In yesterday’s keynote at the International Standards for Digital Archives conference Bill Stockting took a retrospective look at the development and methodolgy of the A2A programme led by The National Archives (TNA) in the UK. A2A (Access to Archives)
Neuer Post
Blogger knows I’m in Germany – the interface is all in German. Neat. And just a teeny bit creepy.
I’m here with Jane at the International Standards for Digital Archives conference. Lots of presentations about EAD, EAC, METS and related standards. I was talking about the Spokes software yesterday (the EAD day). The picture shows the inside of the Umspannwerk Ost restaurant where we had dinner last night. It used to be an electrical substation. The conference venue (the Umweltforum) used to be a church. They’re good at recycling here.
Today was all about EAC and METS – Daniel Pitti was one of the speakers giving the background to EAC in the morning. Apparently there have been complaints about the complexity of the standard, so Daniel was asking for more details on this problem, as work is about to start on rebuilding it ‘from the ground up’. I enjoyed his closing comment which was along the lines of “it doesn’t matter what you do in the privacy of your own repository, but if you’re going outside, please dress up in a standard” (or a nice hat, of course).
If you want to get ahead …
… get a hat.
Archival Word of the Week: Access Points
Also known as index terms or keywords. We make sure that each archival description on the Archives Hub includes at least one of these. Access points help our search engine, especially our Subject Finder, which does very clever things with them. And each access point on the Hub is a link to other descriptions with the same access point. An index term points you to where you want to go. When you look at the access points for a particular description, you usually see indicating more descriptions of potential interest. So go on, try following an access point, see where it takes you.
See also: Guided Tour: Access Points.
See also: For Archivists: Creating access points.
Researchers’ Use of Academic Libraries
A new report has been published by the Research Information Network (RIN) and the Consortium of Research Libraries (CURL): Researchers’ Use of Academic Libraries and their Services [pdf format]. This is based on information gathered from more than 2,000 UK researchers and 300 librarians. After being somewhat critical in an earlier post about the RIN’s Researchers and Discovery Services report, I feel honour-bound to record here that this report is much more comprehensive and well-written. Its authors are Sheridan Brown and Alma Swan of Key Perspectives Ltd. The report covers a number of areas, including the impact of digital services, problems of attracting enough funding, communication between library staff and researchers, and changing patterns of use.
Archive services within academic libraries get a number of mentions, with the interesting statistic that:
Archives are rated “very useful” by 50% of arts and humanities researchers and special collections by 46%. By comparison the figures for life science researchers are 10% and 8%.
Really? 10% of life scientists find archives “very useful”? Wow!
The report also noted that:
Most researchers use digital finding aids to locate both digital and print-based resources. Print finding aids are used by very few researchers, and these are mainly in the arts and humanities. This highlights the need for libraries to ensure that they provide online high-quality metadata for their holdings, and that they address cataloguing backlogs. Information resources that cannot be found electronically may well be overlooked, since few researchers will invest the time required to track down items that cannot be quickly be identified using digital finding aids.
And in the same vein:
Libraries have made significant efforts to optimise the visibility and usage of their archival or special collection material through digitisation programmes. Feedback from researchers is very positive, but many information resources that could be useful to researchers remain under-used currently, mainly because they exist only in hardcopy or are inadequately catalogued.
and:
…material that is digitised and for which there is easily-available and accurate metadata will be visible and usable by scholars. What remains in print may well be sought out, but probably only if it is digitally catalogued. Indeed, some researchers as well as librarians pointed out that more use would be made of library holdings overall
Archival Word of the Week: Calendar
Not to be confused with calendar. Archivists use this word for an inventory of items in a collection listed chronologically. The items themselves haven’t been re-arranged this way – a calendar is a description, or an interpretation, presenting another way of looking at the collection. But when calendars in either sense appear on the Archives Hub, they themselves tend to be items within an archival collection. Collections on the Hub are described with a hierarchical organisation, another interpretation but one providing more contextual information, and more likely to reflect the organisation of the materials.
Illustration: terrier inspired by the Underdog Show.
Archival Word of the Week: Common-place book
Bit of a misnomer this one: common-place books are not printed books, they’re manuscript, and they are not commonplace – each one is unique.That’s why so many appear in archival collections described on the Archives Hub.
From the 16th century and on into the 19th, many people preserved snippets of conversation and interesting excerpts from books, by writing them down in a notebook, collected in a ‘common place’ for future reference.
Perhaps this blog sometimes resembles a digital common-place book, especially in the way the ‘labels’ organise our posts by theme, much as commonplace books were often organised.
Illustration: excerpt from "Weep On, Weep On" by Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779-1852).
See also: Collections of the Month: Love letters.
Living a Second Life
I attended a talk on Second Life today by Andy Powell of Eduserv. Second Life is a 3-d virtual world that is currently being very hyped up and has received a great deal of interest from educators interested in its potential for e-learning.
Second Life (SL) is free to enter and navigate around, but in order to really get involved you need to buy land, which effectively means buying server space with Linden Labs, the developer and owner of the software. The world is populated by avatars (residents) but Andy warned that those who are looking for a gaming environment would be disappointed – Second Life does not have a purpose as such; it is generally used to buy, sell, entertain and learn. In fact, you can (within acceptable limits) do what you like within SL, including building your own games, houses, galleries, offices and shops.
The software does require a high spec machine, which is likely to limit its value to schools and colleges, but it does have potential as a useful learning environment. You could, for example, buy a plot of land, build a gallery and show an exhibition of archive materials, complete with notes about each exhibit and links to the online catalogues. You could also decide to have a lecture space where you run a slideshow – Andy had just such a space on ‘Eduserv Island’ where he was showing the PowerPoint slides for the day’s session. You can also have an audio presentation as QuickTime is integrated with SL. The main drawback is that you can only have about 40 people in a space at any one time, but it is likely that this will change over time.
You communicate in SL by chat, either public or private, which effectively means typing rather than true audio communication, though this is apparently proposed for future versions of SL. You create your own profile, which may include your interests and skills, and you can create groups of friends so that you are told when a friend is currently in SL.
Andy had built himself a shoe shop and was designing and selling shoes for
Archival Word of the Week: Ephemera
Generic name for published documents which are designed to perform a specific task at a specific time, and expected to be forgotten or thrown away after use – although they might be retained for a striking design or as a souvenir of an event. Ephemera include posters, tickets, and leaflets. Does this blog count as ephemera? I don’t know.
These temporary documents tend to be littered with ‘linguistic shifters’ – relative terms such as ‘tonight’ or ‘here’ – which always require contextual information to make any sense at all.
Link: ephemera
Link: Carried away
Archival Word of the Week: Chit
Noun, Anglo-Indian. Alright, it’s not an archival term, but it might be useful for certain kinds of memo. Perhaps it just entered the lexicon at the wrong time! I hope this handy word won’t be killed off by American English.
All the vocabulary in this weekly feature so far has been of Latin or French origin. A variety of Latin was used by officials and academics into the 18th century, and of course archival theory developed in France. That’s not to mention those Anglo-Normans!
See also: Cor, blust, squit!