Category: resource discovery

Supporting Historians: responding to changing research practices

/ Jane Stevenson

image of camera lensThis post picks out some highlights from a report from Ithaka S+R, “Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Historians” by Roger C Schonfeld and Jennifer Rutner (December 2012). It concentrates on findings that are of particular relevance for archivists and for discovery. The report is recommended reading. It is a US study, but clearly there are strong similarities with other countries.

The report finds that underlying research methods are still broadly as they were but practices have changed considerably: “Based on interviews with dozens of historians, librarians, archivists, and other support services providers, this project has found that the underlying research methods of many historians remain fairly recognizable even with the introduction of new tools and technologies, but the day to day research practices of all historians have changed fundamentally.”

It goes on to summarise the improvements that archives might make to meet changing needs, none of which are unexpected: “For archives, we recommend ongoing improvements to access through improved finding aids, digitization, and discovery tool integration, as well as expanded opportunities for archivists to help historians interpret collections, to build connections among users, and to instruct PhD students in the use of archives.”

It is very encouraging to see the positive comments about researchers’ interactions with archivists: “Having a meeting with the archivist and librarian is really fantastic, because they help you understand what is in the archive, and what you might be able to use.” It is clear from the study that archivists have a vital role to play as key collaborators and colleagues of historians, and their value is clear: “Archivists are often able
 to hone and direct an inquiry, bringing to light items and collections that the researcher may have been unaware of.”

The study does highlight the changing nature of interactions with archival material, as a result of the use of digital cameras in particular, which enables the analytical work to take place elsewhere. It is generally felt to be a convenient and time-saving option, enabling long-term interaction with resources outside of the reading room. This development is actually described as “the single most significant shift in research practices among historians.” It raises questions about whether the role of the archivist changes when the analytical work is displaced from the archive, as archivists may have less opportunity for intellectual engagement with researchers.  The study does highlight a possible issue with digital copies, namely the separation of metadata from content, where the researcher has hundreds of images and needs to organise them constructively, and it also found that scholars are struggling to work with digitised non-textual content effectively.

The ability to find time for research trips was a primary challenge for many researchers. “Interviewees repeatedly emphasized that the amount of time they are able to spend in the archives shapes the nature of the interaction with the sources significantly.” Because most struggle to find time for research trips,  digitised sources are hugely beneficial.

The study found that digitised finding aids help researchers to “travel more strategically”. It suggests that high-quality finding aids may become more important as researchers move more towards photographic visits to archives, rather than serendipitous visits. This connection is something I have not thought about before, and I would be very interested to hear what archivists think about this idea.

Of major relevance for a service like the Archives Hub is the conclusion about finding aids:

“The use of online finding aids greatly facilitates, and sometimes displaces, these visits. If a “good” finding aid is readily available online, this might make a scouting visit unnecessary, depending on the importance of the archive to the research project. In some cases, researchers were able to rule out a visit to an archive based on the online finding aids, and re-purpose funds and effort to tracking down other sources for the project.”

This study is a clear endorsement for our belief (which, I should say, is also backed up by our own researcher surveys) that finding aids play a role not only in identifying and prioritising sources, but also in providing enough information in themselves to make a visit unnecessary. As well as this, they may have a kind of positive negative effect: the researcher knows that materials can be ruled out.  The study strongly emphasised the need for “searchable databases” and “centralized searching” and participants talked about the problem with locating each collection independently, especially across the diverse types of archive repository: “The process of identifying archives – in some cases small, local archives or international archives – can present an amazing challenge to researchers.” Clearly comprehensive cross-searching search tools are a huge boon to researchers.

In terms of discovery, Google is clearly a major tool and there was a feeling that it was the most comprehensive discovery tool, as well as being convenient and easy to use. It is often used at the start of a searching process.: “Generally, historians discover finding aids through Google searches and archive websites.” There is a clear demand for more descriptions online: “The general consensus among interviewees was that more online finding aids would greatly benefit their research, and that archives should continue to make efforts to make these accessible online. Continued and expanded efforts to develop finding aids more efficiently and to make them available digitally would seem to support the needs of historians for improved access.”

In terms of PhD students (and maybe others who are inexperienced researchers), the study found issues with the use of archives and other sources:

“Interviews with PhD candidates indicated that there is often little support for them in learning about new research methods or practices, either in their department or elsewhere at their institution, of which they are aware. While the subject matter treated by historians continues to diversify dramatically, new methodologies develop, and research practices change rapidly, it is clearly critically important that students have a grounding in the methods and practices of the field.” The Archives Hub has recently produced a brief Guide to Using Archives for the Inexperienced, and discussions on the archives email list showed just how much this is an important topic for archivists and how there was a general consensus that  PhD students need more training on research methodologies.

Summing up, the report makes six recommendations specifically for Archives:

1. More online finding aids
2. More digitisation
3. Discovery tools that promote cross-searching, crossing institutional boundaries and encompassing small and local record offices
4. Adequate resources for ensuring the expertise of the archivist continues to be available, enabling archivists to be active interpreters of the collections
5. Adapting to and facilitating the use of digital cameras and scanners in reading rooms
6. Training PhD students in the use of archives

There is a great deal more of interest and relevance in the report around searching, Google Scholar, the use of the academic library, organising and managing research, citation management and digital research methods. It is very well worth reading.

 

With a little help from the Interface

/ Jane Stevenson

It is tempting to forge ahead with ambitious plans for Web interfaces that grab the attention, that look impressive and do new and whizzy things. But I largely agree with Lloyd Rutledge that we want “less emphasis on grand new interfaces” (Lloyd Rutledge, The Semantic Web – ISWC 2010, Selected Papers). I think it is important to experiment with exciting, innovative interfaces, but the priority needs to be creating interfaces that are effective for users, and that usually means a level of familiarity and supporting the idea that “users of the Web feel it acts they way they always knew it should (even though they actually couldn’t imagine it beforehand).” Maybe the key is to make new things feel familiar, so that we aren’t asking users to learn a whole new literacy, but a new literacy will gradually emerge and evolve.

For the Archives Hub, we face similar challenges to many websites that promote and provide access to archives, although our challenges are compounded by being an aggregator and not being in control of the content of the descriptions. We are seeking to gradually modify and improve our interfaces, in the hope that we help to make the users’ discovery experiences more effective, and encourage people to engage with archives.

One of our aims is to introduce options for users that allow them to navigate around in a fairly flexible manner, meeting different levels of experience and need, but without cluttering the screen or making the navigation look complicated and off-putting. Interviews with researchers have indicated how people have a tendency to ‘click and see’, learning as they go, but expecting useful results fairly quickly, so we want to work with this principle, to use hyperlinks effectively, on the understanding that the terminology used and the general layout of the page will have an effect on user expectations.

A Separation of Parts

One of the issues when presenting an archival description is how to separate out the ‘further actions’ or ‘find out more’ from the basic content. The challenge here is compounded by the fact that researchers often believe the description is the actual content, and not just metadata, or alternatively they assume that they can always access a digital resource.

We have tried to simplify the display by introducing a Utility Bar. It is intended to bring together the further options available to the end user. The idea is to make the presentation neater, show the additional options more clearly, and also keep the main description clear and self-contained.

Archives Hub description

 

The user can click to find out how to access the materials, to find out where the repository is located in the UK or contact the repository by email. We are planning to make the email contact link more direct, opening an email and populating it with the email address of the repository in order to cut down on the number of stages the user has to go through (currently we link to the Archon directory of Archive services). We can also modify other aspects of the Utility Bar over time, adding functionality as required, so it is a way to make the display more extensible.

We have included links to social networking sites, although in truth we have no real evidence that these are required or used. This really was a case of ‘suck it and see’ and it will be interesting to investigate whether this functionality really is of value. We certainly have a lively following on Twitter, and indications are that our Twitter presence is valued, so we do believe that social networking sites play an important part in what we do.

