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Propaganda at the British Library Webinar 12 March 2014
- 1. Propaganda Ian Cooke Political & International Studies British Library Webinar 10 March 2014
- 2. www.bl.uk 2 Origins Honneur - Patrie, c.1914. WW1.P/1(27)Constitutiones Apostolicae Sacrae Congregationis de Propaganda Fide. 1642. British Library 494.i.17
- 3. www.bl.uk 3 Nation The White-Haired Girl film poster. 1972. British Library ORB.99/178
- 4. www.bl.uk 4 Enemy The Orchestra of the Psychological War. 1963. British Library HS.74/2170 T. Corbella, The Murder of Miss Cavell inspires German “Kultur” c.1915. Philatelic Collections - Wherry Donation 672.
- 5. www.bl.uk 5 War Allied leaflets prepared for distribution by air from aircraft based in the UK. 1940- 45. British Library B.S. 14/1004
- 6. www.bl.uk 6 Health left: ‘Oh! When will they get rid of alcohol?’ Union of French women against alcohol. 1918. British Library Tab.11748.a. ‘He’s a public enemy …’ Central Office of Information. c1960. B.S. 81/19
- 7. www.bl.uk 7 Today ‘Chorus’ installation by Field for Propaganda: Power and Persuasion exhibition. Photograph from: http://twelve-studio.co.uk/work/the-british-library
- 8. www.bl.uk 8 Posters Right: ‘Kill the fly and save the child’. The Medical Officer. London, c.1920. British Library 1865.C.20(28) Far right: Freedom American-style. 1971. British Library HS.74/2170
- 9. www.bl.uk 9 Philatelic Proofs of Ghana postage stamp, 1d. 1957. Crown Agents archive: Ghana box 40. ‘Struggle of the South Korean People’. North Korea 1972. Publicity Collection A-M. Liberty Calling. Campbell- Johnson Collection, vol. 28 Juan Antonio Morales (attributed), Los Nacionales. [Madrid], c.1936. Shelley collection. Iraq. 100 Dinars. 1942. Crown Agents archive CU3/65/3
- 10. www.bl.uk 10 Central Office of Information archive Kem (Kimon Evan Marengo, artist), postcards showing adaptation of a story from the Shah-name. c.1942. PP/13/9L AIDS: Don’t Die of Ignorance. 1987. HSSH/1/44/87A Alan Adler (artist), Rabies: No pets. 1986. MAFF/1/19/86 The Battle for Civilisation. 1942. PP/4/64
- 11. www.bl.uk 11 How we researched the item list • Talk to curators (we didn’t know exactly what we were after) • Used existing information published about collections
- 12. www.bl.uk 12 Research help - Philatelic
- 13. www.bl.uk 13
- 14. www.bl.uk 14
- 15. www.bl.uk 15 Catalogues used Explore the British Library (books, maps, journals, official reports, posters) http://explore.bl.uk Search our catalogue: Archives and Manuscripts http://searcharchives.bl.uk Sound and Moving Image Catalogue http://cadensa.bl.uk Additionally … Central Office of Information Archive database http://molcat1.bl.uk/COI/ Shaw & Lloyd. Publications proscribed by the Government of India. 1985.
- 16. www.bl.uk 16
- 17. www.bl.uk 17
- 18. www.bl.uk 18 Using printed catalogues and other sources Above: Bezbozhnik u Stanka. No.7 1923. British Library PP.8000.rs Identified in David King, Red Star Over Russia (2009) Right: Ministry of Information, Home Intelligence Division, Public Opinion in the UK, appendices to report. The National Archives INF 1/291 Identified in Ian McLaine, Ministry of Morale (1979)
- 19. www.bl.uk 19 http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/index.html • Online gallery • BL Learning • World War One • Sounds • Web Archive
- 23. www.bl.uk 23
- 24. www.bl.uk 24 commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/British_Library A football match. Gurkhas versus a Signal Company [St Floris, France]. 1915. H. D. Girdwood, via Wikimedia Commons Bomb Gun Section. Shell bursting in front of trench [St Floris, France]. 1915. H. D. Girdwood, via Wikimedia Commons
- 25. www.bl.uk 25 commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/British_Library Captain and Mrs Alfred Dreyfuss, before his conviction and when released from prison. 1899. By Charles Orgaard, via Wikimedia Commons The Living Union Jack.1898. By Sarah Elizabeth Charlton, via Wikimedia Commons.
