Transport for London

Summary

Engaging with a range of users is a fundamental task for every archive service. For archivists based within a business this might entail quite distinct activities to engage colleagues within the business as opposed to those from outside the organisation. Online audiences tend to be both broader and more numerous than physical visitors which serves as both a challenge and an opportunity.

The archives team at Transport for London (TfL) work closely with their colleagues in the marketing and press teams. Working on a twelve-month cycle, every November they review new and interesting finds from that year and decide which would make good stories to roll out the following year. The team look to align stories across a broad range of subjects as well as forthcoming anniversaries. Some stories like Harry Beck, the designer who created the Underground map, are always popular and the team are always on the lookout for new or lesser-known stories to tell.

The collections, which date from 1556 to the present day, contain historic and modern-day records including station designs, the role played by the business to support the 2012 London Olympics, and staff records alongside the more formal Board minutes, Committee papers and annual reports created by the business. There are an estimated 173,000 physical items and the service has already acquired over 26 terabytes (TB) of born-digital material.

After more than 18 months of planning and work, in February 2024 the archive service launched A Journey through time, a series of exhibitions, using the Google Arts and Culture platform with the tag line of ‘a quirky commute through TfL’s history’.

“London’s world-renowned transport network is one of our most treasured institutions and this collaboration with Google Arts and Culture is a fantastic way to see its incredible history in a new light. By digitally preserving its archive collections and making them accessible, we are opening up the fascinating history of London’s transport system and its ongoing impact on our city to a much broader audience.”

Justine Simons OBE, Deputy Mayor for Culture and the Creative Industries in London

Challenges and opportunities

A key element of the archive service’s inward facing engagement is the creation of physical exhibitions of material at the Transport for London Head Office where the archive service is based.

The theme of each temporary exhibition is usually linked to a key organisational priority and the displays and related quizzes have proved to be an effective way to engage colleagues across the business to drop-in to the archive service and talk with staff. Each open day results in the transfer of material from business areas who haven’t transferred items previously. A digital version is placed on the intranet serving as a permanent legacy of the effort.

“Whether you have just joined TfL or been around for 20 years – we can always learn from looking at our past. Making the archives more easily accessible during the workday also means you can take a break, pop down and learn something new in the process.”

Thomas Canning, TfL’s Press Officer

The organisation’s own blog, Made for TfL, frequently features archival material serving to increase the visibility of this content with a much broader audience. The archive service also contributes to internal ‘lunch and learn’ sessions with an intentional mix to highlight items and stories from the collections alongside discussions about the role and work of the team.

Archive colleagues are keen to highlight the wide range of topics beyond London transport history that the collections support, including architecture and wartime London. Although the London Transport Poster collection is held by the London Transport Museum, the archive service has identified supporting and complimentary records amongst the corporate archive, including the work of its graphic designers. This knowledge is shared through a series of research guides and by featuring their favourite items from the collections on the archive service’s website. The Google Arts and Culture project has helped to extend the reach of TfL’s archive service to wider audiences.

Outcomes for service users

The Google Arts and Culture content features over 2,000 documents, photographs and films from the archive collections. It features introductions to Transport for London and the Corporate Archives – the latter describing its role as being ‘to preserve and make accessible records, not to interpret them’.

Underlying the need for these activities is the fact that less than 10% of the collections have been digitised. This features a mix of material that can be licensed (for example staff registers), material that was digitised due to external funding (for example maps and the early board minutes) and items that were scanned in-house for enquiries or to support outreach. The service does not have a distinct digitisation budget but it does allocate some staff time to scanning.

Along with a pictorial history of each of the eleven underground lines, other stories take a topical approach, looking at inclusivity, creativity, train maps and stories and looking at individuals and events associated with the underground over time. The site is currently registering over 3,000 page views a month from about 2,000 visitors. There is evidence it is becoming a core tool for engagement with the public, with the team noticing a small but growing number of enquiries now mentioning the Google Arts and Culture site and some internal business areas have begun to suggest topics for new stories.

