Exploring IIIF for the ‘Images and Machine Learning’ project

There are many ways of utilising the International Image Interoperability framework (IIIF) in order to deliver high-quality, attributed digital objects online at scale. One of the exploratory areas focused on in Images and Machine Learning – a project which is part of Archives Hub Labs – is how to display the context of the archive hierarchy using IIIF alongside the digital media.

Two of the objectives for this project are:

  • to explore IIIF Manifest and IIIF Collection creation from archive descriptions.
  • to test IIIF viewers in the context of showing the structure of archival material whilst viewing the digitised collections.

We have been experimenting with two types of resource from the IIIF Presentation API. The IIIF Manifest added into the Mirador viewer on the collection page contains just the images, in order to easily access these through the viewer. This is in contrast to a IIIF Collection, which we have been experimenting with. The IIIF Collection includes not only the images from a collection but also metadata and item structure within the IIIF resource. It is defined as a set of manifests (or ‘child’ collections) that communicate hierarchy or gather related things (for example, a set of boxes that each have folders within them, and photographs within those folders). We have been testing whether this has the potential to represent the hierarchy of an archival structure within the IIIF structure.

Creating a User Interface

Since joining the Archives Hub team, one of the areas I’ve been involved in is building a User Interface for this project that allows us to test out the different ways in which we can display the IIIF Images, Manifests and Collections using the IIIF Image API and the IIIF Presentation API. Below I will share some screenshots from my progress and talk about my process when building this User Interface.

The homepage for the UI showing the list of contributors for this project.
The collections from all of our contributors that are being displayed within the UI using IIIF manifests and collections.

This web application is currently a prototype and further development will be happening in the future. The programming language I am using is Typescript. I began by creating a Next.js React application and I am also using Tailwind CSS for styling. My first task was to use the Mirador viewer to display IIIF Collections and Manifests, so I installed the mirador package into the codebase. I created dynamic pages for every contributor to display their collections.

This is the contributor page for the University of Brighton Design Archives.

I also created dynamic collection pages for each collection. Included on the left-hand side of a collection page is the archives hub record link and the metadata about the collection taken from the archival EAD data – these sections displaying the metadata can be extended or hidden. The right-hand side of a collection page features a Mirador viewer. A simple IIIF Manifest has been added for all of the images in each collection. This Manifest is used to help quickly navigate through and browse the images in the collection.

This is the collection page for the University of Brighton Design Archives ‘Britain Can Make It’ collection.

Mirador has the ability to display multiple windows within one workspace. This is really useful for comparison of images side-by-side. Therefore, I have also created a ‘Compare Collections’ page where two Manifests of collection images can be compared side-by-side. I have configured two windows to display within one Mirador viewer. Then, two collections can be chosen for comparison using the dropdown select boxes seen in the image below.

The ‘Compare Collections’ page.

Next steps

There are three key next steps for developing the User Interface –

  • We have experimented with the Mirador viewer, and now we will be looking at how the Universal Viewer handles IIIF Collections. 
  • From the workshop feedback and from our exploration with the display of images, we will be looking at how we can offer an alternative experience of these archival images – distinct from their cataloguing hierarchy – such as thematic digital exhibitions and linking to other IIIF Collections and Manifests that already exist.
  • As part of the Machine Learning aspect of this project, we will be utilising the additional option to add annotations within the IIIF resources, so that the ML outputs from each image can be added as annotations and displayed in a viewer.

Labs IIIF Workshop

We recently held a workshop with the Archives Hub Labs project participants in order to get feedback on viewing the archive hierarchy through these IIIF Collections, displayed in a Mirador viewer. In preparation for this workshop, Ben created a sample of IIIF Collections using the images kindly provided by the project participants and the archival data related to these images that is on the Archives Hub. These were then loaded into the Mirador viewer so our workshop participants could see how the collection hierarchy is displayed within the viewer. The outcomes of this workshop will be explored in the next Archives Hub Labs blog post.

Thank you to Cardiff University, Bangor University, Brighton Design Archives at the University of Brighton, the University of Hull, the Borthwick Institute for Archives at the University of York, Lambeth Palace (Church of England) and Lloyds Bank for providing their digital collections and for participating in Archives Hub Labs.

Digital Content on Archives Hub

As part of the Archives Hub Labs ‘Images and Machine Learning’ project we are currently exploring the challenges around implementing IIIF image services for archival collections, and also for Archives Hub more specifically as an aggregator of archival descriptions. This work is motivated by our desire to encourage the inclusion of more digital content on Archives Hub, and to improve our users’ experience of that content, in terms of both display and associated functionality.

Before we start to report on our progress with IIIF, we thought it would be useful to capture some of our current ideas and objectives with regards to the presentation of digital content on Archives Hub. This will help us to assess at later stages of the project how well IIIF supports those objectives, since it can be easy to get caught up in the excitement of experimenting with new technologies and lose sight of one’s starting point. It will also help our audience to understand how we’re aiming to develop the Hub, and how the Labs project supports those aims.

     Why more digital content?

  • We know it’s what our users want
  • Crucial part of modern research and engagement with collections, especially after the pandemic
  • Another route into archives for researchers
  • Contributes to making archives more accessible
  • Will enable us to create new experiences and entry points within Archives Hub
  • To support contributing archives which can’t host or display content themselves
The poet Edward Thomas, ‘Wearing hat, c.1904’

The Current Situation

At the moment our contributors can include digital content in their descriptions on Archives Hub. They add links to their descriptions prior to publication, and they can do this at any level, e.g. ‘item’ level for images of individually catalogued objects, or maybe ‘fonds’ or ‘collection’ level for a selection of sample images. If the links are to image files, these are displayed on the Hub as part of the description. If the links are to video or audio files, or documents, we just display a link.

There are a few disadvantages to this set up: it can be a labour-intensive process adding individual links to descriptions; links often go dead because content is moved, leading to disappointment for researchers; and it means contributing archives need to be able to host content themselves, which isn’t always possible.

Where images are included in descriptions, these are embedded in the page as part of the description itself. If there are multiple images they are arranged to best fit the size of the screen, which means their order isn’t preserved.

If a user clicks on an image it is opened in a pop out viewer, which has a zoom button, and arrows for browsing if there is more than one image.

The embedded image and the viewer are both quite small, so there is also a button to view the image in fullscreen.

The viewer and the fullscreen option both obscure all or part of the decription itself, and there is no descriptive information included around the image other than a caption, if one has been provided.

As you can see the current interface is functional, but not ideal. Listed below are some of the key things we would like to look at and improve going forwards. The list is not intended to be exhaustive, but even so it’s pretty long, and we’re aware that we might not be able to fix everything, and certainly not in one go.

