Tag: archival research

WIPO, Wandering, and a Week with the Archives: Some Quick Notes from Geneva

Image from here.

Namaskar.

I write this as I return from a whirlwind week in Geneva—a city I had long longed to visit. Partly because of my PhD work, partly because of its place in the history of international (IP) law, and partly because some cities acquire an almost mythical quality when you spend years reading about them before ever setting foot in them. Geneva was one such city.

Thankfully, SciencesPo generously provided the funding that made this long-standing wish a reality.

Much like I did after my archival adventures at the British Library in London, I thought I’d set down a few practical notes for those interested in conducting research at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO).

As I have noted before, archival research can often feel intimidating, especially when the institution in question happens to be one of the most influential international organisations in the IP universe. Throw in layers of bewildering bureaucracy, security protocols, institutional formalities, and dare I say …. enough acronyms to populate a small dictionary, and things can appear rather daunting.

If that’s what you’re thinking, I hear you, dost. I do, yes, I do.

But here’s the good news: WIPO is far more accessible than one might imagine. Like many large institutions, it becomes significantly less intimidating once you find the right person to guide you through its labyrinthine corridors—both literal and metaphorical.

In my case, that person was Dr Edward Kwakwa, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at a conference in Finland last year, organised by a dear friend and mentor, Dr Daniel Acquah. An honest ask, a sincere follow-up and voila — an archival aspiration suddenly became a practical possibility.

For those uninitiated, WIPO is the United Nations specialised agency for intellectual property, established in 1967. Depending on where one positions oneself politically, WIPO is either a champion of global innovation, a sophisticated vehicle for the internationalisation of Western IP norms, or—as is often the case—a fascinating olio of all of the above.

Whatever your ideological inclinations, if your interests lie in the history of IP, international law, development, technology governance, or the broader politics of knowledge production, WIPO’s archives are a treasure trove. Buried within those boxes and files are stories of negotiations and norm-making, diplomatic dramas and developmental debates, institutional anxieties and geopolitical ambitions, and competing visions of the global knowledge order—some forgotten, some flourishing, and some still fighting for relevance today.

So if any of that sounds remotely interesting, make the trip.

First Things First: Thanks to Sahana and Colin!

Before I get to the practicalities, two people deserve special mention.

The first is my dear friend and colleague, Sahana Simha, currently a fellow at WIPO. Sahana not only hosted me but also shepherded me through the peculiar puzzles of a new city and a new institution! Every researcher needs a friendly local guide; I had the good fortune of finding one. She is the reason my first day—and indeed my entire stay—was considerably less chaotic than it might otherwise have been. May all travelling researchers be blessed with a Sahana-esque host. 

The second is Colin Wells, Archives Management Officer at WIPO. I can’t emphasise this enough that archivists and librarians are the unsung heroes of historical research. We academics may eventually get our names etched onto articles and books, but archivists and librarians are the people who rescue order from chaos, retrieve forgotten files, and, of course, save us from ourselves.

Colin did all of this with praiseworthy patience and precision. He arranged materials in advance, answered (or perhaps endured) my endless questions, and ensured that my limited time in Geneva was spent reading documents rather than chasing them.

I am deeply grateful to both of them. May their tribe increase!!!

Now … comes the Practical Bit

A small caveat at the outset: WIPO’s archival programme is still something of a work in progress. Unlike older institutions whose archival systems have been polished over decades, WIPO’s Archives department is still in its salad days—growing, evolving, and finding its feet. But do not mistake juvenescence for inefficiency. The team is helpful and even enthusiastic about facilitating research.

The key is simple: plan early and coordinate carefully.

The first step is to identify relevant files from WIPO’s archival catalogue, which can be obtained by contacting <wipoarchives@wipo.int>. Alternatively, you can simply send a general query and seek their advice. Once you have a sense (or at least an inkling?) of what you need, contact the archives team with your specific request. Subsequently, they will review the materials, determine accessibility, and guide you through the process.

