Black and white photograph of Image: Photographic Library, The Council of Industrial Design. Staff in the general office housing the duplicate prints working on requests received from callers, or through the post of telephone. Taken from the Design Council Archive housed at the University of Brighton Design Archives.

Catalogue number: DCA-30-1-DCO-15-1-2. Design Council Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives.

Design Archives Archivist and Research Fellow Sue Breakell is speaking at the annual national conference of the Archives and Records Association, the professional body for archivists and conservators, at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, 29-31 August 2012. Sue’s paper is entitled ‘Engaging with the design community: the Design Archives and its networks’. Describing the range of the Design Archives’ networks of contacts, it argues for the importance of archive professionals engaging with the wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives on the collections in their care, activities which are more important than ever in the digital age, when archives have a much higher profile and a more diverse range of meanings.