The Big Wheel: First Spin

October 3, 2008 / Jane Stevenson

This October the Archives Hub is taking part in The Big Draw. We want you to make drawings on the themes of Fairgrounds or Playgrounds, or Cycling or Recycling. Scan or photograph your drawing, and then email the digital version to us. We’ll post your pics here each Friday. And we’ll give an Archives Hub notepad and propelling pencil to everyone who sends us a drawing, and the first name out of the cycle helmet will receive colouring pens, a pencil case and a notepad – all made from recycled car tyres! If you send us your postal address, we won’t use it for anything else.

1. Swing Ride Silhouette
Above: Drawing by Amanda Hill, formerly of the Archives Hub, and now relocated to Canada. This pic links to a larger version. Submitted by Amanda:"Mike says it looks like a pizza, but then he’s a complete philistine."

2. Recycle
Above: Quick drawing by Paddy of the Archives Hub. Submitted by Paddy: "I was going to try the Manchester Wheel but it looks a bit difficult… "

The Big Draw 2008: The Big Wheel

September 26, 2008 / Jane Stevenson

This October (2008) the Archives Hub is taking part in The Big Draw. We want you to make drawings on the themes of Fairgrounds and Playgrounds or Cycling and Recycling. Scan or photograph your drawing, and then email the digital version to us. We’ll post your pics here each Friday. And we’ll give an Archives Hub notepad and propelling pencil to everyone who sends us a drawing, and the first name out of the cycle helmet will receive colouring pens, a pencil case and a notepad – all made from recycled car tyres! If you send us your postal address, we won’t use it for anything else.

Above Concept drawing by Chris Baker for a submerged ferris wheel for the film Artificial Intelligence: AI, originally developed by Stanley Kubrick and realised by Steven Spielberg after Kubrick’s death in 1999. From the Stanley Kubrick Archive. Image provided by University of the Arts London with all rights reserved by the respective owners and reproduced with the permission of the Stanley Kubrick Estate. Submitted by Karyn Stuckey, Archivist.

History and memory

September 16, 2008 / Jane Stevenson

“History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.” (Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces)

When I attended a workshop on the Ontology of the Archive back in March 2008, Louise Craven from The National Archives talked about archives referenced in literature in a very engaging and thought-provoking way. It made me more aware of how archives are evident in many novels in one way or another. Fugitive Pieces (a truly great and inspiring book) is not particularly about archives but it resonates because it is about memory and history and understanding, and about the spaces, the emptiness, about what is missing…but then the absence is just as important as the presence in so many things, and not least in shaping and interpreting history. Archivists know this better than most, as they can be responsible for choosing what stays and what goes as far as documentary evidence is concerned, and they are responsible for deciding how to describe what exists, which has so much impact upon whether and how things are accessed and used, and arguably on how things are actually interpreted.

In some ways, archives represent history rather than memory because they are not consciously created to be research material – at least not in the sense that they may become historical evidence years into the future. When the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944) wrote over 2,000 letters to his wife, particularly whilst he was in India designing New Delhi, he did not think about the letters being read nearly one hundred years hence, and used by social and architectural historians (at least we assume he did not). So, do letters such as these give us a piece of history? Do they represent the history rather than the memory? I have generally been inclined to think that archives are a means to access history in a direct way, as much as that is possible at all – they bring history closer because they are not an interpretation or an intellectualising of past events, but the stuff of past events. Having said that, reading a novel such as Fugitive Pieces, the past is brought to life and is given soul and emotion so effectively, and maybe that is really the life blood of history. In many ways its central theme is the holocaust, but rather than describing events, it just barely touches upon them. Yet the poignancy of the writing builds up emotions and empathy that seem to bring history to life far more palpably than facts could ever do.

Documents may not be emotional in themselves, but they can convey a great deal of emotion. Love letters may be obviously moving, and there may be expectation of the emotion that we should feel when reading them, but the simplest of texts – maybe a list of household goods or a hastily scribbled note, can also convey a great deal of feeling, especially if we know something of the context. This partly explains the continual importance that archivists place on provenance and the integrity of the whole archive. If we want to try to understand the feelings of past events, then it may be that the more context we have the better. But ironically by having so much context, the reality of a place in time will always elude us in the end; a broader perspective can draw us away from understanding the experience that the creator of the material might have felt.