As you might imagine, WIPO is not the sort of place where one simply saunters in with a notebook, a laptop, and an oozing optimism. Security is taken rather seriously. Dates have to be coordinated well in advance, and once your visit is approved, the archives team will alert security and ask for your identification details beforehand. You will then be issued a visitor badge, which must be faithfully collected each morning and surrendered at the end of the day (no, this is not negotiable). The library is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. And they are, in the nicest possible way, quite strict about those hours.

Once all that is done… voilà… You have successfully navigated Geneva’s gentlest gauntlet of bureaucracy. You will then be allowed in the WIPO Library within the main complex. This became my temporary habitat from Monday through Friday, where I sifted through files and scanned a potpourri of pages.

One of the curious joys of archival research is that you may arrive with one question and leave with twenty more. The WIPO archives, which I am only beginning to pore over carefully, will be no exception. Given my limited time, I confined myself largely to materials relevant to my immediate interests—the discourse surrounding international copyright law between roughly 1900 and 1950.

Even then, the archive kept tempting me down new paths. I will share some stories in the coming days here at this site, at SpicyIP, or IPRMENT. Keep an eye on the space.

In sum, if you are considering archival research at WIPO, my advice is simple: plan ahead, contact the archives team early through the above-mentioned email ID, be patient with the process, and leave ample room for serendipity. Well … the archives may be carefully catalogued, but the most delightful discoveries seldom are.

Such is (archival!) life.

I hope these notes prove useful to anyone contemplating a research trip to Geneva. If you have questions about the process, do leave them in the comments, and I’ll do my best to answer.

Happy hunting.

LV

P.S. An unexpected yield of the visit was a rapid introduction to Bangalorean English. By week’s end, I was emboldened enough to confidently tell Sahana, “Macha, put off one scene, no!” Quite what I meant by this—and whether I used it in the correct context—remains shrouded in uncertainty (just like unexcavated archives). But it is, without question, a linguistic achievement that may ultimately outlast anything I unearthed in the archives.

See you in the next post!

Archival Anxiety (or Arch-xiety, if I may) and the Ghosts in the National Archives of India …

Ghosts in Literature: Symbolism and Representation - The Writing Post
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Dear Dosts,

The other day, I wandered into the National Archives of India for my PhD research. But what I found there wasn’t just documents (an interesting trove of records) and dust. I also found something much more… twitchy.

Yes. ‘Twas a strange kind of anxiety. Archival anxiety, or Arch-xiety, if I may.

While many researchers/scholars would tell you about methodology, rigour, citations, and “the archive”, and it would be helpful too to listen to them, I wished to intellectualise my feeling/confusion—hoping it would comfort my being, and liberate me from them. Or at the very least, it would let me join the club of those with a similar twitchy feeling. As J. Krishnamurthi once said, Freedom is to be a light to oneself. Perhaps, so I hope, intellectualising my experience will liberate and free me from feeling it alone.

Just as haunted sites—so often portrayed in films and books—are marked by flickering lights, elusive presences, inexplicable sounds, and the eerie uncertainty of whether something is in our mind or the house/room, archives too can feel like haunted spaces. You open a box of old files (or open the not-very-user-friendly website) expecting to find truth, clarity, and maybe a little enlightenment.

Instead, what we see is torn pages, vanishing ink, brittle paper, and someone’s handwriting that looks like a doctor having a seizure during a storm. (Pardon me for the stereotype joke.) Both archives and haunted places carry the same unsettled atmosphere, the same lingering sense that someone/something was—or still is—there. The feeling is of the same kind, only differing in degree.

I feel archives, unlike libraries, are like archaeological sites—places where something is buried, or at least presumed to be. Except in such archaeological sites, we dig not with shovels, but with forms, stamps, and utmost politeness, patience, and sincerity. For we assume something is waiting to be read, ruminated, and written out. We don’t know what or where. But we dig anyway. And it’s fun.

