I attended a seminar a few weeks ago on The Ontology of the Archive, one of a series held as part of a workshop looking at Archiving and Reusing Qualitative Data organised by the ESRC Centre for Research and Socio-Cultural Change at the University of Manchester.
Louise Craven of The National Archives began the day with a very stimulating and challenging talk on
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.)
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/
We had not one, not two, not three – we’ve had four new contributors last month, including the National Fairground Archive at the University of Sheffield Library.
Above: Turtle ride, Blackpool Pleasure Beach, circa 1955, from the Arthur Jones collection, donor Glyn Jones. Copyright © National Fairground Archive.
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‘…
Yesterday I went to a meeting organised by the CURL Research Support Task Force (the Consortium of University Research Libraries in the British Isles, maybe best known for Copac, the online public access catalogue for CURL libraries).
This blog is inspired by the first talk, which was by Richard Ovenden, Keeper of Special Collections at the Bodleian Library. His subject was ‘The next 10 years’, always something that gets the brain firing off in many and various directions. One of the things that I particularly liked about the talk was his generally positive take on the outlook for Special Collections (usually rare books, manuscripts and archives and maybe other unique artifacts). When institutions are thinking about their priorities, one of the main drivers in this age of increasingly ubiquitous access to electronic information is going to be what makes their institution stand out – what makes them unique. Well, one of the selling points here has got to be the Special Collections, which are by definition unique and rare materials.
Richard pointed to the strategic aims of Emory University over the next 5 years they just have 3 aims digital innovations, a customer-centered library and special collections. If more universities in this country could see the sense in putting special collections at the forefront of their development strategies in this way we would really be getting somewhere!
Richard talked about the EEBO effect (Early English Books Online). This makes finding material very easy, but what are the implications for physical access? Will institutions start to become less inclined to plug gaps in their rare books collections as the electronic version is so easily available via EEBO?
Manuscripts and archives are a slightly different case to books because they are pretty much always completely unique. Maybe there will be a shift here to the idea of supporting new research areas, not just building on the same areas that the collections traditionally cover, to reflect the new research areas that are now developing. However, we are in an increasingly competitive environment, where our esteemed US colleagues (at least some of them) can often afford to purchase archive collections where we cannot. Maybe we need to counter this to some extent by being more collaborative across our special collections. A point that I had not thought about before is that digital material will increasingly become a valuable commodity, and we will need to think about buying a digital archive in the same way as we may have to bid for more traditional archives. Creators of this material will become more aware of its value and may start to think more about exactly where it is held they cannot easily make money from it if it is stored on a server elsewhere.
Richard pointed to the growing interest in visual materials, which surely will increase over the next 10 years. The Archives Hub team are well aware of this and are developing support for displaying and linking to digital images and surrogates. Equally, archives will become increasingly born-digital, so we can link to the real thing. He referred to the Barbara Castle collection that the Bodleian recently acquired, which included 3 PCs as well as the usual boxes of books and papers. When considering how we deal with digital collections, there must be some benefits to be derived from working more closely with Institutional Repositories, which are now pretty high profile within the HE sector there should be a good fit here with Special Collection materials.
Another positive note sounded by Richard was his belief in the growing awareness of the value of evidence he sees a move from the value of theory back to the value of evidence. Undergraduates seem to be more likely to be producing dissertations than they were and therefore there are opportunities for us to inculcate the value of archives to them.
Marketing strategies are becoming increasingly important the Hub team are well aware of this and very keen to develop our own strategy and get ourselves more out there and engaged with users and potential users of the materials (anyone got any good ideas about engaging academics??). One way of doing this is to use such things as blogs, podcasts and other social networking possibilities, which are likely to become more important, and clearly new possibilities in this social Web area will arise that we cannot yet predict.
To sound a rather less positive note, Richard made the observation that grant-giving bodies are not really giving grants for cataloguing anymore. It is something of a mystery to me why this should be, as it is at the heart of opening up access. They will often give grants for education and interpretation, but not to actually enable archivists to get the material to the point where it can be used in this way. The grants that JISC has given to the Archives Hub in the past to enable us to fund contributors had a huge impact on opening up collections, and as a colleague said to me, the Hub helped to shape the strategy of collection-level cataloguing as a result of this.
Overall, Richards talk made me feel positive about the way forward and I felt a real sense that the Archives Hub can play an important role in continuing to open up collections, raise the profile of archives and special collections and look for innovative and imaginative ways to engage our audience.