We have also included the ability to view different formats. This will not be of value to most researchers, but it is  intended to be part of our mission to open up the data and give a sense of transparency – anyone can see the encoding behind the description and see that it is freely available. Some of our contributors may find it useful, as well as developers interested in the XML behind the scenes.

The Biggest Challenge: how to present an archive description

Until recently we presented users with an initial hit list of results, which enabled them to see the title of a description and choose between a ‘summary’ presentation and a ‘full’ presentation. However, feedback indicates that users don’t know what we mean by this. Firstly, they haven’t yet seen the description, so there is nothing on which to base the choice of  link to click, and secondly, what is the definition of ‘summary’ and ‘full’ anyway? Our intention was to give the user the choice of a fairly brief, one page summary description, with the key descriptive data about the archive collection, or the full, complete description, which may run to many pages. A further consideration was that we could only provide highlighting of terms on a single page, so if we only had the full description, highlighting would not be possible.

There are a number of issues here. (a) Descriptions may be exactly the same for summary and full because sometimes they are short, only including key fields, and they do not provide multi-level content; the full description will only provide more information if the cataloguer has filled in additional fields, or created a multi-level display. (b) ‘Summary’ usually means a cut-down version of something, taking key elements, but we do not do this; we simply select what we believe to be the key fields. For example, Scope and Content may actually be very long and detailed, but it would always be part of the ‘summary’ description. (c) Fields that are excluded from the summary view may be particularly important in some cases – for example, the collection may be closed for a period of time, and this would really be key information for a researcher.

With the new Utility Bar we changed ‘summary’ and ‘full’ to become ‘brief’ and ‘detailed’. We felt that this more accurately reflects what these options represent. At present we have continued with the same principle of displaying selected fields in the ‘brief’ description, but we feel that this approach should be revised. After much discussion, we have (almost) decided that we will change our approach here. The brief description will become simply the collection-level description in its entirety; the detailed description will be the multi-level description. This gives the advantage of a certain level of consistency, but there are still potential pitfalls. Two of the key issues are (a) that ‘brief’ may actually be quite long (a collection description can still be very long) and (b) that many descriptions are not multi-level, so there would be no difference between the two descriptions. Therefore, we will look at creating a scenario where the user only gets the ‘Detailed Description’ link when the description is multi-level. If we can do this we will may change the terminology; but in the end there is no real user-friendly way to succinctly describe a collection-level as opposed to a multi-level description, simply because many people are not aware of what archival hierarchy really means.

Archives Hub list of resultsAs well as introducing the Utility Bar we changed the hit list of results to link the title of the description to the brief view. We simply show the title and the date(s) of the archive, as we feel that these are the key pieces of information that the researcher needs  in order to select relevant collections to view.

 

Centralised Innovation

For some of the more complex changes we want to make, we need to first of all centralise the Archives Hub, so that the descriptions are all held by us. For some time we thought that this seemed like a retrograde step: to move from a federated system to a centralised system. But a federated system adds a whole layer of complexity because not only do you not have control over the data you are presenting; you do not have control over some of the data at all, to view it, and examine any issues with it, and also to potentially improve the consistency (of the markup in particular). In addition, there is a dependency between the centralised system and the local systems that form the federated model. Centralising the data will actually allow us to make it more openly available as well, and to continue to innovate more easily.

Multiple Gateways: Multiple Interfaces

We will continue to work to improve the Archives Hub interface and navigation, but we are well aware that increasingly people use alternative interfaces, or search techniques. As Lorcan Dempsey states: “options have multiplied and the breadth of interest of the local gateway is diminished: it provides access only to a part of what I am potentially interested in.” We need to be thinking more broadly: “The challenge is not now only to improve local systems, it is to make library resources discoverable in other venues and systems, in the places where their users are having their discovery experiences.” (Lorcan Dempsey’s Webblog). This is partly why we believe that we need to concentrate on presenting the descriptions themselves more effectively – users increasingly come directly to descriptions from search engines like Google, rather than coming to the Archives Hub homepage and entering a search from there. We need to think about any page within our site as a landing page, and how best to help users from there, to discovery more about what we have to offer them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An evaluation of the use of archives and the Archives Hub

/ Jane Stevenson

This blog is based upon a report written by colleagues at Mimas* presenting the results of the evaluation of our innovative Linked Data interface, ‘Linking Lives‘. The evaluation consisted of a survey and a focus group, with 10 participants including PhD students and MA students studying history, politics and social sciences. We asked participants a number of questions about the Archives Hub service, in order to provide context for their thoughts on the Linking Lives interface.

This blog post concentrates on their responses relating to the use of archives, methods of searching and interpretation of results. You can read more about their responses to the Linking Lives interface on our Linking Lives blog.

Use of Archives and Primary Source Materials

We felt that it was important to establish how important archives are to the participants in our survey and focus group. We found that “without exception, all of the respondents expressed a need for primary resources” (Evaluation report). One respondent said:

“I would not consider myself to be doing proper history if I wasn’t either reinterpreting primary sources others had written about, or looking at primary sources nobody has written about. It is generally expected for history to be based on primary sources, I think.” (Survey response)

One of the most important factors to the respondents was originality in research. Other responses included acknowledgement of how archives give structure to research, bringing out different angles and perspectives and also highlighting areas that have been neglected. Archives give substance to research and they enable researchers to distinguish their own work:

“Primary sources are very valuable for my research because they allow me to put together my own interpretation, rather than relying on published findings elsewhere.” (Survey response)

Understanding of Archives

It is often the case that people have different perceptions of what archives are, and with the Linking Lives evaluation work this was confirmed. Commonly there is a difference between social scientists and historians; the former concentrating on datasets (e.g. data from the Office of National Statistics) and the latter on materials created during a person’s life or the activities of an organisation and deemed worthy of permanently preserving. The evaluation report states:

“The participants that had a similar understanding of what an archive was to the Archive Hub’s definition had a more positive experience than those who didn’t share that definition.”

This is a valuable observation for the work of the Hub in a general sense, as well as the Linking Lives interface, because it demonstrates how initial perceptions and expectations can influence attitudes towards the service. In addition, the evaluation work highlighted another common fallacy: that an archive is essentially a library. Some of the participants in the survey expected the Archives Hub to provide them with information about published sources, such as research papers.

These findings highlight one of the issues when trying to evaluate the likely value of an innovative service: researchers do not think in the same language or with the same perspectives as information professionals. I wonder if we have a tendency to present services and interfaces modelled from our own standpoint rather than from the standpoint of the researcher.

Search Techniques and Habits

“Searches were often not particularly expansive, and participants searched for specific details which were unique to their line of enquiry” (Evaluation report). Examples include titles of women’s magazines, personal names or places. If the search returned nothing, participants might then broaden it out.

Participants said they would repeatedly return to archives or websites they were familiar with, often linked to quite niche research topics. This highlights how a positive experience with a service when it is first used may have a powerful effect over the longer term.

The survey found that online research was a priority:

“Due to conflicting pressures on time and economic resources, online searching was prevalent amongst the sample. Often research starts online and the majority is done online. Visits to see archives in person, although still seen as necessary, are carefully evaluated.”  (Evaluation report)

The main resources participants used were Google and Google Scholar (the most ubiquitous search engines used) as well as The National Archives, Google Books and ESDS. Specialist archives were referred to relating to specific search areas (e.g. The People’s History Museum, the Wellcome Library, the Mass Observation Archive).

Thoughts and Comments About the Archives Hub

All participants found the Hub easy to navigate and most found locating resources intuitive. As part of the survey we asked the participants to find certain resources, and almost all of them provided the right answers with seemingly no difficulty.