Documenting our aims though is an important part of steering our innovations work, even if those aims end up evolving as part of the exploration process.

Display and Viewing Experience

❐ The viewer needs updating so that users can play audio and video files in situ on the Hub, just as they can view images at the moment. It would be great if they could also read documents (PDF, Word etc).

❐ Large or high-resolution image files should load more quickly into the viewer.

❐ The viewer should also include tools for interacting with content, e.g. for images: zoom, rotate, greyscale, adjust brightness/contrast etc; for audio-visual files: play, pause, rewind, modify speed etc.

❐ When opened, any content viewer should expand to a more usable size than the current one.

❐ Should the viewer also support the display of descriptive information around the content, so that if the archive description itself is obscured, the user still has context for what they’re looking at? Any viewer should definitely clearly display rights and licensing information alongside content.

‘Now for a jolly ride at Bridlington’

Search and Navigation

❐ The Archives Hub search interface should offer users the option to filter by the type of digital content included in their search results (e.g. image, video, PDF etc).

❐ The search interface should also highlight the presence of digital content in search results more prominently, and maybe even include a preview?

❐ When viewing the top level of a multi-level description, users should be able to identify easily which levels include digital content.

❐ Users should also be able to jump to the digital content within a multi-level description quickly – possibly being able to browse through the digital content separately from the description itself?

❐ Users should be able to begin with digital content as a route into the material on Archives Hub, rather than only being able to search the text descriptions as their starting point.

Contributor Experience

❐ Perhaps Archives Hub should offer some form of hosting service, to support archives, improve availability of digital content on the Hub, and allow for the development of workflows around managing content?

❐ Ideally, we would also develop a user-friendly method for linking content to descriptions, to make publishing and updating digital content easy and time-efficient.

❐ Any workflows or interfaces for managing digital content should be straightforward and accessible for non-technical staff.

❐ The service could give contributors access to innovative but sustainable tools, which drive engagement by highlighting their collections.

❐ If possible, any resources created should be re-usable within an archive’s own sites or resources – making the most of both the material and the time invested.

Future Possibilities

❐ We could look at offering options for contributors to curate content in creative and inventive ways which aren’t tied to cataloguing alone, and which offer alternative ways of experiencing archival material for users.

❐ It would be exciting for users to be able to ‘collect’, customise or interact with content in more direct ways. Some examples might include:

  • Creating their own collections of content
  • Creating annotations or notes
  • Publicly tagging or commenting on content

❐ Develop the experience for users with things like: automated tagging of images for better search; providing searchable OCR scanned text for text within images; using the tagging or classification of content to provide links to information and resources elsewhere.

Image credits

Edward Thomas: Papers of Edward Thomas (GB 1239 424/8/1/1/10), Cardiff University Archives / Prifysgol Caerdydd.

Servants of the Queen (from Salome, c1900): by Dorothy Carleton Smyth. Art, Design and Architecture collection (GB 1694 NMC/0098F), Glasgow School of Art Archives and Collections.

‘Now for a jolly ride at Bridlington’: Claude William Jamson Archive (GB 50 U DX336/8/1), Hull University Archives.

‘Things for children’: Design Council Archives (GB 1837 DES/DCA/30/1/13/25), University of Brighton Design Archives.

User Experiences of Archive Catalogues and Use of Primary Sources

On 19 June we ran a webinar on user research and user behaviour. We had three speakers – David Marshall, a UX Researcher from the University of Cambridge, Kelly Arnstein, a UX Specialist from the University of Glasgow, and Deborah Wilson, a Subject Librarian from Queens University Belfast.

Link to view the Zoom recording of the session – please use the passcode : m^9xj.vt https://jisc.zoom.us/rec/share/T1HJWEHzO5jvLEoJEEjzm2ch9DhlHKiGUQGEQSzrt-jhQ6DzFUEKvyBpWuOTa-Xv.IKKYEwWG9fT5-lup

(main talks 1hr + 25 minute discussion). Slides are also provided as links (below).

The talks were excellent, and followed by a lively discussion. They should prove to be useful to anyone looking at designing a website for archive catalogues, and working with students using primary sources. Overall, there was a lot of consensus about user behaviour, which is useful in terms of sharing findings – because it is likely to be relevant to all archives. The emphasis for this session was on students and academic researchers, but we did discuss some of the challenges of meeting the needs of a diverse audience.

A few summary points that came out of one or more of the talks:

  • People may use an archive catalogue for research and also for teaching, scoping a project, marketing and other reasons.
  • Researchers want comprehensive detailed descriptions
  • They value name of creator
  • They want an idea of the physicality of the collection and the overall size
  • People want context and hierarchy, and like the idea of ‘leafing through’ material to see relationships.
  • There are those who want to get quickly to what they need and those who value browse and serendipity. This seems like a possible tension, and certainly a challenge, in terms of interface design. It may be that at different times the same researcher wants a quick route through and other times they want to take time and discover.
  • Cambridge research found that some users wanted to limit their search by date initially, but there was a strong feeling that a wide search and then filtering was generally a good option.
  • Finding everything of value was seen as key – many researchers were prepared to spend time to discover materials related to their research and worried about missing important materials.
  • The physical object remains key to many researchers
  • Saving searches and other forms of personalisation were seen as a good thing
  • Quite often researchers, especially if they are more experienced, understand that research skills are important and archive catalogues are complex; this may contrast with library databases, where they are more inclined to want to get to things quickly.
  • Undergraduates often don’t understand the different approach needed to engage with primary sources
  • Undergrads often engage with archives at the point of an assignment, where they are being marked on their use of primary sources; they initially try to find sources in the same way as they would search for anything else.
  • It is really valuable to educate students on the importance of context, the broad search and filter approach, understanding citations, evaluating databases, etc. They often don’t really know what primary sources are and can find them off-putting.
  • Researchers can make assumptions about what a repository holds, and then be surprised to find that there is material that is relevant for them.
  • A bad catalogue can put a researcher off, and they may choose to go further afield if the catalogue offers a better experience.
  • People often ignore tooltips. It is a challenge to provide help that people use.