When I worked as an archivist in a repository, I didn’t really muse on these things; now that I am surrounded by descriptions of archives without having to concern myself with the actual physical materials, it seems to encourage the occasional philosophical outburst. I think it has something to do with the fact that the descriptions are removed from the physical things and so I spend quite a bit of time thinking about them in abstract…or something along those lines.

Beyond Brochures — A Few Thoughts about Marketing

September 12, 2008 / Joy Palmer

The Archives Hub is headed for a bit of a makeover this autumn, and lately my head has been spinning with buzzwords like ‘brand identity,’ ‘brand values, “strategic marketing” and ”USPs,” (Unique Selling Points — for those who don’t know…I didn’t). For someone like me who’s been in the HE sector for many a year, these terms lift me out of my comfort zone — from academia, where we like to be low-key about these matters (or at least act that way) to the business world, where we suddenly asked to think about our users and stakeholders as ‘customers.’

On the other hand, the process is an exciting one, and I am learning to rethink my view of ‘Marketing’ as something much more than advertising and spin. An excellent book I can recommend to anyone in our sector who is undertaking marketing or promotional activities is Developing Strategic Marketing Plans That Really Work: A Toolkit for Public Libraries by Terry Kendrick. (Incidentally, I learned from Kendrick that Marketing and Promotions are certainly not the same thing — more on that below). Obviously, we’re not a public library, but Kendrick’s points are very applicable to those who are running library or archival services that are funded by public money. Significant amounts of this money are devoted to services like ours, and maximising value from this expenditure requires that we communicate effectively with our users. We need to demonstrate value to “meet, and hopefully exceed, government standards and performance targets” (2).

Kendrick points out that marketing as a concept is often misunderstood — it is not synonymous with advertising and promotions, which is just one facet of marketing. Instead,

“Marketing is a dialogue over time. In other words, it is a two-way process which is not simply the sending out of messages from the library to users or non-users. In our everyday lives all of us are bombarded with advertising messages and slogans, many of which completely wash over us… For libraries this suggests that the most effective marketing is based upon an ongoing conversation with users and non-users and not simply upon slogan-based marketing campaigns.”

This approach to marketing appeals because this is something that many of us in this profession strive for — understanding and responding to user’s needs. I realise that a great deal of the planning and engagement we undertake at the Hub could fall under the umbrella of ‘marketing activity.’ This doesn’t mean that all we are is ‘marketers,’ but it does highlight that user-engagement is central to what we do, and that engagement comes in many forms (whether via a usability test or the Hub’s interface, or a meeting with our colleagues at The National Archives and other archival networks to discuss where we are headed as a collective). What we need to be clearer about is our mission, our values, and where we want to be headed.

Thankfully, our central mission is coming into sharper focus, and this autumn, in addition to a surface makeover, we’re looking forward to creating a marketing strategy that achieves a more effective dialogue with our users.

Mind The Skills Gap

August 28, 2008 / Jane Stevenson

I’ve just been reading a report commissioned by the Research Information Network, Mind The Skills Gap: Information-handling Training for Researchers. It acknowledges that researchers are ’embracing the new opportunities with enthusiasm’, but whilst many have become highly skilled in taking advantage of technology, others appear to lack the understanding to make full use of the new technologies, and there is a widespread view that even many who claim to be proficient show ‘alarming deficits’ in their information skills. The conclusion seems to be that the proficiency of researchers, in terms of information retrieval, has not kept up with the rapid pace of change in the information landscape.

The report focuses in particular on the role of information professionals and does acknowledge, certainly within higher education, that there have been efforts to address this, with moves to extend to researchers the training in information skills and competencies that is offered to undergraduates. However, provision is often unco-ordinated and the precise role of libraries and library staff is not necessarily made clear by the overall strategy of the institution.

The report proposes that generic training in the use of information resources may not be as effective as training given within contexts that take account of subjects being researched and levels of experience of researchers, although addressing this would have substantial resource implications.

The identification of training needs is seen as an issue. This is always a challenge when we, as providers of information and resources, are looking to run effective services or make sure that we support the intended consumers of information resources. Understanding researchers’ (or users’) needs is the first step in ensuring that those needs are effectively addressed.