Image: from Mark Drasutis photos on Flickr ( Creative Commons licence), http://www.flickr.com/photos/markdrasutis/
The Archives Hub has been putting itself about a bit over the past couple of years…by which I mean that we are becoming distributed. We have around 150 contributors, who provide us with their archive descriptions, and through the medium of EAD and our search and retrieval software, Cheshire, we make these available for cross-searching.
The role of the Archives Hub is to facilitate dissemination of information and therefore promote use of archives as widely as possible to enhance all kinds of research. But at the same time we have sought to be transparent in what we do and how we do it, and we have always emphasised that the data belongs to the contributors. What we don’t want them to feel is that once they pass their descriptions on to us that is pretty much that…it’s out of their hands. We like to think that we’ve avoided this by continuing to maintain personal contact with contributors, providing news and updates, being generally approachable…and sending out mugs and fun Christmas cards!
I find the whole issue of control very interesting. There are so many levels on which we can think about it now – the control of archive descriptions, the control of archives (getting into issues of preservation vs. access), the control that can come from understanding technology, and how far archivists have to understand technology in this day and age in order to have control, and also the issue of control with the advent of ‘Web 2.0‘ and user-generated content.
What we want to do is facilitate contributors having responsibility for their data, and one way of doing this is to enable them to host their own data and administer it themselves. As well as providing them with the software to do this, they can create their own web interface and give it a look and feel that they are happy with. This means that researchers (and archivists) still have the advantages of the Archives Hub as a central cross-searching facility as well as the means to search just the descriptions of one repository.
We will be moving to a new version of our software soon (Cheshire 3) and this will be particularly well suited to this distributed environment. However, that doesn’t mean that we will be pressing all of our contributors to set up their own server – we are still more than happy to host their data here at Manchester, and they have the added advantage of a data editor to check their descriptions and provide advice and support (which we are happy to do for the distributed contributors as well). But whether the data is here or held by the contributor, we want to continue to act as a facilitator rather than a controller.
I do wonder whether it is useful to talk about control of the data anyway – I think that we are moving towards a scenario where the movement of data will become more fluid, and we will want to provide access in more flexible ways. Maybe ‘control’ really means the ability to ensure that the archival descriptions are accurate and reliable – which generally relies upon the authority of the archivist – rather than implying that the channels of dissemination must be limited. What we want is one authoritative version of the description with any number of ways to actually get that information to the people out there.
Image: from Flickr courtesy of Telstar Logistics
The next Training Day for contributors (and potential contributors) will be on Monday February 25th, 2008, at The University of Manchester. If you would like to attend, please email archiveshub@mimas.ac.uk.
Photo copyright © National Co-operative Archive. All enquiries about photographic collections and copyright to archive@co-op.ac.uk.
January 18th, 2008: The Hub’s 20,000th description is for the records of the Bridge of Earn Hospital, Perthshire, provided by the University of Dundee Archive, Records Management and Museum Services (ARMMS).
Images copyright © University of Dundee.
I thought it was worth posting something I’ve just been reading on another blog. The question was posed: If you could contact a librarian via Facebook or MySpace for help with your research, would you? If not, why?
This is something that is interesting to many of us at the moment – the value of Facebook to our work as archivists and in user support. This research refers to librarians, but doubtless the results for archivists would be similar. It was also carried out in the States, although I suspect UK students might have similar ideas.
The survey found that a total of 23% of respondents stated yes or maybe they would be interested in contacting a librarian via these two social networking sites, so there is some scope for this. Undergrads had a slightly higher than average percentage of 34%.
However, nearly half of the total respondents stated they would not be interested. The reasons given were various – the biggest reason being that they feel the current methods (in-person, email, instant messaging) are more than sufficient.
14% said no because they felt it was inappropriate or that Facebook/MySpace is a social tool, not a research tool. This is an opinion that has been expressed on several occassions in talks and articles I have read. I’m interested to see whether this changes as the service develops, although my suspicion is that by this time next year we’ll be talking about a different social networking service anyway!
My feeling as far as the Archives Hub is concerned is that I would still be happy to put up a search widget and to enable people to contact us via Facebook – it may be a minority but that’s fine – it just gives people another option if they want to take it.
Have a look at the survey results at http://onlinesocialnetworks.blogspot.com/2008/01/data-students-facebook-library-outreach.html
Image: No Facebook – Blessington St, St Kilda by avlxyz from Flickr (Creative Commons licence)