“It is clear. The descent of folders and references at the top are good for referencing/orientating oneself. The descriptions are good – they obviously can’t contain everything that could be useful to everyone and still be a summary. It is similar to other archive searches so it is clear.” (Survey response, PhD history student)

The social scientists that took part in the evaluation were less positive about the Archives Hub than the historians. Clearly many social science students are looking for datasets, and these are generally not represented on the Hub. There was a feeling that contemporary sources are not well represented, and these are often more important to researchers in fields like politics and sociology. But overall comments were very positive:

“…if anyone ever asked about how to search archives online I’d definitely point them to the Archives Hub”.

“Useful. It will save me making specific searches at universities.”

Archives Hub Content

It was interesting to see the sorts of searches participants made. A search for ‘spatial ideas’ by one participant did not yield useful results. This would not surprise many archivists – collections are generally not catalogued to draw out such concepts (neither Unesco nor UKAT have a subject heading for this; LCSH has ‘spatial analysis’). However, there may well be collections that cover a subject like this, if the researcher is prepared to dig deep enough and think about different approaches to searching. Another participant commented that “you can’t just look for the big themes”. This is the type of search that might benefit from us drawing together archive collections around themes, but this is always a very flawed approach. This is one reason that we have Features, which showcase archives around subjects but do not try to provide a ‘comprehensive’ view onto a subject.

This kind of feedback from researchers helps us to think about how to more effectively present the Archives Hub. Expectations are such an important part of researchers’ experiences. It is not possible to completely mitigate against expectations that do not match reality, but we could, for example, have a page on ‘The Archives Hub for Social Scientists’ that would at least provide those who looked at it with a better sense of what the Hub may or may not provide for them (whether anyone would read it is another matter!).

This survey, along with previous surveys we have carried out, emphasises the importance of a comprehensive service and a clear scope (“it wasn’t clear to me what subjects or organisations are covered”). However, with the nature of archives, it is very difficult to give this kind of information with any accuracy, as the collections represented are diverse and sometimes unexpected. in the end you cannot entirely draw a clear line around the scope of the Archives Hub, just like you cannot draw a clear line around the subjects represented in any one archive. The Hub also changes continuously, with new descriptions added every week. Cataloguing is not a perfect art; it can draw out key people, places, subjects and events, but it cannot hope to reflect everything about a collection, and the knowledge a researcher brings with them may help to draw out information from a collection that was not explicitly provided in the description. If a researcher is prepared to spend a bit of time searching, there is always the chance that they may stumble across sources that are new to them and potentially important:

“…another student who was mainly focused on the use of the Kremlin Archives did point out that [the Archives Hub] brought up the Walls and Glasier papers, which were new to [them]”.

Even if you provide a list of subjects, what does that really mean? Archives will not cover a subject comprehensively; they were not written with that in mind; they were created for other purposes – that is their strength in many ways – it is what makes them a rich and exciting resource, but it does not make it easy to accurately describe them for researchers. Just one series of correspondence may refer to thousands of subjects, some in passing, some more substantially, but archivists generally don’t have time to go through an entire series and draw out every concept.

If the Archives Hub included a description for every archive held at an HE institution across the UK, or for every specialist repository, what would that signify? It would be comprehensive in one sense, but in a sense that may not mean much to researchers. It would be interesting to ask researchers what they see as ‘comprehensive resources’ as it is hard to see how these could really exist, particularly when talking about unpublished sources.

Relevance of Search Results

The difficulties some participants had with the relevance of results comes back to the problem of how to catalogue resources that often cover a myriad of subjects, maybe superficially, maybe in detail; maybe from a very biased perspective. If a researcher looks for ‘social housing manchester’ then the results they get will be accurate in a sense – the machine will do its job and find collections with these terms, and there will be weighting of different fields (eg. the title will be highly weighted), but they still may not get the results they expect, because collections may not explicitly be about social housing in Manchester. The researcher needs to do a bit more work to think about what might be in the collection and whether it might be relevant. However, cataloguers are at fault to some extent. We do get descriptions sent to the Hub where the subjects listed seem inadequate or they do not seem to reflect the scope and content that has been provided. Sometimes a subject is listed but there is no sense of why it is included in the rest of the description. Sometimes a person is included in the index terms but they are not described in the content. This does not help researchers to make sense of what they see.

I do think that there are lessons here for archivists, or those who catalogue archives. I don’t think that enough thought is gives to the needs of the researcher. The inconsistent use of subject terms, for example, and the need for a description of the archive to draw out key concepts a little more clearly. Some archivists don’t see the need to add index terms, and think in terms of technologies like Google being able to search by keyword, therefore that is enough. But it isn’t enough. Researchers need more than this. They need to know what the collection is substantially about, they need to search across other collections about similar subjects. Controlled vocabulary enables this kind of exploratory searching. There is a big difference between searching for ‘nuclear disarmament’ as a keyword, which means it might exist anywhere within the description, and searching for it as a subject – a significant topic within an archive.

 

*Linking Lives Evaluation: Final Report (October 2012) by Lisa Charnock, Frank Manista, Janine Rigby and Joy Palmer

Finding and accessing archives for voluntary action history

/ Jane Stevenson / 1 Comment

Guest Blog by Georgina Brewis

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the history of voluntary, civic and cultural organisations has never been more popular as an academic subject in Britain. Leading historians like Brian Harrison have called attention to the importance of voluntarism as a theme in post-war British history while there has been a wave of PhD theses dealing with topics such as the voluntary hospitals, the role of disability charities in politics, the professionalization of the voluntary sector and the formation of humanitarian networks across empire.  In 2011 no less than three edited collections presenting the latest research on voluntary action history were published and several further volumes appeared in 2012 or are in press. Such new research has been strengthened and sustained by the Voluntary Action History Society and particularly its active New Researchers group.  Importantly, not all these studies are by historians, pointing to the importance of archival resources for students of political science, sociology, health studies and other disciplines. There is growing recognition that we cannot write British social history or social policy without looking at the considerable contributions of charities, voluntary groups, philanthropists, campaigners and volunteers.

So how do academic researchers track down the archives of the voluntary and community organisations they want to use? Any would-be researcher of charity needs to understand that those bodies with catalogued and accessible institutional archives – whether kept in-house or deposited elsewhere – represent only a very small minority of voluntary organisations. Unsurprisingly these tend to be the larger, better funded and longer-established groups such as the British Red Cross or the Children’s Society.  The voluntary sector in Britain is often likened to a pyramid: a very small number of organisations at the top with paid staff, regular income and office space resting on a much larger base of groups run entirely by volunteers, subsisting on small grants and donations. Voluntary sector archives may reflect this pattern, but there is no guarantee that even the largest charity will have made provision for preservation and conservation of its records (aside from the limited financial data required by the Charity Commission) let alone for cataloguing or access.

Researchers and students are advised to start with the National Register of Archives. Another useful database is DANGO, which identifies the locations of the papers of several thousand non-governmental organisations, and was put together by a team at Birmingham University, although the end of project funding means its entries and website are no longer being updated. Searching the Archives Hub will find records of voluntary groups where these are deposited at an institution contained on its database; Hull History Centre, SOAS, Birmingham University Library or the Women’s Library have all built up specialisms in this area. Perhaps there would be a way of encouraging charities with in-house collections to make the catalogues available via Archives Hub?

Archives Hub has helped me search for materials relating to small or short-lived student-run charities that may be contained within a students’ union archive or an individual’s private papers.  Although an organisation’s institutional archive may be lost or never have existed, its history can be reconstructed through accessing annual reports, correspondence and other papers held in many different repositories – as I have managed to do for the group International Student Service. It would be helpful for future researchers if it was possible to log this information somewhere.

