Revealing collections, exploring discovery? Participatory archiving and creating 'thick description' catalogues for medical and scientific archives

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Despite the large number of significant scientific and medical archives deposited in UK archives since the 1970s, many collections are underused because of inadequate cataloguing, a lack of scientific expertise amongst archive staff and only limited contextual information. Staff at the Wellcome Library wish to address this by extending the involvement of its stakeholders in the archival process. The Library has access to a diverse network of experts and subject specialists, ranging from specialist communities of practice in the biomedical sciences and elite clinical disciplines, to patient support and pressure groups, and hopes that the expertise of all these groups can be captured and incorporated into archival catalogues. Significantly the Library believes that these participatory approaches could also involve 'historically marginalised communities', such as the mental health survivor history network, in the description of archives. These objectives mesh with contemporary academic and professional debates about the 'participatory archive' which seek to enable record creators, depositors and users to participate in professional archival processes with the aim of creating more detailed descriptions and a deeper understanding of the record and the context of its creation and use. Some recent attempts to apply user-generated content perspectives to the catalogue have been driven by the use of Web 2.0 technologies, however participatory archival practice includes many less technologically dependent approaches, such as Revisiting Archive Collections (RAC) and life history interviews with creators and depositors. In these examples, user contributions are obtained by the archivist staging and recording encounters between users and the collections, the results of which can then be used to enhance catalogue descriptions. User participation approaches such as these can be employed to capture the knowledge of both traditional 'experts', including the creators and depositors of archive collections, and the responses of individuals and groups that might be characterised as having a cultural rather than 'expert' association with the archives. Incorporating more subjective and instinctive responses into archive catalogues poses some serious questions about validity, reliability and representativeness and the archivist's role in assessing this is a major professional challenge. This research aims to deliver a thorough understanding of the potential strengths, opportunities and challenges of participatory approaches to archival description by examining the impacts of employing RAC and life history interviews to a number of scientific archives at the Wellcome Library. A crucial element of this research will be to explore how decisions about the reliability or otherwise of the data captured are made and then documented, and how any resulting ethical issues are met. The key research questions are* What are the challenges in capturing and utilising multiple voices within scientific archive catalogues? What are the impacts of such approaches on public engagement with scientific archives? * What are the professional implications of the incorporation of multiple voices within the catalogue? Should the archivist have a central role in moderating and framing this new content and if so how is this role to be documented?* What are the ethical implications of incorporating multiple voices into the catalogue?* What lessons can be learnt about the capture and utilisation of user contributed content from other disciplines?* What is the relationship between the approach to participation and the chosen delivery mechanism (including technology based solutions)?Although the research focuses on scientific and medical archives in the Wellcome Library, the results will be of wider interest to all heritage professio