Opening up UK archives data (i)

UKAD meetingOn 14th April the UK Archives Discovery Network (UKAD) met in Manchester to discuss challenges surrounding the opening up of archival data. We were looking to develop our understanding of the key issues driving or preventing these developments and to start pulling together an action plan. We also talked about digital and digitised archives, which I’ll blog about in a separate post.

We split into two groups to brainstorm driving and restraining factors. There was no chance of drying up – we all had plenty to say, and of course, the restraining influences grew rapidly, threatening to outstrip the drivers by quite some way. However, in the end we had a good balance, and we felt that the day had been very positive, although summing up the position is one thing, implementing actions is quite another. However, we hope to start putting some things into place that will help to take us along the road to promoting archival discovery.

We are looking to create a UKAD website, which will help us to promote UKAD to archivists and others, and we’ll let you know about that as soon as we can.

With thanks to Melinda Haunton from The National Archives, who, as the UKAD secretary, galliantly pulled together the large number of flip charts and made them into something coherent, here is a summary of the points.

Our driving forces included:

  • Perceived user demand
  • Time saving – easier to search, more effective customer service
  • Opportunities – for use of data and for benefiting from others’ use
  • Government policy drivers in this direction (data.gov.uk is evidence of Govt buy-in)
  • Rich data – think about opportunities to make the most of events, people, places, concepts within the finding aids
  • Serendipitous collaboration – working together is a big driver – a common way to hear about initiatives and experiences of others that could be of benefit to you
  • Potential to get new users – eg via GIS data connected to archives data – users who may not think of using archives
  • Standards exist to drive openness
  • Sustainability of resources – less tied to a single service if data is open
  • Enrichment and adding value – others can enrich our data
  • Archives making use of others’ open data – sector benefits from open data as well as contributing to it
  • Connecting archives – new narratives – data can coalesce around events, people, places, subjects
  • Exposure of holdings – especially for small repositories who have limited resources to promote themselves
  • Unlikely to be restrictions on opening up descriptive data (unlike digital/digitised archives)
  • Could glean evidence of impact – ways to gather usage statistics are increasingly effective – provide evidence of benefits
  • Opening up could reach out to excluded communities more effectively (different routes into archives)
  • Potential for wider impact – e.g. in demonstrating impact of academic research (RAE)

Our restraining forces included:

  • Lack of evidence of user demand – it may not be what we expect/assume
  • APIs – where they exist, are they used? (possibly not)
  • Users’ understanding what they’ll get – you won’t normally get direct access to archives through descriptions
  • Proprietary software providers – may not ‘play ball’
  • Archivists understanding of open data issues – need understanding to get buy-in
  • Access to developer expertise – archivists frequently find getting IT or developer support very difficult
  • Machine to machine – not visual, not easy to sell – need to understand the potential
  • Messy data – all the issues we are so aware of with different data sources; the balkanisation of data
  • Backlogs – if its not catalogued, we can’t open it up
  • Sustainability of resources
  • Data becoming out of date as it gets further from the original source – end up reusing out-of-date data
  • Contractual embargoes – e.g. involving commercial partners e.g. software providers
  • Dependencies  – potentially data may be dependent on other things – e.g. attached to schema, source code, IPR
  • Evidence of impact – can be difficult to get this and prove the worth of open data
  • Branding – or lack of it on reused open data – may affect funding if funders can’t see direct benefits
  • Loss of control causes fear – once its open anything can happen
  • Lack of ‘archival developers’ – very few developers with some understanding of archives and archival issues

Our Actions included:

  • Working together – collaborative evidence gathering and sharing, not competing – use examples/evidence from others
  • Evidence – case studies, knowing what researchers are requesting, evidence for advantages of digitising
  • Understanding funders – shared understanding of funders can help with internal funding
  • Archives developer days – bringing developers together as has been done with Dev8D – collaborative approach to programming
  • Strategy for approaching software vendors to get buy-in – appeal to their commercial interests, a concerted approach from aggregators may be more effective
  • UK based evaluation of archival cataloguing systems – still know little about percentages using different systems and evaluation of systems
  • Conference/workshops to raise awareness of buy in including practical demonstrations – must be interactive and practical and encourage sharing of projects, experiences and ideas

George Bernard Shaw: Man and Cameraman

George Bernard Shaw The playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was an avid amateur photographer at a time when the art was developing. In his lifetime he was known as a photographer but his collection has been largely left untouched since his death in 1950. Man & Cameraman aims to give his images back to the public.

This feature is illustrated with twelve photographs from the George Bernard Shaw Photographs collection at the London School of Economics. There is an introduction by Karyn Stuckey, Man & Cameraman Archivist at LSE, some suggested links, and some suggested reading (with links to Copac and Zetoc records).

George Bernard Shaw: Man and Cameraman.

Reinventing the wheel: the new Hub website

promotional postcard On 1st April 2010 the Archives Hub website changed. It was not just about a new look and feel, but a whole new site. The Hub team spent several months planning the new architecture, navigation and content. Most of the content was rewritten and this gave us a great opportunity to think about a coherent approach where we could be consistent in our tone and terminology and really think about what each page should say. We wanted the site to be intuitive and for each page to be useful and attractive, and not give an overwhelming amount of information.

We decided to introduce plenty of images, to lift the site visually, and we wanted to keep plenty of whitespace, to make it easy on the eye. In addition, the website designers, True North, helped us to think about our identity and the importance of presenting the Archives Hub in a way that conveys confidence, self-belief, professionalism and warmth.

The Archives Hub has getting on for 200 contributors now, which is quite an achievement, and we are very appreciative of the effort that our contributors put into creating descriptions for the Hub. We want to continue to develop the site with a focus on archivists as well as on researchers, as we see both groups of users as vital to us, and in fact they often overlap. We hope that our ‘Archivists’ section is helpful and informative for contributors and other information professionals interested in what we do and in issues around online data and interoperability.

Our Features section takes over from the old ‘Collections of the Month’ idea, bringing the same message about the breadth and depth of Hub content and enabling us to showcase contributors and wonderful collections.

Our ‘Researchers’ section is going to be expanded, although we are keen to keep it focussed and easy to scan and digest. We are looking at ways that we can continue to support researchers in using the Hub to the greatest advantage. Of course, the main way is to provide an effective search interface and to continue to expand the content.  And this brings us on to the search – as well as a whole new information site, we have upgraded our software. We are now using ‘Cheshire 3’, which enables us to provide functionality that we could not provide before. We will be talking more about that in subsequent blogs. The new software is running on all-new hardware, so in fact we really have fundamentally changed the whole Archives Hub, but we hope that we have retained what is good about the site and about our service.