HubbuB: September 2011

APEnet & Europeana

You  may be aware of the Archives Portal Europe – http://www.archivesportaleurope.eu. We’ve been considering whether the Hub should be part of this and I would welcome any thoughts that you have about it, as it would be your archives that would be represented. I don’t think the Website offers the best navigation or user interface at the moment, and the coverage is very very patchy. But should we be supporting the principle of a European-wide archives portal, and looking to be part of it? I know they are planning on a great deal more development work, and they are interested in the Hub joining in 2012. We are generally keen here at the Hub to do all we can to promote your collections, and enable connections to be made with other materials, and whilst very ambitious, projects like APENet take this idea to a whole new level.

Similarly, we are looking at what Europeana are doing, and I will be attending the Europeana Tech conference in October (http://www.europeanaconnect.eu/europeanatech/)  – a blog post will follow with some reflections on the conference and on the significance of Europeana. At present, our main aim is to stay abreast of what is happening and look at the sort of commitment being a part of it would involve.

New contributors

The more contributors the Hub has, the more valuable it becomes as a cross-searching tool for researchers, helping them to discovery the great archives that are out there. Our latest contributors are Cambridge University: Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, St Pauls Cathedral, Oxford Brookes Special Collections, Victoria & Albert Museum Theatre & Performance, Islington Local History Centre, Glasgow Women’s Library, Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. We are very close now to our 200th contributor!

SNAC project for name authorities

The Social Networks in Archival Context project has been very successfully taking EAD descriptions and creating EAC-CPF authority files, working to disambiguate and pattern-match in order to create a set of name authorities that we can all use and benefit from. I recommend taking a look at their website: http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/ and in particular the demonstrator: http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/xtf/search. Search or click on a record and try the new RGraph demonstrator to see a prototype visualisation – it shows the sorts of new ways of looking at data that we have the opportunity to create.

The project have agreed in principle to take Hub description, and create authority records. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. As yet, of course, the Hub does not display authority records, but this is something we need to work on. We will also be looking at how this fits into our new Linking Lives project, part of our Locah work (http://archiveshub.ac.uk/blog/?p=2699). I’ll try to knock up a blog post that outlines what the SNAC project is doing and how we might fit into it.

Hub Feature

This month we’re pleased to say that we have a feature about the Mary Hamilton Papers, held at John Rylands Library, The University of Manchester: “Courtier, diarist and bluestocking, her papers offer a veritable cornucopia of information on royal, aristocratic, artistic and literary circles during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.” http://archiveshub.ac.uk/features/maryhamilton/index.html

HubbuB is a monthly newsletter aimed primarily at Archives Hub contributors and archives professionals.