Curating Childhoods is a 12-month study that forges links across disciplines in order to transform the way we document and archive children's everyday lives in the digital age. To date, accounts of children's lives have been conspicuously absent from the Mass Observation Archive - in large part due to the ethical challenges of documenting and recording intimate accounts of children and young people's lives. Such a trend stands in stark contrast to increased growth and proliferation of young people's use of online social media platforms as a means of self-documenting and curating multimedia accounts of their lives. In response to these trends, the study facilitates dialogue between young people's private digital data practices and public archives seeking to document the everyday. The project builds on a previous research initiative called 'Face 2 Face: Tracing the Real and the Mediated in Children's Cultural Worlds' (2012-3) which developed micro ethnographic and multimedia tools for documenting the temporal rhythms of children's everyday lives. The Curating Childhoods study is the next logical and necessary step in the development of this initiative and seeks to explore how researchers and archives can work with children and young people to address the ethical challenges of documenting and curating public records of everyday life. With the increasing democratisation of 'documentation' it has been ever more important to reconsider the role of the researcher, the archivist, and the professional as arbiters of ethical governance and practice. Consequently, the documentation of children and young people's lives will act as a key test case for our ability to work through this terrain, investigating alternatives to the simple privatisation of responsibility for protecting privacy (Hope, 2014). In collaboration with the Mass Observation Archive, the project's team will develop a series of knowledge exchange activities and resources bringing together the expertise of archivists, researchers and young people around issues of ethics and responsibility in the curation and sharing data. In the first instance, the research team will invite a panel of young people involved in the 'Face 2 Face' study to participate in a day workshop with archivists to talk about their everyday practices of curating, storing and sharing personal data. This workshop will then form a key contribution in the development of a set of new open-access knowledge exchange materials around 'good practice' in the curation and management of private digital data, targeted at young people, archivists and researchers. A key outcome of the Curating Childhoods project will be the development of a new on-going multimedia dataset on 'Everyday Childhoods', to be hosted and maintained at the Mass Observation Archive. This dataset will provide a rich new resource for researchers that will provide invaluable insights into the changing social and cultural configurations of childhood and youth over time. The dataset will initially comprise data collected as part of the Face 2 Face study, but will also later incorporate new data contributions from a 'self documentary day' for children on 12th May 2015, co-organised by the research and archive teams. Throughout the process of creating and compiling this dataset, the research and archive teams will critically examine the practical and ethical challenges of a establishing a new multimedia dataset on 'Everyday Childhoods' in the Mass Observation Archive. More broadly, this study will seek to contribute to on-going discussions across the arts and humanities and the social sciences on the challenges of recording and preserving digital and multimedia accounts of the everyday, as well as the wider ethical implications of researching and documenting children's lives in the digital age.