- 26. www.bl.uk 26 sounds.bl.uk • Speeches and public debate • Life stories and everyday life • Use of popular and traditional music
- 27. www.bl.uk 27 www.webarchive.org.uk • Curated collection of UK websites • Many websites no longer live today • Collections include: UK General elections; Political Action and Communication; Spending cuts
- 28. www.bl.uk 28
- 29. www.bl.uk 29 Thank you! David Welch, Propaganda Power and Persuasion. London: The British Library. 2013
Editor's Notes
- Welcome to Propaganda at the British Library. My name is Ian Cooke, and I’m Lead Curator for International and Political Studies. I was also one of two curators leading our Summer exhibition for 2013, Propaganda: Power and Persuasion. Our aim for the exhibition was to take a subject that most people have some experience and opinions about, and use our collections to reflect current research and to challenge some of the more common opinions and preconceptions around propaganda. We were very keen to make use of visually striking material but also material that gets into our everyday lives and we don’t necessarily think about as propaganda. Today, I’ll talk about the exhibition and the sorts of material it contained, but I also want to use this session to talk about the process of putting the exhibition items together as an example of doing research at the British Library: how we brought together material from our collections, using our catalogues and online collection guides. I’ll also show where you can find similar examples of propaganda, powerful persuasion, and everyday ephemera in our online galleries and other digitised collections. So, the subject for this presentation is going to be a bit wider than the exhibition itself. In doing so, I hope that this will provide information that you can apply to other research projects using the British Library
- Origins allowed us room to talk about the development of propaganda before the First World War, and also enabled us to introduce concepts around the interpretation and study of propaganda – which would become useful through the rest of the exhibition. Also in this section, we showed an ancient coin, board games, and a larger-than-life portrait of Napoleon as Emperor.
- In Nation, we looked at the use of propaganda in creating and sustaining a national narrative (especially at times of stress or change) and also in international competition – in presenting a desirable image of a nation and its people to an international audience. We also used this section to look at the development, and sometimes demolition, of personality cults. Also in this section, we displayed postage stamps, music, maps, and the bid film for the London 2012 Olympic Games
- Our next section, which was potentially the most difficult, looked at demonization of peoples both within and outside of the state. We also examined how similar tactics were used by groups who saw the state as something imposed, illegitimate and inimical, as a means to capture public attention and generate sympathy and support. Also in this section we included: pamphlets, cartoons, speeches and satirical film.
- The section on creating an enemy then ran naturally into our section on propaganda in wartime. This formed the largest part of our exhibition, and we looked at propaganda aimed at domestic audiences as well as at combatants and civilians in enemy or occupied countries. We examined the role of propaganda in: morale-building; justifying war; encouraging recruitment, savings and production; communicating instructions about new behaviour (eg air defence instructions); and in maintaining or building support for occupying forces in enemy or neutral territory. Also in this section: cartoons and film, also radio broadcasts, paintings, cigarette cards and headscarves.
- Our final thematic section looked at public health campaigns. In some ways this proved our most controversial section, as not everyone agreed that the definition of propaganda encompassed public health campaigns. However, we attempted to show how similar strategies and methods (eg demonization, reassurance, the use of ‘everyman’ characters etc) were used by different countries at different times to influence behaviour on a domestic and personal level including: food and diet; risky and safe behaviours (eg drinking and smoking); sexual activity; and maternal and infant health. This was one area also where there was more rich information about the effectiveness of campaigns, and we used the 1987 UK AIDS awareness campaign as one of our case studies. Talk about examples on screen: also in this section, we showed matchbox covers, leaflets, public information films.
