Exploring the Bloodaxe Archive: a creative and critical dialogue

The acquisition of the internationally significant archive of poetry publisher Bloodaxe Books in 2013 was the starting point for a new collaboration between library staff at Newcastle University and researchers in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics. An exploratory, and then a major, Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project, ‘The Poetics of the Archive: Creative and Community Engagement with the Bloodaxe Archive’, became the opportunity to test new theories about archival practice, particularly through digital applications, and expand the audience traditionally involved with literary archives from humanities researchers, to poets, artists and film-makers. The project was realized through both following and subverting established foundations of archival practice: alongside traditional cataloguing, which provided the strong frame for other activities and the metadata on which it drew, an experimental digital interface was created, which could harness multimedia and creative outputs. It was also the aim of the interface to emulate an experience where users had the capacity to ‘browse’ the data alongside ‘search and retrieve’ discoverability, and make links that depended on the kind of serendipity on which creative activity thrives.