The Design Archives’ Jen Grasso (Digital Content and Systems Coordinator) and Sirpa Kutilainen (Preservation and Digital Resources Coordinator) are presenting papers at the upcoming Archives and Records Association Conference held in Bristol from 27-29 August, 2025. This year’s conference theme of Next Generation: Innovation and Imagination in Record Keeping called for papers to ‘ask how things were, how things are, how things could be and what are we doing to get there’ through the lens of Sustainability, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.
Jen will be presenting an ongoing project titled ‘The Glass Plates Project: Increasing Access to Archive Collections using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning’. Her paper discusses the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance access to photographs in the Design Council archive. The Design Council Archive is the Design Archives’ founding collection, as well as its largest, providing insight into the history and development of design from the mid-20th century in the United Kingdom and internationally. One of the strengths of this archive is its photographic library; a collection of over 100,000 prints and 60,000 negatives used by the Design Council to promote the idea of ‘good design’. It was used as a marketing tool for manufacturers, journalists and buyers, to support teaching design in the education sector, in addition to being a reference resource for the general public. One subset of this collection is a series of over 11,000 black and white glass-plate negatives, digitised over five years, that are identifiable by a sequential list of image numbers. A set of 26 registers organised chronologically provide the content and structure for this data set including manufacturer, copyright, accession date, and taxonomic category used by the Council to organise its photo library. The sequential numbering does not correspond to the chronological order, making it virtually impossible to identify the content in each negative, nor where it sits in the Council’s taxonomy. Jen’s paper discusses the different phases of an ongoing project with computer-science colleagues in the School of Architecture, Technology and Engineering that employed Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create a tool to make this data set of 11,000 uncatalogued glass-plate negatives an accessible and usable resource.
Sirpa will be co-presenting a paper titled ‘Shut down – switch on: empowerment, problem-solving and plugging a gap’ with Amy Sampson, Preservation Manager at The National Archives and her co-lead of the HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning) Shutdown Group. They will be discussing the development of the group, which has drawn together a now large number of archives professionals from the United Kingdom and Ireland seeking to problem-solve the impact of shutdown on collections, systems and spaces and will summarise how a group of people found themselves lacking either information, support, or – in many cases – both, were brought together through the shared experiences to create a skill-sharing network to address this need. It will outline how Sirpa and Amy, as group coordinators, have tackled the challenges of providing organised support, worked to understand what the members want, how to further grow the HVAC Shutdown Group and to continue to forge connections that transform this area of practice.
Image: A collage of images from the Design Council Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives.
