In 2023 we celebrated 75 years of the archives service in Berkshire with an exhibition entitled ‘Our Favourites’. It was a chance for us to showcase our personal favourite items from the collections and in this blog, we reveal a little about the process of curating such an exhibition.

Initially, all we knew about the exhibition was that it was going to coincide with our 75th anniversary and that we wanted it to be a celebration of our collections. The first step in the planning stage was to investigate what other institutions had done for their anniversaries, as well as look at our own previous anniversary celebrations. We settled on choosing favourite items from the collection to create an exhibition that had a more personal feel. We also wanted to show the history of the service since its inception with the aid of boards and a timeline.

We then opened suggestions for documents up to staff, volunteers and friends of the archives. We were met with much enthusiasm with several people giving us multiple favourite records that they couldn’t decide between. Due to the number of suggestions, we could only pick one record per person, and some were simply too large to fit in our exhibition cases! So that these did not miss out, we decided to use them on social media as a way of raising awareness of the upcoming exhibition.

Once we had our records chosen, we compiled them into a shortlist so we that could identify gaps in the geographic spread, record type, or time period. We wanted the selection of records to reflect the whole county as much as possible. We were then able to fill these gaps with further suggested records. However, we also wanted to make sure that everything in the exhibition was a natural favourite, and that nothing was ‘shoehorned’ in. Ultimately, we had a list of varied, colourful, and interesting documents.

Whilst giving our contributors time to decide on their favourite records, we set about writing up a history of the service which would be displayed on boards in the exhibition. We were lucky that the County Archivists of days past kept such detailed notes in their annual reports! We didn’t want to provide a history of just the building, but rather have a reflection on the service’s focus. We searched the annual reports for trends, such as types of accessions, goals, or staff. This helped us to also draw out key dates for use on our timeline. We also needed images to go on these boards, so we noted down any significant records as well as looking at the archives slide collection for key events. Once we had decided on the text, images, and timeline, we sent the details off to our designer who would put it the boards together for us.

Returning to the documents, it was time to divide them into cases. This was one of the more significant challenges of the curation. With conventional exhibitions, there are usually thematic or chronological connections between the records, often with the majority all coming from the same collection. With this exhibition, we had a huge variety of items from different times, places, and contexts. The only linking factor was that they had been chosen out of all the many records we hold. So we decided to lean into that. We had six cases, five of which would be focused on the reaction that the items provoked in their nominator. This also helped to emphasise the personal aspect of the exhibition. The five cases we settled on were: Happy, Poignant, Pride, Significant, and Unusual. The final case was focused on important firsts within the service’s history. These helped to complement the timeline, as well as highlighting some of our big milestones. Even at this stage, it was clear that some things would be too big for the cases so would need to be facsimiles and these were passed to our conservation team.

With case layouts roughly decided and mocked-up, we asked our contributors to write a short caption of up to 200 words to explain what the record was, what it meant to them, why they liked it, and how they came across it. Once again, we were met with much enthusiasm, and several of the captions needed to be cut down so that they would fit in the cases! Iit was important that we retained the original voice which we did by utilising direct quotes along with the more general information about the items. We also had to find a homogenous voice across all the captions so that the exhibition had a consistent tone.

Our social media team also created several videos of staff members showing their favourite documents and explaining a little bit about these. Filming for these started very early so that different filming angles and camera techniques could be tried. We settled on the concept that the videos should be mostly the individuals’ own monologue so that they could say what they wanted about it. For those who did not want to be on camera, but still had a good story to tell, we used voiceovers. In a first for the service, we also used QR codes. These were mounted and put in the cases next to the relevant items so that visitors could scan them and be taken straight to the video. If you would like to watch those videos, head over to our YouTube channel.

With all this done, we were ready to assemble the exhibition. All the captions and titles were mounted, and we put all the items in their cases. We were then able to see if anything needed changing. As it turned out, we swapped two cases over at the eleventh hour so that the records did not look squashed in with the captions. With the cases full, we put the boards up on the wall, and were ready for our first visitors. This exhibition really was a team effort, and what better reflection of the Royal Berkshire Archives is there than that?

Don't worry if you were unable to visit and see the exhibition at the time as it has been uploaded to our website. So you can now view the exhibition online today!