It remains the case that many researchers will have to seek access to records by contacting an organisation or group founder directly, with variable results. This is likely to be increasingly the case given the increase in numbers of pressure groups, charities and other voluntary bodies since the 1960s. In my experience there is a range of practice from organisations which ignore or refuse requests for access with varying degrees of politeness to those that welcome you with open arms and let you sit unsupervised with the charity’s papers, free to copy, remove, deface or pour coffee all over the institutional record. Once you’ve had success accessing the records of one organisation, it may be easier to open communications with others in a related sector. Learning how to negotiate what we might call ‘informal archives’ will be a key challenge for future researchers of voluntary action. There is a need for better advice for academics, particularly students and new researchers, on the multiple ethical considerations and practical concerns that come with using informal archives. How do you track down such records? How do you reference sources? What do you do if you’re concerned about the physical state of records or what might happen to them when the group’s founder dies? How to reconcile your obligations as a historian with the fact that a particular organisation has trusted you to look at their materials?

It is also worth remembering that records relating to charitable activities can turn up in unexpected places, for example in the archives of private companies. The records of a charitable Trust or Foundation may well contain better sources about a particular charity than the organisation itself has preserved, although again there may be problems of access. There are good signs that this is changing not least through the positive examples of two funders involved with the new Campaign for Voluntary Sector Archives: the Barrow Cadbury Trust and the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund.

This new Campaign for Voluntary Sector Archives, which was launched at the House of Lords in October 2012, seeks to raise awareness of the importance of voluntary sector archives as strategic assets for governance, corporate identity, accountability and research. It maintains that caring for archives and records is actually an important aspect of the sector’s wider public benefit responsibility. Most significantly, the Campaign brings together academic researchers, custodians, creators of records and others in the voluntary sector to share expertise and resources. Together, we should be able to begin to address some of the issues and questions I’ve outlined above. Yet there is a long way to go before all voluntary organisations are convinced not only of the value of records to the current mission, but also of the value of making these accessible to researchers from a variety of disciplines. For more information contact info@voluntarysectorarchives.org.uk

The New Scholarly Record

/ Jane Stevenson

I was lucky enough to attend the 2012 EmTACL conference in Trondheim, and this blog is based around the excellent keynote presentation by Herbert van de Sompel, which really made me think about temporal issues with the Web and how this can limit our understanding of the scholarly record.

Herbert believes that the current infrastructure for scholarly communication is not up to the job. We now have many non-traditional assets, which do not always have fixity and often have a wide range of dependencies; assets such as datasets, blogs, software, videos, slides which may form part of a scholarly resource. Everything is much more dynamic than it used to be. ‘Research objects’ often include assets that are interdependent with each other, so they need to be available all together for the object to be complete. But this is complicated by the fact that many of them are ‘in motion’ and updated over time.

This idea of dynamic resources that are in flux, constantly being updated, is very relevant for archivists, partly because we need to understand how archives are not static and fixed in time, and partly because we need to be aware of the challenges of archiving ever more complex and interconnected resources. It is useful to understand the research environment and the way technology influences outputs and influences what is possible for future research.

There are examples of innovative services that are responding to the opportunities of dynamic resources. One that Herbert mentioned was PLOS, which publishes open scholarly articles. It puts publications into Wikipedia as well as keeping the ‘static’ copy, so that the articles have a kind of second life where they continue to evolve as well as being kept as they were at the time of submission. For example, ‘Circular Permutation in Proteins‘.

The idea of executable papers is starting to become established – papers that are not just to read but to interact with. These contain access to the primary data with capabilities to re-execute algorithms and even capabilities to allow researchers to upload and use their own data. It produces a complex interdependency and produces a challenge for archiving because if something is not fixed in time, what does that mean for retaining access to it over time?

This all raises the issue of what the scholarly record actually is. Where does it start? Where does it end? We are no longer talking about a bunch of static files but a dynamic interconnected resource. In fact, there is an increasing sense that the article itself is not necessarily the key output, but rather it is the advertising for the actual scholarship.

Herbert concluded from this that it becomes very important to be able to view different points in time in the evolution of scholarly record, and this should be done in a way that works with the Web. The Web is the platform, the infrastructure for the scholarly record.  Scholarly communication then becomes native to the Web. At the heart of this is the need to use HTTP URIs.

However, where are we at the moment? The current archival infrastructure for scholarly outputs deals with things with fixity and boundaries. It cannot deal with things in flux and with inter-dependencies. The Web exists in ‘now’ time; it does not have a built in notion of time. It assumes that you want the current version of something – you cannot use a URI to get to a prior version.

Diagram to show publication on the Web
Slide from Herbert van de Sompel’s presentation showing the publication context on the Web

We don’t really object to this limitation, something evidenced by the fact that we generally accept links that take us to 404 pages, as if it is just an inevitable inconvenience. Maybe many people just don’t think that there is any real interest in or requirement for ‘obsolete’ resources, and what is current is what is important on the Web.

Of course, there is the Internet Archive and other similar initiatives in Web archiving, but they are not integrated into the Web. You have to go somewhere completely different in order to search for older copies of resources.

If the research paper remains the same, but resources that are an integral part of it change over time, then we need to change archiving to reflect this. We need to think about how to reference assets over time and how to recreate older versions. Otherwise, we access the current version, but we are not getting the context that was there at the time of creation; we are getting something different.

Can we recreate a version of a scholarly record? Can we go back to certain point it time so we can see linked assets from a paper as they were at the time of publication? At the moment we are likely to get many 404s when we try to access links associated with a publication. Herbert showed one survey on the decay of URLs in Medline, which is about 10% per year, especially with links to thinks like related databases.

One solution to this is to be able to follow a URI in time – to be able to click on URI and say ‘I want to see this as was 2 years ago’.  Herbert went on to talk about something he has created called Memento. Memento aims to better integrate the current and past Web. It allows you to select a day or time in the browser and effectively take the URI back in time. Currently, the team are looking at enabling people to browse past pages of Wikipedia. Memento has a fairly good success rate with going back to retrieve old versions, although it will not work for all resources. I tried it with the Archives Hub and found it easy to take the website back to how it looked right in the very early days.

Screen shot of the Archives Hub hompeage
Using Memento to take the Archives Hub back in time.

One issue is that the archived copies are not always created near the time of publication. But for those that are, they are created simply as part of the normal activity of the Web, by services like the Internet Archive or the British Library, so there is no extra work involved.

Herbert outlined some of the issues with using DOIs (digital object identifiers), which provide identifiers for resources that use a resolver to ensure that the identifier can remain the same over time. This is useful if, for example, a publisher is bought out – the identifier is still the same as the resolver redirects to the right location However, a DOI resolver exists in the perpetual now. It is not possible to travel back in time using HTTP URIs. This is maybe one illustration of the way some of the processes that we have implemented over the Web do not really fulfil our current needs, as things change and resources become more complex and dynamic.

With Memento, the same HTTP URI can function as the reference to temporally evolving resources. The importance of this type of functionality is becoming more recognised. There is a new experimental URI scheme, DURI , or Dated URI. The ideas is that a URI, such as http://www.ntnu.no, can be dated: 1997-06-17:http://www.ntnu.no (this is an example and is not actionable now). Herbert did raise another possibly of developing Websites that can deal with the TEL (telephone) protocol. The idea would be that the browser asks you whether the Website can use the TEL protocol, and if it can, you get this option offered to you. You can then use this and reference a resource and use Memento to go back in time.

Herbert concluded that the idea of ‘archiving’ should not be just a one-off event, but needs to happen continually. In fact, it could happen whenever there is an interaction. Also, when new materials are taken into a repository, you could scan for links and put them into an archive, so the links don’t die. If you archive the links at the time of publication or when materials submitted to a repository, then you protect against losing the context of the resource.

Herbert introduced us to SiteStory, which offers transactional archiving of a a web server. Usually a web archive sends out a robot, gathers and dumps the data. With SiteStory the web server takes an active part. Every time a user requests a page it is also pushed back into the archive, so you get a fine grained history of the resource. Something like this could be done by publishers/service providers, with the idea that they hold onto the hits, the impact, the audience. It certainly does seem to be a growing area of interest.

Herbert’s slides are available on Slideshare.