The Mass Observation Project (MOP), run by the Mass Observation Archive Charity (MOA) is a volunteer writing project that has run since 1981, and involved c. 3,500 self-selected individuals writing in response to directives - broadly themed questions sent out by the MOA, three times a year. Writers' responses to these directives provide a personal account of individuals' activities and attitudes towards a broad range of issues relating to British society. This writing has the potential to be of interest to wide audiences including, academics, policy-makers, practitioners, lay researchers, community groups, schools, adult education groups and individuals. However, for some time there has been a debate about the 'representativeness' of MOP writers. The MOA undertook some basic analyses of its writers, finding that at certain points in the lifetime of the MOP, writers have been over-represented by women living in the South East aged 50+. Some academics have used this finding to argue that MOP writers are not representative of the broader UK population, and their writing should not be used for research purposes. Others argue that the depth and quality of MOP writing makes it a unique longitudinal resource that can be used by researchers from different disciplinary fields. The debate has impacted on the trust and use of the MOP. This project seeks to put an end to this debate by producing sophisticated analyses of MOP writers that provide clear, evidence-based descriptions of writers and their socio-economic characteristics. This will enable all users of the archive to be confident about how and why they use this resource. The MOA, who are our partners in this project, have not had the tools and skills to do these sorts of analyses. During recent work on another project involving use of MOP writing, we discovered that the MOA hold lots of information on MOP writers. This includes information about their age, gender, occupation, which directives they have responded to, and how long these responses are. In its current form, this information can't be analysed. But, in collaboration with the MOA, we have developed a plan to integrate this information into one searchable database, to conduct a series of analyses to find out more about MOP writers. We will ask how the characteristics of MOP writers compare with those of the UK population as a whole; how they compare with those of the UK population that engage in active volunteering; and what their writing behaviour can tells us, for example, do women respond to different directives to men? As well as looking at this statistical information, we will look at MOP writing in response to the 1990 directive entitled Social Divisions, which 652 writers responded to (this represents 75% of active/serial responding writers). Writers talk about what class they think they are, whether they belong to a minority group, and whether they discriminate against others that are different. This will enable us to understand how writers perceive themselves, and how they fit with the broader UK population. We will also look at the 2008 Directive Your Lifeline, where 159 writers discussed meaningful life events. This will allow us to see, for example, when in their life-course they decided to write for the MOP, and whether they share particular life events, such as bereavement, divorce, or children leaving home. Using computer software, we will combine the statistical information with the MOP writing, and conduct an additional in depth analysis of these 811 individuals Our end-products will include the launch of an interactive searchable database, maintained by the MOA, enabling archive users to undertake a wide variety of searches of writer characteristics and responses to different directives; and publication of accessible reports, articles and conference papers, describing MOP writers to lay and academic audiences. These outputs will widen access to and enable confident use of the archive.

The publication of the Beveridge Report in 1942, and the subsequent establishment of comprehensive welfare services in the UK, was referred to as 'a revolutionary moment'. The same term has been used to describe the current context in which welfare services are being dismantled in England. At these two transformational moments, fundamental questions have been raised about the respective roles and responsibilities of the state and the voluntary and community sector (VCS) in welfare services provision. During the 1st revolutionary moment (1940s) the Beveridge report proposed a series of measures to address the 'evils' of the time. The subsequent restructuring of welfare provision led to significant changes in the structure and focus of many VCS organisations, and a period of intense debate about the nature and extent of the voluntary action. In our current 'revolutionary moment' as a result of major national and international events the role of the VCS as a welfare service provider has intensified despite severe cuts to funding. A fundamental renegotiation of the role of the state is underway; we are entering a period of intense debate about the nature and extent of voluntary action and its relationship to the state and welfare provision. The overarching aim is to explore the debates that have taken place on the role of voluntary action in the provision of welfare in the 1940s and 2010s in England. It will compare and contrast popular, political and VCS discourses. In order to meet this aim, we address 3 sets of questions: 1.What are the similarities and differences in narratives about the role, position and contribution of the VCS in the provision of social welfare in the 1940s compared with the 2010s? And, drawing on social origins theory, what combination of factors, including but not restricted to the balance of class forces, can help account for shifting narratives between the 1940s and 2010s? 2.What are the similarities and differences within and between the narratives of voluntary sector representatives, government officials, and the general public about the role, position and contribution of the voluntary and community sector in social welfare provision, firstly during the 1940s and secondly through the 2010s? And, drawing on the theory of strategic action fields, to what extent and how do different narratives reflect field shaping discursive interventions and a changing configuration of actors? 