How do we collect?
We are fortunate to be working mostly with living authors and illustrators, many of whom have supported the Centre from the very beginning. By talking directly to the creators of the material, and often visiting them in their own homes, we have usually built up a good rapport with them before the material enters the collection. The information that we gather at this stage is often very valuable for understanding how an author or illustrator works. In the case of a large or complex archive, this will inform decisions about how we sort and arrange the material once it arrives at Seven Stories. It can also help to determine what is included in the donation.
We try to stay in close touch with authors/illustrators/editors and/or their representatives after the work has been donated. There are several reasons for this; for example, we may need their permission to reproduce items on which they hold copyright, or we may need their help to identify or interpret material.
This picture shows our archivist Sarah Prescott talking to Michael Rosen. Michael visited Seven Stories In February 2006, to launch our poetry festival. We took advantage by spending a couple of hours going through some of the manuscripts he gave us the previous year. They were drafts of poems from numerous titles, which he was able to identify in no time but which would have taken us a month of Sundays to sort out.