David’s Slides: https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/documents/user-research-dm.pptx

Kelly’s Slides: https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/documents/user-research-ka.pptx

Deborah’s Slides: https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/documents/user-research-dw.pptx

Names (7): Into the Unknown

On the Archives Hub we have plenty of name entries without dates. Here is an example of the name string ‘Elizabeth Roberts’ (picked entirely randomly) from several different contributors:

Richard and Elizabeth Roberts
Roberts, Elizabeth fl. 1931
Elizabeth Grace Roberts
Roberts, Elizabeth Grace
Elizabeth Roberts
Roberts, Elizabeth
ROBERTS, Elizabeth Grace
ROBERTS, Mrs Elizabeth Grace

The challenge we have is how to work this names like this. Let me modify this list into an imaginary but nonetheless realistic list of names that we might have on the Hub, just to provide a useful example (apologies to any Elizabeth Roberts’ out there):

Elizabeth Roberts 1790-1865
Elizabeth Roberts, 1901-1962
Elizabeth Roberts b 1932
Elizabeth Roberts fl. 1958
Elizabeth Roberts, artist
Elizabeth Roberts
Elizabeth Roberts
Elizabeth Roberts

How should we treat these names in the Archives Hub display? If we can make decisions about that, it may influence how we process the names.

These names can be separated into two types (1) name strings that identify a person (2) name strings that don’t identify a person. This is a fundamental difference. It effectively creates two different things. One is an identifier for a person; one is simply a string that we can say is a name, but nothing more.

If we put two descriptions together because they are both a match to Elizabeth Roberts, 1790-1865, then we are stating that we think this is the same person, so the researcher can easily see collections and other information about them. 

If we put two descriptions together that are both related to Elizabeth Roberts we are not doing the same thing.  We are simply matching two strings. 

Which of these names is an identifier? That depends upon levels of confidence, and that is why being able to set and modify levels of confidence is crucial.

Elizabeth Roberts 1790-1865 – this is enough to identify a person.  In theory, there could be two people with the same life dates, but the chances are very low. So, we would bring together two entries and represented them on one name page.

Elizabeth Roberts b 1932 – Is a birth or death date enough? It allows for some measure of certainty with identity, and we would probably deem this to be enough to identify a person and match to another Elizabeth Roberts born in 1932, but it is not certain. If this Elizabeth Roberts was the creator, and she has several mentions of ‘art’, ‘artist’ and ‘painting’ in her biography, it is more likely that she is the same as Elizabeth Roberts, artist and might be useful to create a link, but would it be enough for a match?

Elizabeth Roberts fl 1931 – whilst a floruit date helps place the person in a time period, it is not enough to confidently identify a person.  

Elizabeth Roberts, artist – occupation or other epithet enough is not usually enough to identify someone.   If there is a biographical history, there is more information about the person, but this is not enough to be sure. 

If we had an entry such as Elizabeth Roberts, Baroness Wood of Foxley (completely imaginary and just for the purposes of example), then the epithet is more helpful. We might decide that this identifies a person enough for a match with any other instances of Elizabeth Roberts with baroness wood and foxley in the name string.

If we had MacAlister, Sir Donald, 1st Baronet, physician and medical administrator then ‘1st baronet’ alongside the name should give enough confidence for a match with another entry for 1st Baronet.

Display behaviour

So, how might we reflect this in the display? It can be useful to think about the display and researcher requirements and expectations and work back from there to how we actually process the data.

Firstly we might group two entries if they have the same date.

But this does not offer much benefit to the end user. They still see eight entries for this name string. So, we might bring together the entries that match exactly on the name string.

But there are still two entries that are essentially just name strings – the fl. and the ‘artist’ entry are essentially the same as those without any additional information in that they are name strings and they do not identify a person, so it makes sense to group all of these entries.

screenshot of shortest list of names with matching

We now have a short set of entries. We can’t merge any more of them.

However, this does leave us with a problem. The end user is likely to assume that these all represent different people. That ‘Elizabeth Roberts’ is a different person from ‘Elizabeth Roberts 1901-1962’. The tricky thing is that she might be….and she might not be. It is likely that a user wanting Elizabeth Roberts with dates 1790-1865 would see the above list and click on the matching entry, not realising that the last three entries could also refer to the same person.  We don’t want to exclude these from the researcher’s thinking without hinting that they may represent the same person.

We might give the list a heading that hints at the reality, such as ‘We have found the following matches:’. Maybe ‘matches’ would have a tool tip to say that the entries without dates could match the entries with dates. It is quite hard to even find a way to say this succinctly and clearly.

The identifiable names would link to name pages. We might provide information on the name pages to again emphasise that other Elizabeth Roberts entries could be of interest. We haven’t yet decided what would be best in terms of behaviour for the non-identifiable names – they might simply link to a description search – it does not make much sense to have a full name page for an unidentified person where all you have is one link to one archive description. We can’t provide links to any other resources for a non-identifiable name; unless we simply provide e.g. a Wikipedia lookup on the name. But again, we face the issue of misleading the end user; implying a ‘same as’ link when we do not have enough grounds to do that.

Names as creators

We may decide to treat creator names differently. Archival creator does have a significant meaning – it emphasises that this is a collections about that person or organisation (though even the nature of the about-ness is difficult to convey). But many users do not necessarily appreciate what an archival creator is, and many descriptions don’t provide biographical histories, so could this end up creating confusion? Also, in the end a creator name is far more likely to include life dates, so then they would have a full name page anyway. What would be the benefit of treating a creator name with no life dates and no biographical history differently from an index term and giving it a name page? You would just be linking to one archive, albeit ‘their’ archive.

What about if a name string record, say the Elizabeth Roberts fl 1931, has been ingested as an EAC record, i.e. a name record that was created by one of our contributors? It is likely that name records will include a full date of birth, or at least a birth or death date, but this is not certain. Whilst we are not currently set up to take in EAC-CPF name records, we do plan to do this in the future. If the name is provided through an EAC record and they are a creator, they may have a detailed biography, and may have other useful information, such as a chronology, so a name page would be worthwhile.  

This short analysis shows some of the problems with providing a name-based interface. We will undoubtedly encounter more thorny issues. The challenge, as is so often the case, is just as much about how to convey meaning to end users when they are not necessarily familiar with archival perspectives, as it is about how to process the data.

And we haven’t even got to thinking about Eliza Roberts or Lizzy Roberts…..

Archives Hub Survey Results: What do people want from an archives aggregation service?

The 2018 Archives Hub online survey was answered by 83 respondents. The majority were in the UK, but a significant number were in other parts of Europe, the USA or further afield, including Australia, New Zealand and Africa. Nearly 50% were from higher or further education, and most were using it for undergraduate, postgraduate and academic research. Other users were spread across different sectors or retired, and using it for various reasons, including teaching, family history and leisure or archives administration.

