This June’s Collections of the Month examines a partial print of the history of forensic science, shining a light on the descriptions for the papers of physicians, pharmacists, chemists and toxicologists involved in criminal investigations, and records relating to forgery and violent crimes.
Illustration copyright © 2009 The Archives Hub.
Archival Management Software: A Report for the Council on Library and Information Resources. Lisa Spiro, January 2009.
The Archives Hub is not in the business of archival management systems, but this report provides a useful perspective on what systems have to offer, and also the current state of cataloguing, albeit essentially in the US. Recommended reading. Here is a summary, highlighting some points of interest.
The report starts off on well-trodden ground about the number of hidden archives. As a partial remedy, it encourages providing access to materials through minimal steps (basic descriptions which may not be ‘perfect’), rather than providing detailed catalogues of a small percentage of holdings. At the same time it states that collection-level descriptions must be done well, otherwise they may not effectively represent the collection to users. The report refers to taking a stripped-down approach to cataloguing – quite a change from the norm for many archivists. This is an issue we have been thinking about at the Hub, and we have taken the decision to reduce the number of mandatory fields that we require of our contributors. A difficult decision, but we felt that we needed to fit in with the ethos that a minimal description is better than no description, and we should be conscious of the difficulties archives often have in providing comprehensive descriptions with only minimal resources.
As an interesting adjunct to the debate about the control archivists have over descriptions (the requirements for expertise), the report cites a project where students are paired with unprocessed collections in their area of interest and trained to catalogue them, resulting in access for users and research topics for the students. Presumably this work is overseen by archivists, but it is still a departure from the idea that cataloguing requires an ‘expert’.
The important point is to provide electronic access as ‘increasingly, materials that are electronically inaccessible are simply not used’ (quoting Jones, Hidden Collections, Scholarly Barriers, 2003). I was heartened to read that the Library of Congress Working Group on
This month we’ve been focussing on the epidemic disease tuberculosis or T.B., once known as ‘consumption’. We highlight the records of hospitals and sanatoriums, the papers of medical professionals, campaigners and organisations, and victims of the disease; illustrated with a range of photographs from Lothian Health Services Archive, The Women’s Library, the People’s History Museum, and the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow.
Photo: Illuminated tram-car advertising, 1957, part of Glasgow Corporation’s tuberculosis campaign. Image Wellcome Library, London and copyright © Wellcome Trust, reproduced under Creative Commons licence.
As I reported in a previous blog, the Archives 2.0 conference threw up and tossed about a whole host of issues. Geoffrey Yeo from University College London talked about archival description and how this might need to change, and he made me start to think about what we mean when we talk about the context of an archive collection.
As an archive student I was taught about the vital importance of the archival context. This is seen as providing important evidence for users of the archive, enabling them to place the materials within the context of their creation. The context gives the material meaning. We generally catalogue from the collection level down to the item level, and we tend to impose this route on our users – our websites often compel them to go to the collection and drill down to find specific items.
The Archives Hub generally takes this approach: an initial search results in a hit list of collection level descriptions. Advanced searches by default include both collection and lower level descriptions. We are very aware of the advantages of taking users to individual item descriptions, especially now that we are planning to add images and links to content. It would be great to add images to individual descriptions. One of the challenges is to present the user with collection and item-level descriptions in such as way that they understand the principle of the archival description – from the general down to the specific.
At the Archives 2.0 Conference, Jon Newman talked about the MLA London Revisiting Archive Collections project. Having struggled to find anything useful about the project on the MLA London Website, I’ll just refer to a previous Hub Blog post to describe it: “Focus groups of diverse groups of people, generally unfamiliar with archives, were set up in three different London institutions. They were asked to look at and provide feedback on specially selected archives that were chosen because they might resonate with the groups, having relevance to their lives and experiences. For example, a Tanzanian women’s group was commenting on photographs and manuscripts relating to Tanzania and a group of cleaners and security staff, many of west African origin, were looking at Somalian and Nigerian material.”
Jon gave some examples of how participants gave different contexts to images by providing additional information about them. For example, a participant commented on a photograph of two women from a Nigerian tribe. She was originally from a neighbouring tribe and remembered details about clothing and how the tribes had a tradition of gently mocking eachother.
This project essentially broke away from the archival context to create other contexts for the archives. It showed how they can have different meanings to different people, depending upon their perspective, and gave the archives new contexts that other researchers could benefit from.
My feeling is that the archival profession is moving from a situation in which we very much saw archival context as THE context to a position where we are starting to appreciate and encourage other contexts. I wonder whether we will start to accept that all contexts are, or can be seen as, equally important, or are some more important than others?
