Where next for the National Archives Network…?

/ 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

/ 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

/ Jane Stevenson

Photos of Robert Donat

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?)

/ 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

/ 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

The technology horizon(s)

/ Jane Stevenson


The Horizon Report (2008) from the New Media Consortium provides a well-worth-reading and considered opinion on ’emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning or creative expression within learning-focused organizations.’ It lists the six main technologies considered to be key emerging technologies within the next 1-5 years, as well as looking at some challenges and overall trends.

The two technologies that are first on the horizon, likely to be in mainstream use in the next year, are grassroots video and collaboration webs. Grassroots video is something that anyone can do easily at very little cost. The feeling is that learning-focused organisations will want their content to be where the viewers are – so there will be more tutorials and learning-based content alongside music videos and the huge raft of personal content available on the vast number of video-sharing sites.

Collaboration is now facilitated by flexible and free tools that use the Web 2.0 concept of the Web as the platform – so collaboration without the need for downloading an application. It is simple to edit documents, hold meetings and swap information whilst never leaving one’s desk (although I’m not sure being even more desk-bound is such as good thing…).

The second horizon, so to speak, heralding technologies that will be mainstream in two to three years, brings mobile broadband and data mashups. Mobiles are clearly going to become more important as a means to stay networked whilst on the go (so encouraging us away from our desks!). New displays and interfaces are being developed. Indeed, at Mimas, we have been involved in developing mobile hairdressing training – so students can learn to cut and style with their scissors in one hand and their phone in the other :0)

The Horizon Report states that there is growing expectation to deliver content to mobile and personal devices. It seems clear that archival finding aids fit comfortably into this category – enabling people to use their mobile phones to search for archival sources, locate their whereabouts and find out about access and opening times. At the moment, i’m not sure that there are high expectations for this amongst researchers, but this may change over the next few years.

Data mashups combine different sources of data in customised applications. Here, we can point to a fine archival example of this – the Archives Hub contributors map . This is something we would like to develop further – maybe adding images or large-scale maps for areas where we have a large number of contributors. It does seem clear to me that this sort of combining of data could really be of benefit for archives. Maps showing the location of repositories is a clear winner, and maybe also some kind of combining of travel or transport data.

In four to five years, according to the report, the horizon will have brought us collective intelligence and social operating systems. I think that collective intelligence is certainly very pertinent for us. Wikipedia has been an outstanding example of success in this area and we now have some initiatives in the archives world, although it is early days yet. Archivopedia is the main example I can think of. When looking for this I found Archipedia – so I can only assume there will eventually be a ‘pedia’ for every subject (…yes, I just tried gardenpedia and there it was!). There must be some mileage in the idea of collective intelligence being applied to archives, and this is the sort of thing that we would like to look at in future in relation to the Hub.

Social operating systems form part of that shift in focus that is happening from content to people. This chimes in with the whole concept of Web 2.0 as putting people at the heart of the Internet – a change from an emphasis on sharing files and applications to creating and sustaining relationships. Systems should be people-led, and not the other way around. Take a look at Katherine Gould’s blog on The Social Catalog for an example of a potential social operating system.

Experimentation in the use of these technologies and practices should reap benefits, but this needs to be supported by policy and given the proper resources. Clearly collaboration is key, enabling the risks and workload to be shared, as well as the outcomes. We need to be able to create meaningful content and relevant and valuable learning opportunities with the tools that are available to us.

I believe that archivists need to embrace technology and appreciate the need to become technically literate to a level required for our work, just as for teachers and students. As the report says, ‘fluency in information, visual and technological literacy is of vital importance…We need new and expanded definitions of these literacies that are based on mastering underlying concepts rather than on specialized skill sets’.

I feel I should end on a pithy and insightful statement about new dawns and beautiful sunrises! But instead I’ll take the opportunity to mention the photo, as for a change I’ve used one of my very own…Norfolk, county of flat land and huge skies, provides a sense of never-ending horizons, and here I am on my very own path to the horizon! (…ending in a very sociable and collaborative cream tea.)

People Power

/ Jane Stevenson


I’ve been reading with interest some posts on the EAD list about user-generated content.

Bob Kosovsky, Curator, of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts asks “It is possible to envision a platform where an EAD finding aid can be accepting of user-generated content? Could there ever be a more wiki-like interface with EAD?”

