Our visit to the archive introduced us to real archival processes, materials and information. One of the key things I was interested in was how the large variety of material, ranging from graphic merchandise to statistical data, was contained within the archive, and how these volumes differed.
One interesting method that I found was the use of ‘tabbing’ within mounted volumes, which was a crude archival method of storing loose paper and excerpts. It is simply a thin slice of card bound in to the signature along with the rest of the paper, but allowed smaller pieces to then be glued on to it, essentially using it as a mount.
Speaking to the archivist, it is now a process that has been replaced with modern plastic sleeves in lever arch files as the glue damages the documents and makes them difficult to remove and replace if copies need to be taken. However, in a document where the material is generally not designed to be taken out, it is an authentic method of binding smaller loose material in to our publication.
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