In the section of the report about the content of library provision of training there is mention of archives: ‘Where libraries are responsible for major special collections and archives relevant for research in the arts, humanities and social sciences, specialist librarians and archivists may be closely associated with training programmes, and their specialist expertise seen as particularly valuable in gaining the confidence of researchers.’

The conclusions of the report seem sensible, and fairly predictable: better communication; a more integrated approach to strategies; librarians, academics staff and central training units working more closely together; training that takes account of experience and of disciplinary differences; exploiting the potential of e-learning and blended learning approaches to training.

The RIN proposes as a next step to organise a ‘strategic workshop conference’ along with RCUK, Vitae, RLUK and SCONUL to consider the findings of the report.

Image: Mind the gap on Flickr (CC licence) M

Where next for the National Archives Network…?

July 21, 2008 / Jane Stevenson

Joy and I went to a meeting last week at The National Archives to discuss the issues surrounding the National Archives Network, and the possible future directions that the archive community might take. We came away with our heads full of ideas and issues to take forward – so a job well done I think.

The National Archives Network as a concept really began after the 1998 seminal report by the National Council on Archives, ‘Archives On-line: The Establishment of a United Kingdom Archival Network‘ (PDF file). The vision was to create a single portal to enable people to search across UK archives. However, it is not really surprising that this never materialised given the resources and technical support necessary to make such a huge concept work. The landscape has changed since the report came out, and this solution seems to be less relevant nowadays. However, the concept of a network and the importance of collaboration and sharing data have continued to be very much on the agenda.

The meeting was initiated by Nick Kingsley and Amy Warner from TNA National Advisory Services. It included representatives from The Archives Hub, AIM25, SCAN, ANW, Genesis and Janus, as well as a number of other interested archivists from various organisations. The morning was dedicated to brief talks about the various strands of the network, and it quickly emerged that we had many things in common in terms of how we were working and the sorts of development ideas that we had, and therefore there would clearly be an advantage in sharing knowledge and experience and working together to enhance our services for the benefit of our users.

In the afternoon we formed into 3 groups to talk about name authority files, searching and sharing data and also hidden archives. A number of broad points came out of these break out groups and also the discussion that followed:

We need to ensure that our catalogues are searchable by Google (no surprises there) – it looks like some of us have tackled this more successfully than others, and obviously there are issues about databases that are not accessible to Google. It is important for contributors that services like the Hub and AIM25 are available via Google, and this provides an additional motivation for contributing to such union catalogues.

We really need to come together to think more carefully about name authority files – how these are created, who is responsible for them, how we can even start to think about reaching a situation where there is actually just one name authority file for each person!

It is important to progress on the basis of exposing our data so that it can be easily shared. This means working together on various options, including import/export options and Web Services that allow machine-to-machine access to the data. There are also issues here about the format of some of the catalogues. Some work has already taken place on exporting EAD data from DS CALM and AdLib, two major archive management systems. The Archives Hub and AIM25 have also been working together with the aim of enabling contributors to add the same description to both services.

We talked about other areas where sharing our experiences and understanding would be of great benefit, including Website design and how to present collection and multi-level finding aids online. We also recognised the importance of gathering together more information about our users – what they want, what they expect, what would be of benefit to them. In the end, this is one of the keys to producing a useful and rewarding service.

The meeting was very positive, and there are plans to take some of these issues forward through working groups as well as meeting again as a whole group, maybe sharing some of the specific projects that we have been involved with and collaborating on future initiatives.

Historians’ use of archives

July 4, 2008 / Jane Stevenson

I have recently read an interesting article by Wendy Duff, Barbara Craig and Joan Cherry in Archivaria (58), published by the Canadian Society of Archivists in 2004 (sorry, I have a tendency to get to some articles a bit late!). It looked at historians’ use of archives (using 173 responses to a questionnaire). Whilst the study was carried out in a Canadian context, many of the observations and conclusions have wider resonance. Here I just draw out some of the points made in the study that are relevant in some way to the Archives Hub.

