The Spanish Civil War

/ Jane Stevenson

Air raid

In 1936, a military revolt against the Spanish government led to a war involving Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, and brought anti-fascist volunteers to Spain from around the world.in defence of democracy.

This month we highlight descriptions for the papers of political campaigners, historians, and International Brigades volunteers, the records of aid organisations, and descriptions for collections of posters, photographs, and interviews with veterans of the Spanish Civil War.

llustration: drawing by Basque refugee children of an air raid; reproduced by permission of People’s History Museum.

UK Archives Discovery Network is born!

/ Jane Stevenson


The National Archives Network of the UK (NAN) has been around for some time. It had a reasonably high profile around the turn of the century (that sounds weird!) when the cross-searching networks were being set up, but then in the following years its remit and purpose became less clear.
However, a great deal has been achieved over the past 10 years. The NAN projects and hubs have involved literally hundreds of archive repositories across the UK, ranging from public authorities through to the archives of small charities, and the result is that archives have had some resources to enable them to convert existing descriptions for contribution to the national projects, and that users have a number of very valuable cross-searching sites to use in order to facilitate discovery.
The vision was always to provide one gateway to search archives across the UK. Whilst this may still be a desirable vision, it may not be a realistic one, given the resources that it would involve and the issues of effective cross-searching of disparate descriptions. However, what we can do is to move towards opening up our data in ways that encourage cross-searching, sharing and working together to learn about how we can benefit users.
Over the past year, the NAN has been thinking about where it should be heading. At a recent meeting (August 2009), it was decided to change the name to the UK Archives Discovery Network, to reflect the UK-wide status of the network and to emphasise that we are about facilitating discovery for users.
The aims of the UKAD Network include working together in the best interests of archive users, surfacing descriptions, opening up data, sharing experiences and increasing links between repositories and networks. Whilst it may take some time for the Network to realise its remit, there are already benefits happening as a result of coming together, talking and sharing ideas and experiences.
I hope that the community continues down this path, because I think that it has become more important than ever to work together and really consider interoperability. Creating closed systems, however impressive they are in themselves, means continuing in a silo-based mentality, which is not truly responding to users’ expectations.
We have a social network site, which provides a fairly informal way of communicating:
http://archivesnetwork.ning.com/
There is also a JISC listserv: archives-discovery-network@jiscmail.ac.uk. We encourage archivists to use this to raise any issues associated with cross-searching, data standards, use of technology and archive networks.
We hope that archivists will be keen to use the UKAD network as a means to foster connections and collaborate on projects. Here’s to the next 10 years – goodness only knows where we will have reached by then!
Image: Flickr cc. Jan Leenders

Pubs and Inns

/ Jane Stevenson / 1 Comment

'Hub' pub sign
As we start to enjoy the beautiful British summer time, here at the Archives Hub our thoughts often turn to beer and beer gardens. We thought we ought to celebrate this by devoting our August feature to pubs and all things hostelry and alcohol related.

We are highlighting descriptions for the records of breweries, licensed premises, and trade associations, plus the papers of pub users – and temperance campaigners.

Illustration: The Hub (no relation) pub, Brighton. Photo © Simon Carey and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

Optimistic outcome for optimising the Hub

/ Jane Stevenson


Paddy, Steve and I (Jane) have spent the last 4 months working on an interesting JISC project to optimise Archives Hub pages for search engines, as part of the Strategic Content Alliance

Initiative.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a process that aims to increase the visibility of a Website in important search engines like Google. SEO works by modifying the content, the layout, and the architecture of web pages, in addition to using community building techniques to enhance the popularity of a website.

As part of this project, an SEO expert is tracking and recording our current web traffic. We are implementing recommended changes and looking for changes to the website traffic after the changes are made.

Recommendations we have implemented
1. A Search Engine Sitemap

This is something that was developed by Google and is used by other search engines. An XML sitemap is a recommended way of organising a Website and identifying the URLs for the purpose of indexing the site by search engine bots, allowing them to find content and data faster and more efficiently. It is a means for us to tell the search engine what the important pages are, and we can also put a date into the sitemap as an indication of how often the page is updated. The sitemap should help the pages get indexed faster.

The sitemap was relatively easy to create, although it probably needs a bit more work from us in terms of grading pages for priority.

2. Metadata

We have been working on the page metadata. In particular we have minimised duplicate title and description tags, ensured all pages have title tags and thought a bit more about the content of the title and description tags – does the title properly represent the page? Is the description an effective summary of the content with important keywords? It is important to think about this from the perspective of the robots – what are the words that will be most useful for them, in terms of search engine searches?

For example, where we had a metadata title ‘Archives Hub: For Archivists’, we had a heading for the same page ‘Contributing to the Archives Hub’. Ideally these should be the same and we should decide which terms are most important – should ‘archivists’ be in the main heading? Should ‘contributing’ be in the title tag? We have also started to reverse our page titles so that the subject of the page is entered first of all, so not ‘Archives Hub: Contributors’ but ‘Contributors to the Archives Hub’.

3. Headings

As stated above, we are getting the metadata title and page title to correspond, and we are also thinking about the importance of the page headers for search engines. In the past we have had monthly features with titles like ‘Wabsters and Shewsters’. Whilst this might work as an intreguing title for a user, it will not help a user searching for Scottish textile history.

