Société Internationale des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts du Spectacle

Archives on the Web - A Discussion Paper

Jane Pritchard, Archivist

Rambert Dance company and English National Ballet

Winds of Change - New Technology

21st International Congress

Helsinki, 31 August - 6 September 1996

I now recognise that I was extremely bold when registering for this conference in suggesting that, as were just developing a site on the World Wide Web at English National Ballet and I had been invited to contribute archival information for it, I could speak briefly about my experiences. I did not think up a title and would now suggest that "A Novice on the Web" would be appropriate. To be honest my experience of the Internet is still somewhat limited but at this stage in the proceedings we need to open windows for discussion so I will plunge ahead and share my experiences and problems with you.

Early this year the two major dance companies I work for requested I undertake special projects. Rambert Dance Company (where we still do not have a Web site) was the more traditional - a book to mark the company's seventieth anniversary. This is a fixed, once-only project working to a deadline and if mistakes crept in one was stuck with them, updating or correcting when new material comes to light, that is publishing a second edition, would be an expensive undertaking. The book is - and I quote from a review - an "excellent, fact-laden, yet still highly entertaining... invaluable reference tome". It draws on the wealth of the Rambert Archive and information was selected in response to enquiries and the trends of enquiries over the past two years. I felt strongly that if we were putting information into a fixed book form the quality of presentation and the reproduction of visual material had to be of a high standard. So much for the old-style of disseminating information.

At English National Ballet I was asked to prepare information for inclusion on our new World Wide Web site. I have circulated images of our 'Home page', our 'Introduction' and the 'Contents' page to indicate what we have included. Although you will find a brief history of the company under 'Background', all the detailed information relates to the last three years, the period for which Derek Deane has been in position as Artistic Director. However for that period we have included information on productions and biographies of dancers, choreographers, designers and composers.

At present English National Ballet's Web site is primarily a marketing tool and, as such, compliments our published resources. The 'News' and 'Performances' pages are updated; much of the rest remains static for a season. The 'Ballets' even includes the principal text and articles from our programmes, so that individuals may (and do) turn up at performances with a print-out of the programme notes which they have been able to read in advance and only need to collect an up-to-date cast sheet! What I hope will happen over the next year is that we will develop a wider range of information. I do not see us including a full index of archival holdings - too much is for internal use - but a full index of the repertory throughout the company's 47 year history, which would be more detailed than we could afford to include in book form. In the Rambert book we gave what I felt was the minimum that was useful to researchers, even then twice as much as was included in our publication twenty years ago. I also hope to include key archival holdings such as whether notation or music scores for the ballets exist in the archive, how much of the production (sets, costumes, design material) survives; who photographed each production; whether film, television or video material exists and, if so, if and where it can be viewed.

We are eagerly looking at how other performing arts companies are using their sites. Discovering what we can learn from them and how we can avoid their mistakes. English National Ballet's site has been praised for being so comprehensive and for being clearly designed. It has also been criticised for overwhelming the user with too much dense information.

We do, however, have one major snag. At English National Ballet we only have one computer linked to a modem. Internally we are not even networked! It may appear to the outside world that we are forging ahead - and in some respects we are. But we are also still living in 'the dark ages'! I think we would supply information more efficiently if we could really describe ourselves as users too. On the company's printed publicity we advertise our Web site; in education packs we recommend internet as a means of seeking out further information but the muddle of often apparently contradictory notes that emerges when you surf using a production title is alarming. It is not so much the scholar as the general user who, I believe, ends up confused. I hope we will soon be able to become more familiar with using new resources efficiently. Only then will we be able to help others.

To finish, I would mention that I am working on a third dance collection, sorting and indexing material for deposit with a University Library. I rather suspect that it will be that collection which will be made electronically accessible first, as it will clearly take some time to persuade actively performing companies to take advantage of their sites to disseminate information on our archives as well as advertising our current activities and performances.

21st Congress

URL: http://www.sibmas.org/congresses/sibmas96/hels15.html