Enduring images: Living Archives
Paul Corney, Tuesday, October 20, 2009

This weekend I made a semi annual visit to Sparknow’s Financial Controller to look at the numbers and our pipeline. Keeping abreast of a rapidly evolving business is a challenge as the diversity of client assignments expands. And it is vitally important to have a tight handle on cash flows and to be meeting deadlines and quality standards.

So it’s a sunny Sunday as I make my way down the A303 past Stonehenge pausing to stop at one of the UK’s longstanding roadside institutions, the Little Chef café. The chain of cafes has had a makeover. The garish red colour is still much in evidence yet they have decided to note fifty years of existence by making each outlet a living archive. What really struck me was the use of images across a 50-year timeline to celebrate their heritage and the employees that have worked for them.

It is a similar technique to that we used to trigger reminiscences and suggest areas of enquiry at the start of a major engagement to create a Living Archive for the Asian Development Bank in Manila. Setting up an exhibit in the midst of ADB’s knowledge hub / Starbucks café we invited passers bye to jot down observations and things they’d like to know more about on significant events in ADB’s 40 year existence. The exhibit provided a visual focal point and spawned numerous and unexpected trigger stories including: ADB’s role in the formation of the Greater Mekong Regional (economic cooperation) Group; how the 1997 Asian Crisis was tackled; and how ADB dealt with the emergence of the autonomous Central Asian Republics.

After three-dozen Oral History type interviews (with a cross section of senior, national and international officials some of whom were ADB alumni) each of which was recorded, transcribed and stored in a narrative database (Kobble), we are at the point of delivering a myriad of “products” that will become ADB’s Living Archive. For reasons that will become apparent in future postings we can only provide a brief glimpse now of the final deliverables. It comprises a book, a catalogued set of audio clips, a set of podcastable material and a CD that features the sounds of ADB and Asia as a backdrop to many illustrative anecdotes.

This past year we have all come to value the politeness and respect for the individual that is a characteristic of Asian society. It has been a humbling experience and none more so than on our visit this month which found us delivering aid with Oxfam to the victims of the recent typhoon that stuck the environs of Manila.