Notes from an article by W. Duff and P Stoyanova: Transforming the Crazy Quilt: Archival Displays from a Users’ Point of view. Archivaria 45 (Spring 1998)

Although this study is quite old now, I think it provides very useful information that I thought was worth writing about in case people hadn’t come across it before. This is a summary written mainly from our point of view as the Hub Team, so thinking really about what we can learn from the study and apply to display on the Archives Hub.

If anyone has any pointers to other useful information about user testing and users’ opinions on archival display we’d be very interested to hear from you!

This study used focus groups to obtain users

We have been working on how to promote the Archives Hub more widely, emphasising its value to the whole research community. Whilst it is always likely to be historians in the front line when it comes to using archives, I think that sometimes people are not aware of the value that primary sources can have for a whole range of subject areas.

The Archives Hub is funded by the JISC and our core descriptions are from UK universities and colleges and therefore we are very keen to promote the Hub to academic researchers. One way that we have come up with to do this is our new Intwine feature. The Archives Hub Collection of the Month (CoTM) feature already showcases the diversity of archives described on the Hub. We wanted to utilise this feature more effectively, and one of the ways to do this was to categorise it in some way. I thought that we might be able to use the Intute categories as a means to do this. Originally, we considered aligning the CoTM with Intute by picking future subjects according to the Intute categories, so that we might have so many CoTM’s on arts and humanities, so many on social sciences, so many on science and technology and the same for health and life sciences. However, in some ways its useful to be flexible with the subjects picked for CoTM so that we can feature new collections that are on the Hub or collections that contributors are particularly keen to highlight. We therefore decided to categorise past CoTM features under these academic discipline areas, and also under the Intute sub-categories within this. Thus we came up with Intwine.

A further feature that we have introduced is dynamic searches within Intwine, so that for example a user interested in astronomy can search for all descriptions that have this as an index term. This is particularly useful because one of the shortcomings of Intwine is that it does not reflect the entirety of the descriptions held on the Hub; it only reflects the descriptions included in Collection of the Month features. It is also a good way of getting someone into the Hub site to a page where they can see other similar subjects listed via the Hub’s Subject Finder.

We think this is a straightforward and, we hope, effective way to get across to our users the idea that the Archives Hub does indeed have archive descriptions relating to engineering, climate change, wartime operations research, scientific conferences and, of course, undulating railways.

After all of the fun pictures that Paddy has been posting as part of the Big Draw, its time to get back to the ‘serious’ (though never dusty) issues! I have been pondering what I think is a very engaging issue…of engaging with our audience. We are always keen, of course, to ensure that the Hub develops in line with what users want. For us the core audience is researchers in higher and further education, because we are funded for that purpose, but of course, we want the Hub to be useful and valuable to all researchers, and we hope that it fulfils that function reasonably well.

So, we are currently thinking about user testing in order to more directly engage with users’ requirements. We are in the early stages of putting together a plan for how to approach this. It seems to me that so often we (service providers) talk about the importance of developing services in line with user requirements, but don’t necessarily fully engage users in this process. Having said that, we’ll need to actually find willing users to give up an hour or so of their time – so we’ll have to see how that goes. I wonder how many other online archive services have successfully engaged users in this way and how they went about it?

When we had consultants employed to carry out a summative evaluation of the Hub (see ‘Evaluation Reports’ section) it was hoped to get 100 respondents, but the take-up was rather lower, with only 18 taking part in a phone survey and 15 in an online survey. The results were still useful and valid, but it does illustrate the problem of getting users to actually give constructive feedback. I’m just about to go through the National Archives Network User Research Group (NANURG) user evaluation that took place in 2001-2002. This evaluation was successful in involving sixth form students, family historians, librarians, professional researchers and a number of other users, but it took place before I joined the Hub so I’ll be interested to read the report.

One of the findings of the evaluation was that some users are hindered by ‘their limited understanding of the function of archives, catalogue descriptions, and the language used’. The recommendations included more work on design, use of colour and graphics and interactive pages.

