Listening to the Past, Speaking to the Future

44archives strengthened. It acknowledges the potential forgreater involvement of the business sector and thepotential for linking businesses to schools enablingstudents to explore how organisations impact on thecommunity and on the economy.Supporting Classroom LearningNicky Sugar with students from the Royal Free Hospital School in 2000.Photo: Royal Free Hampstead NHS TrustRecommendation FourIncrease community participation in UK archiveactivities with particular focus on engaging hard-to-reachcommunities.Action 1Investigate the establishment of, and pilot CommunityArchive Liaison Officers to support the developmentof community archives and foster links between existingarchives and record offices and the wider community.Developing Collections for the21st CenturyBusiness, Private and SpecialistArchivesWhere constraints of confidentiality and legal regulationallow, many businesses, private sector and other specialistorganisations make their archives available to the publicfor study without receiving any public funding. The TaskForce welcomes this participation as organisations outsidethe public and government domain are a rich source ofarchival material. For example, changes in UK businessesover the last thirty years have put many records at risk andthese are an increasingly important part of our archivalheritage. The Task Force recognises and values businessand specialist archives, including moving image andsound archives, as an integral part of the culture, heritageand information assets of the UK and wishes to see theseLong stays in hospital can be miserable for children, notonly because they’re missing home but also through theirseparation from school life. Using the hospital’s owncollections of documents, photographs, registers anduniforms, archive staff at London’s Royal Free Hospitaldevised a programme of history lessons for the children’sward school.The Royal Free’s archivist Nicky Sugar helped teachers todevelop lesson plans including literacy and numeracyelements. Classes were held in the wards and, for childrenwell enough to go there, at the hospital’s archive centre.Lessons were punctuated by ‘detective tasks’, in whichchildren used the archives and artefacts to make theirown discoveries.Children learned useful skills, and archive and teachingstaff saw how the archive could be used in new ways.Nicky Sugar said, “I was keen to make links between thearchive and the community, and I realised that it’s not veryoften that you have a school and an archive under thesame roof … It was a difficult group, because of all thedifferent needs the children had, but we could see ithelping to give them new confidence.” There are plans fora new series of lessons in 2004.Connecting Corporate MemoriesBT’s Connected Earth project, launched in 2002,represents a unique collaboration between the corporate,public and independent heritage sectors. It shows howcreative solutions to providing access to a physicalcollection – in this case the collection oftelecommunications artefacts amassed by BT and itspredecessors – can combine the traditional strengths of