The team have produced a number of video tutorials to support the digital collections portal using their digital preservation system, Preservica, to provide access to both digitised and born-digital material. One film serves as an introduction to the main features of the portal including the use of icons to distinguish between folders and individual files. Additional films investigate browsing by topic, using Boolean operators to construct a search and the digitised staff magazines which cover 1914-1945. Use of the digital collections portal is currently low but does seem to be increasing.

For public engagement purposes the Google Arts and Culture site has been complemented by a series of archive webinars, which started during Covid-19, and seemed a natural progression from the internal ‘lunch and learn’ sessions. The webinars serve as an outlet to share their work and activities and have covered a range of topics including oral history, putting together a physical exhibition and their online catalogue.

Recording the events allows them to be added to the organisation’s YouTube channel – increasing the reach and impact of the work. In 2023/24 over 600 people attended the webinars and interaction via LinkedIn and YouTube had increased by more than 20% on the previous year.

What was learned from the process?

The whole process to create the Google Arts and Culture platform was about three years in duration, primarily because the project increased in scale and ambition. The planning of stories was an organic process that began with the stories that were already known. In doing this some themes began to emerge and some stories were left ‘orphaned’ so further stories were developed to support these.

Google Arts and Culture digitised the maps, which account for about a third of the content, with the remainder already digitised or undertaken in-house. It is estimated the resource took about 1,200 hours of staff time across the three years. Whilst the time taken to write a single story does vary, in the planning nine hours is the estimate that is used. The work has enhanced the team’s writing and image editing skills – the latter being critical as the content needs to be as visual as possible.

Key advice

The Google Arts and Culture platform, alongside the other outreach activities discussed above, support several of the archive service’s key strategic objectives including increasing engagement, both within the business and with the public, and improving accessibility and discovery of collections. The service has found that it is important to set out the tasks necessary to achieve the distinct outreach objectives in the service’s Forward Plan, including assigned staff time on tasks, which feeds through into staff personal objectives.

With all its outreach activities, the service has also sought to capitalise on the importance TfL attaches to reputation and goodwill towards the organisation. Mentions of the archive service and collections on TfL’s social media channels are always positive and the social media posts using archival content are frequently amongst the most popular. The service has therefore built up a strong relationship with the press office, who review all mentions of TfL in the press and on social media channels. The service has also been mindful of the marketable value of the organisation’s history and intellectual property rights: when undertaking commercial collaborations, the archive service will often seek to incorporate the ‘backstory’ into the promotion around a collaboration.

The archive service also advises seeking out other ways to articulate how the archive supports the business. For example, TfL simultaneously looks to protect and celebrate its intellectual property rights, particularly the globally iconic roundel logo. There are necessary limitations and permissions required relating to the use of the logo in any commercial or promotional activity. Consideration about how archival content is presented is therefore always important. Occasionally this impacts how content is made available online, for example including the use of lower quality images or watermarks.

How will this work be developed in the future?

In 2025 TfL will be celebrating its 25th anniversary and a number of projects are underway or planned within the archive service, including an update to their collections highlights and an oral history project to capture 25 women for 25 years of TfL. It is expected that this will be added to Google Arts and Culture and promoted through the organisation’s social media channels. The team is also working with the press office to identify five major developments over the past 25 years and to then create packages of content for each.

Not all of the digital collections have online catalogue descriptions, but the plan is to incorporate them into the digital collections portal so that users will only have one site to visit to begin their searches.

The archive service also initiated an oral history programme to capture stories relating to the Covid-19 pandemic. As well as capturing some first-hand stories for the collections, this work and its innovative approach to story-telling has further helped shift perceptions of the archive service and collections within the business.

Find out more

Email: corporatearchives@tfl.gov.uk

Access the TFL online catalogue

Relevant resources

The National Archives’ Digital engagement toolkit

The National Archives’ guide to Developing your audience

Digital Preservation Coalition’s Digital Preservation Business Case Toolkit

The National Archives’ Novice to Know-How basic digital preservation online training course

The National Archives’ case studies on digital preservation implementation