3.What evidence is there of how different narratives have been constructed, articulated, contested, and circulated? And, drawing on discursive institutionalism, how are different narratives related to each other in the struggle for 'room' and 'common sense' during periods of unsettlement and transition, as actors seek to frame action and construct the possibilities for change? Our approach to addressing these questions is to explore: 1.Public narratives: analysis of Mass Observation directives on voluntary action and social welfare from 1940s 2010s, plus one commissioned in 2017. 2.State narratives: analysis of key government policy documents (e.g. green and white papers, acts of parliament), speeches and parliamentary debates relating to the role of the voluntary sector in welfare service provision in England generated during the 1940s and 2010s (accessed from The National Archives, Historic Hansard, Hansard and various websites). 3. Voluntary sector narratives: focusing on 4 VCS organisations (NCVO, Children England, NCVYS, Age UK) review key statements, policy documents, and publications produced by them in the 1940s and 2010s, stored in their archives and websites. This 2 year study co-produced with NCVO, NCVYS, Children England, Age UK and Mass Observation; guided by a project Steering Group; and involving various knowledge exchange activities will contribute to the development of VCS policy and practice, through building capabilities, enhancing the existing evidence base and reframing debat

Since 1922 the BBC has been where Britain learns about itself and the world. It is a cultural institution of global significance, its history central to our understanding of the 20th and 21st centuries. Yet one vital piece of its history has never been accessible to anyone beyond a tiny circle of BBC staff and official historians: its internal archive of 632 recorded interviews - with key programme-makers and presenters such as David Attenborough, Sydney Newman, and John Cole, producers of early television such as Cecil Madden and Grace Wyndham Goldie, pioneering engineers, past directors-general, even Home Secretaries. All were interviewed as they retired and encouraged to speak frankly. Their testimonies offer unique 'ringside' accounts of how the BBC has developed the arts of broadcasting and seen the world of politics and culture. Yet, not only are they inaccessible to all but a select few; they are also unusable - scattered, un-catalogued, preserved in multiple formats from videotape to crumbling paper. BBC CONNECTED HISTORIES brings new digital humanities thinking to bear on this problem. It will digitise these materials to the highest standards and create a digital catalogue of the entire collection. Through generating metadata and tagging each interview, it doesn't just make available individual testimonies; the collection as a whole becomes searchable. Single accounts can be related to one another, themes or events mapped from several angles. Biographies become networked. By publishing this catalogue as 'linked open data' (LOD), the oral histories (OH) become connected to other digitised resources, including those of our Partners - the Science Museum (incl. the National Media Museum), Mass Observation (MO), and the British Entertainment History Project (BEHP), as well as all the BBC's other collections. So anyone searching for material on, say, 'Mrs Thatcher resigns', 'Diana', 'immigration' or 'comedy' can simultaneously discover relevant passages in the OH collection, the BBC's own vast programme archive, the personal accounts of listeners and viewers in MO, or the interviews of broadcasting technicians in BEHP. Or vice versa. This radically expands the ability of any public or academic researcher to connect different sets of evidence - and different perspectives - on BBC history. It provides programme-makers planning output for the BBC's 2022 Centenary with ready access to important though neglected material. The project will present highlights from the OH and linked collections on a series of BBC-hosted '100 Voices' websites, each on a broad theme (entertainment, war, national identity, etc.). These act (a) as high-profile shop-windows for research, (b) as public portals through which the OH catalogue and related resources can be searched, and (c) access-points for the public to upload their own recollections via a 'memory-share' facility, thereby 'crowd-sourcing' a new body of data. 25 new oral history interviews with former BBC staff will be filmed. These will be of individuals not included in the official OH, and will cover their whole lives, not just their BBC career. Each will be transcribed and tagged, linking them to existing resources. This demonstrates to the BBC the value of adopting a different (deeper, more connected) practice in future archival work - as will be written into a 'White Paper' to be presented formally to the BBC. This will also set out how the BBC's attempt to build a 'Digital Public Space' of shared resources might be improved through new policies on openness and user-engagement. Four journal articles, co-authored by the project team and the research fellow, will explore other methodological insights - in media history, oral history, and digital humanities. Finally, the PI, Hendy, is the authorised Centenary historian for the BBC. The new perspectives generated throughout this project will directly inform the monograph single-volume history he publishes in 2022.