These layered, dusty, and fragile archaeological sites (just like haunted places) are inhabited by gods, ghosts, and most importantly, their salient silences. But, I feel, these silences we conjure only in our minds. They make noise in (y)our head, trying to speak for things that were never written, things that were erased. Things you’ll never know.

Like broken paintings, shattered mirrors, or cracked necklaces—objects said to be haunted—the silence of these ghosts and gods of archival sites dwells in torn pages, digital dust, colonial tongues, disappearing ink, hard-writen texts, glitchy or not-so-friendly websites/databases, and, of course, the foe-ish bureaucratic apparatus.

But if you look closely at these sites, you (at least I am) are not only haunted by the past (as these places often claim through the sense of ‘gone’), but also by what remains unresolved, untranslatable, illegible, or most importantly, absent. This absence is both appalling and appealing. Why?

‘Tis appealing because something remains unknown, unrecorded, hidden from the public sphere. And for this very reason, it appeals to us, entices us to delve into them.

And it’s appalling because we can never fully know what happened. And we know that we cannot. At best, we construct truths—the truths that are often ours, and therefore, always in motion. Yet we dress them up, refine them, cite them, footnote them. Still, they flicker—like a romantic candlelight in the wind.

We know, deep down, that we’re playing the sense-making game—sometimes fully aware, sometimes only half—yet always conscious of its limits, and our own. After all, what we call “research” today—the very impulse that draws us to these sites in the first place and something gives us the courage to endure the anxiety (and even intellectualise it, as I’m doing now)-the archival document is never truly a piece of the past. It is nothing but a figure of the future (a future document it is), perpetually relative to our present inquiry.

Take the Berne Convention—the primary site of my inquiry. I am tracing the genealogy of the “balance” discourse in copyright law, examining how and why copyright law is understood and approached today. Yet as I parse these 19th-century documents, I do not encounter a static historical truth.

Truly, and in a literal temporal sense, I engage with them as future documents—artefacts animated not by their past, but opened for the questions I carry from the present. Put differently, it is not the archive that leads me to my research; it is my research that sends me to the archive. The Berne Convention, thus, becomes a sense-making safari, not a destination of discovery but a site I visit to make the present intelligible.

Nevertheless, I sat (and enjoy sitting) there, in that archive, not just reading and searching but feeling —a strange mixture of dread and delight.

And here I realised: this isn’t just an archival research problem. It’s a condition that causes archival anxiety, which is more than a methodological challenge.

One can experience arch-xiety in two flavours:

One, at the physical/material/infrastructural level. This occurs when the archive resists access—the website’s server is down, the scanner is broken, files are not digitised or can’t be opened, or a document cannot be downloaded. It’s the anxiety of absence, of infrastructure, of not being allowed in, of not knowing where to begin. In this kind, you’re not locked out, yet you’re also not really in.

Two, at the hermeneutic or epistemic level. Here, even when I do get in, I find myself lost or feel un-reached. This feeling is uncomfortably confusing as it arises from a problem that can be easily termed common sense or applicable to all. E.g., it can stem from an unfamiliar language (not necessarily a colonial language), the non-pagination of the document, illegible handwritten pages, cryptic or half-written notations or signatures. Sometimes, a heartbroken person would say, even presence feels like absence! 😦

Funnily, just like in a haunted house, where the light is rarely fully on. The information is an archive flicker too—it speaks and un-speaks. A visitor/researcher is both a witness and an outsider. 

And that, dear friend, is what I came to feel: archival anxiety—not merely as a barrier to research (or truth?), but as a structure of feeling, a condition of thought, a fount of knowledge, a slight pressure in the rib, a site of ghosts.

Have you also come across such ghosts?

If not, maybe let’s go together next time. Perhaps we’ll find a torch and a ghost, too. Who knows?