Archives and the Researchers of Tomorrow

/ Jane Stevenson

“In 2009, the British Library and JISC commissioned the three-year Researchers of Tomorrow study, focusing on the information-seeking and research behaviour of doctoral students in ‘Generation Y’, born between 1982 and 1994 and not ‘digital natives’. Over 17,000 doctoral students from more than 70 higher education institutions participated in the three annual surveys, which were complemented by a longitudinal student cohort study.” (Taken from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2012/researchers-of-tomorrow#exec_sum).

This post picks up on some aspects of the study, particularly those that are  relevant to archives and archivists. I am assuming that archivists come into the category of libraries as being ‘library professionals’, at least to an extent, though our profession is not explicitly mentioned. I would recommend reading the report in full as it offers some useful insights into the research behaviour of an important group of researchers.

What is heartening about this study is that the findings confirm that generation Ydoctoral students are

Image from: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

“sophisticated information-seekers and users of complex information sources“.  The study does conclude that information seeking behaviour is becoming less reliant on the support of libraries and library staff, which may have implications for the role of libraries and archive professionals, but “library staff assistance with finding/retrieving difficult-to-access resources” was seen as one of the most valuable research support resources available to students, although it was a relatively small proportion of students that used this service. There was a preference for this kind of on-demand 1-2-1 support rather than formal training sessions. One of the students said ” the librarians are quite possibly the most enthusiastic and helpful people ever, and I certainly recommend finding a librarian who knows their stuff, because I have had tremendous amounts of help with my research so far, just simply by asking my librarian the right question.”

The survey concentrated on the most recent information-seeking activity of students, and found that most were not seeking primary sources, but rather secondary sources (largely journal articles and books).

“This apparent and striking dependence on published research resources implies that, as the basis for their own analytical and original research, relatively few doctoral students in social sciences and arts and humanities are using ‘primary’ materials such as newspapers, archival material and social data.”

This finding was true across all subject disciplines and all ages. The study found that about 80% of arts and humanities students were looking for any bibliographic references on their topic or specific publications, while only 7% were looking for non-published archival material. It seems that this reliance on published information is formed early on in their research, as students lay the groundwork for their PhD. Most students said they used academic libraries more in their first year of study – whether visiting or using the online services, so maybe this is the time to engage with students and encourage them to use more diverse sources in the longer-term.

A point that piqued my interest was that the arts and humanities students visiting other collections in order to use archival sources would do so even if  “many of the resources they required had been digitised“, but this point was not explained further, which was frustrating. Is it because they are likely to use a mixture of digital and non-digital sources? Or maybe if they locate digital content it stimulates their interest to find out more about using primary sources?

Around 30% used Google or Google Scholar as their main information gathering tool,  although arts and humanities students sourced their information from a wider spread of online and offline sources, including library catalogues.

One thing that concerned me, and that I was not aware of, was the assertion that “current citation-based assessment and authenticity criteria in doctoral and academic research discourage the citing of non-published or original material“. I would be interested to know why this is the case, as surely it should be actively encouraged rather than discouraged? How does this fit with the need to demonstrate originality in research?

Students rely heavily on help from their supervisors early on in their research, and supervisors have a great influence on their information and resource use. I wonder if they actively encourage the use of primary sources as much as we would like?  I can’t help thinking that a supervisor enthusiastically extolling the importance and potential impact of using archives would be the best way to encourage use.

There continues to be a feeling amongst students, according to this study, that “using social media and online forums in research lacks legitimacy” and that these tools are more appropriate within a social context. The use of twitter, blogs and social bookmarking was low (2009 survey: 13% of arts and humanities students had used and valued Twitter) and use was more commonly passive than active. There was a feeling that new tools and applications would not transform the way that the students work, but should complement and enhance established research practices and behaviour. However, it should be noted that use of ‘Web 2.0’ tools increased over the 3 years of the study, so it may be that a similar study carried out in 5 years time would show significantly different behaviour.

Students want training in research geared towards their own subject area, preferably face-to-face. Online tutorials and packages were not well used. The implication is that training should be at a very local level and done in a fairly informal way. Generic research skills are less appealing. Research skills training days are valued, but if they are poor and badly taught, the student feels their time is wasted and may be put off trying again. Students were quite critical of the quality and utility of the training offered by their university mainly because (i) it was not pitched at the right level (ii) it was too generic or (iii) it was not available on demand. Library-led training sessions got a more positive response, but students were far less likely to take up training opportunities after the first year of their PhD.  Training in the use of primary sources was not specifically covered in the report, though it must be supposed this would be (should be!) included in library-led training.

The study indicated that students dislike reading (as opposed to scanning) on screen. This suggests that it is important to provide the right information online, information that is easy to scan through, but worth providing a PDF for printout, especially for detailed descriptions.

One quote stood out for me, as it seems to sum up the potential danger of modern ways of working in terms of approaches to more in-depth analysis:

“The problem with the internet is that it’s so easy to drift between websites and to absorb information in short easy bites that at times you forget to turn off the computer, rest your eyes from screen glare and do some proper in-depth reading. The fragments and thoughts on the internet are compelling (addictive, even), and incredibly useful for breadth, but browsing (as its name suggests) isn’t really so good for depth, and at this level depth is what’s required.” (Arts and humanities)

We do often hear about the internet, or computers, tending to reduce levels of concentration. I think that this point is subtly different though – it’s more about the type of concentration required for in-depth work, something that could be seen as essential for effective primary source research.

Conclusions

We probably all agree that we can always do more to to promote the importance of archives to all potential users, including doctoral students. Certainly, we need to make it easier for them to discovery sources through the usual routes that they use, so for one thing ensuring we have a profile via Google and Google Scholar. Too many archives still resist this requirement, as if it is somehow demeaning or too populist, or maybe because they are too caught up in developing their own websites rather than thinking about search engine optimisation, or maybe it is just because archivists are not sure how to achieve good search engine rankings?

Are we actively promoting a low-barrier, welcome and open approach? I recall many archive institutions that routinely state that their archives are ‘open to bone fide researchers only’. Language like that seems to me to be somewhat off putting. Who are the ‘non-bone fide’ researchers that need to be kept out? This sort of language does not seem conducive to the principle of making archives available to all.

The applications we develop need to be relatively easy to absorb into existing research work practices, which will only change slowly over time. We should not get too caught up in social networks and Web 2.0 as if these are ‘where it’s at’ for this generation of students. Maybe the approaches to research are generally more traditional than we think.

The report itself concludes that the lack of use of primary sources is worrying and requires further investigation:

“There is a strong case for more in-depth research among doctoral students to determine whether the data signals a real shift away from doctoral research based on primary sources compared to, say, a decade ago. If this proves to be the case there may be significant implications for doctoral research quality related to what Park described as “widely articulated tensions between product (producing a thesis of adequate quality) and process (developing the researcher), and between timely completion and high quality research“.

 

 

 

 

 

Open Up!

/ Jane Stevenson

Speaking at the recent World Wide Web (WWW2012) conference in Lyon, Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission, emphasised the benefits of an open Web:  “With a truly open, universal platform, we can deliver choice and competition; innovation and opportunity; freedom and democratic accountability”.

Image: '774:Neuron Connection Pattern' http://www.flickr.com/photos/60057912@N00/4743616313

But what does ‘open’ really mean? Do we really have a clear idea about what it is, how we achieve it, and what the benefits might be? And do we have a sense of what is happening in this landscape and the implications for our own domain?

There is a tendency to think that the social web equates to some degree with the open web, but this is not the case. Social sites like Facebook often create walled gardens, and you could argue that whilst they are connecting people, they are working against the principle of free and linked information. Just because the aim is to enable people to be social and connected, that doesn’t mean that it is done in a way that ensures the data is open.