Historians were chosen for this survey because ‘their work has an impact far beyond their own academic communities, saturating text books used in public education and influencing new generations of undergraduate and graduate students’. I think this point is worth making more often because sometimes the academic users of archives are not recognised as a substantial group, but if we measure that level of use in terms of their overall influence, their impact would be seen as far greater. A study in 2003 (Helen R. Tibbo, American Archivist 66, no.1) surveyed 700 historians and found that 43% used the Internet to locate material. The survey suggests that historians may be characterised as users who consult a number of archival repositories rather than maybe just visiting one or two. The study also suggested that ‘university archives play a vital role in historical research’ and went on to say:

‘Perhaps what university archives lose in breadth [compared to government and local archives] they make up in availability, or their collections may be particularly valuable to the study of social history’.

One of the points that caught my attention was the observation that ‘historians tend to depend upon an informal network for finding material for their research.’ This network may include archivists as well as colleagues, but certainly if it is the case that this observation carries over to the UK (which I believe it does) then it does highlight one of the difficulties of making academics and historians aware of the resources that are available to them, such as the Archives Hub.

One of the questions asked about barriers to archival research. This threw up the lack of a finding aid as the second largest barrier (47%), the lack of detail of a finding aid (31%) and problems with finding aids being out of date (19%). In terms of formats, 92% liked the original format the most, so no surprises there, and only 2% liked digital reproductions the most. Indeed, there is a continuing tendency to print out documents for use. However, the conclusion to the study certainly emphasises that historians would benefit from not only having speedy access to good, detailed finding aids from their computers, which appears to be pretty much the main priority of the respondents, but also having links to digitised historical documents. It does point out that the historian’s preference for completeness ‘suggests that the digitization of selections of materials might meet some of their needs, but only if such selections are provided with explicit descriptions of what has been selected and why.’

This sort of study, examining use and user needs, raises the question in my mind of whether we should give people what they say they want or what we think they want…or maybe even what we think they will start to want at some point. Let’s face it, how many of us would have actually asked for many of the features that we now get from sites like Amazon? We may not have explicitly wanted them, but once they are there many of us certainly do use them and find them valuable. So maybe its a careful balance of understanding and anticipation when it comes to meeting the needs of the user.

Hello Mr Chips

June 9, 2008 / Jane Stevenson

The very first Archives Hub feature, in September 2001, was for the papers of Robert Donat (1905-1958), the film and theatre actor and theatre director. The collections is held at The University of Manchester, The John Rylands University Library. This first feature was originally very minimal – just the collection description – but this feature about Robert Donat now includes an introduction, related collections, links, and suggested reading (with links to bibliographic records on Copac).

Plus the image above showing postcards of Robert Donat, kindly supplied by The Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture.

Personalisation and Resource Discovery (Or, Can the Archives Hub Learn a Few Lessons From Amazon?)

May 29, 2008 / Joy Palmer

As the team thinks carefully about the future of the Hub, we are pressed to examine current trends and developments surrounding the UK (and broader) Information Environment, and to make sure our long-term strategic aims are in line with those trends. In other words, we need to predict which technologies and user-expectations are going to take a hold, and make sure the Hub is in step with that future. Understanding those trends and these possible futures is no simple matter, and the trend of ‘Personalisation’ is a perfect example of a seriously complex area that we must examine with real scrutiny.

JISC (our funders) are investing a lot of time and revenue into personalisation — funding several studies in the area, including this one — Developing Personalisation for the Information Environment and encouraging its services to consider ways in which users might have personalised experiences when accessing and using content. The first of these studies has specifically looked at the relation of JISC services to social-networking and collaborative environments, surveying all ‘web 2.0’ implementations currently in effect within JISC services. The second study, still underway, continues this scoping work, but aims to look specifically at ‘opportunities to personalise sites adaptively in a way that is transparent to the user’ (see page 1 of their interim report).

What is ‘adaptive personalisation’ and what might it mean for services like the Hub? Many JISC services offer some sort of personalisation where users can customise their experiences — for instance Zetoc’s RSS alerts, Copac’s search RSS, or Intute’s bookmarking tools — but adaptive personalisation is different in that the system uses information it knows about a user to ‘push’ content. This technique is already used to great effect by commercial organisations, the most obvious being Amazon and eBay, who collect usage data (what you searched, what you clicked on, what you bought) to suggest or ‘recommend’ items to you.

