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Download fileBusiness archives and local communities: corporate heritage in Loughborough, UK
journal contribution
posted on 2017-06-19, 14:43 authored by Clare RavenwoodClare Ravenwood, Tim ZijlstraThe LoCHe project investigated corporate archives, focusing on the case of Loughborough, a market town in Leicestershire, UK. The potential benefits for the business from creating and managing a company archive are great and the local community also benefits, but this reciprocal relationship and its associated challenges has not been widely examined. Through analysis of interviews and focus groups with a variety of stakeholders, it explored the relationship between businesses, archives and the local community. The project found that corporate archives are considered important to local enthusiasts as a source for historic research, and help inform local and work identity. Individuals are key to collecting and preserving material both in the community and the business, but community members are often unable to contribute to or access business archives. Also there is a disconnection between stakeholders which results in an ad hoc and confused local picture. The impact of digital is yet to be felt except in limited ways. It also revealed that corporate archives are often treated as an afterthought by businesses, which potentially leads to the loss of archives due to lack of interest, resources or skill to manage it appropriately.
Funding
This work was supported by Arts and Humanities Research Council.
History
School
- Business and Economics
Department
- Business
Published in
Archives and RecordsCitation
RAVENWOOD, C. and ZIJSTRA, T., 2017. Business archives and local communities: corporate heritage in Loughborough, UK. Archives and Records, 39 (2), pp.211-223.Publisher
© The Authors. Published by Taylor and FrancisVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/Acceptance date
2017-05-27Publication date
2017Notes
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Archives and Records, on 12 Jun 2017, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23257962.2017.1336615ISSN
2325-7962eISSN
2325-7989Publisher version
Language
- en