Since its foundation as a central body for British trade unions in 1868, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) has been involved in the creation of the welfare state and public health, education and social services. It has helped to ensure legal rights in employment and an end to discrimination. The Labour Party was established by the TUC so that working people could have their own representatives in Parliament. The TUC has played an important role in international affairs, and union representatives have sat on public bodies and government advisory boards at national and international level.
The TUC Library documents this rich history and is now a major research resource for the study of all aspects of trade unions, lifelong learning, and people at work. The library collects not only trade union and political publications from the UK and overseas, but also official and pressure group publications as well as material from the various campaigns and policy areas in which the TUC has been involved. The emphasis is on British material, but most countries are represented, especially those in Europe, North America, and the Commonwealth. There are special collections on women workers, the labor movement in the Colonies and a number of deposited archives, including those of the Workers' Educational Association and the Labour Research Department.
The TUC Library was first established in 1922 as part of a Joint TUC-Labour Party Research and Information Department, managed by a committee of representatives from both organizations and chaired by Sidney Webb. It brought together books, pamphlets, periodicals and other material collected over the previous fifty years by the TUC Parliamentary Committee, the Labour Party Information Bureau and the Women's Trade Union League. The Joint Library remained in existence until 1956, when the TUC moved out of Transport House in Westminster for its new home, Congress House in Bloomsbury, taking what it considered as its half of the Library.
Due to falling union membership in the 1980s and 1990s, the TUC needed to cut back on its services and create further income by letting out office space in Congress House. It was decided that the TUC Library would be deposited in a university where its holdings would be accessible to both academics and the general public. In 1996, the TUC Library moved to its new home in the London Metropolitan University (then the University of North London) Holloway Road Learning Centre, where it re-opened in 1997 as the TUC Library Collections. The TUC retained its ownership of the Library and continues to add material on a regular basis.
The collections took on a new role with a different user base, and there was a greater emphasis on the research aspects of the holdings. Several important archive deposits were added, but at the same time, an active collection policy for current trade union material ensures that the library remains a dynamic resource for both historical and contemporary research topics. Disclosing the strengths of the collections and providing access to their rich resources became a priority, and several successful applications were made to major public funders such as the British Library, National Manuscripts Conservation Trust and the Heritage Lottery Fund (as well as several private trusts) for conservation and cataloguing projects. At its transfer to the university, the collections had only a cumbersome card catalogue, so the retrospective re-cataloguing of material and adding records to the University's online catalogue has been a major part of our work.
The next development was to create digital copies of key “treasures” in the collection. This had four aims:
• To create an easily accessible online library of resources for the study of labor movement history. Trade unions have played, and will continue to play, a decisive role in shaping economic and social developments in Britain—yet much of their history remains unknown and inaccessible to the public.
• To provide distance access to precious and fragile archives for those who would find it difficult or expensive to visit the library.
• To democratize access to rare or unique archives for people who would previously never have entered record offices or academic libraries.
• To create surrogate copies that would aid conservation by reducing the need for handling original documents.
The ideal opportunity arose in 1997 when the incoming Labour Government developed a digitization program based on its 1995 pre-election policy document, “Communicating Britain's Future” outlining the benefits for society to be gained from the presence of an “information superhighway.” The document encouraged lottery funding for a “Millennium Archive” to put material from “our great collections of national significance” into digital form.
Between 2001 and 2004, the New Opportunities Fund (now part of the Big Lottery Fund) rolled out the Digitisation of Learning Materials (NOF-Digitise) program to support lifelong learning through the provision of a range of specially created electronic content. There were three broad themes: cultural enrichment, citizenship, and re-skilling the nation. Funding of £50 million was distributed to 148 projects to create internet sites containing digitized resources.Footnote 1 Under the program, the TUC Library Collections were awarded £175,000 to create a website to illustrate the history of working people and the trade union movement. The TUC/University partnership project identified two key audiences—adult students taking courses run by the TUC and the Workers' Educational Association—but the digital content was selected to interest a broad range of users, including academics, family historians (there are several “name-lists” among the resources) and school students.
The website, The Union Makes Us Strong: TUC History Online (http://www.unionhistory.info) presents a history of the British trade union movement since the development of organized labor in the early nineteenth century. Introduced by a timeline of nearly two hundred years of social history illustrated with digitized photographs, posters and documents, the site also includes a number of themed learning packages:
• The General Strike Collection comprises two thousand documents and images collected by library staff in 1926 and includes TUC and local strike committee records, printed publications and newspapers from Britain and overseas, dispatch riders' reports, photographs etc. The collection provides a unique insight into the story of Britain's most important industrial dispute. At its height, between 1,500,000 and 1,750,000 workers in vital industries came out on strike in support of the 1,000,000 miners who had been “locked out.”
• All 1,700 pages of the original manuscript of the novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell, voted one of the “Nation's 100 best-loved books” in the BBC's 2003 “Big Read” event and an influential classic of working-class literature. Written in the early years of the last century but not published in full until 1955, it has now been translated into six languages, become the subject of an annual arts festival and sold millions of copies worldwide. The manuscript has iconic status within the British labor movement, and there are thousands of Tressell enthusiasts around the globe. This unique resource has previously only been accessible to researchers who made the trip to London. Now readers around the world can access the manuscript online.
• The Register of the 1888 Bryant & May Matchworkers' Strike with personal details of all seven hundred individual strikers, plus related images and documents. This manuscript item was selected because of its interest to schools, and to both London historians and family historians. The story of the “Matchgirls' Strike” is one of the few episodes from British labor history that is taught in schools and is known to the general public.
