My Career: Archivist at Guinness, Eibhlin Colgan

Did you always want to be an archivist?
I didn’t know there was such a thing as an ‘archivist’ until I started college! Growing up, I always had a great interest in history but never imagined that I would be able to make a career working with it.

In college, I studied… French and history at undergrad level in UCC and I did an MA in history focusing on late 19th-century Irish history. The research for that master’s led me to use archival material for the first time and I was drawn to the idea of working with original documents, preserving collections for future access. This led to an HDip (now MA) in archival studies in UCD to qualify as an archivist.

My most formative work experience was… as part of my archival studies, we were encouraged to undertake a work experience in an archival repository, and I chose the Guinness Archive, then based at Park Royal, our London Brewery. That one-week work experience has led to a 20+ year career at Guinness!

My first real job was… working in my dad’s contract cleaning business. Early starts, physical work – good training for later life!

The most invaluable thing I learned early on in my career was… that the softer skills you don’t learn on a university course, are as important, if not more important, than the functional skills you learn in college. As an archivist, you are trained to appraise, catalogue, and preserve historical collections, but these collections only come to life by making them accessible through promotion, advocacy, and stakeholder engagement.

A common misconception about what I do is… that I spend all my days elbow-deep in physical documents! So much of my work now is digitally based – either working with digitised or born-digital records. Our users expect us to deliver historical content in digital format. However, there is nothing better than handling original documents. 

My main responsibility in work is to… manage and curate the incredible 260+ year history of the Guinness company and brand. That divides down into firstly, managing the archive collection itself – cataloguing, digitising, preserving, and acquiring new additions – and secondly, using our knowledge from the archive collection of our past to provide authenticity to projects and inform the future of the brand.

Do you have a career mentor or someone you look up to/seek advice from?
I have always been very fortunate to have worked for two great managing directors of the Guinness Storehouse, who have given me the freedom to develop the work of the archive and been a great sounding board over the years. My job title hasn’t changed in 20 years; however, the work and remit of the Guinness Archive has hugely expanded over the years, and it’s integral to a wide range of functions across the Diageo business. 

The first thing I do every morning is… make coffee! I only feel properly awake after my first cup of coffee.

I travel to work by… car. I live in Celbridge, the original home of Arthur Guinness, and have to do the school drop before heading to work in the brewery. Unfortunately, public transport is not an option.

On an average workday I… there’s no average day at work, which is what I love about it! The breadth of projects and the wide range of people I engage with daily is what keeps the role so interesting. I can be sorting boxes in our warehouse, giving media interviews, running workshops with agencies, working with researchers, inputting into exhibition design across our brand homes, managing digitisation projects, meeting with my team…

The first thing I do at work is… review emails and my diary for the day. No two workdays are the same, so each day is a fresh start. The archive team is a small tight-knit team, and we start every Monday morning with a team meeting outlining the main tasks for everyone for the week.

I break for lunch at… we have a staff canteen on site which is part of Guinness’s long legacy of looking after its people – so I’ll usually have lunch there. The earliest references we hold to on-site canteens for staff date back to the mid-1800s.

The most useful business tool I use every day is… our archive catalogue. The catalogue is the brains behind the archive collection, holding well over 100,000 records. Catalogue entries provide the context behind each ledger/document/ image/advert within the collection.

I save time by… having my emails on my phone. We work in a very fast-paced environment where decisions are made quite quickly and timely answers are also required, so I always have my phone in hand. 

The best part of my day is… when I am working on a project where the past influences the future. I always say that I am probably the only archivist in the world who sits with innovation brewers and marketers to influence the next chapter in our brand history. We recently did a lovely collaboration with a Dublin-based sustainable jeans company called Native Denims, whose parent company, John Ireland, was the original uniform supplier to the Guinness brewery over 100 years ago. Being able to make those historical connections really authenticated this recent collaboration.

The most challenging part of my day is… switching off at the end of the day – there is always one more query, one more project to answer.

I know it’s been a good day if… I know I have made a difference to someone. One of the lovely services we offer at the Guinness Archive is a family history service for people to look up their relatives who worked in the brewery. It can be very emotional to see visitors viewing original documents of loved ones and facilitate them to reminisce about their family and family circumstances.

If you want to get into my line of work, my advice is to… search out some work experience opportunities. The heritage field is quite wide with practitioners now working in the areas of digital preservation, digital humanities, archives, special collections in libraries, museums etc., so talk to people in these roles to explore the right fit for you.

I’ve just finished working on… launching our collection of newly digitised and restored Guinness television adverts. Guinness as a brand has such a rich visual advertising history and this collection spans the first 40 years of their television advertising in the UK and Ireland, 1955-1995, accounting for over 500 adverts. This project was a great example of collaboration, as we partnered with the Irish Film Archive and Coimisiún na Meán, to digitise and make this collection available to view for the public. The second part of this great collaboration is an awards ceremony, where Irish creatives can enter the inaugural Guinness Archives Awards, to reinterpret and reimagine the 1970s creative brief ‘An expression of Irishness’, through the lens of 2024 with Guinness 0.0 as the hero product. You can find out more information and enter here. At the moment, I’m working on bringing another great collection to the public. The Guinness Brewery at St. James’s Gate was the largest private employer in Dublin for decades. Within the archive, we hold information on people who worked in the brewery in the 1800s and into the 1900s. We also hold a collection of trade records, listing trade with pubs across the UK and Ireland from circa 1870-1960. We have recently partnered with Ancestry.com to digitise and index 1.5 million records relating both to our past employees and our customers.

Imagery courtesy Eibhlin Colgan