I am sure that we don’t want to neglect the archival context because once gone, it is almost impossible to recover, and valuable evidence that can aid interpretation is lost. But maybe we should be less inclined to make the archival context primary and actually think in terms of flexible access to archives through descriptions that give equal weight to the individual item, the various contexts within which that item might be seen, and the evidential value of the item as part of a whole collection?
Whilst thinking about this whole issue, I couldn’t help but reflect that there is an increasing tendency to display isolated ‘treasures’ on the Web, and actually neglect context altogether. Many websites, it seems to me, get funding to create an attractive interface to display images, but give little attention to metadata, connections, contexts and sustainability.
So, are we moving towards a myriad of contexts, or are we in danger of losing context altogether?
Image of salt: From Flickr courtesy of kevindooley’s photostream
Archives 2.0: Shifting Dialogues between Users and Archivists was the culmination of a programme of events held by the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change, based at the University of Manchester. The Archives Hub were very happy to be co-organisers and I certainly got a good deal out of the four seminars that I attended and this two-day conference that drew together archivists, academics and other information professionals.
The first session was called ‘Whither Archives 2.0’ (named in honour of ye olde archivists I feel!). Well, I’m not entirely sure that we could answer the ambitious question of where archives 2.0 may be going, other than in the general sense that social networks and user engagement in a broad sense is only going to gather momentum.
I think that presentations on difficult subjects often have a tendency to provide a list of challenges and issues, without necessarily providing much else. There was a danger that we would all talk about the problems and challenges, which are of course important to think about, but in fact there was a good mixture of setting out the landscape, considering the broader philosophical implications and thinking about the issues as well as presenting practical projects that have really borne fruit.
In my talk (slides available on Slideshare) I referred to Kate Theimer’s Archives 2.0 manifesto that she published on her ArchivesNext Blog a while back. There were no radical dissenters from this idea of a more open, participatory and collaborative approach in principle, but I certainly felt that there were differing levels of acceptance. There were certainly assertions that professionalism and the rigour of standards are still appropriate and necessary, and so maybe the balance is difficult to achieve. There were also some references to control – the need for the professional to have a certain level of control over the archive and over the metadata – a fascinating area of debate. Interestingly, we didn’t spend much time defining what we meant by ‘Archives 2.0’ (I think that I was the only one who did this to any extent). In principle I think this is a good thing, because it’s too easy to get bogged down with definitions, but maybe there were differences between those who would define it in the broader sense of an open and collaborative mindset and those who were more focused on the current popular tools that are on offer – Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, etc.
Michael Kennedy, presenting on Documents on Irish Foreign Policy was particularly resolute that for diplomatic archives such as those he has responsible for, integrity is uppermost. He was cautious of adopting an Archives 2.0 approach that might allow users to interfere with the text. He seemed to feel that this meant that he was to some extent rejecting an Archives 2.0 approach, but we don’t want to end up taking a draconian approach to what Web 2.0/Archives 2.0 means for archives and archival finding aids – we don’t have to let users add to the text just in order to tick the right box.
One thing that struck me about some of the projects that were presented was that they seemed very self-contained and very much to operate within their own defined space. It reminds me of the ‘walled garden’ analogy that Ewan McIntosh talked about at the JISC Conference this week. We are still tending to build our own environment in our own space and asking people to come to it – to come to a destination that we prescribe for them. Ewan talked about VLEs and how students are forced to go to them for course materials, but usually dash in and out and then go back to more comfortable and happening environments. To me, Archives 2.0 is partly about thinking out of the box – maybe thinking beyond the confines of a project website and considering dissemination more broadly. Its hard though, because I think it brings us back to that thorny issue of control, or lack of it. It means considering dropping traditional practices and ways of doing things that we are comfortable and familiar with. It means venturing into other spaces and in these other spaces we aren’t necessarily in control. But this can bring great rewards. I think that this is amply demonstrated by ‘Revisiting Archive Collections’ – an MLA project that Jon Newman spoke about and that I have referred to in a previous Hub blog. I will come back to this in another blog post, because I thought it threw up some interesting notions of context which will make this post just too long!
