I don’t think we made much of a fuss about reaching 200 contributors, but we’re really pleased to say that we’re now into the 200’s and new contributors are coming on board regularly, which makes the Hub even more useful to even more researchers.
We’re currently trying out a bit of a whizzy thing with the contributors’ map – go to http://archiveshub.ac.uk/contributorsmap/ and try a few clicks and you’ll see what I mean. We particularly like the jump from Aberdeen to Exeter, and are looking for archives from further afield in order to execute even bigger jumps!
Speaking of contributors, we’ve made a few changes to our contributor pages. We now have a link to browse each contributor’s descriptions, and also a link to simply show the list of collections. This link was largely introduced to help us with our quest to bring the Hub out loud and strong through Google. We’re doing pretty well on that front….we’ve found that page views have gone up radically over the last few months, and that can only be good for archives. I think the list of descriptions can really look quite impressive – I tried Aberdeen and found collections from ‘favourite tunes’ to ‘a valuation of the Shire of Aberdeen’.
We’ve been busy on our new Linking Lives project, using Linked Data to create a Web front-end, and making the data available via an open licence. We’re really pleased that the vast majority of contributors have not asked us to exclude their descriptions, and many have emailed specifically to endorse what we are doing. This is brilliant news, and I think it shows that most archivists are actually forward-thinking and understand that technology can really benefit our domain (flattery will get you everywhere!). We want to ensure that archives are out there in the Web of Data, and part of the innovative work that is happening now. You may have seen a few blog posts to get going on Linking Lives: http://archiveshub.ac.uk/linkinglives/. Pete’s are rather more technical than mine, and brilliantly set out some of the difficult issues. I’m trying to think about what archivists are interested in and how we think about archival context. I hope our posts on licensing convey how much we are thinking about the best way to present and attribute the content.
Lastly for this month’s HubbuB, I’ve knocked up a fairly short Feature on the latest stuff that’s happening. I’m thinking of this as an annual feature – sometimes we are so busy we kind of forget to actually make a bit of noise about what we’ve achieved. You’ll see that we’re working on some record display improvements. I really hope I can show you these soon.
We are out and About in August. Jane and Joy will be going to the Society of American Archivists’ Conference this year, speaking as part of a panel session. We will be talking about Discovery, the Archives Hub and Linked Data. We’re also very excited to be visiting the OCLC offices in Dublin Ohio. Lisa and Bethan will be at the Archives and Records Association conference in Edinburgh, so go and say hello if you are there. Lisa is also speaking at the conference.
Our Monthly Feature is all levitating women and mustacheod men, as we take a trip into Magic and Illusion at the Fairground Archive: http://archiveshub.ac.uk/features/magic/. Some great images, and a lovely photograph of Cyril Critchlow, a wizard in his 80’s, performing as ‘Wizardo, Harry Potter’s grandfather’!
We’ve recently created a page of Top Tips for Cataloguing: http://archiveshub.ac.uk/cataloguingtips/. These are some of the key areas that we believe are important for good online catalogues. We do still find that archivists don’t always think about the global online environment, so it’s worth setting out some of the most important points to bear in mind. It’s partly about thinking of the audience, browsing the Web, using Google, scanning pages for relevant content, and it’s partly about descriptions – ensuring that the title is as clear and self-explanatory as possible, thinking about how best to describe the archive in a way that is user-friendly.
We’ve been talking about ways to help get descriptions onto the Hub when they are created in Microsoft Word or Excel. We’re just exploring possibilities at the moment, but we are interested in anyone who uses, or knows anyone who uses, Microsoft Word to catalogue. Maybe smaller offices, or maybe you ask volunteers to do some of this?
We know people do use Microsoft Excel as well. We are thinking about ‘Tips for using Excel’. Would this be useful? We don’t necessarily want to give the impression that Excel is the most appropriate choice for cataloguing – its a spreadsheet software, not really for complex hierarchical archives. But we do realise that for some people, the choice of what to use is limited, and we want to do our best to accommodate the realities that people are faced with.
