A time-travelling and provocative approach to get us thinking about the purpose of outreach and engagement activities, now and in the future.

Why do we do outreach, are we prioritising the right outreach, how much impact are we really having, should we outsource this function or stop it altogether? Should we be focusing more on outreach and engagement activities rather than running public research rooms? How do we approach sustainability, equality, diversity and inclusion if we don’t reach out to new audiences? How should our outreach policy be directed by gaps in our collections or other people’s agendas? What should we be thinking about now to prepare for the future?

Along the way, I shall present two short case studies:

a) a high-profile outreach programme surrounding a single UNESCO-registered document, the song of enslaved people from 18th century Barbados
b) bottom-up community engagement with under-served communities where key decisions are made by a community panel

And take an imaginative leap into what a more technologically- influenced future might look like.

This paper proposes imagination and creativity as mechanisms to engage with archives, offering pathways for both archivists and users to interact with materials beyond the confines of a traditional research visit. Imagination and speculation serve as tools to lower barriers to entry into archives, expanding their potential use beyond academic scholarship.

The Institute of International Visual Arts (iniva) Archive serves as a case study, with a particular focus on creative engagement within the context of a visual art archive. This study explores how programming around the archive has facilitated new ways for users to engage with its materials. Such programming has primarily targeted young people aged 16 to 25, introducing them to archives during a critical stage of their development. This audience is engaged not only as users of archives but also as individuals who might consider careers in the information sector.
The concept of radical imagination is central to this approach, serving as a tool for envisioning possibilities beyond current circumstances and imagining what comes next. Embracing this concept helps us to better understand how the archival sector can evolve and adapt to future challenges.

Creative engagement opens new access points for users, enabling a broader range of individuals to connect with archives. This serves the archives and records management sector by encouraging archivists to innovate and respond to changing societal needs. Such an approach inspires not only inclusivity but also the development of innovative pathways for archivists to reimagine their role and expand the impact of their work.

On 31 May 2025, V&A East Storehouse will open to the public. The culmination of a decade long project, the new working store and visitor attraction aims to provide unprecedented access to the V&A Collections. The mission of V&A East Storehouse is to open the collections to all visitors breaking down traditional perceived barriers.

V&A East Storehouse’s Study Centre opens up over 1000 archive collections from the Archive of Art and Design, Theatre and Performance Archive and Young V&A Archive, giving insight into the way artists, designers and practitioners work. Alongside the Study Centre, from September 2025, V&A East Storehouse will be the home of the David Bowie Centre providing unique access to Bowie’s career archive of over 90,000 items.

Delivering this project in a post-Covid landscape, and following a significant organisational restructure, has provided challenges as well as space to innovate different modes of practice which we will consider in this paper. Visitor targets for V&A East Storehouse are ambitious with a particular drive to attract younger audiences. To meet this aspiration, innovative approaches to access have been explored whilst still finding a balance between the desire to create unfettered access and maintain high standards of collection care. The project has also provided an opportunity to address the relationship between the V&A’s object collections and the archives, resulting in greater advocacy for archive collections and working towards new working practices to develop parity of access to all collections.