Another confusion may arise around open and its relationship to privacy. Again, things can be open, but privacy can be respected. It’s about clear and transparent choices – whether you want your data to be open or whether you want to include some restrictions. We are not always aware of what we are giving away:

“the Net enables individuals in many cases to compromise privacy more thoroughly than the government and commercial institutions traditionally targeted for scrutiny and regulation. The standard approaches that have been developed to analyze and limit institutional actors do not not work well for this new breed of problem, which goes far beyond the compromise of sensitive information.” (Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet).

There is an irony that we often readily give away personal data – so we can be (unknowingly?) very open with our own information – but often we give it away to companies that are not, in their turn, open with the data that is provided. As Tim Berners-Lee has stated, “”One of the issues of social networking silos is that they have the data and I don’t”.  It is possible to paint quite a worrying trend towards control being in the hands of the few:

“A small elite of gifted (largely male) super-wealthy masters of the universe are creating systems through their own brilliance which very few others in government, regulation or the general public can understand.” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/16/threat-open-web-opaque-elite).

Google has often been seen as a good guy in this context, but recently a number of actions have indicated a move away from open web principles. We have started to be aware of the way Google collects and uses our data, and there have been some dubious practices around ways that data has been gathered (eg. personal data collected from UK Wifi networks). Google appear to be very eager to get us all using Google+, and we are starting to see ‘social’ search results that appear to be pushing people towards using Google+. I think we should be concerned by the announcement from Google that they are now starting to combine your Google search history with other data they collect through use of their products in order, they say, to deliver improved search results. Do we want Google to do this? Are we happy with our search history being used to push products. Is a ‘personalised’ service worth having if it means companies are collecting and holding all of the data we provide when we browse the web for their own commercial purposes?

It does seem that many of these companies will defend ‘open’ if it is in their interests, but find ways to bypass it when it is not. But maybe if we continue to apply pressure in support of an open approach, by implementing it ourselves and favouring tools and services that implement it,  we can tip the balance increasingly towards a genuine open approach that is balanced by safeguards for guaranteeing privacy.

It is worth thinking about some of these issues when we think about our own archival data and whether we are going to take an open approach. It is not just our own individual circumstances, within one repository, that we should think about, but the whole context of what we want the Web to be, because our choices help determine the direction that the Internet goes in.

We do not know how our archival data will be used and we never have. Even when the data was on paper, we couldn’t control use. Fundamentally, we need to see this as a good thing, not a threat, but we need to be aware of the risks. The paradigm has shifted because the data is much much easier to mess with now that it is digital, and, of course, we have digital archives, and we are concerned to protect the integrity of these sources. Providing an API interface seems like a much more explicit invitation to play with the data than simply putting it on the Web. Furthermore, the mindset of the digital generation is entirely different. Cutting and pasting, mashing and inter-linking are all taken for granted and sometimes the idea of the provenance of data sources seems to go out of the window.

This issue of ‘unpredictable use’ is interesting. When the Apple II was launched, Steve Jobs did not know how it would be used – as Zittrain states, it ‘invited people to tinker with it’, and whilst Apple might have had ideas about use, there ideas were not a constraint to reality. Contrast this with the iPhone: it comes out of the box programmed. Quoting Zittrain again: ‘Whereas the world would innovate for the Apple II, only Apple would innovate for the iPhone.’  Zittrain sees this trend towards fixed appliances as pointing to a rather bleak future of ‘sterile appliances tethered to a network of control.’

Maybe the challenge is partly around our understanding of the data we are ‘giving away’, why we are giving it away, and if it’s worth giving away because of what we get in return. Think about the data gathered as we browse the Web – cookies have always had a major role in building up a profile of our Web behaviour – where we go and what we do. Cookies are generally interested in behaviour rather than identity. But still, from 26 May this year, every website operating in the UK will be required to inform its users that they are being tracked with cookies, and to ask users for their consent. This means justifying why cookies are required – it may be for very laudable reasons – logging users’ preferences to help improve their experience, and generally getting a better understanding of how people use the site in order to improve it. It may be in order to target advertising – and you may feel that its hardly a problem if this is adversely affected, but maybe it will be smaller, potentially very useful sites that will suffer if their advertising revenue is affected. Is it a good think that sites will have to justify use of cookies? Is it in our interests? Is this really where the main fight is around protecting your identity?  At the same time, the Government is proposing to bring in powers to monitor the websites people are looking at, something which has very profound implications for our privacy.

On the side of the good guys, there are plenty of people out there espousing the importance of an altruistic approach. In The Digital Public Domain: Foundations for an Open Culture the authors argue that the Public Domain — that is, the informational works owned by all of us, be that literature, music, the output of scientific research, educational material or public sector information — is fundamental to a healthy society. Many other publications echo this belief and you can see plenty of evidence of the movement towards open publication. Technology can increasingly help us realise the advantages of an open approach. For example, text mining is something that can potentially bring substantial economic and cultural benefits. It is often associated with biomedical sciences, but it could have great potential across the humanities. A recent JISC report on the Value and Benefits of Text Mining concluded that the current licensing arrangements are a key barrier to unlocking the potential value of text mining to society and enabling researchers to gain maximum benefit from the data. Text mining  analyses text using computational methods, and provides the end user with what is most relevant to them. But copyright law works against this principle:

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/inform/inform33/TextMining.html

“Current copyright law, however, imposes serious restrictions on text mining, because it involves a range of computerised analytical processes that are not all readily permitted within UK intellectual property law. In order to be ‘mined’, text must be accessed, copied, analysed, annotated and related to existing information and understanding. Even if the user has access rights to the material, making annotated copies can currently be illegal without the permission of the copyright holder.” (JISC report: Value and Benefits of Text Mining)

It is important to think beyond types of data and formats, and engage with the debate about the sort of advances for researchers that we can gain by opening up all types of data; whilst the data may differ, many of the arguments about the benefits of open data apply across the board, in terms of encouraging innovation and the advancement of knowledge.

The battle between open and transparent and the walled garden scenario is played out in many ways. One area is the growth of native apps for mobile devices. It is easy to simply see mobile apps as providing new functionality, and opportunities for innovation, with so many people creating apps for every activity you can think of. But what are the implications of a scenario where you have to enter a ‘silo’ environment in order to do anything, from finding your way to a location to converting measurements from one unit to another, to reading the local news reports? Tim Berners-Lee sees this as one of the main threats to the principle of the Web as a platform with the potential to connect data.

Should we be promoting the open Web? Surely as information professionals we should. This does not mean that there is an imperative to make everything open – we are all aware of the Data Protection Act and there are a whole range of very valid reasons to withhold information. But it is increasingly apparent that we need to be explicit in applying permissions – whether it be explicitly fully open licences, attribution licences or closure periods. Many of the archives described on the Archives Hub have ‘open for consultation’ under Access Conditions. But what does this really mean? What can people really do with the content? Is the content actually ‘open for reuse in any way the end-user deems useful to them’? And specifically, what can they do with digital content, available on the World Wide Web?

We need to be aware of the open data agenda and the threats and opportunities presented to us. We have the same kind of tensions within our own world in terms of what we need to protect, both for preservation reasons and for reasons of IPR and commercial advantage, but we want to make archives as open and available as possible and we need to understand what this means in the context of the digital, online world. The question is, whether we want to encourage innovation, what Zittrain calls a ‘generative’ approach. This means enabling programmers to take hold of what you can provide and working with it, as well as encouraging reuse by end users. But it also means taking a risk with security, because making things open inevitably makes them more open to abuse.

People’s experiences with the Internet are shaped by the devices they use to access it. And, similarly, their experiences of archives are shaped by the ways that we choose to enable access. In the same way that a revolution started when computers were made available that could potentially run software that was not available at the time they were built, so we should think about enabling innovation with our data that we may not envisage at present, not trying to determine user behaviour but relishing the idea of the unknown. This raises the question of whether we facilitate this by simply putting the data out as it is, even if it is somewhat unstructured, making it as open as possible, or whether we should try to clean up data, and make it more rigorous, more consistent and more structured, with the purpose of facilitating flexible use of the data, enabling people to use and present it in other ways. But maybe that is another story…

In a way, the early development of the Internet has been an unexpected journey. Innovation has been encouraged because a group of computer scientists did not want to control or to ensure maximum commercial success. It was an altruistic approach; and it may not have turned out that way. Maybe the PC was an unlikely success story in business, where a stable, supported, predictable solution might have been favoured, where companies did not need skills in-house.  Both Microsoft and Apple made their computers’ operating systems open for third-party software development, so even if there was a sense of monopoly, there was still a basic ethos of anyone being able to write for the PC.