We’ve had some interest in the idea of researchers being able to request digital copies of archives through the Hub. That is, a researcher comes across an archive they would like to see, and they would like digital copies, so they indicate this in some way. Not yet fully thought out, but again, we’d need to know if there is a need for this. How many officers are starting to digitise on demand?
Finally, we’re covering music, dance, plants, medicine and the Middle East with our latest contributors. Check out who is recently on board on our contributors’ page: http://archiveshub.ac.uk/contributors/
We had a forum this month that included both Contributors’ Forum members and Steering Committee members. It was a really useful and productive morning. The write-up from this can be found on our blog: http://archiveshub.ac.uk/blog/?p=2677. For me and Joy, this kind of feedback is invaluable in helping us to plan for the future, and we are very appreciative of those who came along and participated.
Linking Lives: a Linked Data project
You will be pleased to hear that we secured funding for an enhancements project, called ‘Linking Lives’. This project aims to work with our Linked Data output from Locah to create a names-based user interface, with links to other data sources. All will become clear as I start to set this out and blog about it. We showed a mock-up of the sort of interface that we want to create to the Forum, and it was well received. We’re very excited about this project, because it really does enable us to start to think about presenting archival descriptions in a new way, and integrating them much more closely with other data sources.
Feature for July
We are pleased to say that the Victoria and Albert Museum Theatre and Performance Collections are now contributing to the Hub and this month we feature their wonderful collections along with some great images: http://archiveshub.ac.uk/features/theatreperformancecollections/
Content negotiation
You now have ability to retrieve records as XML or text files simply by adding the requisite extension to the persistent URI, e.g.
This may not be immediately useful to your average user, but it is working towards the idea of flexible access for different uses, thinking beyond the traditional web-based interface. It certainly helps me, as I often want to check the encoding behind the descriptions!
Browser Plugin
We now have a simple plugin to search the Archives Hub. It enables the Hub to be searched via the search box in the top right of the browser, providing another means of access to the Hub. If you go to the Hub homepage, you can see the drop-down list of search plug-ins available and you will have the opportunity to add ‘Archives Hub’. This is indicated by blue highlighting on the drop-down arrow.
Reference and Former Reference
We’ve had quite a bit of difficulty with how to deal with records that include both a reference, and a ‘former reference’. These are generally from CALM. We have found that for some contributors the ‘former reference’ is exactly that, but for others it is actually the reference they want to use. We therefore feel that the only option is to display both references on the Hub. If any contributor would like us to globally edit records to remove one of the references, we can do that for you. For example: http://archiveshub.ac.uk/data/gb0370pp1. We hope that this works for people. If it doesn’t, we can gather feedback and consider a different approach.
Desing Council Archive: Festival of Britain poster
This is the first of our monthly diary entries, where we share news, ideas and thoughts about the Archives Hub and the wider world. This diary is aimed primarily at archives that contribute to the Hub, or are thinking about contributing, but we hope that it provides useful information for others about the sorts of developments going on at the Hub and how we are working to promote archives to researchers.
Hub Contributors’ Forum
At the Hub we are always looking to maintain an active and constructive relationship with our contributors. Our Contributors’ Forum provides one way to do this. It is informal, friendly, and just meets once or twice a year to give us a chance to talk directly to archivists. We think that archivists also value the opportunity to meet other contributors and think about issues around data discovery.
We have a Contributors’ Forum on 7th July at the University of Manchester and if any contributors out there would like to come we’d love to see you. It is a chance to think about where the Hub is going and to have input into what you think we should be doing, where our priorities should lie and how to make the service effective for users. Just in case you all jump in at once, we do have a limit on numbers….but please do get in touch if you are interested.
The session will be from 10.30 to 1.00 at the University of Manchester with lunch provided. It will be with some members of the Hub Steering Committee, so a chance for all to mix and mingle and get to know each other. And for you to talk to Steering Committee members directly.
Please email Lisa if you would like to attend: lisa.jeskins@manchester.ac.uk.
