In 2011 The Glasgow School of Art in partnership with the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow was awarded an AHRC grant for an 18-month project entitled The Glasgow Miracle: Materials for Alternative Histories. This aimed to analyse the renaissance of the visual arts in Glasgow from the 1970s to the present day. In order to achieve our aims, the project team worked with a number of previously inaccessible archive collections, undertaking cataloguing and repackaging work, with a view to opening up this material for further research. The approach to this work and the decisions relating to its long-term management were informed by the material's relevance to, and potential use by, curators, artists and historians, and by discussions with several other arts organizations who were working to organize and more fully utilize their records. This article describes the project's archive-related activities, which aimed to combine the needs of the arts organization with the archival and conservation requirements necessary for accessible catalogue records and long-term preservation. Areas covered include the motivations behind undertaking cataloguing and preservation work, the approaches used to manage these collections and the current use of this material.

This is a pre-review manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Archives and Records on 19/02/2015, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23257962.2015.1010150