Cataloguing Kays: Body Image in the Catalogues of Kay & Co Ltd of Worcester, 1920 - 2000. JISC Final Report

Cataloguing Kays is a university-run project intended to create a community web-archive to celebrate the history and public memory of Kay & Co Ltd of Worcester, a noted mailorder catalogue company which was, until 2006, the largest employer in Worcester. The Kays Archive, housed at UoW, is one of the most comprehensive archive collections of 20th century mail-order catalogues in the UK and has a strong local elevance. The catalogues provide a window into over 100 years of body image, social history, consumable goods, fashion and design. The Project Team created www.WorldofKays.org, an online, fully-searchable archive containing 1500 digitised images from the catalogues, 1920-2000. The website is intended to form a seed bed for international research, focussing in particular on the representation of body image and the way the catalogues represent the developing tropes of consumer lifestyle and aspiration. The images are enhanced by blog postings from or film and audio interviews with local residents and former Kays staff members, who recall how the goods were selected and presented; as well as the impact the mail-order industry had on shaping 20th century lifestyle and consumption. These interviews and blogs have been sourced through the Cataloguing Kays team’s outreach activity in the local, academic and online communities. From the outset, we, the Cataloguing Kays team, engaged with online communities through social media sites, Facebook and Twitter, and through specialist blogs and online forums, inviting comment and contributions. Through events for the general public and a programme of targeted community outreach work with Kays Heritage Group and support groups for Worcestershire’s young and adult carers, we have also collected filmed and audio reminiscence material as well as community art and poetry content for the website. Our academic conference, the Catalogue of Dreams, showcased both the website and the physical archive to the wider academic, cultural and heritage sectors, provoking lively debateand much interest from international scholars.