Accounts with Interest: opening up the archives of Barclays Bank

This research will examine customer records and other nominal data held within Barclays Group Archive (BGA) against the backdrop of current digital humanities projects and archival theory. The BGA's collections will be used as a site of enquiry to explore the possibilities for using BGA data to create new resources, as a case study to assess the applicability of digital humanities to large historical datasets from businesses and organisations. These digital resources would have the potential to open up the archives, engage new audiences and increase accessibility to the collections and would contribute to scholarly debate in this area. Initial research will centre on surveying record and data types held at BGA, changes to these over the centuries, and identifying potential opportunities and barriers to their exploitation. Concurrently, a systematic and comprehensive survey of datalinking projects will be conducted to assess their potential applicability to historical nominal data. Other identified digital humanities projects, including handwriting and optical character recognition and geospatial technologies, innovative user interfaces and visualisation techniques, and citizen engagement, will also be examined to evaluate their suitability for application to BGA data. The records of other British banks will be examined in order to identify whether there are enough similarities between national banking institutions to enable a re-producible model to be created or collaborative projects, such as datalinking, to be developed.
This research project is positioned within the field of archival studies and will contribute to the scholarly investigation of technological and intellectual access to archives, and of audience engagement and development. Transdisciplinary in nature, it will also contribute to the field of digital humanities, in particular with regard to its application to historical datasets. Initial research questions include how might existing technologies enhance the research potential of customer records for Barclays and other banking institutions; are there sufficient similarities between historical customer information held by UK banking archives to enable the creation of generally applicable models for digital access and/or datalinking, and could these be applied to business archives more generally; and how might the exploitation of nominal data through digital humanities lead to the development of new resources to attract new audiences and contribute to stakeholder engagement.
Keywords: archival theory; digital humanities; Barclays Bank; access to archives; audience engagement; historical datasets