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At some point between June 1, 2020 and June 11, 2020, the old pettrust.org.uk website was taken down. I had gone in on June 1st to retrieve a blog post written by one of the early figures in therapeutic community who had just died. I went in again on June 11th to retrieve a blog post a former child had written, which he had not been able to find. It was because the website was no longer there. It turned out not to be the temporary glitch that I assumed it must be, but a decision taken by the Mulberry Bush. 

Among the explanations I was given when I made enquiries was "It has sometimes proved difficult to respond as well as would have been wished to enquiries relating to the PETT website as enquirers quoted references/catalogue numbers that were not easily identifiable." This rang alarm bells for me. "It suggests that there has been a significant rupture in the relationship between the PETT Archive and Study Centre cataloguing and referencing system, and that used by the new Planned Environment Therapy Archive" I wrote. "If this has happened, it is a concern."

There was no response, but as I have begun looking at the online catalogues those alarm bells have begun to ring more and more loudly. I am really hoping that I am mistaken, and will be looking for alternative explanations for what I am finding. Unfortunately, among those will always be a lack of care and competence. Also among them will be my misinterpreting and misunderstanding, and potentially mis-remembering. Caveats of all kinds must be borne in mind. But bearing in mind that this is speculative, among those things which might have happened are:

- The loss of the old Archive's accession register

- The loss of a significant tranche of digital files

- The loss of the archivist's (my) email correspondence files, at least in a readably searchable format

- The loss of at least some Archive reports and papers, at least in a readably searchable format

- The loss of at least some catalogues (as a subset of the question concerning digital files), at least in a readably searchable format. 

- The loss of PETT files

- The loss of the PETT website, at least in a readily searchable format, once it was removed from public access (The Internet Archive, unfortunately, does not save everything. And the idea of "Once on the Internet, always on the Internet" was a dream of innocence)

Any one of these would be a tragedy, and it is important not to assume anything until the evidence and alternative explanations narrow the options. Together and among them, it would be a catastrophe. If something did happen, a terminus ante quem would be June 2020, when the website was taken down. It is more likely to have happened before the first of the online catalogues was completed, in late 2019. Because when things go wrong it tends to be in times of transition, and rapid change in particular (which is one reason to avoid war, if we can; but why logistics and forward planning, and thorough training, are so essential for an effective military), the odds are stronger for something, or a series of somethings, happening earlier in 2019.

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Overcoming procrastination

The date between completing the last section and beginning this one - four months - tells its own story. The process of analysing the catalogue descriptions is still in progress, but will probably not go too much further, simply because, as an exercise, it is so disheartening. The receiving archives will need to be extremely careful how they use any as they begin to process the former MB3 Archive collections into their own systems, and will be best advised to begin from the beginning with the files and folders themselves, and their own research. As the catalogue descriptions already analysed and critiqued in the Appendices to Part III show - please see these to see what I am talking about - the descriptions are often very wrong, in some cases being out of touch with and contradicted by what it is they are describing. As the system of "Alarm Bells" at the end of each critique shows, basic sources of information, from Accession Records to Correspondence to the records themselves appear in different combinations not to have been consulted. 

From the beginning of this venture I have a) made the Mulberry Bush aware of what I am doing, and b) kept it open to feeback and appraisal. I am aware of my own emotional and intellectual investments, and the biases these introduce. Consequently I have tried not to rely too heavily on my own memory, which I know in cases is wrong (I have critiqued one catalogue description where it describes the "Archive and Study Centre" as the "Archive and Research Library", having forgotten an episode in which the Trustees did indeed agree to rename the Archive and Study Centre, as recorded in their minutes (see Footnote 1). My re-awakened memory is that I was in favour of the change at the time, and even suggested it; but refused to change usage until the Trustees took the necessary and logical actions to internalise and publicise the change, which didn't happen; and continued to use 'Archive and Study Centre' without challenge or correction, and as a matter of course, up to the final report). I have not had any feedback.

The primary catastophe I had in mind when beginning this chapter was the possibility that data had been lost from the FreeNas raid digital storage system (see here). I had spent the last many months of 2018 populating it with the Archive's digital files from various places, to bring together from CDs and DVDs, external hard drives, computers, and the older and temperamental NAS a single, comprehensive and searchable digital resource. On it were my archived extensive born-digital correspondence files, Archivists reports, catalogues, films, audio recordings, and much more, listed with their locations on a document table, both in hard copy and stored on the FreeNas. The possibility of a FreeNas catastrophe first entered my mind in 2019, soon after the new Senior Archivist took post, when she was not able to find on it some films which I felt ought to have been there, finding them on some external hard drives instead. 

There are or were other possible possibilities. The Mulberry Bush came into the Archive with a new broom. Replacing the old Archive's aging computers with new ones might have broken connections with the old Archive's Filemaker Pro-based databases - accessions, archives, oral history and library - which could explain why those do not appear to have been consulted as one would have expected, the alternative being harder-to-search hardcopies (see Footnote 2); or access may have been lost simply by failure to pay the annual FileMaker Pro subscription. There may have been a failure to create a guide to old cataloguing identifiers when they were replaced by new ones, and/or to record changes of file/folder/box locations to make it possible to trace and reconstruct what was what and where originally.  This could explain the reason given for taking down the old PETT website - "It has sometimes proved difficult to respond as well as would have been wished to enquiries relating to the PETT website as enquirers quoted references/catalogue numbers that were not easily identifiable." 

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Footnote 1: In the 'Minutes of a meeting of the Planned Environment Therapy Trust held on Saturday, 2nd July, 2005' Trustee Helen Frye noted "we had reached a point where the two different functions of the Centre could be identified. It had been decided to change the name to “Archive and Research Library” and “Conference and Study Centre”."

Footnote 2: FileMaker Pro was brought in for the Therapeutic Living With Other People's Children project for its flexibility as a relational database, its compatability with the various computer systems used by PETT, and its relative ease of use by volunteers, as well as members of the team. The PETT Newsletter for April 2012, p. 4 noted that at that point, after two years, it already had over 10,300 catalogue entries, and of course grew substantially over the next six years. It replaced the old systems, described in the Final Report to the Heritage Lottery Fund on p. 116, in Section 5.5. "Not as Expected: Archives and Cataloguing":

The electronic version of the accession register was in a very early version of DBase Text database software, while the listings and catalogues of archive and library collections were in a mix of spreadsheets and Word documents, held systematically in hardcopy in ring binders as well as digitally. The oral history collection had a separate spreadsheet database, as well as physical log entries in a ring binder. because of its flexibility.

The old systems were not disposed of. The hardcopies in ring binders appear to have been in use by the MB3 Archive until the end.