• The fully searchable digital copies of the TUC Annual Congress Reports from 1868–1968 provide a major source for academic researchers. Its eighteen thousand pages are filled with the voices of giants of the British labor movement—Keir Hardie, Ernest Bevin and Will Thorne, to name but a few. The reports tell the story of how the trade union movement responded to war, the Russian Revolution, the Depression of the 1930s, the social revolution of the 1960s—and how a motion at the 1899 Congress by the Railway Servants led to the formation of the Labour Party.
The digitized content was created in various ways—both in-house and by external contractors. Technical standards and long-term preservation were important. Two copies of each image were produced in high-resolution TIFF format, and from these “master” images the compressed JPEG derivatives were produced for the Web. KE Software (UK) Ltd. supplied the contents management system for the website, which allowed related documents and images to be retrieved. Targeted audience feedback confirmed that the website was easy to navigate, and it has proved popular with students, the media, academics, trade unionists and the general public. In 2003, The Union Makes Us Strong website won the CILIPFootnote 2 Jason Farradane Award for outstanding work in the information field.
In 2006, lottery funding allowed us to create a new micro site: The Worker's War: The Home Front Recalled (www.unionhistory.info/workerswar), a partnership project between London Metropolitan University, the TUC and the National Pensioners Convention. For this project (and its successor described below) we were lucky enough to attract an experienced project manager who had previously worked on the Labor Arts digitization project based at the New York University Bobst Library. The new website was supported by the Big Lottery Fund as one of a series of national activities to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. It illustrates and archives the experiences of working men and women as firefighters and rescue workers, miners and factory workers, and the importance of the trade union movement throughout this time, as well as the impact on women's lives and the difficulties of the postwar reconstruction period. The website also illustrates the immense social impact of industrial conscription, e.g. the dislocation of workers who could be posted anywhere in the country, the compulsory direction of young school-leavers into the mines or war industries, and the illegality of strike action (although the numbers of strikes and days lost through strikes increased in each year of the war).
In addition to hundreds of digitized photographs, posters and documents from the TUC Collections, the website contains one hundred oral history interviews with former Home Front workers, documenting their experiences and reminiscences. The colorful jollity of Stakhanovite government posters contrasts starkly with the fearful claustrophobia of workplace bomb shelters recorded in the personal testimonies. Audio clips and fully searchable transcripts from each of the interviews are accessible on the site, along with teachers' notes to guide use of this resource in the classroom.
Our latest digitization project, completed December 2007, has been Winning Equal Pay: The Value of Women's Work Footnote 3—another TUC/ University partnership project, funded this time by the European Social Fund EQUAL program. The website records the history of the struggle for equal pay for women and, in recent times, the legal and workplace strategies that have given teeth to the 1970 Equal Pay Act and resulted in lasting institutional change. The website holds a video archive of ten filmed interviews with women involved in important British equal pay campaigns, starting in 1968 with the sewing machinists' strike at the Ford Motor Company, plus hundreds of digitized photos, posters and documents from the nineteenth century to the present. There are full transcripts of each of the films streamed from the website and also contributions from historians and experts in the field and other educational materials, including a Unionlearn Tutor's Pack. The films and images show clearly the changing approaches to women's union organization at different periods—the separatist women's unions of the nineteenth century, the infamous “personality girl” pageants of the 1950s, “mini-skirts not mini-wages” slogans in the 1960s, and the impact of feminism from the 1970s with the extension of union demands to include abortion, childcare, equal rights for part-time workers, etc.
The digitization program has been successful in meeting its key aims:
• Online access to rare archives and images for those who otherwise might never have seen this material or known of its existence.
• Simple website design—films, audio resources, academic texts, and some 24,000 images are held in a single database, which can be searched from one integrated Advanced Search page. The modular structure will allow further components to be added as funding becomes available. The websites continue to be popular, receiving between 10,000 and 15,000 individual visits each month.
• Cataloguing of special collections within the library, undertaken as preliminary work for each of the digitization projects, has uncovered hitherto unknown delights. For example, a large pamphlet collection dealing with working-class diet and food rationing during the Second World War, with its enforced emphasis on quality rather than quantity, has been of great interest to the university's researchers in nutrition.
• Digital copies of rare and unique records ensure the survival of the content and will help to protect the originals. Since digitization, the number of visitors coming to the library has actually decreased—many inquirers are advised to look first at particular sections of the website. For many, that is enough, but as one researcher told me, “It's not the same.” Well it isn't, but it is hoped that it will allow more people than ever before to access these materials and help to ensure that archives of the labor movement survive for future generations.
Involvement in the digitization program has been exciting and challenging. Recovering and disclosing material held in the library has helped to showcase the TUC Collections and, it is hoped, reinvigorate interest in the history of the labor movement. All the images and documents selected for digitization in these projects are a valuable resource for analyzing historical developments, as well as informing economic and social policy and practice in the twenty-first century. At the same time, they provide firsthand primary materials allowing us to connect with the working lives of our predecessors.
This article provides a case study of projects in one institution and concentrates on the advantages and challenges of digitization for librarians, archivists and other custodians of records. The issues posed for historians require similar investigation. Although I have emphasized the potential for expansion and democratization in historical research, there may also be inequalities of access for those working on non-English language sources or based in universities with less developed communications technology. Researchers need adequate training to navigate their way through the new digital resources and datasets and to take advantage of non-linear approaches and searches across various databases. How do they exploit the technology appropriately? Observing researchers in my own library, I sometimes wonder if they are reading the archives or if they are just taking hundreds of digital photos, simply because they can! As our concerns move on from the direct digitization of historical materials toward the capture and preservation of “born digital” resources (emails, electronic drafts, etc.), the quantity of information created and possibly conserved is enormous. How will the historians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries deal with this potential?