4. URLs

It is worth ensuring that at least one of the important keywords is in the URL for a page. So, a page on railway history should have a URL like http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/railways.shtml and the title ‘Railway history: 200 years of the steam locomotive’.

5. Work on those keywords

We have worked on including keywords throughout the text, and especially in the first few lines. The inclusion of suggested websites and suggested reading provides a legitimate excuse to repeat keywords, both in their titles and in the annotations.

Other recommendations

There were other recommendations that we intend to implement over time, but did not have the resources to implement immediately – and some of them will more rationally fit into a redesign of our webiste (which is happening over the next 6 months).

1. Minimise use of tables

2. Change directory names to something more meaningful, e.g. ‘institution’ instead of ‘inst’, or ‘archivist’ instead of ‘arch’

3. Encourage external sites to link to the Hub site. This is an ongoing activity, but it should be easier with our new Website, and with our new approach to monthly features. We will also be able to link to Hub descriptions from sites like the National Register of Archives because we will have persistent URLs for all descriptions.

Web ranking reports

We have been working with Alan K’necht, an SEO expert, and Thierry Arsenault from the The Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN). Alan has provided us with weekly Web ranking reports. These reports are based upon some agreed search terms that we are using. We created three pages for three subject areas where the Archives Hub has strong collection representation: fairs and circus history, history of textiles and british railway history. For all of these subjcts we already had a monthly feature that we had created, so we could use the pages that already existed and just work on them to make them more optimised for search engines.

Conclusions so far

So, has it worked? If I take ‘fairground history’ as an example. On April 13th, this was at 30 in the Google rankings and at 14 in Google UK rankings. By May 11th it was at 11 in Google and 7 in Google UK. By June 6th it had moved to 6 in the rankings, and a quick search on Google UK now (17th June) puts it at number 3.

Railway history is maybe a more challenging topic, as we are competing with a huge amount of information. ‘Railway history UK’ was not ranked at the start of the project, but by 15th June it was at 15 in the rankings for Google, and at 11 for Google UK. A search on Google of just pages from the UK currently brings the page up to number 6 in the list.

Of course, the challenge with Google is to get the URL in the first page of results, and it is always a moveable feast, so if the page ranks highly one week, it may not do so the next. However, the work that we have done has clearly made an improvement to our rankings, and if we apply the lessons learnt to our other feature pages, we should be able to attract more people to the Archives Hub Website.

The principle of the JISC study was that ‘implementing a few simple and inexpensive Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques can increase an organisation

Features: Top 10

/ Jane Stevenson

Woodcraft Folk: trumpet and gongHere are the current ten most popular features:

  1. Dig for Victory! (Nov 04) Archival Awareness with help from the Women’s Land Army
  2. The Great War (Sep 04)
  3. Forensics: a partial print of the history of forensic science (Jun 09)
  4. The Big Draw (Oct 02) all kinds of drawings can be found in archives
  5. Interpreting Shakespeare (Apr 03)
  6. Miners’ Strike 1984-1985 (Mar 04)
  7. Railway history: 200 years of the steam engine (Jun 04)
  8. Fairs and Circus History (Oct 08)
  9. Trees (Dec 03)
  10. Stanley Kubrick (Jul 08)

Illustration: Woodcraft Folk photo copyright © National Co-operative Archive. From Around the Campfire (Aug 07).

International Archives Day 9th June 2009

/ Lisa

Did you know that today is International Archives Day?

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unesco Archives Portal: a gateway to international archive collection websites

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

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

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

@rchivista: Spanish language blog written by Paco Fern

Forensics

/ Jane Stevenson

FingerprintThis June’s Collections of the Month examines a partial print of the history of forensic science, shining a light on the descriptions for the papers of physicians, pharmacists, chemists and toxicologists involved in criminal investigations, and records relating to forgery and violent crimes.

Illustration copyright © 2009 The Archives Hub.

Archival Management Software

/ Jane Stevenson

Archival Management Software: A Report for the Council on Library and Information Resources. Lisa Spiro, January 2009.

The Archives Hub is not in the business of archival management systems, but this report provides a useful perspective on what systems have to offer, and also the current state of cataloguing, albeit essentially in the US. Recommended reading. Here is a summary, highlighting some points of interest.

The report starts off on well-trodden ground about the number of hidden archives. As a partial remedy, it encourages providing access to materials through minimal steps (basic descriptions which may not be ‘perfect’), rather than providing detailed catalogues of a small percentage of holdings. At the same time it states that collection-level descriptions must be done well, otherwise they may not effectively represent the collection to users. The report refers to taking a stripped-down approach to cataloguing – quite a change from the norm for many archivists. This is an issue we have been thinking about at the Hub, and we have taken the decision to reduce the number of mandatory fields that we require of our contributors. A difficult decision, but we felt that we needed to fit in with the ethos that a minimal description is better than no description, and we should be conscious of the difficulties archives often have in providing comprehensive descriptions with only minimal resources.

As an interesting adjunct to the debate about the control archivists have over descriptions (the requirements for expertise), the report cites a project where students are paired with unprocessed collections in their area of interest and trained to catalogue them, resulting in access for users and research topics for the students. Presumably this work is overseen by archivists, but it is still a departure from the idea that cataloguing requires an ‘expert’.

The important point is to provide electronic access as ‘increasingly, materials that are electronically inaccessible are simply not used’ (quoting Jones, Hidden Collections, Scholarly Barriers, 2003). I was heartened to read that the Library of Congress Working Group on