Output details

Creation of High Wycombe Electronic Furniture Archive

Kaner (PI) identified this collection from 20th century British furniture manufacturing as primary archival material with major research significance. Funded by the AHRC (£300K 2006-9) for its digitisation, Kaner managed the research project developing criteria to prioritise and evaluate the significance of items to art and design research communities for future historiographic, social, economic and design research uses. Over 10,000 digital entries (image, text, photographs, film) with associated metadata were prepared drawing on Kaner’s specialist knowledge of twentieth century furniture designers and manufacturers to provide accurate supporting narrative. A subject-specialist conference was convened at the V&A (2006) and a pilot user group created to generate the metadata and web design. The design method allowed for appropriate fields, nomenclature and esoteric search terms, based on specialist community and end user input. The fields were refined through consultation with JISC, AHDS, AHRC, Getty and the furniture research communities, while field research (interviews, focus groups and reviews of unpublished material) provided data that allowed precise interpretation of the primary archival images (endorsed by ARLIS). The inventory, fields and terms are now being used as a model by the Worshipful Company of Furniture Makers for the cataloguing and digitisation of the Frederick Parker archive.

The archive launched November 2009 accompanied by an exhibition in High Wycombe library, to encourage outreach with ex-employee communities. The website has over 5M hits since then supporting the archive’s claim to be a primary source for twentieth century furniture history. The database and physical archive have been used by industry (Ercol, GPlan) and citations include: Ephemera Society, V&A, 2012; Glasgow School of Art and Design, http://gsaartdesign.blogspot.co.uk/; arts-humanities.net; Visual Arts Data Service http://www.vads.ac.uk/. Over 14 conference and journal publications relate to this project (2009-13), as well as citations in published works (e.g.Lambert, D (2012) Jackson (2013a &b).