Are we still moving down that road where amateur innovation and ‘messing about’ is seen as a positive thing? Or are the problems of security, spam and viruses, along with the power of the big guys, taking us towards something that is far more fixed and controlled?

Linking Cultural Heritage Data

/ Jane Stevenson / 1 Comment

Last week I attended a meeting at the British Museum to talk with some museum folk about ways forward with Linked Data. It was a follow up to a meeting I organised on Archives and Linked Data,  and it was held under the auspices of the CIDOC Documentation Standards Working Group. The group consisted of me, Richard Light (Museum consultant), Rory McIllroy (ULCC), Jeremy Ottevanger (Imperial War Museum), Jonathan Whitson Cloud (British Museum), Julia Stribblehill (British Museum), and briefly able to join us was Pete Johnston (worked on the Locah project and now on the Linking Lives Linked Data project).

It proved to be a very pleasant day, with lots of really useful discussion. We spent some time simply talking about the differences – and similarities – in our perspectives and in our data. One of our aims was to start to create more links and dialogue between our sectors, and in this regard I think that the day was undoubtedly successful.

To start with our conversation ranged around various issues that our domains deal with. For example, we talked a bit about definitions, and how important they are within a museum context. For example, if you think about a collection of coins, defining types is key, and agreeing what those types are and what they should be called could be a very significant job in itself.  We were thinking about this in the context of providing authoritative identifiers for these types, so that different data sources can use the same terms.  Effectively identifying entities such as names and places are vital for museums, libraries and archives, of course, and then within the archive community we could also provide authoritative identifiers for things like levels of description. Workign together to provide authoritative and persistent URIs for these kinds of things could be really useful for our communities.

We talked about the value of promoting ‘storytelling’ and the limitations that may inhibit a more event-based approach. DBPedia (Wikipedia as Linked Data) may be at the centre of the Linked Data Cloud, but it may not be so useful in this context because it cannot chart data over time. For example, it can give you the population of Berlin, but it cannot give you the changing population over time. We agreed that it is important to have an emphasis on this kind of timeline approach.

We spent a little while looking at the British Museum’s departmental database, which includes some archives, but treats them more as objects (although the series they form a part of is provided, this contextual information is not at the fore – there is not a series description as such). The proposal is to find a way to join this system up with the central archive, maybe through the use of Linked Data.

We touched upon the whole issue of what a ‘collection’ is within the museum context, which is often more about single objects, and reflected on the challenge of how to define a collection, because even something like a cup and saucer could be seen as a collection…or it is one object?…or is a full tea set a collection?

For archivists, quite detailed biographical information is often part of the description of a collection. We do this in order to place the collection within a context. These biographical histories often add significant value to our descriptions, and sometimes the information in them may be taken from the archive collection, so new information may be revealed. Museums don’t tend to provide this kind of detail, and are more likely to reference other sources for the researcher to use to find out about individuals or organisations. In fact, referencing external sources is something archives are doing more frequently, and Linked Data will encourage this kind of approach, and may save us time in duplicating effort creating new biographical entries for the same person. (There is also the move towards creating separate name authorities, but this also brings with it big challenges around sharing data and using the same authorities).

We moved on to talk about Linked Data more specifically, and thought a bit about whether the emphasis should be on discovery or the quality and utility of what you get when you are presented with the results. We generally felt that discovery was key because Linked Data is primarily about linking things together in order to make new discoveries and take new directions in research.

book showing design patterns
Wellcome Library, London

One of the main aims of the day was to discuss the idea of the use of design patterns to help the cultural heritage community create and use Linked Data. It would facilitate the process of querying different graphs and getting reasonably predictable information back, if we could do things in common where possible. Richard has written up some thoughts about design patterns from a museum perspective and there is a very useful Linked Data Patterns book by Leigh Dodds and Richard Davis. We felt this could form a template for the sort of thing that we want to do. We were well aware that this work would really benefit from a cross-domain approach involving museums, archives, libraries and galleries, and this is what we hope to achieve.

We spoke briefly about the value of something like OpenCalais and wondered whether a cultural heritage version of this kind of extraction tool would be useful. If it was more tailored for our own sectors, it may be more useful in creating authorities, so that we can refer to things in a common way, as a persistent URL would be provided for the people, subjects, concepts, that we need to describe. We considered the scenario that people may go back to writing free text and then intelligent tools will extract concepts for them.

We concluded that it would be worth setting up a Wiki to encourage the community to get involved in exploring the idea of Linked Data Patterns. We thought it would be a good idea to ask people to tell us what they want to know – we need the real life questions and then we can think about how our data can join up to answer those questions. Just a short set of typical real-life questions would enable us to look at ways to link up data that fit a need, because a key question is whether existing practices are a good fit for what researchers really want to know.

Online Survey Results (2011)

/ Jane Stevenson

We would like to share some of the results of our annual online survey, which we run each year, over a 3-4 week period. We aim for about 100 responses (though obviously more would be very welcome!), and for this survey we got 92 responses. We create a pop-up invitation to fill out the survey – something we do not like to do, but we do feel that it attracts more responses than a simple link.

Context

We have a number of questions that are replicated in surveys run for Zetoc and Copac, two bibliographic JISC-funded Mimas services, and this provides a means to help us (and our funders) look at all three services together and compare patterns of use and types of user.

This year we added four questions specifically designed to help us with understanding users of the Hub and to help us plan our priorities.

We aim to keep the number of questions down to about 12 at the most, and ensure that the survey will take no longer than 10 minutes to complete. But we also want to provide the opportunity for people to spend longer and give more feedback if they wish, so we combine tick lists and radio boxes with free text comments boxes.

We take the opportunity to ask whether participants would be willing to provide more feedback for us, and if they are potentially willing, they provide their email address. This gives us the opportunity to ask them to provide more feedback, maybe by being part of a focus group.

Results of the Survey

Profile

  • The vast majority of respondents (80%) are based in the UK for their study and/or work.
  • Most respondents are in the higher education sector (60%). A substantial number are in the Government sector and also the heritage/museum sector.
  • 20% of those using the Hub are students – maybe less than we would hope, but a significant number.
  • 10% are academics – again, less than we would hope, but it may be that academics are less willing to fill in a survey.
  • 50% are archivists or other information professionals. This is a high number, but it is important to note that it includes use of the Hub on behalf of researchers, to answer their enquiries, so it could be said to represent indirect use by researchers.
  • The majority of respondents use the service once or twice a month, although usage patterns were spread over all options, from daily to less than once a month, and it is difficult to draw conclusions from this, as just one visit to the Hub website may prove invaluable for research.

graph showing value of the HubUse and Recommendation

  • A significant percentage – 26% – find the Hub ‘neither easy nor difficult’ to use, and 3% of the respondents found it difficult to use, indicating that we still need to work on improving usability (although note that a number of comments were positive about ease of use) .
  • 73% agree their work would take longer without the Hub, which is a very positive result and shows how important it is to be able to cross-search archives in this way.
  • A huge majority – 93% – would recommend the Hub to others, which is very important for us. We aim to achieve 90% positive in this response, as we believe that recommendations are a very important means for the Hub to become more widely known.

