Archivaria back issues now online

/ Amanda Hill

I was really pleased to read on David Mattison’s The Ten Thousand Year Blog that articles published in the Association of Canadian Archivists’ journal Archivaria are now available online. The journal started in 1975 and all the articles published between then and the Spring 2002 issue are now freely available in PDF form. More recent issues are reserved for members of the association. That’s fair enough, though five years seems to me rather a long time to keep that content privileged.

Wouldn’t it be good if back issues of the Journal of the Society of Archivists could be made freely available in the same way? Journal articles are available through Taylor and Francis online, but only if you (or your institution) pay a subscription (over and above the subscription that members pay for the hard copy). These articles only go back to 1999, while the journal has been published since 1955.

Functions and activities of archive creators

/ Amanda Hill

A draft new standard has been published on the International Council on Archives’ website. ISAF (International Standard for Activities/Functions of Corporate bodies) is a sister standard to ISAD(G) and ISAAR (CPF), which are the standards for the description of archives and names respectively.

The description of records from a functional perspective has been becoming more common over recent years – partly a reflection of the number of times that governments and institutions re-organise their departments. The activities of a particular organisation (and the resulting records) often remain relatively constant, although the name of the section or department might change over time. ISAF provides a way of identifying these functions and linking them to the appropriate corporate entities and related records.

You can see the application of these functional descriptions in Glasgow University Archive Services’ GASHE website, where it is possible to browse the different activities and functions undertaken by the Scottish Higher Education institutions whose records are described in GASHE. The functional descriptions provide an overview of the activity (for example finance management/financial audit), with links to the various corporate entities involved in the activity (described in ISAAR authority records) and to the archives produced by the activity (described according to the ISAD(G) standard).

The deadline for comments on the draft standard is 31 March 2007.

Review of 2006

/ Amanda Hill

Archives Hub Christmas CardIt’s been an eventful year for the Archives Hub, so I thought I’d take this chance to select a few highlights.

Development work has been proceeding fast on the Spokes software. John Harrison (over in Liverpool), Jane and Steve have put a lot of energy into this and we’re also grateful to all the ‘early adopters’ who’ve given us so much useful feedback. I’m sure that 2007 will see widespread uptake of this software, which gives institutions a low-cost way of presenting their EAD files online. ELGAR is the Spoke installation at the John Rylands University Library here in Manchester, which has not been live for long, but which is already appearing in search engine results for searches on the names of John Rylands collections.

The Hub’s collections of the month have been brilliant this year: I think my favourite one was June’s look at Romanies and Gypsiologists, which is a great example of the way that services like the Archives Hub can bring together related collections from a range of archive-holding institutions. Thanks to Paddy for all the work that he does on this aspect of the service.

We’ve had a couple of interruptions to the Archives Hub’s service this year: a major power cut to Manchester Computing’s building in May and a hard disk failure in October. Steve ensured that the interruptions were as brief as possible!

We are a small team here, with five of us sharing an office, but all three of the men became fathers during 2006, so best wishes to all the new families for their first Christmas.

In the last week a complimentary review of the Archives Hub and other MIMAS services was published in the Guardian newspaper (scroll down the article to ‘The MIMAS Touch’), which was an excellent way to end the year.

We wish all our users, contributors and colleagues a happy Christmas and a fulfilling 2007.

The image is of the 2006 Archives Hub Christmas card, in case you didn’t get a hard copy version. Snowflakes were made using the Make a Flake site.

Thanks for the memories

/ Jane Stevenson

Amanda and I attended an excellent colloquium this week, ‘Memories for Life’. This was the culmination of a project that sought to bring together a diverse range of academics with the aim of understanding more about how memory works and developing the technologies to enhance it:

http://www.memoriesforlife.org/

The expert and very excellent panelists covered aspects of device engineering, computer science, psychology and neuroscience as well as ethical and legal issues. The stuff of our digital life may be created and controlled by us or it may be held externally, evidence of our interactions with the world around us. The colloquium looked at ways this stuff is growing, questioned how it is being used and how it might be used and looked at the implications for us as individuals and as a community.