This is a rather clever marketing technique, but of course from a resource discovery standpoint, there is a great deal of potential — notwithstanding the fact that you need a vast amount of usage data to make this form of personalisation meaningful. In my days slogging through the Ph.D., I often found Amazon a useful research tool for discovering books that my library searches had not uncovered — I would search for a book that I already had, and scavenged the ‘people who bought this, also bought this’ lists. (I suppose this might be cheating, but I prefer to call it ‘enterprising’!) In the interdisciplinary field I was researching (history of technology) this was a highly productive method of surfacing relevant records, as the library metadata might not necessarily reflect the subject matter.

More interestingly, however, is the fact that not only was I finding content, I was also — if on a very peripheral level — engaging with a community of peers. People ‘like me’ who were also interested in the same research questions (or, in more mercenary terms, I knew what the competition was up to).

So what will the Archives Hub of the future look like? More to the point, what will be the experience of Archives Hub users? These are questions that form the focus of a think-tank meeting we are holding next week here in Manchester. Our Steering Committee, along with some other stakeholders, will be joining us to think collaboratively about our future, and we’re very much looking forward to it. Will personalisation (in its many forms) or social networking have a role here? And if so, in what ways? Will the Hub users of the future find records ‘recommended’ to them? Will they be able to share, comment, or annotate records (will they want to?) All of these questions, of course, get at the very heart of what it is we do as a profession (archivists, information professionals, researchers) and in some ways begin to undermine some of our traditional practices or assumptions about cataloguing and standards — what it actually means to describe something. Who gets to describe (and who doesn’t)? For what purposes?

It’s tricky territory, for sure, but exciting and challenging nonetheless. We’d be curious to hear your thoughts about these issues, and especially in terms of the Hub’s future. In turn, we’ll look forward to sharing with you what we learn from our day.

It’s a matter of trust

May 9, 2008 / Jane Stevenson

I attended the Eduserv 2008 Symposium recently. The theme was ‘What do current Web trends tell us about the future of ICT provision for learners and researchers?’. The day provided a good mix of speakers, and for me one in particular stood out, Geoff Bilder from CrossRef. His talk was intriguingly entitled ‘Sausages, coffee, chickens and the web: Establishing new trust metrics for scholarly communication’.

Whilst writing this blog I visited Geoff’s blog Louche Cannon (very entertaining it is too) and there he refers to his feelings about the thorny issue of trust:

“It may sound incredibly un-hip and reactionary, but to hell with the wisdom of crowds. Watching the crowd might be entertaining, but when I need to work, I can get far better results if I constrain that crowd to a few people whose opinions I have reason to respect.”

Geoff’s main point was that we are really continuing to underestimate the importance of trust. It is often implicit but rarely explicit. He referred to what he called the ‘Internet Trust Anti-Pattern’ whereby a system is set up by a core of self-selecting high-trust technologists. Then the masses, for want of a better expression, start to use the system and as it becomes more successful the risk grows that a strain will be placed on it by untrustworthy users. Think of spam, viruses, phishing, and generally dodgy content – we are all well aware of these things and find them a real nuisance on a daily basis. There is undoubtedly a trust problem and users are often uneasy, though generally we have not reached the point where systems are widely declared to be ‘untrustworthy’.

When we think about how we establish trust, it may be through personal acquaintance, perhaps we trust someone because someone we know trusts them. It may alternatively be through a proxy, where trust is effectively extended to strangers. Looking at trust from a different perspective, we can think in terms of trust among equals, where coercion cannot really be applied, as opposed to trust where coercion can enforce behaviour. The traditional scholarly publishing domain works largely through personal trust and there is the possibility of the use of coercion. The internet works largely in the sphere of strangers and there are few means to know whether something is trustworthy or to enforce behaviour.

Geoff argued that the success of eBay, Amazon and Google is partly about their understanding of the importance of trust. Right from the outset eBay thought about how to ensure that people would trust the mechanisms that they had for buying items online – they built in a trust metric. Amazon implemented uncensored reviews, lowering the risks of buying something online. Within Google the page rank is an implicit trust metric that works extremely well.

Web 2.0 is very much about trust. We can pretty much subscribe to someone else