We do find that a substantial number of people are kind enough to answer the survey, although they have not used the service yet. On this survey 60% were not regular users, so that is quite a large number, and maybe indicates how many first-time users we get on the service. Of those users, half expected to use it regularly, so it is likely they are students or other people with a sustained research interest. The other 40% use the Hub at varying levels of regularity. Overall, the findings indicate that we cannot assume any pattern of use, and this is corroborated by previous surveys.

Ease of use was generally good, with 43% finding it easy or very easy, but a few people felt it was difficult to use. This is likely to be the verdict of inexperienced users, and it may be that they are not familiar with archives, but it behoves us to keep thinking about users who need more support and help. We aim to make the Hub suitable for all levels of users, but it is true to say that we have a focus on academic use, so we would not want to simplify it to the point where functionality is lost.

I found one comment particularly elucidating: “You do need to understand how physical archives work to negotiate the resource, but in terms of teaching this actually makes it really useful as a way to teach students to use a physical archive.”  I think this is very true: archives are catalogued in a certain way, that may not be immediately obvious to someone new to them. The hierarchy gives important context but can make navigation more complicated. The fact that some large collections have a short summary description and other smaller archives have a detailed item-level description adds to the confusion.

One negative comment that we got maybe illustrates the problem with relevance ranking: “It is terribly unhelpful! It gives irrelevant stuff upfront, and searches for one’s terms separately, not together.” You always feel bad about someone having such a bad experience, but it is impossible to know if you could easily help the individual by just suggesting a slightly different search approach, or whether they are really looking for archival material at all. This particular user was a retired person undertaking family history, and they couldn’t access a specific letter they wanted to find. Relevance ranking is always tricky – it is not always obvious why you get the results that you do, but on the whole we’ve had positive comments about relevance ranking, and it is not easy to see how it could be markedly improved.  The Hub automatically uses AND for phrase searches, which is fairly standard practice. If you search for ‘gold silver’ you will probably get the terms close to each other but not as a phrase, but if you search for ‘cotton mills’ you will get the phrase ranked higher than e.g. ‘mill-made cotton’ or ‘cotton spinning mill’.  One of the problems is that the phrase may not be in the title, although the title is ranked higher than other fields overall. So, you may see in your hit list ‘Publication proposals’ or ‘Synopses’ and only see ‘cotton mills’ if you go into the description. On the face of it, you may think that the result is not relevant.

screenshot of survey showing what people value
What do you most value about the Archives Hub?

All of our surveys have clearly indicated that a comprehensive service providing detailed descriptions of materials is what people want most of all. It seems to be more important than providing digital content, which may indicate an acknowledgement from many researchers that most archives are not, and will not be, digitised. We also have some evidence from focus groups and talking to our contributors that many researchers really value working with physical materials, and do not necessarily see digital surrogates as a substitute for this. Having said that, providing links to digital materials still ranks very highly in our surveys. In the 2018 survey we asked whether researchers prefer to search physical and digital archives separately or together, in order to try to get more of a sense of how important digital content is. Respondents put a higher value on searching both together, although overall the results were not compelling one way or the other. But it does seem clear that a service providing access to purely digital content is not what researchers want. One respondent cited Europeana as being helpful because it provided the digital content, but it is unclear whether they would therefore prefer a service like Europeana that does not provide access to anything unless it is digital.

Searching by name, subject and place are clearly seen as important functions. Many of our contributors do index their descriptions, but overall indexing is inconsistent, and some repositories don’t do it at all. This means that a name or subject search inevitably filters out some important and relevant material. But in the end, this will happen with all searches. Results depend upon the search strategy used, and with archives, which are so idiosyncratic, there is no way to ensure that a researcher finds everything relating to their subject.  We are currently working on introducing name records (using EAC-CPF). But this is an incredibly difficult area of work. The most challenging aspect of providing name records is disambiguation. In the archives world, we have not traditionally had a consistent way of referring to individuals. In many of the descriptions that we have, life dates are not provided, even when available, and the archive community has a standard (NCA Rules) that it not always helpful for an online environment or for automated processing. It actually encourages cataloguers to split up a compound or hyphenated surname in a way that can make it impossible to then match the name. For example, what you would ideally want is an entry such as ‘Sackville-West, Victoria Mary (1892-1962) Writer‘, but according to the NCA Rules, you should enter something like ‘West Victoria Mary Sackville- 1892-1962 poet, novelist and biographer‘. The epithet is always likely to vary, which doesn’t help matters, but entering the name itself in this non-standard way is particularly frustrating in terms of name matching.  On the Hub we are encouraging the use of VIAF identifiers, which, if used widely, would massively facilitate name matching. But at the moment use is so small that this is really only a drop in the ocean. In addition, we have to think about whether we enable contributors to create new name records, whether we create them out of archive descriptions, and how we then match the names to names already on the Hub, whether we ingest names from other sources and try to deal with the inevitable variations and inconsistencies.  Archivists often refer to their own store of names as ‘authorities’ but in truth there is often nothing authoritative about them; they are done following in-house conventions. These challenges will not prevent us from going forwards with this work, but they are major hurdles, and one thing is clear: we will not end up with a perfect situation. Researchers will look for a name such as ‘Arthur Wellesley’ or ‘Duke of Wellington’ and will probably get several results. Our aim is to reduce the number of results as much as we can, but reducing all variations to a single result is not going to happen for many individuals, and probably for some organisations. Try searching SNAC (http://snaccooperative.org/), a name-based resource, for Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, to get an idea of the variations that you can get in the user interface, even after a substantial amount of work to try to disambiguate and bring names together.

The 2018 survey asked about the importance of providing information on how to access a collection, and 75% saw this as very important. This clearly indicates that we cannot assume that people are familiar with the archival landscape. Some time ago we introduced a link on all top-level entries ‘how to access these materials’. We have just changed that to ‘advice on accessing these materials’, as we felt that the former suggested that the materials are readily accessible (i.e. digital), and we have also introduced the link on all description pages, down to item-level. In the last year, the link has been clicked on 11,592 times, and the average time spent on the resulting information page is 1 minute, so this is clearly very important help for users. People are also indicating that general advice on how to discover and use archives is a high priority (59% saw this as of high value). So, we are keen to do more to help people navigate and understand the Archives Hub and the use of archives. We are just in the process of re-organising our ‘Researching‘ section of the website, to help make it easier to use and more focussed.

There were a number of suggestions for improvements to the Hub. One that stood out was the need to enable researchers to find archives from one repository. At the moment, our repository filter only provides the top 20 repositories, but we plan to extend this. It is partly a case of working out how best to do it, when the list of results could be over 300. We are considering a ‘more’ link to enable users to scroll down the list. Many other comments about improvements related back to being more comprehensive.