Derek Law, from the University of Strathclyde, talked about re-framing the purpose of the library. He wasn’t necessarily stating anything we haven’t already heard, but he did effectively drum home the message that libraries (and archives??) are simply not meeting the current challenges that the online world is throwing up. It reminded me of a recent Horizon programme on the BBC about how people react to disasters. Whilst the threat to libraries may not be quite of that magnitude, Derek did paint a picture of librarians staying stubbornly rooted to the spot in the face of rapid changes going on around them that are going to change the very nature of librarianship and what a library is…if libraries exist at all in 10-20 years time. Whilst Derek was very convincing, I can’t help reflecting that there is another more optimistic side to this. In the UK we apparently publish more books than in any other country (sorry, can’t find the source for this, but I’m sure I heard it on good authority!). So, whilst the environment is changing and libraries do have to adapt, the ‘paper free’ world that has been predicted is not looking very likely to happen in our lifetimes.
Brian Kelly from UKOLN talked to us about the risks associated with implementing Web 2.0 type features (talk on Slideshare), and emphasised that there are risks in everything and sometimes it’s worth taking a certain level of risk in order to gain a certain level of benefit. We need those who are prepared to be early implementers and early adopters, but if we take a measured approach we can avoid the all to familiar trough of despair that often follows excessive levels of expectation. Brian referred to a framework that could be used to consider and manage risk. This does seem like a sensible approach, although I guess that we started the Archives Hub blog, created Netvibes and iGoogle widgets and started Twittering without really analysing the purpose, benefits, risks and costs in any great detail. Maybe we should’ve done this, but then I like to think that we have an admirable sense of adventure, a sense of the missed opportunities that too much naval-gazing can bring about and also a general appreciation that if something takes relatively little time to do or to set up then it might be worth taking the plunge and seeing how it goes. I echo Brian’s reference to the wonderful comic strip by Michael Edison – well worth watching.
A recent RIN report ‘Discovering Physical Objects’ looks at how researchers find out about collections of objects relevant to their research. The report relates to museum objects rather than archives, but as ever, the Archives Hub feel that its always worth looking at library and museum studies, and seeing how they might apply to the world of archives.
Well, the results don’t seem to be very surprising. Researchers want online finding aids but are unaware of those that exist; they want contact with curatorial staff; and access to objects amongst museums is inconsistent.
I was interested to see that access to online finding aids NOW is more important than access to ‘perfect’ descriptions. The report states “technological developments that allow researchers
and others to easily add to and amend the content of these records have the potential to help all museums and other collections to improve the quality of their records.” I assume the report is reflecting what researchers have actually said here, rather than making an assumption, although the wording doesn’t make this explicit.
On the whole, the report gives the impression that museums are really rather behind the archive community in providing online access to descriptions. I’m curious about the statement that ‘only a few have the needs of researchers in mind’ when they create their online finding aids – I’d like to know more about this and the the evidence for it.
I’m surprised that curators apparently underestimate the value of online finding aids. It certainly seems that museum curators have not generally embraced technical possibilities and are not really into the spirit of collaboration and sharing.
The ways forward that the report recommends fit in quite nicely with the Hub’s ethos: to make museum descriptions open and interoperable so that people can create their own interfaces sourcing the data. We’ll keep an eye on the progress of Culture24 with interest.
Image from RIN report: Discovering Physical Objects (2009)
I’m embroiled in our Enhancement Project at the moment, part of which is about enabling images to be displayed within the Archives Hub. Well, it’s actually more than that – it’s about using the tag and related tags to enable links to digital representations of archives and to enable images to be embedded at collection and item level. It’s something we’re really excited about, and we feel that it’s important to make this step in order to keep the Archives Hub moving onwards and upwards.
Due to the distributed nature of the Archives Hub, we aren’t able to use the element, but we’ve made the most of the tags on offer. We’re implementing options for embedded images; links to files; thumbnail links to full-size images; groups of images representing the same item.
We’ve made a conscious effort to implement this in a very standards-based way. I suppose you could say that the principle should be that if the EAD records are put into another system, everything should still work, and the markup does allow for this. I think that this approach is also important because we have a service where we are not creating the data – our contributors are – so we need to try to meet their various requirements whilst at the same time not knowing exactly what they will contribute. For example, we have to be aware that they might enter a large, high resolution image as a thumbnail and the system needs to be able to cope with this. I see it as a learning experience for both us and our contributors, and I think that it’s important to take that sort of perspective with the Hub.
I do hope that Hub contributors take advantage of this development. It will be great for them to be able to include images and link directly to content. We’ve made it very easy to add the necessary markup by providing the facility to do this within our new Data Creation and Editing Template, so there is no need to get down and dirty with the EAD markup unless they want to. We’ll be talking to our contributors about this at our workshops in March/April, which are already pretty much full, so that’s a good indication for us.
