Hang your heads in shame, oh ye Americans! For, this time, Britain has won the race. They have now established an archive to preserve the diaries and journals of the common person. I know that this archive has been years in the making. Congratulations and sincere best wishes for our partner across the sea!
Their website is http://www.thegreatdiaryproject.com
It is my goal to maintain ties with their organization and share information. Since my ancestors were Brits prior to 1645 (messy little Revolutionary War aside) I am hoping to be allowed honorary membership in their group.
As described below, the creation of an archive requires these elements: “enthusiasm” and involvement from volunteers interested in the project, a physical location to house the archive, acquisition of diaries, non-profit status and financial support. It is my dream that someday we will have an archive in the US.
I will allow Catherine Robins to describe the formation of their archive in her own words:
The Great Diary Project Blog
Diaries are a valuable social and historical resource; they offer a window to past lives of a huge spectrum of people, building an image of their lives and the developments which fed today’s society. At the moment these too often meet a wasteful end.
The Great Diary Project aims to stop this by establishing a Diary Repository which will house and make available these valuable commodities.
To do this requires a mix of 1. Enthusiasm for the cause from those involved 2. Finding a home for collected diaries 3. Diary collection and 4. Raising public awareness.
My role is to use social media in order to achieve 4. and so encourage 1. 2 and 3. This blog therefore aims to captivate your enthusiasm through a personal account of the project and so urge you to take a look at our website (link), like us on face book (link) and follow us on twitter (link) and generally spread the word.
First, a disclaimer: This blog tells the story of the project from an entirely personal perspective; were you to speak to others from the project, you would likely find a whole multitude more of opinions and experiences. This is partly because I could not find the words or space to properly articulate each persons story. But also because I believe in the cliché ‘passion inspires passion’; a personal story allows for proper communication of my belief in and experiences of the project.
Herein follows my story of the Great Diary Project.
October 2009; I am inevitably running late for a final year University class. This doesn’t stop me pausing to listen to a radio interview, then manically googling to find who the speaker was (otherwise known as internet stalking a radio interviewee). The reason being that the topic was diaries, and one of the one of the interviewees (Irving Finkel) was exhorting the need for a national Diary Repository to save this fantastic piece of history.
This ideal resonated absolutely with both my scholarly and personal experiences*;
At the time I was working on my dissertation and essentially it would have been a whole lot easier had I been able to read a few contemporary accounts which told me exactly what people at the time thought. I have also kept diaries since childhood and have wondered of the conclusions which might be drawn about myself and my contemporaries were these found in years to come.
I was hooked. I emailed Irving immediately – probably some nonsense along the lines of ‘wow this is so awesome I totally agree thanks for being on the radio, great, thanks.’- and fortunately for me he replied. Thus I was involved.
Soon after Irving came and delivered a seminar and a lecture on the topic of diaries at the University of Leeds. With him Irving brought a selection of his favourite pieces; a diary, for instance, from a train spotter who every day logged the trains he saw, until one day entries abruptly stopped. One can only imagine. A mixed crowd of students, lecturers and friends were enthralled; no one left, even when the refreshments ran out and afterwards people crowded round to ask questions and congratulate the cause.
At a later date I met with Irving in the primary diary store – his office. It was wall to wall, ceiling to floor and every other cliché in between which indicates the room was bursting at the seams with books. It was an amazing sight, but clearly not a viable long term solution.
Between this point and now others have done fantastic and dedicated work. Diaries continued to be collected, a cataloguing system was begun, diaries inputted to this during lunch hours and at home, and a home for the collection continued to be sought for.
Now we are pulling together even more to really push the Great Diary Project into the public consciousness. And for this to work we need you. So I reiterate; we need you to tell other people, like us on face book, re post our posts, follow us on twitter and re tweet our tweets.
And please do visit out website for more information www.thegreatdiaryproject.com
All that remains for me to say is thanks for reading and thank you to Cynthia for very kindly affording us a space on her blog.
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* Referring to the work contributing to a History BA as scholarly may be a tad much but it does make for a nice turn of phrase
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This is a photo of my diary collection. My own diaries take up three and a half shelves on the left. Had I written continuously with no breaks, this collection would be enormous. The first one I saved was 1964. I recently began diary #81. When I wrote my first diary I never expected it to be a lifelong passion. Never thought about that at all.
National Diary Archive 