Valentina Flex

10 Jun

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Career

Valentina Flex worked at Edinburgh University’s Centre for Research Collections since 2016, completing her training and qualification, and progressing from an Archives Assistant to a Project Archivist.

She joined Newcastle University Special Collections in August 2021 to work on a philanthropically funded project to catalogue and oversee the digitisation of our Gertrude Bell Archive, becoming our first Gertrude Bell Project Archivist. This archive of Gertrude Bell’s (1868-1926) writings and photographs is our most significant collection, gaining UNESCO Memory of the World status in 2017. It records Bell’s life and journeys, particularly in the Middle East, and most pivotally and controversially her role in the British Government’s colonial shaping of Iraq following the First World War.

The archive has been curated at the University for over a century, between the Library and the School of Archaeology.

For the project, as well as archival curation and a significant refresh of the dedicated website (https://gertrudebell.ncl.ac.uk/), we had hopes for some profile raising and engagement opportunities for the archive.

As well as fulfilling this core function (12,000 items digitised and reinterpreted), Valentina exceeded every expectation through three key major contributions that fundamentally transformed: 1) our regional, national and international engagement programme, 2) our digital scholarship offering, and 3) our role and recognition as collaborators within the institution.

Regional, national and international engagement

To coincide with the centenary of the Kingdom of Iraq, that Bell played a major hand in, it was our intention to host a small-scale exhibition showcasing our new curation. Valentina’s firm belief was that the exhibition should be more ambitious and not lionise Bell, but instead confront the problematic colonial implications of her legacy, and that Iraq itself should be given equal exposure through the heritage - crucially that Iraqi voices were consulted and represented in the interpretation.

Valentina helped source a major venue in Newcastle’s Great North Museum (GNM) and led a multidisciplinary and culturally diverse team to host the exhibition she curated ‘Challenging Legacies: The Kingdom of Iraq and Gertrude Bell’, which ran from January 2023 – March 2023. She spoke at the opening to an audience of 120 guests, including Newcastle MP Chi Onwurah.

Challenging Legacies was seen in person by 7,188 visitors. Adam Goldwater, Manager of GNM commented that the exhibition exceeded the average footfall for partner curated installations by nearly 5%. Activities included film screenings and talks given and coordinated by Valentina, an education outreach ‘Create a Postcard’ family workshop devised and delivered by Valentina, and a podcast and video where Valentina explained the importance of the heritage with Professor Jackson.

The exhibition directly prompted a major international delegation to the University (27th February 2023) of: Iraq's Minister of Culture, Tourism and Heritage; Deputy Minister and Director of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage (SBAH), Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Antiquities and the President of the University of Mosul to see how we a collaborating with partners in Iraq in areas such as culture, heritage and civic engagement. Valentina was a key part of this welcoming party and the visit was used to formally launch the new website.

Such was the success of the exhibition, we were approached by Exeter University’s Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies (IAIS) to create a new iteration working with colleagues to incorporate further expert commentary, particularly from a Kurdish perspective. Valentina led this collaborative re-curation, speaking at the opening of the second Challenging Legacies exhibition which ran from November 2023 – May 2024.

Valentina is currently working on the third iteration of the exhibition; a showcase for the Iraq Britain Business Council’s (IBBC) Spring Conference (1st July – 2nd July 2024), where she will present on the heritage and seek to attract support to take the Challenging Legacies to Iraq.

The catalysing effect of this programme of engagement has led to greater interaction with the international community we serve, both through the heritage and on its expert curation. Valentina recently hosted our first ever visiting scholar from the Iraqi National Library and Archive in Baghdad (May – June 2024), with a further placement from the British Institute for the Study of Iraq (BISI) planned for Autumn 2024. She is also assisting in the coordination of the British Library funded Endangered Archives project (awarded December 2023) to enable knowledge transfer on digitisation techniques to Mosul University.

Digital Scholarship Offering

As the Gertrude Bell Archive represents a rich data set of text, images, and geo-spatial metadata, Valentina has led on this collection becoming our showcase for digital scholarship.

We have extensively used the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) in the rendering of all 12,000 images, including pioneering techniques to filter specific images within multi-page spreads, all coordinated by Valentina in close collaboration with our Digital Library Services team.

By using this technology, we will soon be aggregating the archive into Stanford University’s Digital Library of the Middle East for even further reach. Valentina has also spoken on this subject at numerous sector events for the information profession, including a IIIF Consortium Meeting (7th December 2023), RLUK’s Digital Shift Forum (21st February 2024), and the upcoming Academic Libraries North Conference (5th July 2024).

We are also using the Gertrude Bell Archive as our testbed for application of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) through an AHRC funded project Evolving Hands (December 2021 - November 2024) with an expert in this field Dr James Cummings. Valentina has led on the content and editorial side of this project, developing a corpus around people, places, and subjects that feature in Bell’s diaries and letters for more dynamic interpretation in future transcriptions. This project allowed us to speak at our first ever non-archival and international conference, the Digital Humanities (DH) Conference (10th July – 14th July 2023). It also led to us successfully take the learning and apply for follow up funding from BA Leverhulme (Deciphering Democracy awarded March 2023) – the net result being Archivists like Valentina as instigators and partners in research and fresh recognition of this at Newcastle University.

Lastly, through Valentina’s successes, we were able to secure additional philanthropic funding to add a geo-spatial interface to the Bell website as a new project (Beyond the Margins, May 2023 – November 2024). Working with our Research Software Engineering team, Valentina researched and developed the technical specifications and vision for greater pathways into the archive for our global audiences. Valentina has currently sourced GIS data for over half of the archive, with education outreach engagement events for young people planned for the launch in November 2024. Like Evolving Hands, our use of GIS has allowed us to upskill as a team and through Valentina we are now involved in teaching, using the archive as a case study for students learning geo-spatial coding.

Role and recognition as collaborators

The success of the Archivist led re-curation of the Gertrude Bell Archive has transformed the partnership with our academic colleagues and co-curators. The website, which has 250,000 visitors a year, 80% being international, now have a standards based, modern, and intuitive front door to shared heritage which is constantly evolving.

With Co-Curator Professor Mark Jackson, an expert on Bell, we developed a new Memorandum of Understanding in June 2023 passing the full archival management of the Gertrude Bell Archive over to the Library, thus ensuring his renewed focus as a champion, advocate, and educator in a close complimentary partnership.

This is ultimately testament to Valentina’s work.

Valentina is a leading example to the archive profession to think creatively, to embrace diversity thoughtfully, and to take risks in an inclusive and collaborative way when curating archival heritage. I take great pleasure in nominating her for Record Keeper of the Year.

Ian Johnson, Head of Special Collections & Archives, Newcastle University