Author: Lisa

Features

/ Lisa

German advert© National Fairground Archive, University of Sheffield

The Archives Hub has been writing/having collections of the month or features since 2001. In that time we’ve had a large variety of features on everything from ornithology to poetry to the Miners’ Strike and even Rugby League.

Our features highlight what treasures there are to be found in archive collections that are on the Hub. Sometimes the feature can be on a specific topic or theme collecting resources together from different repositories or they can highlight a specific repository.

This year we have changed the format of our features to include print resources from our sister service, Copac and there are now links from the Copac home page to the feature.

All of our web pages include Google analytics and we can see that our features are popular. Our feature pages have been viewed by nearly 9000 people since 1 January 2011 and most viewed  feature this year has been our feature: Scrum, ruck and tackle: the Rugby Football League Archive at the University of Huddersfield. Having your collections featured on the Hub also increases the amount of traffic you’ll get to your descriptions through Google.

Although the Hub team has been known to write a feature or two, we much prefer it if our contributors write the features, after all, they are the experts on their collections. This year has been a bumper year for features, with features from the University of Huddersfield, Imperial War Museum, the Women’s Library and the National Fairground Archive to name but a few. We have features scheduled now for the rest of 2011 and even have a couple of months booked up in 2012.

We like to be as flexible as possible when it comes to our features and offer to help as much or as little as the contributor wants. As a contributor, you can simply write the text of the feature and provide images, or you can suggest related collections, websites and reading lists as well. It’s entirely up to you.

Should you wish to feature on the Archives Hub, please contact archiveshub@mimas.ac.uk. We operate on a first come first served basis, so if you have an event, exhibition or project launch coming up and you would like your feature to coincide with it, let us know as early as possible.

Huddersfield Giants’ Match © Image courtesy of the Rugby Football League and The University of Huddersfield Archive and Special Collections

Out and about or Hub contributor training

/ Lisa

Every year we provide our contributors and potential contributors with free training on how to use our EAD editor software.

The days are great fun and we really enjoy the chance to meet archivists from around the UK and find out what they are working on.

The EAD editor has been developed so that archivists can create online descriptions of their collections without having to know EAD.  It’s intuitive and user friendly and allows contributors to easily add collection level and multi-level descriptions to the Hub.  Users can also enhance their descriptions by adding digital archival objects  – images, documents and sound files.

Contributor training day

Our training days are a mixture of presentation, demonstration and practical hands on. We (The training team consists of Jane, Beth and myself) tend to start by talking a little about Hub news and developments to set the scene for the day and then we move onto why the Hub uses EAD and why using standards is important for interoperability and means that more ‘stuff’ can be done with the data. We go from here on to a hands-on session that demonstrates how to create a basic record. We cover also cover adding lower level components and images and we show contributors how to add index terms to their descriptions. (Something that we heartily endorse! We LOVE standards and indexing!).

We always like to tailor our training to the users, and encourage users to bring along their own descriptions for the hands-on sessions. Some users manage to submit their first descriptions to the Hub by the end of the training session!

This year we have done training in Manchester and London, for the Lifeshare project team in Sheffield and for the Oxford colleges. We are also hoping (if we get enough take up) to run courses in Glasgow and Cardiff this year. (6th Sept at Glasgow Caledonian, Cardiff date TBC. Email archiveshub@mimas.ac.uk to book a place)

So far this year three new contributors have joined the Hub as a result of training:  Middle East Centre Archive, St Antony’s College, Oxford; Salford City Archive and the Taylor Institute, Oxford. We’ve also enabled four of our existing contributors to start updating their collections on the Hub: National Fairground Archive, the Co-operative Archive, St John’s College, Oxford and the V&A.

We have been given some great feedback this year and 100% of our attendees agreed/strongly agreed that they were satisfied with the content and teaching style of the course.

Some our feedback:

A very good introductory session to working with the EAD editor for the Archives Hub. I have not used the Archives Hub for a long time so an excellent refresher course.

This was a fantastic workshop – excellently designed resources, Lisa and Jane were really helpful (and patient!). The hands-on aspect was really useful: I now feel quite confident about creating EAD records for the Hub, and even more confident that the Hub team are on hand with online help

The hands on experience and being able to ask questions of the course leaders as things happened was really useful. Being able to work on something relevant to me was also a bonus.

Excellent presentation and delivery. I came along with a theoretical but not a practical knowledge of the Archives Hub and its workings, and the training session was pitched perfectly and was completely relevant to my job. Many thanks.

