Every archival collection is unique, and the individual documents within them are likely to be unique as well, so it’s essential to establish where a collection has come from, and what has happened to it over time – so that researchers can then judge the quality of the material, and place it within a context where it can be interpreted. Descriptions on the Archives Hub provide details of provenance under the headings ‘Custodial History’ and ‘Immediate Source of Acquistion’. Archivists and researchers also use the phrase ‘chain of custody’ or ‘chain of ownership’ when discussing provenance.
Undergraduate experience of university libraries
A post by Brian Mathews (a librarian at the Georgia Institute of Technology) on his Ubiquitous Librarian blog compares undergraduate levels of library usage and satisfaction in UK and US universities. He looked at information from SCONUL and compared it with statistics from the US Association of Research Libraries (ARL). He notes that usage of libraries by undergraduates is much higher in the UK:
…86% indicate daily or weekly use, while the US is around 50%. When asked about using library web resources they were at 77% daily/weekly, while US was between 40-50%.
but that levels of satisfaction with space and resources are much lower and that our printed materials and journals are ‘barely adequate’. He expresses surprise at this, but it sounds like an issue of under-resourcing to me and probably won’t surprise staff working in UK universities. The difference in usage levels are interesting though – why are they so much higher here?
BBC 2.0
The Archives Hub’s funding body, JISC, held a one-day conference on Tuesday in Birmingham. One of the keynotes was by Tom Loosemore, of the BBC’s Future Media and Technology section. The slides and notes of Tom’s talk on the fifteen Web Principles of BBC 2.0 are worth a look.
The image of BBC2 on its opening night has been taken from The Ident Zone. The logos from the BBC’s own site can’t be shared on the web (cf. Principle #13).
Archival Word of the Week: Muniment
There are lots of muniments described on the Archives Hub, sometimes within the records of universities themselves. An Anglo-Norman word, a muniment is a legal document, such as a title deed, preserved to protect ownership or privileges. Muniments may date back many centuries. Often found in rolls.
Watt a good idea
Amanda sent me a YouTube link on the theme of Web 2.0 a few weeks ago. I was reading about James Watt (1736-1819) at the time, for a feature.
Watt devised a radical improvement for the widely-used but inefficient Newcomen steam engine, by simply separating out a key process into an external mechanism.
It struck me that this was a lot like XHTML, and a fundamental principle of XML …
Travel tip for Berlin conference
I’ll be talking about the Archives Hub at the International Standards for Digital Archives Conference which runs from 24-26 April in Berlin.
I’d booked my flights a month or so back, but discovered yesterday that British Airways had cancelled them. Great. Couldn’t alter the booking online, so I spent 10 minutes on hold on the 0870 number trying to get through to the airline to get alternative flights. Then my brighter other half used the brilliant ‘Say No to 0870‘ site to see if there was an alternative, cheaper number. Even better, there’s a freephone number: 0800 123111 and my call to that number was answered straight away (as BA have pay for those calls). Thought I’d share this just in case anyone else is in the same situation!
Archival Word of the Week: fl.
Abbreviation for the word ‘flourit’, ‘fluorit’, or ‘floruit’. The Oxford English Dictionary says ‘floruit‘, but you will probably see these variations, even on the Archives Hub, very sorry about that. Pronounced ‘floor-yuh-it’. When an index term for a proper name requires a date, but if neither the birth nor end date is known to the cataloguer, then the archival material being described can provide a date when its creator ‘flourished’, in the sense that they were obviously active, rather than at the peak of their career or somesuch. Illustration with apologies to Sonny Carter.
Archival Word of the Week: Holograph
A holograph is a document written wholly in the author’s own handwriting.
See also: Love letters.
Petition to the Prime Minister for freeing census data
There’s been a lot of news coverage of the PM’s petitions website in the last week, to do with the issue of charging for use of the UK’s roads, but one of the most popular petitions at the moment is one which relates to access to UK census data:
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to reduce the classified period for census data from 100 years to 70 years. This would allow census information from 1911, 1921 and 1931 to be used by the general public researching their family history in the absence (or failing memories) of their elderly relatives. Birth, Marriage and Death information is already available so why is information about where people lived hidden.
This has attracted over 21,000 signatures so far, making it the fourth most popular on the site.
The image of an 1891 census return was taken from The National Archives’ Learning Curve resource, Focus on the Census.
Archival Word of the Week: Fonds
A noun, singular, most often pronounced ‘fonz’. This generally just means an archival collection, so when an archival description is at ‘fonds-level’, it’s an overview without details of each individual item. Some archivists simply use the term ‘collection’, or treat the terms as interchangeable. But others reserve ‘fonds’ to distinguish a collection generated by a person, family, or organisation, as opposed to an ‘artificial’ collection, which has been gathered and arranged by a collector or a repository.
Sadly, the term ‘fonds’ does not seem to appear in this sense in the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED does include ‘fond’, meaning "source of supply, stock, store", which is apt in the sense of the archival collection providing a fund of data, which we can elaborate with metadata. But does anyone want to suggest some published examples to the OED for the archival use of the word? And can anybody guide us with the pronunciation?