One respondent noted that ‘there was no option for inexperienced users’. It is clear that a number of users do find it hard to understand. However, to a degree this has to reflect the way archives are presented and catalogued, and it is unclear whether some users of the Hub are aware of what sort of materials are being presented to them and what their expectations are. We do have a Guide to Using Archives specifically for beginners, and this has been used 5,795 times in the last year, with consistently high use since it was introduced. It may be that we should give this higher visibility within the description pages.

Screenshot of Hub page on using archives
Guide to Using Archives

What we will do immediately as a result of the survey is to link this into our page on accessing materials, which is linked from all descriptions, so that people can find it more easily. We did used to have a ‘what am I looking at?’ kind of link on each page, and we could re-introduce this, maybe putting the link on our ‘Archive Collection’ and ‘Archive Unit’ icons.

 

 

 

It is particularly important to us that the survey indicated people that use the Hub do go on to visit a repository. We would not expect all use to translate into a visit, but the 2018 survey indicated 25% have visited a repository and 48% are likely to in the future. A couple of respondents said that they used it as a teaching tool or a tool to help others, who have then gone on to visit archives. People referred to a whole range of repositories they have or will visit, from local authority through to university and specialist archives.

screenshot of survey results
I have found material using the Archives Hub that I would not otherwise have discovered

59% had found materials using the Hub that they felt they would not have found otherwise. This makes the importance of aggregation very clear, and probably reflects our good ranking on Google and other search engines, which brings people into the Archive Hub who otherwise may not have found it, and may not have found the archives otherwise.

 

 

How the Exploring British Design project informed the development of the Archives Hub

Back in 2014 the Archives Hub joined forces with The University of Brighton Design Archives for an exciting new project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, ‘Exploring British Design’ (EBD).

The project explored Britain’s design history by connecting design-related content in different archives, with the aim of giving researchers the freedom to explore around and within archives.

You can read a number of blog posts on the project, and there is also a video introducing the EBD website on You Tube, but in this post I wanted to set out how we have learned from the project and how it has informed the development of the new Archives Hub.

Unfortunately, we may not be able to maintain the website longer term, and so it seemed timely to reflect on how the principles used in this project are being taken forward.

Modelling the Data

A key component of EBD was our move away from the traditional approach of putting the archive collection at the centre of the user experience. Instead, we wanted to reflect the richness of the content – the people, organisations, places, subjects, events that a collection represents.

We had many discussions and filled many pieces of paper with ideas about how this might work.

rough ideas for data connectivity
Coming up with ideas for how EBD should work

We then took these ideas and translated them into our basic model.

model of data for EBD
Relationships between entities in the EBD data

Archives are represented on our model as one aspect of the whole. They are a resource to be referenced, as are bibliographic resources and objects. They relate to the whole – to agents, time periods, places and events. This essentially puts them into a whole range of contexts, which can expand as the data grows.

Screenshot of EBD homepage
Homepage of Exploring British Design: People are foremost.

The Exploring British Design website was one way to reflect the inter-connected model that we created.

We have taken the principles of this approach with the new Archives Hub architecture and website, which was launched back in December 2016. Whilst the archive collection description stays very much in the forefront of the users’ experience, we have introduced additional tabs to represent themed collections and repositories. All three of these sources of information are, in a data and processing sense, treated equally. The user searches the Hub and the search runs across these three data sources. The model allows us to be flexible with how we present the data, so we could also try different interfaces in future, maybe foregrounding images, or events.

screenshot of Archives Hub search results
Search for ‘design industry’ gives results across Archive Collections, Themed Collections and Repositories

Names

The EBD project had a particular focus on people. We opted to combine machine methods of data extraction – data taken partly from our already existent archive descriptions as well as from other external sources – with manual methods, to create rich records about designers. This manual approach is not sustainable for a large-scale service like the Archives Hub, but it shows what is possible in terms of creating more context and connectivity.

screenshot of a person page from the EBD website
EBD website showing a person page

We wanted to indicate that well-structured data allows a great deal more flexibility in presentation. In this case the ‘Archive and Museum Resources’ are one link in the list of resources about or related to the individual. We could have come up with other ways to present the information, given how it was structured.

We are intending to introduce names pages to the Archives Hub, which will then more clearly echo the EBD approach. They will largely have been created through automated processes, as we needed to create them at scale. They will generally be quite brief, without the ideal structure or depth, but the principle remains that we can then link from a person page to a host of related resources. The Hub website will have a new tab for ‘Names’ and end users will be able to run searches that take in collections, themes, repositories, people and organisations.

The EBD project allowed us to explore standards used for the creation of names data. It was our first experience of using Encoded Archival Context (Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families) (EAC-CPF), so we could start to see what we could do with it, as well as discover some of the shortcomings of the standard, as our data went beyond what is supported. For example, we wanted to link images to people and events but this was not covered by the standard. It was useful to have this preliminary exploration of it, and what it can – and can’t – do, as we look to adopt it for names within the Archives Hub.

Structured Data

One of the things the project did reinforce for me was the importance of indexing. On the Archives Hub we have always recommended indexing, but we have had mixed reactions from archivists, some feeling that it is less useful than detailed narrative, some saying that it is not needed ‘now we have Google’, some simply saying they don’t have time.

Indexing has many advantages, some of which I’ve touched on in various blog posts – and one at the top of the list, is that it brings the advantages of structured data. A name in a narrative can, in theory, be pulled out and utilised as a point of connectivity, but a name as an index term tends to be a great deal easier to work with: it is identified as a name, it usually has structured surname, forename content, it usually includes life dates and may include titles and epithets to help unambiguously identify an individual.

EBD was all about structured data, and we gave ourselves the luxury of adding to the data by hand, creating rich structured records about designers. This was partly to demonstrate what could be done in an interface, but we were well aware that it would be problematic to create records of that level of detail at scale. However, as we start to grapple with expanding name records in the Archives Hub, we have EBD as a reference point. It has helped us to think more about approaches and priorities when creating name records. If we were to create an EAC Editor (similar to our EAD Editor) we would think carefully about how to facilitate creating relationships. For example, the type of relationship – should there be a controlled list of relationship types? e.g. ‘worked with, collaborated with, had professional connection with, influenced by,  spouse of’ – these are some of the relationships we used in EBD, after much discussion about how best to approach this. Or would it be more practical to stick to ‘associated with’ (i.e. not defined), which is easier, but far less useful to a researcher. Could we have both? How would one combine them in an interface?  Another example – the potential to create timelines. If we wanted to provide end users with timelines, we would need to focus on time-bound events. There are many issues to consider here, not least of which is how comprehensive the timeline would be.