- The exhibition closed with a section headed ‘Today’. This addressed the ways in which propaganda, and challenges to propaganda, are changing with the use of new media, and online communications. The ‘Chorus’ installation, which you can see here, used a mix of live and archived data from Twitter and animated it to highlight different questions around the use of social media. We were interested in arguments around both the democratising aspects of social media – the immediacy of response, providing a platform for debate, allowing networks to grow; and, conversely, the opportunities that these forms of communication gave to anonymise, choreograph and mislead in communications. So, were we looking at the antidote to propaganda, or just propaganda in a new form. Our ‘Today’ section also concluded a theme which ran through the whole of the exhibition, and examined how propaganda moves through different media types over time; always occupying the most compelling and most popular forms of communication. In our exhibition, we were keen to reflect the ways in which propaganda entered everyday life. This gave us the opportunity to include a very broad range of materials and media. For me, this was one of the most rewarding aspects of putting the exhibition together, as it was a great opportunity to dig deeper and find out more about what is in our collections; to test out preconceptions about we do and don’t hold, and to be surprised by unexpected finds.
- One surprise was the range of poster collections within the Library. I was expecting to find large numbers of pamphlets, booklets and other small printed ephemera, but had generally believed that our poster collecting was very limited. Instead, I found very rich collections, including some amazing UK campaigns material from the turn of the 20th century, and a very large collection of World War One posters, especially from Britain and France. Similarly, we found large collections of Chinese and Russian posters from the Cold War period. In fact, our Russian poster collection extends to the immediate post-Soviet period, up to around1993. As well as the original posters themselves, our collections were also a very good source of reprints, catalogues and guides from previous exhibitions around the world on poster art.
- Another significant source that we used in the exhibition was our Philatelic collections. We liked the idea of propaganda that was designed to be moved around, that you could hold in your hand, pocket or wallet without really thinking about. That could cross borders. Postage stamps are one way that states can influence how their own populations, and those around the world, perceive them. It’s an opportunity to build a national narrative over time, either through overt or more subtle means – and the change in postage stamp designs at times of national change can be interesting to observe. [compare Nkrumah and North Korea examples]. Our philatelic collections are among the largest and most extensive in terms of geography in the world. I expected to find some very good examples of postage stamps – but I was surprised by the related material that was also available. As well as stamps used to record payment for postage, there are stamps used for overt campaigning purposes. In our exhibition, we used an American example from the First World War, using the image of ‘Liberty’ campaigning for the purchase of war bonds. The collections also contain material related to the development of postage stamps. Much of the material on the development of postage stamps comes from the archive of the Crown Agents, who were responsible for postage stamp issues and also bank notes for the colonies of the Empire. So this archive collection also contains proofs of bank notes designed on behalf of the colonies of the Empire and states approaching independence within the Commonwealth. Alongside postage stamps and paper currency, our Philatelic collections also hold a number of relevant collections of postcards. In our exhibition, we drew on the Shelley collection of postcards relating to the Spanish Civil War. This collection came about through a project to interview members of the International Brigades, and built up a large collection of postcards sent by members. They provide a fascinating record not just of the messages sent, but also the designs of the postcards themselves (many of which were based on posters) and the campaign stamps used on the cards. Both the postcards and the campaign stamps were used to raise money for the Republicans.
- We found that our Central Office of Information Archive was also a very good source for propaganda and persuasive messaging as it appeared in a range of forms, such as: posters, post cards, leaflets, badges, stickers and t-shirts. The UK Central Office of Information was formed following the Second World War, as a Government agency responsible for commissioning publicity and market research on behalf of government departments. Our archive covers materials commissioned by the COI from 1945 up to around 2000. The collection also includes earlier material produced during the War by the Ministry of Information.
