A very rare thing!

/ Jane Stevenson

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/

We have ways of keeping control!

/ Jane Stevenson


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

Facebook and research support: the jury’s still out

/ Jane Stevenson


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)

The 34 minute article…paper or electronic?

/ Jane Stevenson

At the recent Online Information Conference I attended a very interesting session looking at what usage data can tell us about users of libraries. This session emphasised the importance of maximising library investments through better data gathering. Of course, the same would apply to archives, but we have very little detailed usage data for archives as far as I am aware. However, I think that we can to some extent benefit from analysis of library users, so I thought I would give a summary of the session in this blog.

Dr Carol Tenopir, a Director of Research at the University of Tennessee, spoke about the results of a survey of library users from five American universities. Her team were looking particularly at journal use, both print and e-journals. The survey looked at such things as last article read, value of the reading, purpose of the reading and other details such as age of reading, source, time spent, etc.

The survey team asked how many articles were read in the last month. On average, academics read 23 scholarly articles a month and spend 34 minutes reading (based on the last article read). Students read 15 articles a month and spend 36 minutes. Often they were reading to just get the main points rather than reading in depth. At the same time the time spent finding articles has decreased.

The number of articles read has increased over the last 30 years, but the time taken to read each article has decreased – in 1977 each article took on average 48 minutes to read. This suggests that we are more inclined to skim read than we used to be, maybe partly due to the huge amount of literature available to us?

The results surrounding print versus electronic media were interesting. It made me think about the debates in the archive world surrounding the importance of access to the original archive and the value of digital surrogates. The survey found that around 65% read electronic articles and therefore a third of people still use print journals, so there is clearly still a substantial market for good old fashioned texts. Older articles are judged more valuable and are more likely to be sourced from libraries. The survey found that since 2005 older articles are read more, which may be to do with improved ability to search the systems available and access to back-files. Of the articles published within the last year, 43% are likely to come from the library, but for articles over 5 years old around 70% are from the library. For academics, older articles are more likely to be for research and are considered more valuable.

Respondents to the survey were not necessarily sure where they got articles from when they browsed the Web

In the end, its the story that counts

/ Jane Stevenson / 1 Comment


In the spirit of cross-domain thinking, I am going to depart from the archives domain because I’d like to blog about the The Royal Television Society Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture by Anthony Lilley, Chief Exec of Magic Lantern entitled The Me in Media which was on the TV last week. I just thought it was quite an interesting take on television and where communication and ‘conversation’ is going – very relevant to the world that us information professionals now inhabit.

Anthony Lilley talked about three main features of media: networks and interactivity, which are both changing radically, and also the power of narrative, which is eternal. I can’t say that I’ve got any great insights into how archivists fit into all of this but certainly our role is about communication and about preserving stories and narratives for the future.

A child of today will become the ‘still centre of their own web of media’, choosing what to create, when and where, and most of this will be interactive. We will all still be making sense of the world and constructing stories, but this will have a great deal less to do with the mass media and very little of what there is will be broadcast in the traditional sense.

In the future we may look back at the arrival of TV as an incremental change to broadcasting, whereas we are now at start of change in type, not in scale. Lilley suggested that TV has not got to grips with the magnitude of this change. It is vital that TV starts to engage more fully with the interactive world, going well beyond the