The vexed question of how to combine data from name descriptions created by several institutions is not something we really dealt with in EBD, but that will be one of the biggest challenges for us in aiming to implement name data on the Archives Hub.

The level of granularity that you decide upon has massive implications for complexity, resources and benefits. The more granular the data, the more potential for researchers to be able to drill down into lives, events, locations, etc. So including life dates allows for a search for designers from 1946; including places of education allows for exploring possible connections through education, but adding dates of education allows for a more specific focus still.

Explaining our approach

One thing that struck me about this project was that it was harder than I had anticipated to convey to people what we were trying to achieve and what we could achieve. I tended to find that showing the website raised a number of expectations that I knew would be difficult to fulfill, and if I’m being honest, I sometimes felt rather frustrated at the lack of recognition of what we had achieved – it’s really not easy to combine, process and present different data sources!  It is ironic that the more we press forwards with new functionality, and try to push the boundaries of what we do, the more it seems that people ask for developments that are beyond that!  You can try to modify expectations by getting deep down and technical with the challenges involved in aggregating and enhancing data created over time, by different people, in different environments (we worked with CSV data, EAC-CPF data, RDF and geodata for example), with different perspectives and priorities.  But detailed explanations of technical challenges are not going to work for most audiences. End users see and make an assessment of the website; they shouldn’t really need to be aware of what is going on behind the scenes.

Originally, in our project specification, we asked the question: “How can we encourage researchers, archive and museum professionals, and the public, to apprehend an integrated and extended rather than collection-specific sense of Britain’s design history?”  Whilst we did not go as far to answer this question as we had hoped, the work that we did made me feel that it might be harder than I had envisaged. People are very used to the traditional catalogues and other finding aids that are out there, and it creates a certain (possibly unconscious) mindset. I know this too well, because, as an archivist, I have had to adjust my own thinking to see data in a different way and appreciate that traditional approaches to cataloguing and discoverability are not always suited to the digital online age.

Data Model

The hierarchical approach to data is very embedded among archivists, and this is what people are used to being presented with.  Unless archivists catalogue in a different way, providing more structured information about entities (names, places, etc) then actually presenting things in a more connected way is hard.

image of hierarchical folders
A folder structure is often used to represent archival hierarchy

A more inter-connected model, which eschews linear hierarchy in favour of fluid entity relationships, and allows for a more flexible approach with the front-end interface to the data relies upon the quality, structure and consistency of the data. If we don’t have place names at all we can’t provide a search by place. If we don’t have place names that are unambiguously identified (i.e. not just ‘Cambridge’) then we can provide a search by place, but a researcher will be presented with all places called Cambridge, anywhere in the world (including the US, Australia and Jamaica).

A diagram showing archives and other entities connected
An example of connected entities

The new Archives Hub was designed on the basis of a model that allows for entities to be introduced and new connections made.

Archives Hub Entity Relationship diagram
Entities within the Archives Hub system

So, the tabs that the end user sees in the interface can be modified and extended over time. Searches can be run across all entities; it is not solely about retrieving descriptions of archives. This approach allows for researchers to find e.g. repositories that are significantly about ‘design’ or repositories that are located in London. It allows us to introduce Themed Collections as a separate type of description, so a student doing a project on ‘plastics’ would discover the Museum of Design in Plastics as a resource alongside archive collections at repositories including Brighton Design Archives, the V&A and the Paul Mellon Centre.

screenshot of Archives Hub search results
Search for ‘plastics and design’ shows archives and themed resources

Website Maintenance

One of the things I’ve learnt from this project is that you need to factor in the ongoing costs and effort of maintaining a project website. The EBD website is quite sophisticated, which means there are substantial technical dependencies, and we ended up running into issues with security, upgrades and compatibility of software, issues that are par for the course for a website but nonetheless need dealing with promptly. Maybe we should have factored this in more than we did, as we know the systems administration required for the Archives Hub is no small thing, but when you are in the throws of a project your focus is on the objectives and final output more than the ongoing issues. We cannot maintain a site long-term that is not being regularly used. EBD does not get the level of use that would justify the resources we would have to put into it on an ongoing basis.

Conclusion

When we were creating the model for the Archives Hub, we thought as much about flexibility and future potential as anything else. This is one thing that we have learnt from running the Hub for 25 years and from projects like Exploring British Design. You need to plan for potential developments in order to start to work with cataloguers, to get the data into the shape that you need it to be. We wanted to be able to introduce additional entities, so that we could have names, places, languages, images, or any other entities as ‘first class citizens‘ of the Hub. We wanted to be able to enhance the end user’s ability to take different paths, and locate relevant archives through different avenues of exploration.

We need to temper our ambitions for the Hub with the realities of cataloguing, aggregation and resources available, and we need as much information as we can get about what researchers really want; but this is why it is so important to encompass potential as well as current functionality. We may not be able to introduce everything we have envisioned or that users ask for right now; but it is important to understand the vital link between approaches to cataloguing, adherence to data standards, and front end functionality. We created visualisations for EBD and we would love to do this for the Hub, but it was not an easy thing to do, and so we would need to consider what the data allows, the software options available, whether the technical requirements are sustainable over time, and the effectiveness of the end result for the researcher.

Visualisation showing connections to Elizabeth Denby
Visualisation for Elizabeth Denby

When we demonstrated the visualisations in EBD, they had the wow factor that was arguably lacking in the main text-based site, but for serious researchers the wow factor is a great deal less important that the breadth and depth of the content, and that requires a model that is fundamentally rigorous, sustainable over time and realistic in terms of the data that you have to work with.

 

Archives Hub Search Analysis

Search logs can give us an insight into how people really search. Our current system provides ‘search logs’ that show the numbers based on the different search criteria and faceting that the Hub offers, including combined searches. We can use these to help us understand how our users search and to give us pointers to improve our interface.

The Archives Hub has a ‘default search’ on the homepage and on the main search page, so that the user can simply type a search into the box provided. This is described as a keyword search, as the user is entering their own significant search terms and the results returned include any archival description where the term(s) are used.

The researcher can also choose to narrow down their search by type. The figure below shows the main types the Archives Hub currently has. Within these types we also have boolean type options (all, exact, phrase), but we have not analysed these at this point other than for the main keyword search.

Archives Hub search box

Archives Hub search box showing the types of searches available

There are caveats to this analysis.

1. Result will include spiders and spam

With our search logs, excluding bots is not straightforward, something which I refer to in a previous post: Archives Logs and Google Analytics. We are shortly to migrate to an entirely new system, so for this analysis we decided to accept that the results may be slightly skewed by these types of searches. And, of course, these crawlers often perform a genuine service, exposing archive descriptions through different search engines and other systems.