- So, we were ambitious in the range of material that we wanted to show, and finding out about these items was a big task - and I had a lot of help in finding the material that we used in the exhibition. To start with, in our initial work on pulling together a list of items, we invited a lot of curators to a couple of meetings, so that we could set out our ideas for the exhibition and asked them to respond with items that they knew about in their collections. The important point here of course is that, although I was one of the curators leading on the exhibition, I didn’t just rely on my own knowledge of the collections. Instead, we sought to draw on the much richer institutional knowledge within the Library, and this certainly helped to shape the exhibition as a whole, well as provide information about specific items. That is one of the strengths of the Library – not just our collection holdings, but the availability of curators who can help explain and put our collections into context. The best way of getting into that knowledge base from outside the Library is through our ‘Help for Researchers’ web pages. These pages give introductions to our collections by subject, by resource type and by area and language. Some parts of ‘Help for Researchers’ are more-detailed than others, but almost every page has contact details at the bottom. They are intended as a way of getting at least some of that institutional knowledge out more widely.
- Here’s how you find ‘Help for Researchers’ from our web pages. Either from ‘Quick Links’ on right-hand-side of the page, or from selecting the ‘Collections’ tab. The Help for Researchers pages are also very useful for parts of our collection that are less easy to find on our catalogues.
- For example, we have very detailed guides and finding aids to our Official Publications, and Philatelic Collections. Here you can see a list of named collections in our Philatelic holdings. These are significant, as they are not catalogued online elsewhere.
- There are also links to specific databases, for example to Central Office of Information publications, or the prints and drawings of the India Office.
- To a large extent, the research for the exhibition followed an iterative process of talking to curators, and experts and others interested in the subject outside the Library, and then searching on our catalogues for material which we had identified as of interest. One of the great things about working at the British Library is that in searching our collections, you can stay reasonably optimistic that you’ll find what you are after, or at least something close to it. I’d go back to curators and experts for more information depending on what I had found. I’ve listed the main British Library catalogues that I used in researching the exhibition. Most often, I used ‘Explore the British Library’ and this covered most of the items that I’ve been talking about so far. Archives and Manuscripts are important for our personal papers, which include collections for people who worked in print media or as politicians and campaigners. For example, we used the papers of Lord Northcliffe. Northcliffe was a newspaper baron at the start of the 20th century. He owned ‘The Times’ and ‘Daily Express’ newspapers, and was seen as influential in British politics. Towards the end of the First World War, he headed the British ‘Committee for Enemy Propaganda’ and we included his notes for this Committee in our exhibition. I also used our Sound and Moving Image catalogue to find examples of recorded music and speech, such as radio broadcasts and popular songs. Records for these are also held in ‘Explore’, but sometimes the information and organisation of the records was slightly different. Using more than one way in to our records was helpful, especially for some of the more speculative searches. Broadcast News, available in our Reading Rooms, provides access to news broadcasts from UK free-to-air channels from May 2010 onwards. As well as capturing the broadcast, we also have the associated metadata, including subtitles – which makes it a useful tool in searching for news commentary of recent events. For Propaganda, I used it for finding footage from the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations, and also for coverage of the funeral of Margaret Thatcher. As well as online catalogues, some printed catalogues, available in our Reading Rooms, were useful as well. As with the more-specific catalogues, these could help in pin-pointing items not covered in as much detail in our online catalogues. For example, I used the Publications proscribed by the Government of India, to locate propaganda leaflets, written in Urdu, and aimed at Indian forces fighting on the Western Front in the First World War.
- Finding our online catalogues is relatively simple from our home page. You can see a full list of catalogues from our ‘Quick Links’ or use the ‘Catalogues’ tab at the top of the page.