At the Archives Hub we’ve been toying with this idea of enabling users to contribute to the site in some way, although we haven’t really begun to actively explore the options yet. The Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections (http://polarbears.si.umich.edu) provides a good example of an interactive site, and there are certainly some useful comments provided that give users of the site additional information about the collections. I think the display could be improved – I’m not sure about the Link Paths section, which takes up quite a bit of room on each description page. This does raise the question of descriptions getting cluttered and maybe confused with different types of information or with too much information, but overall I think this is a great site.

The discussion on the EAD list points to the great advantages of using EAD, which does provide the flexibilty to introduce new ways of viewing, sorting and finding information. At the Hub we are keen to really make the most of the fact that our descriptions are encoded in EAD. However, there is one particularly important question to ask, as Michele Combs from Syracuse University Library says: “What new capabilities will be truly useful to the researcher?”

We ran a short online survey for the Hub last June in which we asked how interested people would be in having the ability to contribute comments. Whilst the results appeared to show that this was actually seen as a low priority, the way the survey was worded implied that the choice was between adding more descriptions, adding item-level descriptions, adding images or adding comments. Whilst in reality we can of course pursue any or all of these, it is worth remembering that with limited resources it is always the case that choices have to be made. Should we invest time and energy in creating a more interactive site when we could spend the time maybe promoting the site and getting more content and more users or improving the search and retrieve functionality?

Many users of the Hub are not regular users but visit only once or intermittently, and therefore I wonder whether we would get an active “commenting community” going. And if we did get plenty of comments would this in itself be an issue – we wouldn’t want to clutter descriptions and also we may find that comments are not always the sort of thing that would be helpful to others. For us, something like this would really have to be monitored and edited where necessary…again, a question of time and resources.

In addition, it may be worth thinking about whether this sort of functionality is appropriate for something like an archival site. It works well for leisure sites like the Internet Movie Database (http://imdb.com) where people are happy to spend time browsing and have their own opinions on films, directors, etc. Also it could be argued that there is less of an issue about contributors adding incorrect information, though of course this is still going to happen.

A post on the EAD list by Robert S Cox of the University of Massachusetts makes a pertinent point – they have a blog where users can supply comments (http://www.library.umass.edu/spcoll/umarmot/), but Robert says that “Thus far, the comments we’ve received have been restricted to spam, more spam, reference questions, spam, and pats on the back.” …oh dear!

Maybe a Wiki that is for the archive community is a better option? Archivopedia (http://archivopedia.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page) is “open to collaborators who wish to write, edit, and create articles about primary source materials”. I typed in ‘fonds’ and the disambiguation service suggested ‘folders’ (?) and most other articles I found were stubs (very basic and short). But its early days and something like this might take off if it gets a critical mass of archivists interested in contributing. (Please please get rid of the awful pulsing ‘Archivopedia’ that comes up at the top of a Google search page!).

So, the jury is still out I think…and certainly at the Hub we would want to get more user feedback on the usefulness of providing user-generated content on the site, but we’ll continue to monitor other examples of interactive sites and I do think that the UK National Archives Your Archives site does provide cause for optimism that users are often ready and willing to add worthwhile and valuable information – http://yourarchives.nationalarchives.gov.uk/index.php?title=Home_page.

Finally, there’s a good post on next-generation finding aids by Merilee Proffitt at http://hangingtogether.org/?p=278
Image: GeekandPoke image on Flickr (Creative Commons Licence) http://www.flickr.com/photos/geekandpoke/

A useful list of social networking sites

/ Jane Stevenson

Sometimes it can feel as if there are an overwhelming amount of sites that are all apparently about making life easier! Well, I’ve just been looking at 25 Useful Social Networking Tools for Librarians (thanks to Amy S Quinn) which provides a good starting point if you are feeling a bit confused about the whole thing. I think its a really useful list – I have used 12 of these sites (not bad eh!) and of those I reckon I use 9 regularly.

I particularly like using Flickr and Slideshare because they do provide great ways to share resources – so they can actually really save you time. My favourite is probably Netvibes which I use for my personalised homepage – I can bring together links to my most used sites (including Wikipedia), feeds from blogs, the Archives Hub search box (of course) and other useful or entertaining information such as weather reports and Daily Dilbert. Netvibes really is easy to set up and I find it very helpful to have all of this information organised how I want it in one place.

I’m off now to check out ‘Daft Doggy‘…