s institutional memory and to make it available to anyone with an interest in European collaboration in scientific and space research. Ongoing digitisation activities to open material online are an important and visible part of this, but in addition, ESA supports in-person research and physical access to the holdings deposited at the HAEU through its European Space Agency Postgraduate Research Grant programme. Under this initiative, two grants are made available each year to postgraduate students and early career academics in history and other social sciences and humanities. Those selected enjoy a stay as part of the international scholarly community of the EUI in Florence, and can take advantage of support from the HAEU archives team.
So what’s the added value of having an archivist on hand, and access to the stack? Our HAEU colleague Andreja spoke about her work and outlined the enormous advantages to researchers, as well as what she gets back from working with researchers:
“I often ask myself: ‘How can my actions contribute to presenting the ESA archival material in the most meaningful and engaging way?’ The ESA fonds currently includes almost 34 000 files in the HAEU database. As the reference archivist, my work analysing the items in different languages, mainly English, French, German, and Italian, and preparing archival descriptions, barely skims the surface.”
Andreja went on to explain how the researchers themselves are active partners in valorising the ESA holdings.
“It is always an exchange between giving and receiving, in the relations we build with our researchers at the HAEU. We provide them with practical advice on navigating the HAEU database, and in return they give us insights into their research, allowing us to see ESA through their eyes and from a different perspective. We investigate material they could be interested in - and in the process gain information can be helpful for us later when deciding with our colleagues at ECSR about future digitisation plans.
However, it is not only today’s researchers from whom I learn about the ESA fonds. We do an exchange with children as part of the Educational Programme at the HAEU, allowing us to also talk to the next generation about the ESA archival material - and the spark of enthusiasm in their eyes says it all.
This ability to inspire is also present in the many stories of ideas becoming realities that are preserved in the Archives. On a personal level, it certainly challenges me to be creative and open minded in my work each day!”
The products of archival research
The outcome of these activities is making an important contribution to topics of global relevance in 2024. You can read more about the 2023 grant-holders’ studies into the European Copernicus programme with the aim of understanding the production and diffusion of satellite data for environmental purposes, and a history of climate data and its contribution to shaping climate knowledge, in advance of the publication of their research.
As Pierre in the ECSR team notes, it’s always exciting to see the range of content and scope of grant-holders work, and to gain a sense of current trends in scholarship:
“Back in the 1990s, institutional history was a big topic, with, for example, the ESA History Project, which produced a comprehensive written record of ESA’s beginnings. Today, we see a new generation of researchers with new frameworks for research and we are delighted that more and more young historians are using the ‘historical’ space data in our collections, from activities such as the European Earth Observation programme, to respond to contemporary challenges like climate change. We are very much in favour of this ‘new’ history, where our future can be understood and guided thanks to our collections.”
The ECSR team itself also carries out a comparable support role within ESA, being a first point of contact for requests for information from the Archives from across the Agency and Europe (and sometimes the globe!)
Pierre notes that many of these come from those involved with the missions themselves, such as Envisat, along with regular inquiries from colleagues in legal affairs and communications. One major new area for assistance from the archivists is space debris, which is clearly gaining international prominence, and which ties in with ESA’s commitment to space sustainability and recent introduction of its Zero Debris approach.
Archivists, material and mediation
This underlines the special role that archivists play as a sort-of mediator, harnessing their expert subject knowledge, often gained over years of work, to shed new light on collections and demonstrate their relevance today. In a world without archivists, the risk is that these resources would be sidelined, or worse still, forgotten and our ability to exploit data, information and lessons from the past for the benefit of our future would be lost.
(However, that doesn’t take away from the need for users to appraise the value of material, prior to consigning it to the Archives. We’ll be talking more about this often-overlooked part of the archiving process soon.)
As it is, we are delighted that events like #AskAnArchivist are turning a spotlight on the mutually-dependent relationship of material and archivist, and helping to make the institutions and people safeguarding our cultural heritage more visible and accessible.
Read more
Ask an Archivist day
The ESA Postgraduate Research Grant programme