- This is what our Explore catalogue looks like. You can see a search box at the top of the page – here I’ve just searched for ‘miscellaneous posters’ – one of my favourite search terms. You can see that you can keep things fairly general when you start, and then drill down with more specific terms as you start to see the results. ‘Refine my results’ on the left-hand-side can help you to cope with very large result sets: you can narrow down by material type, subject, author, year of publication, language and publisher. Once you’ve found a result that you are interested in, the ‘details’ tab gives you more information about the record you have found, and ‘I want this’ can be used to order material to our Reading Room, or to access our document supply service. Recently, we’ve been adding more digitised content to our catalogue – where we are able to make this accessible remotely, then ‘I want this’ will also give the option to view the entire item in our online viewer. Our Archives and Manuscripts catalogue is very similar in design and function. One additional feature is that the ‘Details’ tab also allows you to browse through the hierarchy of an archive collection. As well as the original material itself, our collections, and catalogues provide access to a wealth of published research and supporting material (such as bibliographies and online catalogues) surrounding the study of propaganda. In many cases, I used these to identify items to include in the exhibition.
- For example, David King’s Red Star Over Russia, which gives an illustrated documentary history of the Soviet Union up to Stalin’s death, based on his own private collection, proved valuable in identifying material from our own collections to include in the exhibition. Ian McLaine’s Ministry of Morale reproduces The Ministry of Information’s chart of public morale over time during the Second World War. An item which generated a lot of interest from visitors to the exhibition.
- So far, I’ve talked mainly about planning research in our Reading Rooms, using our online resources to plan a visit to the Library. I want to change tack a little now, and talk about the Library’s online resources that provide access to images and other digital copies from our collections. The British Library has digitised a vast amount of material that is relevant to the topic of propaganda, the use of visually powerful material, and the visual culture of the everyday – the sort of ephemera that I was talking about earlier. Much of this is free to access. The challenge, and this is similar to using our print collections, is that you can’t just find it in one place – you need to look across the various online services that we offer, and that is a process that can take some time. So, I’ll give you an overview of some of the best places to look for relevant items, and how to get the best out of our online collections. For the most part our digitisation projects can be thought of in terms of curated collections. We have tended to digitise specific collections or around a theme or event. The number of images might be small (although not always the case), but the description and supporting material is detailed. They have generally been built to be browsed rather than searched. I’m going to start with our Online Gallery – which provides free access to images from 30,000 items in our collections, from around the world and on a wide range of themes. The best way to get started is to use the ‘Online exhibitions’ tab, and “View all” to get a full list of collections. You can see from this front page, there is a collection on ‘Britain and the American Civil War’. Online Gallery is also a good resource for finding digitised maps, as well as postage stamps and other philatelic materials. The size of each collection varies from less than 100 to 15,000 images (Asia, Pacific and Africa collections). Also on the page here, you can see, at the bottom left the ‘Evanion Collection of ephemera’.
- The Evanion Collection is very good for visual culture and everyday ephemera from the 19th century. ‘Evanion’ was the stage name of Henry Evans, a ventriloquist and conjurer who worked in the late 19th century. This pamphlet is the sort of thing that you can find in the Evanion collection. Online Gallery has digitised some 2,000 items from the collection (of 5,000 in total). Generally, you’ll see quite detailed description for each of the items in the Gallery, although the items don’t have standardised catalogue records as such. As you can see, there is an option to ‘Search within this collection’ to narrow down or look for specific items. When searching, bear in mind the language used in the descriptions, as this can help you to find similar material. Eg ‘political’ is a more useful term here than ‘campaign’.
- Moving on a step in terms of curation and added interpretation, our Learning website uses images and sound from our collections to create themed modules that support learning in schools and further education. I’ve put the web address for our Learning site on the slide here, but you can also find this from our home page by selecting the tab marked ‘Information for …’ and then ‘teachers’. Examples relevant to our topic include ‘Campaign! Make an Impact’, ‘Dreamers and Dissenters’, ‘Mapping history’, and ‘Sisterhood and After’. These can be found under the ‘History’ and ‘Citizenship’ headings on the page here. The collections of images are typically small, but each module is an excellent introduction and example of using our collections to understand a topic, and a good source of inspiration. Some of the modules include films and other resources made specifically for this purpose.