On a related note, the HATII project, Multidimensional Visualisation of Archival Finding Aids, aims to address some of the issues surrounding the structuring and visualisation of finding aids, particularly those that are using EAD. The Hub team will be interested to see how this project progresses and what the outcomes are. For this project, the content of a finding aid is structured into cells which are linked together to form dimensions. For example, the Records of the Marketing Department are a cell, and they relate to Minutes, Agendas and Related Papers and also specifically to Academic Board minutes as well as to Publications, which link to Prospectuses. So, each cell relates to several other cells in different ways and relationships can be built up in visual ways that allow the researcher to see different contexts and follow different connections. I’m not sure how we’d implement something like this in practice for a service like the Hub, but it clearly addresses the importance to researchers of different relationships within archives other than the standard drill-down collection-series- sub-series- item type relationship. I found the system architecture and mapping diagrams rather hard to get my head round, but the first demo is good – it provides a clear visual representation of the principle.

A small gripe about the HATII visualisation of finding aids project website is that the project start and end dates don’t appear to be provided. There is a page last updated date, so that does give some help. It brings to mind a note I recently saw displayed in a shop window, ‘back in 15 minutes’…but was the note put up 5 minutes ago or 5 days ago?

Image ‘Autofocus test’ taken from sigsegv’s photos on Flickr (Creative Commons)

Above: Drawing by Paddy of the Archives Hub, inspired by Trunks Meet Trunks. Submitted by Paddy.

This October the Archives Hub took part in The Big Draw, inviting you to make drawings inspired by archives – or by elephants! The event is now closed – a big thank you to everyone who took part.

Above: Drawing by Jack, age 5. Submitted by Joy Palmer of the Archives Hub.

This October the Archives Hub is taking part in The Big Draw. We want you to make drawings inspired by archives – or by elephants! – scan them or photograph them, and then email the digital versions to us. We’ll give an Archives Hub notepad and propelling pencil to everyone who sends us a drawing, and the first name out of the pith helmet will receive some paper made from elephant pooh! If you send us your postal address, we won’t use it for anything else.

Above: Drawing by Amanda Hill, formerly of the Archives Hub, and now relocated to Canada. Submitted by Amanda: "This elephant is a small part of the Archives Hub’s own history. It was drawn on 19 January 2004, during a meeting to discuss the replacement of Irwell, the server upon which the service ran until 6 December of that year. I’m afraid I found those meetings rather dull…."

This October the Archives Hub is taking part in The Big Draw. We want you to make drawings inspired by archives – or by elephants! – scan them or photograph them, and then email the digital versions to us. We’ll give an Archives Hub notepad and propelling pencil to everyone who sends us a drawing, and the first name out of the pith helmet will receive some paper made from elephant pooh! If you send us your postal address, we won’t use it for anything else.

Above: One of the drawings created by spot caricaturist Mike Bryson at a recent Mimas event. This shows Jane Stevenson of the Archives Hub and her husband Ade. Submitted by Lisa.

This October the Archives Hub is taking part in The Big Draw. We want you to make drawings inspired by archives – or by elephants! – scan them or photograph them, and then email the digital versions to us. We’ll give an Archives Hub notepad and propelling pencil to everyone who sends us a drawing, and the first name out of the pith helmet will receive some paper made from elephant pooh! If you send us your postal address, we won’t use it for anything else.

Above: One of the drawings created by spot caricaturist Mike Bryson at a recent Mimas event. This shows Lisa Jeskins of the Archives Hub and Caroline Williams of Intute. Submitted by Lisa: "Caroline laughed a lot."

This October the Archives Hub is taking part in The Big Draw. We want you to make drawings inspired by archives – or by elephants! – scan them or photograph them, and then email the digital versions to us. We’ll give an Archives Hub notepad and propelling pencil to everyone who sends us a drawing, and the first name out of the pith helmet will receive some paper made from elephant pooh! If you send us your postal address, we won’t use it for anything else.