Contributor Audio Tutorials
Our audio tutorial is aimed at contributors who need some help with creating descriptions for the Hub. It takes you through the use of our EAD Editor, step-by-step. It is also useful in a general sense for creating archival descriptions, as it follows the principles of ISAD(G). The tutorial can be found at http://archiveshub.ac.uk/tutorials/. It is just a simple audio tutorial, split into convenient short modules, covering basic collection-level descriptions through to multi-level and indexing. Any feedback greatly appreciated – if you want any changes or more units added, just let us know.
Archives Hub Feature: 100 Objects
We are very pleased with our monthly features, founded by Paddy, now ably run by Lisa. They are a chance to show the wealth of archive collections and provide all contributors the opportunity to showcase their holdings. They do quite well on Google searches as well!
Relevance ranking is a tricky beast, as our developer, John, will attest. How to rank the results of a search in a way that users see as meaningful? Especially with archive descriptions, which range from a short description of a 100 box archive to a 10 page description of a 2 box archive!
John has recently worked on the algorithm used for relevance ranking so that results now look more as most users would expect. For example, if you searched for ‘Sir John Franklin’ before, the ‘Sir John Franklin archive’ would not come up near the top of the results. It now appears 1st in results rather than way down the list, as it was previously. Result.
Images
Since last year we have provided the ability to add images to Hub descriptions. The images have to be stored elsewhere, but we will embed them into descriptions at any level (e.g. you can have an image to represent a whole collection, or an image at each item level description).
We’ve recently got some great images from the Design Council Archive: http://archiveshub.ac.uk/data/gb1837des-dca – take a look at the Festival of Britain entries, which have ‘digital objects’ linked at item level, enabling researchers to get a great idea of what this splendid archive holds.
Any contributors wishing to add images, or simple links to digital content, can easily do so through using the EAD Editor: http://archiveshub.ac.uk/images/ You can also add links to documents and audio files. Let us know if you would like more information on this.
Linking to descriptions
Linking to Hub descriptions from elsewhere has become simpler, thanks to our use of ‘cool URIs’. See http://archiveshub.ac.uk/linkingtodescriptions/. You simply need to use the basic URI for the Hub, with the /data/ directory, e.g. http://archiveshub.ac.uk/data/gb029ms207.
Out and About
It would take up too much space to tell you about all of our wanderings, but recently Jane spent a very productive week in Prague at the European Libraries Automation Group (ELAG), a very friendly bunch of people, a good mix of librarians and developers, and a very useful conference centering on Linked Data.
Bethan is at the CILIP new professionals information day today, busy twittering about networking and sharing knowledge.
Lisa is organising our contributors’ workshops for this year (feels like our summer season of workshops) and has already run one in Manchester. More to follow in Glasgow, London and Cardiff. This is our first workshop in Wales, so please take advantage of this opportunity if you are in Wales or south west England. More information at http://archiveshub.ac.uk/contributortraining/
Joy is very busy with the exciting initiative, UKDiscovery. This is about promoting an open data agenda for archives, museums and libraries – something that we know you are all interested in. Take a look at the new website: http://discovery.ac.uk/.
In 1921, the letter-cutter, sculptor, artist and writer Eric Gill founded an arts and crafts colony in Ditchling, East Sussex. Known as The Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic, it was a unique experiment in communal life in the early twentieth century, and survived until 1989.
This month we highlight descriptions for the Ditchling collections held by The Crafts Study Centre, which are especially rich in the work of the calligrapher Edward Johnston (1872-1944) and the weaver and dyer Ethel Mairet (1872-1952).
As Puffin editor between 1961 and 1980, Kaye Webb introduced a generation of children to good books, and, through the Puffin Club, established a community of engaged young readers. Webb revolutionised publishing for children, and her archive provide a fascinating insight into her life and work.
I don’t think we made much of a fuss about reaching 200 contributors, but we’re really pleased to say that we’re now into the 200’s and new contributors are coming on board regularly, which makes the Hub even more useful to even more researchers.