- At the start of this year, we launched our Learning website commemorating the centenary of the start of World War One. This is part of a Europe-wide initiative, so the website draws on British Library collections and those of other institutions across Europe. This website has over 50 articles on First World War, 8 of which are specifically on the subject of propaganda, alongside images from nearly 500 sources. You can go to the image list by clicking on “Collection Items”.
- And, then, on left of the screen you can see a break-down by theme, with 93 sources described as ‘Propaganda’.
- Wikimedia Commons is another way that we are starting to release images, which can be re-used. A noticeable difference between the Online Gallery and Learning sites and Wikimedia Commons is that the level of contextual information and description is a lot less than in the Learning and Online Gallery pages that we’ve looked at so far. However, Wikimedia Commons provides support for re-using images in your own research. Image files can be downloaded, and information about rights and re-use is clear on the site. At present, collections strongly represented include maps and, especially, photographs. The latter includes the Girdwood collection, 352 photographs including of Indian troops on the Western Front during World War One, made on behalf of the Government of India in 1915. Records for these note that photographs from the front line may have been posed reconstructions rather than front line photography.
- Also on Wikimedia Commons is the Canadian copyright collection, including more than 5,000 photographs, and photographs of drawings, originally intended for commercial use, eg as postcards. There are a large number of patriotic images, as well as those documenting the lives and obsessions of people in Canada (including a very large number of photos of cats).
- Although I’ve mainly been talking about visual resources, recorded sound can be very important too for propaganda, persuasive speech and records of everyday activity. In our exhibition we used recorded music, radio broadcasts and speeches. Sounds.bl.uk is our platform for online access to digitised sound recordings. We try to make these as widely accessible as we can, although sometimes restrictions relating to the original collection mean that we have to restrict access to UK Higher Education users (although any reader can listen in our reading rooms). The website is set up for browsing and searching – and there are in excess of 50,000 recordings on the site. You can find examples of public debate under the ‘Arts, Literature and Performance’ heading, ‘Oral History’ and ‘Accents and dialects’ both give very rich descriptions of people’s lived experiences (many of the ‘accents and dialects’ recordings feature people talking about personal experience and the everyday), and ‘World and Traditional Music’ in particular provides some very good examples of the social role of music.
- We also have an online collection that is born-digital, rather than digitised, and this is our Web Archive. The UK Web Archive is a curated collection, where we, and partners in the project, have selected UK websites for preservation, and then sought permission from website owners to make the archived copies available online. There are more than 13,000 websites in the archive, many of which have been captured at regular intervals to show change over time. The archive includes examples of web pages that are no longer live (eg MPs who subsequently lost their seats, election candidate websites).
- To take one example of change over time, you can see the development of the Conservative Party website. The collection includes all the content of the website that we were able to capture (some content, including that based on Flash, cannot be archived), not just the front page. A significant part of the Web Archive relates to political campaigning and elections. There are special collections relating to the 2005 and 2010 General elections, the 2009 European Parliamentary elections, and to political campaigning on the web. As well as the main political parties, we have been collecting websites of campaigning groups and political blogs. The UK Web Archive can be browsed by special collection or keyword – but is also searchable across full-text.
- This was a big project, and certainly was not something that I was doing by myself. However, I hope that there are parallels with the research and presentation parts of the exhibition that relate to other types of research projects. The British Library contains a very diverse collection, and is good at producing surprises and suggesting new ways to investigate a topic. Although I was working “from the inside”, there wasn’t much that I did that couldn’t be done by a reader at the Library. Our catalogues were the most important tool that I used in finding specific items, but I needed to use the wider information on Help for Researchers, and talk to other curators in the Library to know better where to look, and for what types of subject or format I’d be successful in finding. I hope that you found that interesting and I’ll try to answer some of your questions for the rest of this seminar. If you’d like to find out more about our exhibition themes, and see more examples, then the exhibition book is still available from our online shop