Subject Areas

We spent a significant amount of time creating a list of subjects that would give us a good indication of disciplines in which people might use the Hub. The results were:

    • History 47
    • Library & Archive Studies 33
    • English Literature 17
    • Creative & Performing Arts 16
    • Education & Research Methods 10
    • Predominantly Interdisciplinary 9
    • Geography & Environment 5
    • Political Studies & International Affairs 5
    • Modern Languages and Linguistics 4
    • Physical Sciences 4
    • Special Collections 4
    • Architecture & Planning 3
    • Biological & Natural Sciences 3
    • Communication & Media Studies 3
    • Medicine 3
    • Theology & Philosophy 3
    • Archaeology 2
    • Engineering 2
    • Psychology & Sociology 2
    • Agriculture 1
    • Law 1
    • Mathematics 1
    • Business & Management Studies 0
  • History is, not surprisingly, the most common discipline, but literature, the arts, education and also interdisciplinary work all feature highly.
  • There is a reasonable amount of use from the subjects that might be deemed to have less call for archives, showing that we should continue to promote the Hub in these areas and that archives are used in disciplines where they do not have a high profile. It would be very valuable to explore this further.

graph showing use of archival websites

  • The Hub is often used along with other archival websites, particularly The National Archives and individual record office websites, but a significant number do not use the websites listed, so we cannot assume prior knowledge of archives.
  • It would be interesting to know more about patterns of use. Do researchers try different websites, and in what order to they visit them? Do they have a sense of what the different sites offer?
  • There is still low use of the European aggregators, Europeana and APENet, although at present UK archives are not well represented on these services and arguably they do not have a high profile amongst researchers (the Hub is not yet represented on these aggregators).

Subsequent activities

  • It is interesting to note that 32% visit a record office as a result of using the Hub, but 68% do not. It would be useful to explore this further, to understand whether the use of the Hub is in itself enough for some researchers. We do know that for some people, the description holds valuable information in and of itself, but we don’t know whether the need to visit a record office, maybe some distance away, prevents use of the archives when they might be of value to the researcher.

What is of most value?

  • We asked about what is important to researchers, looking at key areas for us. The results show that comprehensive coverage still tops the polls, but detailed descriptions also continue to be very important to researchers, somewhat in opposition tograph showing what is most valuable to researchers the idea of the ‘quick and dirty’ approach. More sophisticated questioning might draw out how useful basic descriptions are compared with no description and what sort of level of detail is acceptable.
  • Links to digital content and information on related material are important, but not as important as adding more descriptions and providing a level of detail that enables researchers to effectively assess archives.
  • Searching across other cultural heritage resources at the same time is maybe surprisingly less of a priority than content and links. It is often assumed that researchers want as much diverse information as possible in a ‘one-stop shop’ approach, but maybe the issues with things like the usability of the search,  navigation, number of results and relevance ranking of results illustrate one of the main issues – creating a site that holds descriptions and links to very varied content and still ensuring it is very easily understandable and researchers know what they are getting.
  • The regional search was not a high priority but a significant medium priority, and it might be argued that not all researchers would be interested in this, but some would find it particularly useful, and many archivists would certainly find it helpful in their work
  • We provided a free text box for participants to say what they most valued. The ability to search across descriptions, which is the most basic value proposition of the Hub, came out top, and breadth of coverage was also popular, and could be said to be part of the same selling point.
  • It was interesting to see that some respondents cited the EAD Editor as the main strength for them, showing how important it is to provide ways for archivists to create descriptions (it may be thought that other means are at their disposal, but often this is not the case).
  • Six people referred to the importance of the Hub for providing an online presence, indicating that for some record offices, the Hub is still the only way that collections are surfaced on the Web.

What would most improve the Hub?

  • We had a diversity of responses to the question about what would most improve the Hub, maybe indicating that there are no very obvious weaknesses, which is a good thing. But this does make it difficult for us to take anything constructive from the answers, because we cannot tell whether there is a real need for a change to be made. However, there were a few answers that focused on the interface design, and some of these issues should be addressed by our new ‘utility bar’ which is a means to more clearly separate the description from the other functions that users can then perform, and should be implemented in the next six months.

Conclusions

The survey did not throw up anything unexpected, so it has not materially affected our plans for development of the Hub. But it is essentially an endorsement of what we are doing, which is very positive for us. It emphasised the importance of comprehensive coverage, which is something we are prioritising, and the value of detailed descriptions, which we facilitate through the EAD Editor and our training opportunities and online documentation. Please contact us if you would like to know more.

HubbuB: October 2011

/ Jane Stevenson

Europeana and APENet

Europeana LogoI have just come back from the Europeana Tech conference, a 2 day event on various aspects of Europeana’s work and on related topics to do with data. The big theme was ‘open, open, open’, as well, of course, as the benefits of a European portal for cultural heritage.  I was interested to hear about Europeana’s Linked Data output, but my understanding is that at present, we cannot effectively link to their data, because they don’t provide URIs  for concepts. In other words, identifiers for names such as http://data.archiveshub.ac.uk/doc/agent/gb97/georgebernardshaw, so that we can say, for example, that our ‘George Bernard Shaw’ is the same as ‘George Bernard Shaw’ represented on Europeana.

I am starting to think about the Hub being part of APENet and Europeana. APENet is the archival aggregator for Europe. I have been in touch with them about the possibility of contributing our data, and if the Hub was to contribute, we could probably start from next year. Europeana only provide metadata for digital content, so we could only supply descriptions where the user can link to the digital content, but this may well be worth doing, as a means to promote the collections of any Hub contributors who do link to digital materials.

If you are a contributor, or potential contributor, we would like to know what you think…. we have a quick question for you at http://polldaddy.com/poll/5565396/. It simply asks if you think its a good idea to be part of these European initiatives. We’d love to get your views, and you only have to leave your name and a comment if you want to.

Flickr: an easy way to provide images online

You will be aware that contributors can now add images to descriptions and links to digital content of all kinds. The idea is that the digital content then forms an integral whole with the metadata, and it is also interoperable with other systems.

I’ve just seen an announcement by the University of Northampton, who have recently added materials to Flickr . I know that many contributors struggle to get server space to put their digital content online, so this is one possible option, and of course it does reach a huge number of people this way. There may be risks associated with the persistence of the URIs for the images, but then that is the case wherever you put them.

On the Hub we now have a number of images and links to content, for example: http://archiveshub.ac.uk/data/gb1089ukc-joh, http://archiveshub.ac.uk/data/gb1089ukc-bigwood, http://archiveshub.ac.uk/data/gb1089ukc-wea, http://archiveshub.ac.uk/data/gb141boda?page=7#boda.03.03.02.

Ideally, contributors would supply digital content at item level, so the metadata is directly about the image/digital content, but it is fine to provide it at any level that is appropriate.  The EAD Editor makes adding links easy (http://archiveshub.ac.uk/dao/). If you aren’t sure what to do, please do email us.

Preferred Citation

We never had the field for the preferred citation in our old template for the creation of EAD, and it has not been in the EAD Editor up till now. We were prompted to think about this after seeing the results of a survey on the use of EAD fields presented at the Society of American Archivists conference. Around 80% of archive institutions do use it. We think it’s important to advise people how to cite the archive, so we are planning to provide this in the Editor and may be able to carry out global edits to add this to contributors’ data.

List of Contributors

Our list of contributors within the main search page has now been revised, and we hope it looks substantially more sensible, and that it is better for researchers. This process really reminded us how hard it is to come up with one order for institutions that works for everyone!  We are currently working on a regional search, something that will act as an alternative way to limit searching. We hope to introduce this next year.

And finally…A very engaging Linked Data interface

This interface demonstration by Tim Sherratt shows how something driven by Linked Data can really be very effective. It also uses some of the Archives Hub vocabulary from our own Linked Data work, which is a nice indication of how people have taken notice of what we have been doing. There is a great blog post about it by Pete Johnston, Storytelling, archives and Linked Data. I agree with Pete that this sort of work is so exciting, and really shows the potential of the Linked Data Web for enabling individual and collective storytelling…something we, as archivists, really must be a part of.