For more information, see our page on adding digital objects to Hub descriptions.
No…we’re not thinking of changing the name…but I am thinking about a presentation that I’m giving on the Archives Hub in the context of ‘Archives 2.0’.
We’ve been doing a great deal of work recently that relates to the interoperability of the Hub. As part of an Enhancements Project taking place at Mimas, we are promoting data sharing, and an important part of this is work on import and export routines between services. Ideally, of course, it would be great to share data without any need for complex routines that effectively alter the structure of the data to make it suitable for different services, and remote searching of other data sources is something that we are also going to be looking at. But I guess that whilst we like to think of our service as interoperable, it’s currently still within certain limitations. It is problematic even sharing data held as EAD (Encoded Archival Description XML for archives) because EAD is really quite a permissive standard, allowing a great deal of flexibility and thus in some ways inhibiting easy data exchange. It is even more challenging to share data held in different databases. Many archives use the CALM system or the AdLib system, and we are working towards improving the export option from these systems, thus allowing archivists to have all of the advantages of an integrated management system, whilst at the same time enabling them to contribute to a cross-searching service such as the Hub.
I firmly believe that Archives 2.0, as an implementation of Web2.0 for archives, should primarily be viewed as an attitude rather than a suite of tools or services, characterised by openness, sharing, experimentation, collaboration, integration and flexibility that enables us to meet different user needs. Whilst widgets and whizzy features on websites are certainly a way to work towards this, I do think that more fundamentally we should be thinking about the data itself and how we can open this up.
This year sees the 200th anniversary of the birth of the geologist and naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1892) and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his revolutionary book On the Origin of Species, which explained his theory of natural selection and evolution.
Image: Detail of a design by Tom Eckersley (1914-1995) for the World Wildlife Fund (now WWF-UK), showing species in danger of extinction – due to some very un-natural selection.
Image provided by University of the Arts London with all rights reserved by the owners: the Tom Eckersley Estate and London College of Communication. Image taken by Graham Goldwater, with rights reserved by University of the Arts London, contact: archive-enquiries@arts.ac.uk, 02075 149 335.
I’ve just been reading an article by Elizabeth Shepherd in the December 2008 ARC magazine, asking whether research matters within archives and records management. The ‘anti-intellectualism’ that Terry Cook refers to is something that I can recognise, not least because I was that way inclined as a younger archivist. I remember wanting the MA course to give me the practical skills necessary to become an archivist, and wanting to get on with the real hands-on stuff of collecting, appraising, cataloguing and preserving, once I started work. It seemed to me at the time that this was what was important – ‘its all very well theorising, but you need to get on and do it’ kind of attitude. It took me quite a few years to realise that this was a misplaced notion. It seems obvious to me now that you need to ask yourself ‘why’ you are doing something as a fundamental part of the process.
To take EAD as an example, when I talk to students about using EAD, I think that what is most important is to impress upon them why they might use it – why it is of benefit, and, indeed, what its shortcomings might be. The ‘why’ needs to come before the ‘how’. It is so important to have a firm understanding, which helps to facilitate the proper evaluation and application of a standard. The idea of just going ahead and doing something because its always been done, or because most people are doing it, just seems anathema to me now.
I absolutely agree with Elizabeth that we have to think in terms of working on the mindset of the archivist or records manager. This is something I’ve written about in a chapter for a recent book, What Are Archives? Cultural and Theoretical Perspectives: A Reader. In terms of issues like data structure, format, cataloguing, and dissemination, archivists and records managers need to understand the benefits and the wider implications of the various options available. It seems hardly worth saying that archivists should think about sustainability and think long-term (although clearly this is not always easy). We need to be open to the possibilities of new technologies and see them as exciting opportunities – which is not to say that we should adopt them simply because they are new and novel – but sticking with old methods and ways of thinking in a fast changing world may leave us disengaged, and separated from our stakeholders and users.
Whilst the Archives Hub has a very practical raison d’etre, we do also involve ourselves in research, and this is essential when you are looking to harness new technologies for the benefit of effective cross-searching and dissemination of information. Whilst we are, I am sure, as guilty as many people, of introducing the odd feature without proper critical thought about why, about the wider implications, about things like sustainability and future planning, we generally do endeavour to operate on a sound theoretical basis.
I think that it would be worth services, like the Archives Hub, thinking about working more closely with researchers on topics like the evaluation of online services, the changing patterns of user behaviour, the benefits of a National Archives Network, the use of EAD…there are many options, but all of them would be of benefit in helping us to gain a greater sense of WHY.