2. There are a small number of unaccounted for searches

Unidentified searches only account for 0.5% of the total, and we could investigate the origins of these searches, but we felt the time it would take was not worth it at this point in time.

3. Figures will include searches from the browse list.

These figures include searches actioned by clicking on a browse list, e.g. a list of subjects or a list of creators.

4. Creator, Subject and Repository include faceted searching

The Archives Hub currently has faceted searching for these entities, so when a user clicks to filter down by a specific subject, that counts as a subject search.

Results for One Month (October 2015)

Monthly figures for searches

For October 2015 the total searches are 19,415. The keyword search dominates, with a smaller use of the ‘any’ and ‘phrase’ options within the keyword search. This is no surprise, but this ‘default search’ still forms only 36% of the whole, which does not necessarily support the idea that researchers always want a ‘google type’ search box.

We did not analyse these additional filters (‘any/phrase/exact’) for all of the searches, but looking at them for ‘keyword’ gives a general sense that they are useful, but not highly used.

A clear second is search by subject, with 17% of the total. The subject search was most commonly combined with other searches, such as a keyword and further subject search. Interestingly, subject is the only search where a combined subject + other search(es) is higher than a single subject search. If we look at the results over a year, the combined subject search is by far the highest number for the whole year, in fact it is over 50% of the total searches. This strongly suggests that bots are commonly responsible for combined subject searches.

These searches are often very long and complex, as can be seen from the search logs:

[2015-09-17 07:36:38] INFO: 94.212.216.52:: [+0.000 s] search:: [+0.044 s] Searching CQL query: (dc.subject exact “books of hours” and/cql.relevant/cql.proxinfo (dc.subject exact “protestantism” and/cql.relevant/cql.proxinfo (dc.subject exact “bible o.t. psalms” and/cql.relevant/cql.proxinfo (dc.subject exact “authors, classical” and/cql.relevant/cql.proxinfo (dc.subject exact “bible o.t. psalms” and/cql.relevant/cql.proxinfo (dc.subject exact “law” and/cql.relevant/cql.proxinfo (dc.subject exact “poetry” and/cql.relevant/cql.proxinfo (dc.subject exact “bible o.t. psalms” and/cql.relevant/cql.proxinfo (dc.subject exact “sermons” and/cql.relevant/cql.proxinfo bath.personalname exact “rawlinson richard 1690-1755 antiquary and nonjuror”))))))))):: [+0.050 s] 1 Hits:: Total time: 0.217 secs

It is most likely that the bots are not nefarious; they may be search engine bots, or they may be indexing for the purposes of  information services of some kind, such as bibliographic services, but they do make attempts to assess the value of the various searches on the Hub very difficult.

Of the remaining search categories available from the main search page, it is no surprise that ‘title’ is used a fair bit, at 6.5%, and then after that creator, name, and organisation and personal name. These are all fairly even. For October 2015 they are around 3% of the total each, and it seems to be similar for other months.

The repository filter is popular. Researchers can select a single repository to find all of their descriptions (157), select a single repository and also search terms (916), and also search for all the descriptions from a single repository from our map of contributors (125). This is a total of 1,198, which is 6.1% of the total. If we also add the faceted filter by repository, after a search has been carried out, the total is 2,019, and the percentage is 10.4%. Looking at the whole year, the various options to select repository become an even bigger percentage of the total, in particular the faceted filter by repository.   This suggests that improvements to the ability to select repositories, for example, by allowing researchers to select more than one repository, or maybe type of repository, would be useful.

Screen shot of Hub map

Google Map on the Hub showing the link to search by contributor

We have a search within multi-level descriptions, introduced a few years ago, and that clearly does get a reasonable amount of use, with 1,404 uses in this particular month, or 7.2% of the total. This is particularly striking as this is only available within multi-level descriptions. It is no surprise that this is valuable for lengthy descriptions that may span many pages.

The searches that get minimal use are identifier, genre, family name and epithet. This is hardly surprising, and illustrates nicely some of the issues around how to measure the value of something like this.

Identifier enables users to search by the archival reference. This may not seem all that useful, but it tends to be popular with archivists, who use the Hub as an administrative tool. However, the current Archives Hub reference search is poor, and the results are often confusing. It seems likely that our contributors would use this search more if the results were more appropriate. We believe it can fulfill this administrative function well if we adjust the search to give better quality results; it is never likely to be a highly popular search option for researchers as it requires knowledge of the reference numbers of particular descriptions.

Epithet is tucked away in the browse list, so a ‘search’ will only happen if someone browses by epithet and then clicks on a search result. Would it be more highly used if we had a ‘search by occupation or activity’? There seems little doubt of this. It is certainly worth considering making this a more prominent search option, or at least getting more user feedback about whether they would use a search like this. However, its efficacy may be compromised by the extremely permissive nature of epithet for archival descriptions – the information is not at all rigorous or consistent.

Family name is not provided as a main search option, and is only available by browsing for a family name and clicking on a result, as with epithet. The main ‘name’ search option enables users to search by family name. We did find the family name search was much higher for the whole year, maybe an indication of use by family historians and of the importance of family estate records.

Genre is in the main list of search options, but we have very few descriptions that provide the form or medium of the archive. However, users are not likely to know this, and so the low use may also be down to our use of ‘Media type’, which may not be clear, and a lack of clarity about what sort of media types people can search for. There is also, of course, the option that people don’t want to search on this facet. However, looking at the annual search figures, we have 1,204 searches by media type, which is much more significant, and maybe could be built up if  we had something like radio buttons for ‘photographs’, ‘manuscripts’, ‘audio’ that were more inviting to users. But, with a lack of categorisation by genre within the descriptions that we have, a search on genre will mean that users filter out a substantial amount of relevant material. A collection of photographs may not be catalogued by genre at all, and so the user would only get ‘photographs’ through a keyword search.

Place name is an interesting area. We have always believed that users would find an effective ‘search by place’ useful. Our place search is in the main search options, but most archivists do not index their descriptions by place and because of this it does not seem appropriate to promote a place name search. We would be very keen to find ways to analyse our descriptions and consider whether place names could be added as index terms, but unless this happens, place name is rather like media type – if we promote it as a means to find descriptions on the Archives Hub, then a hit list would exclude all of those descriptions that do not include place names.

