Here is a presentation I gave at ELAG 2015 to introduce our innovation project, Exploring British Design. The presentation is entitled ‘From Ivory Tower to People Power‘ (You Tube link) and emphasises the collaborative nature of the project and the focus on people as a topic, rather than on archival description, which is not always the best starting place for researchers. The presentation covers:

• Aims of the project
• Workshops with postgraduate students about how they research and analysis of their research paths
• Workshops with postgraduates about websites: what students do and don’t like in terms of discovery
• Traditional archival cataloguing ‘lock in’ of entities such as people, places and events.
• Connectivity beyond single A to B connections; ‘anything can be a focus’ and can link to a myriad of other things
• Use of EAC-CPF (XML standard for archival authority files)
• Creating the data, handcrafting data, limitations of our approach, too many ideas not enough time!
• Demonstration of the Website