As a magician in a former life, Professor Richard Wiseman showed us how magic tricks illustrate the sleight of hand that can fool us into certain beliefs that are not in fact true. To some extent magic actually manipulates memory and shows us that we can’t necessary trust what we see (or think we see). Similarly, Richard explained how psychological experiments that he has been involved with show just how open we are to suggestion. One example he gave was a s

Irish blues

/ Amanda Hill

The library of Trinity College Dublin was featured in Material World this week on BBC Radio 4. The programme discussed the use of Laser Raman spectroscopy, which is a non-destructive way of analysing the contents of the pigments in the illustrations of the 9th-century Book of Kells. It had originally been thought that the blues in the paintings were made from lapis lazuli, causing elaborate theories of very early trade links between Ireland and Afghanistan to be developed. The new technique showed that the blue was in fact created from woad, which is slightly less exotic and exciting, but much more easily explained. Keeper of manuscripts Bernard Meehan and keeper of conservation Susie Bioletti both featured in the programme, which is available online until next Thursday.

A selection of features

/ Jane Stevenson

This December’s feature, Somerville and Ross, is the fourth time now that we’ve highlighted the description for their Manuscript Collection held at Queen’s University Belfast. It’s an interesting collection!

The yellow jersey though goes to John Ruskin, whose manuscript collection at The University of Manchester, The John Rylands University Library has made a total of six appearances in our features. Several collection descriptions appear three times, including those for papers of Robert Donat and Nikolaas Tinbergen, and for the records of Penguin Books.

Henry Blogg

/ Jane Stevenson

Coxswain Henry Blogg (1876-1954) was the RNLI‘s most decorated lifeboatman. As well as RNLI medals for gallantry, he was awarded the George Cross and British Empire Medal. In 53 years of service, Henry Blogg and his crew helped to save 873 lives. There is now an RNLI Henry Blogg Museum in Cromer, Norfolk.

Death again

/ Amanda Hill

I was going to post about the mention of the Cumbria Archive Service on Radio 4’s The Today Programme yesterday morning, but then two pieces of news about the National Archives and Library in Iraq caught my attention. One was a posting by Jeffrey B. Spur on the History News Network stating that the institution has been closed, the other was Patricia Sleeman’s message to the JISCmail archives-nra list, inviting archivists to read the diary entries of the institution’s Director, Saad Eskander, which have been mounted on the Society of Archivists’ website.

These items put PR triumphs by UK archivists into perspective, but you can hear Anne Rowe (Cumbria’s County Archivist) talking about the more mysterious seventeenth century deaths in Cumbria in The Today Programme until next Thursday.

Free XML editor

/ Amanda Hill

Screenshot of XML Copy Editor and preview of HTML Many Hub contributors have invested in proprietary XML editing software such as XMetaL or Oxygen, but if you haven’t yet done so you might be interested in a free program called XML Copy Editor. It comes in Linux and Windows versions and makes it easy to validate EAD files. It’s also easy to associate style sheets such as the Hub’s so that you can get an impression of how your file will appear in a browser (which makes it a lot easier to proof-read). One feature I particularly liked was the ability to choose which browser to use for this: this is a failing in XMLSpy, which defaults to Internet Explorer (which then always crashes on my machine). I’ve never worked out how to change it to use Firefox (or any other browser), but it was easy to do that with XML Copy Editor.

Of course you don’t get all the functionality of the proprietary systems, but you are prompted as to which tags are valid at any point in the file, and there’s a handy special-character insertion menu, so if you don’t mind working with EAD tags visible, this looks like a good alternative to the paid-for options.

Picked up from Digitizationblog via the ArchivesBlogs aggregator.

Random death

/ Amanda Hill

Geoff Pick of the London Metropolitan Archives made an appearance on BBC Radio 4’s statistical programme ‘More or Less’ this evening, talking about the way the V1 rockets hit London in 1944. The way the bombs landed, often in clusters, meant that many people thought that they were being deliberately aimed at certain targets. The London County Council Architect’s Department’s maps of the locations of the strikes were used by R. D. Clark, a statistician, to prove that they were in fact perfectly random. During the next seven days you can listen to the programme through the BBC’s website.

P.S. For what it’s worth, I tried very hard to find a reference number for these maps, but with no joy. Please chip in if you know better…