This is one of the most difficult areas for a service like the Archives Hub. We want to provide search options that meet our users’ needs, but we are aware of the varied nature of the data. If a researcher is interested in ‘Bath’ then they can search for it as a keyword, but they will get all references to bath, which is not at all the same as archives that are significantly about Bath in Gloucestershire. But if they search for place name: bath, then they exclude any descriptions that are significantly about Bath, but not indexed by place. In addition, words like this, that have different meanings, can confuse the user in terms of the relevance of the results because ‘bath’ is less likely to appear in the title. It may simply be that somewhere in the description, there is a reference to a Dr Bath, for example.

This is one reason why we feel that encouraging the use of faceted search will be better for our users. A more simple initial search is likely to give plenty of results, and then the user can go from there to filter by various criteria.

It is worth mentioning ‘date’ search. We did have this at one point, but it did not give good results. This is partly due to many units of description not including normalised dates. But the feedback that we have received suggests that a date search would be popular, which is not surprising for an archives service.  We are planning to provide a filter by date, as well as the ordering by date that we currently have.

Finally, I was particularly interested to see how popular our ‘search collection level only’ is. screen shot of Hub search boxThis enables users to only see ‘top level’ results, rather than all of the series and items as well. As it is a constant challenge to present hierarchical descriptions effectively, this would seem to be one means to simplify things. However, for October 2015 we had 17 uses of this function, and for the whole year only 148. This is almost negligible. It is curious that so few users chose to use this. Is it an indication that they don’t find it useful, or that they didn’t know what it means? We plan to have this as a faceted option in the future, and it will be interesting to see if that makes it more popular or not.

We are considering whether we should run this exercise using some sort of filtering to check for search engines, dubious IP addresses, spammers, etc., and therefore get a more accurate result in terms of human users.  We would be very interested to hear from anyone who has undertaken this kind of exercise.

 

From Ivory Tower to People Power

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

 

Exploring British Design: Interface Design Principles

Britain Can Make It exhibition poster
Britain Can Make It, exhibition poster

For our AHRC project, ‘Exploring British Design‘ one of the questions we asked is:

How might a website co-designed by researchers, rather than a top-down collection-defined approach to archive content, enhance engagement with and understanding of British design?

The workshops that we have run were one of the key ways that we hoped to understand more about how postgraduates and others research their topics, what they liked and didn’t like about websites, and in a general sense how they think and understand resources, and how we can tune into that thinking.

 

 

In the blogs posts that we have created so far, we set out one of our central ideas:

Providing different routes into archives, showing different contexts, and enabling researchers to create their own narratives, can potentially be achieved through a focus on the ‘real things’ within an archive description; the people, organisations and places, and also the events surrounding them.

The feedback from the workshops gave us plenty to work with, and here I wanted to draw out some of the key messages that we are using to help us design an interface.

Researchers often think visually

Several of the participants in our workshops were visual thinkers. Maybe we had a slightly biased group, in that they work within or study design, but it seems reasonable to conclude that a visual approach can be attractive and engaging. We want to find a way to represent information more visually, whilst providing a rich and detailed resource. Our belief is that the visual should not dominate or hide the textual, as does often happen with cultural heritage resources, but that they should work better together.

Researchers often think in terms of creating a story or narrative

When we asked our participants to focus on an individual object, several of them thought in terms of its ‘story’. It seemed to me that most of the discussions that we had assumed a narrative type approach. It is hardy surprising, as when we talk about people, places and events we connect them together. It is a natural thing to do.

Different types of contexts provide value

When we asked workshop participants to think about how they would go about researching the object they were given, they tended to think of ways to contextualise it. They were interested in where it came from, in its physicality and its story. For example, we gave out photographs of an exhibition and they wanted to know where the photographs were taken, more about the exhibition and the designers involved in it, what else was going on at that time?   Our idea with Exploring British Design is that we can create records that allow these kinds of contexts to flourish. The participants did not concentrate on traditional archival context, as they did not tend to recognise this in the same way as archivists – it is one perspective amongst many.

We cannot provide a substitute for the value of handling the original object, and it was clear that researchers found this to be immensely valuable, but we can help to provide context that helps to scope reality.

Uncovering the obscure is a good thing

Not surprisingly, our workshop participants were keen that their research efforts should result in finding little-known information that they could utilise. They talked about the excitement of uncovering information and the benefits for their work.

Habits are part of the approach to research

The balance between being innovative and anchoring an interface in what people are familiar with seems to be important.

Trust is very important

The importance of trust was stressed at all of our workshops, and the need to know the context of information. We need to build something that researchers believe is a quality resource, with information they can rely on.

Serendipity is good…although it can lead you astray

It was clear that our participants wanted to explore, and liked the idea of coming across the unexpected. Several of them felt that the library bookshelves provide a good opportunity to browse and discover new sources (they talked about this more than the serendipity of the web). But there was also a note of caution about time wasted pursuing different avenues of information. It seems good to build in serendipity, whilst providing an interface that gives clear landmarks and signposts.

Search and Relevance

Our workshop participants were clear that choice of search terms has a big influence on what you find, and this can be a disadvantage. You may be presented with a search box, and you don’t really know what to search for to get what you want, especially if you don’t know what you want! Also, the relevance ranking can be a puzzle. Library databases often seem to give results that don’t make that much sense.

One thing that stood out to me was the willingness to use Google, which is a simple search box, with no indication of how to search, that brings back huge amounts of results; but the criticisms of library databases, where choice of search term is crucial and where ‘too many results’ are seen as a problem. It seemed that the key here was effective relevance ranking, but our workshop participants did agree that relevance ranking can deceive: the first page of results may look good, but you don’t really know what you are missing. Google is good at providing a first page of useful looking results….and maybe that’s enough to stop most people wondering about what they might be missing!

 Exploring British Design

As our project has progressed, I think it is fair to say that we have benefitted hugely from the input of the students and academics that we have talked to, not only for this project but also more generally. But it was not possible for us to manage to implement a directly co-designed website. The logistics of the project didn’t allow for this, as we wanted to gather input to inform the project, and then we had the complications of pulling together the data, designing the back end and the API. We would probably have needed at least another 6 months on the project to go back to the workshop participants and ask them about the website design as we went along.

But I think we have achieved a good deal in terms of engagement. Our Exploring British Design project has been about other ways through content, moving away from a search box and a list of search results, and thinking about immersing researchers in a ‘landscape’, where they can orientate themselves but also explore freely. So, we are thinking about engagement in terms of a more visually attractive and immersive experience, giving researchers the opportunity to follow connections in a way that gives them a sense of movement through the design landscape, hints at the unknown, and shows the relevancy of the entities that are featured in the website.  We hope to show how this can potentially expand understanding because it allow for a wider context and more varied narratives.

In the next project post we hope to present our interface for this pilot project!