This site contains detailed searchable information on the holdings of the esea contemporary Archive & Library. You can also find information on the organisation’s past programme and biographical data on the artists who have worked with esea contemporary.
What is available on this site?
Why isn't everything accessible online?
How to access materials not online?
On the online catalogue you can find information about our holdings and the organisation's programme activities since 1986. The information is arranged into the following categories:
All the data on our site is interlinked. For example if you look at the page of a particular artist, you can see all our holdings that relate to them and any events they were involved in. Our records also can provide access to digital surrogates of some our archival records, many which are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
We are working towards making as much of our holdings accessible online as we possible can, however, full access is restricted due to limitations on our resources and UK legislation. We can only make copies of our holdings online if we have the permission of the copyright holders, and we can not make any sensitive data accessible due to the requirements of the Data Protection Act (2018) and UK GDPR.
Unless closed under Data Protection legislation, our holdings are available on site for private non-commercial research. To access our on-site materials you need to book an appointment at least a week in advance to ensure a member of staff is available.
Supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Centre carried out a project between 2016-2018 to bring meaningful access to its historical collections. As as a result the online catalogue was established and we began to document our collections. By the end of the project we had processed our our administrative and programme records dating up to 2003; our marketing materials dating up to 2010; and documented over 500 publications from our library.
In 2021, with support from the London Metropolitan University project Multicultural Heritage at the Crossroad: Organisational Resilience, Institutional Archive and Multicultural Voices project we were able to begin to process documentation relating to our artist-in-residence programme, 2003-2010. The funding was courtesy of the Research Centre for Creative Arts, Cultures and Engagement (CREATURE) .