A presentation from Vrunda Pathare, chief archivist at the Godrej Archives (India), held at the ICA SBA conference in Stockholm, where she spoke about archives not as sites of knowledge retrival but as ”sites of knowledge production".

1. “Great Expectations”
Co-creating resources for the future
“The Future Role of Business Archives”
ICA SBA Conference Stockholm, 5-6 April 2017
Panel 3: Can I see your history?
The expectations of researchers
on business archives
Vrunda Pathare, Chief Archivist

2. All necessary steps should be taken to identify
and list Business Houses that may be willing to
make their records available for research and/or
that require help in the matter of cataloguing
and preserving their holdings so that these
holdings are easily accessible by researchers.
Resolution VI at the 58th Session of
Indian Historical Records Commission, 2003.

3. Archives to be ‘a heritage centre
offering invaluable archival material for
reference and research’.
Sohrab Godrej, 1995
Restore . Reflect . Reimagine

4. Role of Serendipity
in understanding what future users may expect
Dr. Douglas Haynes, Associate
Professor of History at Dartmouth
College, Hanover USA.
Our serendipitous encounter with Dr. Douglas Haynes, Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College, USA - the
first researcher who visited Godrej Archives in 2006, led us discover the new trends in the world of business history
and help us understand what business historians might be looking for whereas our chanced discussions with the
employees made us rediscover new meanings of and the new usage for the archival material in marketing campaigns.

5. Vaibhav Singh, Dept. of
Typography & Graphic Comm.
University of Reading, UK,
Research on Development of
Indian-language typewriters
Ornit Shani, Senior
Lecturer, Department of
Asian Studies, University
of Haifa, Research on
Indian Elections.
Ross Bassett, Associate
Professor, Dept. of
History, North Carolina
State University, Research
on MIT Indians
Raja Adal, Assistant Professor
of modern Japanese history,
University of Pittsburgh,
Research on multilingual
typewriter keyboards
Abigail McGowan, Associate
Professor, Associate Dean of
Arts and Sciences, University
of Vermont. Research on Art
deco furniture in India.
MULTIPLE USERS . MULTIPLE QUERIES
Discovering multiple uses of the business archives

6. Expectations that made us relook at our annotations
Image 2
Document informing
about an application
received from Sedharam
Panchal who used to
work as mechanic with
Godrej's Karachi agents
and he was seeking an
employment as due to
partition, he had lost his
business and had to
come back.
Image 1
“MADE IN INDIA”
for every package
exported to Karachi
Request from the upcoming museum on partition in India made us relook at the annotations of some of the documents
in our collection. While ‘Partition’ has been entered as keyword for the document shown as Image 2 here, the word
‘partition’ was missing from the annotation for documents such as the one shown in image 1. The search for the word
‘Karachi’ in our database then unearthed interesting documents revealing the impact of partition on businesses.
Such queries had helped us enriching archival descriptions in our database.

7. Expanded notion of business archives
Family history
Amanda Engineer, Archives Project Manager at
the Wellcome Library at London visited the
archives in search of records on her father Homi
Kaikushroo Engineer who worked at Godrej in
1940s and 1950s before he migrated to England.

8. Designing the Future
Certified Chrome’s newly
launched Just Rite chair, 1948.
Source: Collection of
catalogues of international
furniture brands, Godrej
Archives
CH-7 Godrej Chair: An inspiration for present designers designing
new future spaces at Godrej’s office premises at Vikhroli, Mumbai

9. Corporate history finding its space in the future of the business
An Altered Perspective
Artists rediscovering archives

10. What researchers ask for?
Product. Place. Process. People.
PROFILE.
PERFORMANCE.
31%
PEOPLE
35%
PLACE
6%
PRODUCT
28%
TOPIC WISE QUERY ANALYSIS

11. “2 - minutes researcher”
The business world demands Instant and quick responses
Expectations Challenges

12. Indian obsession with ‘Going Digital’
It’s urgent. Can't you just
click into the database &
give everything on pen
drive?
Haven’t you
digitised
EVERYTHING?
“Can’t you just
provide a Google like
search?”
“I need Godrej
history in 140 words.”

13. Rare encounters
How can we deal with such rare requests?
Can we differentiate want from need?

14. Archives not as sites of knowledge retrieval but as
“sites of knowledge production”.
Anna Laura Stoler, Anthropologist*
* Quoted by Lucille M. Schultz in the Foreword to Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process edited by Gesa E Kirsch, Liz Rohan, Southern Illinois University Press, USA, 2008

15. Restore . Reflect . Reimagine
THANK YOU!
Plant 19A | Godrej & Boyce Mfg. Co. Ltd. | Pirojshanagar | Vikhroli (W) | Mumbai 400 079 | INDIA | Contact: +91 22 6796 4124
www.archives.godrej.com | https://www.facebook.com/GodrejArchives | https://twitter.com/GodrejArchives | https://www.instagram.com/godrej.archives/