The Hub team train archivists how to use the EAD editor, archive students about EAD and Social media and research students in how to use the Hub to search for primary source materials. You can find our list of training that we provide on our training pages: http://archiveshub.ac.uk/trainingmodules/ .  We’re always happy to hear from people who are interested in training – do let us know!

Training and the Archives Hub.

/ Lisa

A couple of weeks ago I took part in a training session for postgraduate students from the English department at the University of Salford. This had been organised with Ian Johnston, University Archivist at Salford, and Professor Sharon Ruston from ESPaCH. (School of English, Sociology, Politics & Contemporary History)

Training Room

Sharon kicked off the session by explaining what archives mean to her career and how she had actually made her name and written a book on the strength of some new evidence that she uncovered about Shelley and his desire to be a doctor: Shelley and Vitality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), which explored the medical and scientific contexts which inform Shelley’s concept of vitality in his major poetry.

She went on to detail some of her new research on Humphry Davy (examining poetry & science) and explained that although it can often be a lot of effort to look for archives, it can pay dividends if you put the time and energy into searching.

Ian then took the floor and showed the students some of the hidden gems from the University’s archives. He also brought some items with him – a letter from Edith Sitwell, papers from the Duke of Bridgewater archive etc. He also showed some photos of Salford University in the 1970s. We were all fairly amazed by the picture of the paternoster lift, which is a lift that doesn’t stop. Literally you have to jump on as it’s going past. Talk about students living dangerously!

Ian explained why Salford University contributed to the Hub: the benefits of profile in being part of a national cross-searching service leading to more researchers benefitting from the Salford University Archives Collections.

I then did a demonstration of some different websites where you can search for archives online and went on to show how the Archives Hub, Copac and Zetoc work and the different types of information that you can find in each.

Prior to the session, Ian and Sharon had asked the students for their research areas and I used these as my examples. I find if students cannot easily see how and why something is relevant to them, then they switch off. It’s important to tailor your examples to your audience, whatever level they are studying at.

We then got the students to have a go themselves as we walked around the room and gave more individual help. This worked really well as each student got at least 5 or 10 mins of one-to-one help on searching for their particular subject area.

We were all really pleased with how the session went. I could actually see the students sit up and take notice when Sharon was talking about making her name from finding new knowledge. It underlined how primary source material can lead to students incorporating unique perspectives to their research. I feel that this was key to the success of the session. The students were able to see how important archives had been to someone who they respected and knew was an expert in her field.

Ian showed them actual papers and letters from the archive and this allowed them to see concrete examples of what we were talking about, as opposed to thinking about archive materials in an abstract and ‘virtual’ way by just looking at online finding aids.

Sharon and Ian did a great job of explaining the benefits of using archives, I just told them how to find stuff… It was great to see how engaged the students were with what we were explaining to them. So much so I’ve been asked back for a repeat performance. (With the academics!)

International Archives Day 9th June 2009

/ Lisa

Did you know that today is International Archives Day?

This is the 2nd International Archives Day ever held and 9th June was chosen because the International Council on Archives (ICA) was founded on 9th June 1948. Last year was the First International Archives Day, coinciding with the 60th Anniversary of ICA.

For more information about this and the history of ICA, go to the Unesco Archives website.


Over the last year the Archives Hub has had over 120,000 visits from over 184 countries. The map above gives an indication of international use.

One of our contributors, Glasgow University Archive Services, is celebrating International Archives Day by launching an online resource highlighting the international scope and reputation of Glasgow University and its archive collections.

The exhibition, searchable by region, will demonstrate the involvement of Scottish businesses on the development of the world economy and the influence that University of Glasgow and staff and students have had on the development of education around the world and on the history of many countries.

To go to the resource please see the following link: http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/archives/collections/internationalarchiveday/

If you are interested in international archives you could try the following websites and blogs:

Websites:
ArchiveGrid: A subscription site where you can find historical documents, personal papers, and family histories held in archives around the world.

European Archive: A freely available digital library of archives, with an emphasis on audio-visual materials.

MICHAEL UK: MICHAEL aims to provide simple and quick access to the digital collections of museums, libraries and archives from different European countries.

Unesco Archives Portal: a gateway to international archive collection websites

OCLC WorldCat (Manuscript materials): nearly 1.5 million catalogue records describing archival and manuscript collections and individual manuscripts in public, college and university, and special libraries located throughout North America and around the world.

Blogs:
Archiefforum.be: An online community which aims to support students and young archivists in their studies and profession by peer help and advise. (Flemish language)

ArchivesBlogs: a US blog which is a syndicated collection of blogs by and for archivists.

@rchivista: Spanish language blog written by Paco Fern